One Heck Of A Ride

131 Fabled Land Of The Maasai shoot it. I had been watching the animal in my scope, waiting for Charlie’s assessment, and the bull went straight down when I fired. The last thing we expected when we walked up to the bull was for it to get up and run off, but that’s exactly what it did. What we saw and the tracks we found indicated it didn’t stop running until it reached the forest five miles away. When we searched for the animal early the next morning, another heavy storm had washed away the tracks the wounded sable hadmade the previous evening. About an hour into the search we jumped a sable bull we thought might be the one I had wounded, but we lost his fresh tracks an hour later. Disappointed, we drove back to the river leaving a cloud of burning elephant dung behind our vehicle. While we were having lunch, Charlie handed me my .30-.378 when a bushbuck stepped into view and I shot it. That bushbuck was not just a bushbuck to me. It was the last of the eight animals I’d gone to Tanzania to hunt, culminating countless weeks of hunting from dozens of camps on six continents in my quest to complete one of the toughest challenges in big game hunting. After skinning the ram and loading his meat, head and hide in the Land Cruiser, we returned to where we’d last seen the sable. Less than a few hundred yards from where we’d lost his tracks that morning, we found a bull watching his back trail and I killed him with a heart shot. I was so impressed with his forty-inch ringed horns, sleek black coat and stark white markings that I had him skinned for a life-size mount for Marty. Unfortunately, it was not the bull I had wounded a day earlier. We never saw that bull again and I was charged a $1,500 government fee for the wounded and lost animal. The next day was 7 September, and it seemed to me that the tsetses had called in their reserves. Their seemingly endless swarms, countless miles of driving in sweltering heat, and more elephant dung smoke than I can describe made for an extremely uncomfortable day. I didn’t cheer up (even after connecting on an easy shot at a common reedbuck a half hour after lunch) until we successfully stalked a topi a couple hours later and I made a difficult 450-yard frontal shot that dropped him in his tracks. We spent the next day and a half hunting eland without seeing a shootable bull, then drove three hours to a sitatunga camp at the edge of a marsh and sat in a high blind until it was too dark to see anything. We were back at the blind an hour before first light the next morning, but we only spent forty-five minutes there. We had to pack and collect my gear at Kigosi Camp three hours away, and meet the chartered plane that would return me to Mwanza that afternoon. When we reached the camp, we were told the plane was scheduled to arrive at 1:00 PM and we had to pack quickly and go. There was no time to eat or clean up. It was another two hours to the airstrip, where we waited an hour before someone arrived to tell us there would be no plane that day. I was so tired I fell asleep without showering or shaving when we returned to the camp after ten hours of driving on two-track bush trails and waiting for an airplane that never arrived. Big mistake. The generator had broken down overnight and there was no hot water for showers. Without electric lights, we had to wait for daylight to pack our duffels and the vehicle, again giving us little time to meet the plane two hours away. When I finally climbed aboard the twin- engine Piper Seneca II charter, the pilot couldn’t understand why the camp’s staff thought he would come for us the previous day. My return flight had been scheduled months earlier for 10 September and it was 10 September. Someone in our camp had screwed up big time. That mistake