One Heck Of A Ride

126 Fabled Land Of The Maasai safari?” I asked. “They sure do.” A silver medal Kirk dik-dik and a gold medal lesser kudu came the third day. I had worried that the .30-378 would be too much gun for an antelope only slightly larger than a North American jackrabbit, but I’d used a solid bullet and my taxidermist was able to repair the minor damage it did to the dik-dik’s hide. I had been having trouble finding a lesser kudu, but this was not the case this day. We saw no fewer than six good bulls that afternoon, and lots of females, and I took a difficult shot at the bull in a group of three as they were trotting flat out and watched him run off unharmed. (I didn’t give missing that animal a second thought until later.) I eventually shot a handsome male with the longest horns out of a group of four trophy-class bulls we encountered late in day. As is typical of the species, he was bluish gray and had white stripes on its sides, white patches on its neck, and a white chevron on its forehead. His ivory-tipped horns were 28 5/8 inches long measured along its three spirals. Day four again began with Charlie, the trackers, and me leaving camp at 5:30 AM, but this time we drove toward an area where the PH had been seeing fringe-eared oryx. Unfortunately, it proved to be a day from hell, starting with a flat tire the first hour out. After that, there was a problemwith our vehicle’s front driveshaft, which Charlie’s crew removed to get us going again in two-wheel drive. Then, before we reached the area where we expected to find oryx, the lug bolts on a rear wheel stripped and the vehicle had to be towed to Arusha for repairs. We didn’t return to camp until midnight and it was 1:30 AM when I finally crawled into bed, only to get up three hours later and go out hunting again. With the Land Cruiser back in service, we drove straight to the area where Charlie expected to find oryx. Less than an hour later, his trackers began tapping on the vehicle’s roof to get the driver to stop, then pointed to where a lone animal had crossed the dusty and rutted two-track trail. “It’s a wildebeest, and probably a big male that’s been forced out of his herd,” Charlie said after studying the tracks. “Do you want to take a look?” I grinned and nodded, and got the .30-.378 out of the Toyota’s gun rack. We set off on foot and caught up with the bull fifteen minutes later. He was feeding about 300 yards off, obviously unaware that anyone was on his back trail. We had run out of cover, though, and there was no way of getting closer without spooking him. “He’s a good one. Can you shoot from here?” Charlie asked after inspecting the bull’s horns with his binocular. N’gatai, his head tracker, already was setting up the shooting sticks. The bull was broadside to us, and not moving. There was very little wind and the three sticks tied near their tops with a band of rubber cut from an old inner tube provided a steady rest. “I think so,” I said after finding the animal in my scope. I set the variable scope on a medium power, held the crosshairs on the wildebeest’s foreleg slightly above the center of his chest, and concentrated on holding on target while squeezing the trigger. Wildebeest arguably are Africa’s toughest antelope, and so difficult to put down that they’ve been called “the poor man’s buffalo.” This bull was no match for a 180-grain, .30-caliber bullet traveling close to 3,400 feet per second, however. I saw him drop in his tracks an instant before the sound of my bullet hitting meat reached us. I’d shot both blue and black wildebeest in South Africa, and was interested in seeing what made this subspecies different from them. For one thing, he was larger and probably weighed more than 600 pounds. For another, there were dark brown vertical stripes on his muscular shoulders