One Heck Of A Ride

130 Fabled Land Of The Maasai said while we were inspecting the herd with our binoculars. Before I could respond, the herd turned and ran nearly a half-mile before stopping to look back at us. The animals resumed feeding when they saw we weren’t following them, and that’s when Charlie and I, and a tracker and a skinner left the truck. We ran out of cover when we were 433 yards from them, according to my rangefinder, so I used a termite mound as a rest for my .30-.348 and put the bull straight down with a high neck shot. I was happy with this bull and his thick, 24 ½ inch horns. While the skinner and tracker were working on him, Charlie and I found some shade and ate our lunches. We had gone less than a mile after returning to our vehicle when we drove up on a herd of buffaloes, but continued on when we saw none of its bulls had good horns. Soon after that, we had to stop while eleven elephants walked slowly across the road. The tusks on the two largest bulls would weigh thirty to forty pounds, Charlie said. We saw nothing I wanted to shoot the rest of the day, but it didn’t matter. I was enjoying myself after making that tough shot on my roan and redeeming my missed shots at that waterbuck. That evening in camp, I wrote that the Kigosi Game Reserve had good numbers of elephants, saying “there is sign everywhere,” plus “many” bohor and common reedbucks, Cape buffaloes, East African defassa waterbucks, topi, and sable antelope, but only a “few” bushbucks, roan antelopes and duikers. At dinner, I chuckled when I saw the cake they had baked for me. In bold letters across the icing were the words “WELL COME FILL AT HOME.” “Only in Africa ...” I said to myself, and grinned. The next three days were spent mostly on foot, looking for a shootable bushbuck in the dense riverine thickets where they live, but we mostly saw only females and small rams -- and huge swarms of tsetse flies that obviously thrived along rivers. We sprayed ourselves with Deet to try to keep them off us while we walked, and Charlie burned elephant dung in the bed of the Toyota when we traveled between thickets. My eyes burned and it was hard to breathe in the thick cloud that covered the truck and us, but it helped keep the tsetses off us. (There was so much smoke that anyone who saw our Land Cruiser on the road would have thought it was burning.) Charliewas determined to findme a bushbuck, so we left for the river camp an hour earlier on my eighth day in Kigosi. We had barely driven past the camp’s entrance, still talking about a leopard that had walked up to Charlie’s tent after a rainstorm that night, when the driver suddenly stopped. A lioness had left tracks on the two-track road. Two hours of hard rain with a spectacular display of lightning and thunder apparently had gotten the animals moving. By lunchtime, we had seen two herds of elephants, a small group of sable antelope, a family of bushpigs, a big boar warthog, and a lioness sleeping on top of a termite mound. It was turning out to be quite a day until we heard about a special aircraft en route to the Kigosi airstrip to transport a tracker to a hospital. I never learned if he had been attacked by an animal or had suffered some type of accident. I still don’t know if he survived, but his injuries apparently were life threatening. Late that afternoon, Charlie spotted a sable antelope bull in a grove of acacias. It was standing in shade, staring at us from about a hundred yards away. For several minutes all we could see were the fronts of its horns, but it eventually turned its head slightly and Charlie whispered that I should