One Heck Of A Ride

129 Fabled Land Of The Maasai certain my next shot was a good one, but instantly knew I had missed again when that bull ran off unscathed. Soon after that, I decided to let a topi walk away. I told myself we probably would find one with longer horns, but the real reason was that missing three shots with two rifles was bothering me. My first thought was that the scopes might have been knocked out of zero by baggage handlers, but I quickly dropped that theory. One scope, maybe, but not two. When Charlie asked if I wanted to try to catch up with the waterbuck, I declined. I wanted to shoot a target and see if those misses were my fault. I didn’t tell him, but I had been feeling a bit overconfident about my shooting. Ten cartridges had produced eight cleanly killed animals in just six days of hunting at Mto wa Mbu. (I’d missed a running lesser kudu and my zebra needed a second shot.) For some reason, something had changed, and I wanted to know what it was. After lunch, shooting at a target with both rifles proved my misses had nothing to do with the rifles. They were dead on, but I apparently was anticipating the shots and not concentrating on follow-through. My chance to redeem myself came the next morning, when we went after a bohor reedbuck with good horns and it dropped at my first shot. That afternoon, we were stalking a small herd of waterbucks when Charlie spotted a very good bull peeking at us from behind a termite mound, presenting only a frontal shot. It made my day when I held the crosshairs high on his chest and killed him where he stood. I had been concentrating on making the shot and didn’t realize a tsetse fly was biting me until I found myself scratching the backside of my left thumb as we approached the bull. I’d been bitten by tsetses in Zambia and Zimbabwe, but Tanzania’s tsetse flies were like piranhas with wings and their bites seemed much more painful. According to the daily notes I kept on this safari, the worst day for them was 1 September, my fourth day at Kigosi. We had been hunting East African bushbuck and Lichtenstein hartebeest when we made a pit stop and I was attacked by a swarm of tsetses the instant I stepped out of the truck. Before I knew it, I was bitten in two places on my lower lip, as well as on my neck and forehead. My face and neck were swollen for at least two days and I had to force myself not to scratch the bites. Even worse, we never saw a shootable bushbuck or hartebeest that day, and I blew my chance for the best bush duiker we encountered on this safari. I tried to convince myself I’d missed because duikers are small and this little guy was running, but the truth was I’d rushed the shot. We’d been seeing dung piles and discarded leafy branches that indicated there was no shortage of elephants on the Kigosi Reserve, but our first sighting came our fifth day when we crossed the Moyowosi River and drove west to the Nikonga River Camp to hunt a roan antelope. Charlie estimated the tusks on the lone elephant bull we saw near the camp’s entrance might have weighed perhaps forty pounds each. The animal was limping and, when it turned to move off the two-track road, I could see a puncture wound on its lower left leg. There was no way to tell if a bullet or a spear made it, but it was festering. The game scout would submit a report to the wildlife department and someone would be sent out to put it down if the injury didn’t heal, Charlie said as we drove on. An hour later, I took a good bull hartebeest with an eighty-yard shot. We were close enough to the river camp that we turned around and delivered the animal to the skinning shed before continuing on. It was not yet noon when we came upon a small group of roan antelope. “That’s a good bull on the right,” Charlie