One Heck Of A Ride

117 Two Memorial Hunts In Cameroon Before going out again the next morning, I was videotaping the camp when I focused on a guy the sawmill had hired to clear some trees. He was using a small Caterpillar with a blade to push them over. Every tree except one huge tree went down perfectly with the first push, but this big tree did not. He pushed it one way, then another, and then another before it got away from him and fell straight down on the camp’s water tower, flattening it!(I still smile whenever I play the video.) When we returned for our mid-day break, the sawmill crew had built new supports and erected the tank after getting inside it and punching it back into shape, and were filling it with water again. With my bongo hunt over, we concentrated on other species. For dwarf forest buffalo, we sat in machans Borge had built high in trees over trails leading to the river used by these little-known bovines. Unlike their larger cousins, the Cape buffalo I’d hunted in Zimbabwe and Zambia, the horns on dwarf forest buffalo are not impressive. They have no bosses and merely sweep up, much like the horns of bison and domestic cattle do. Unfortunately, the only bull I wanted did not give me an opportunity to shoot it. I had better luck with the forest sitatunga and blue duiker and I Author was videotaping the camp when its water tower was flattened by a tree that workers were trying to take down. The tower was rebuilt and functioning by the end of the day collected both to complete my twelve-day hunt in Cameroon. About half way into the hunt, I had an experience I will never forget while we were trying to call in a duiker. As our caller made his second call, a blue duiker appeared out of nowhere, running full throttle straight at me! My reaction was slow, and when I missed the shot he veered off to my left and was gone. We were all so shocked at being charged by a little duiker that we roared in laughter. The next afternoon, after more calling, I finally took a good blue duiker male. Author and caller with blue duiker When I wrote about this hunt for Safari Times, I titled it “Borge, The Sitatunga Cowboy” because of an incident that happened during the hunt. We were hunting sitatunga in a marshy area south of where we’d been hunting, but the pygmies were having trouble getting their dogs to hold a bull long enough for me to get into position