One Heck Of A Ride

80 Zimbabwe 1981 war had not affected hunting at all and I shouldn’t worry. As it turned out, they were mostly correct. Outfitter and professional hunter Chris Hallamore greeted me at the airport in Salisbury with a smile and a handshake. I knew before leaving Lompoc two days earlier for my first major international hunt and my first African safari that Chris had been one of just 500 members of the Selous Scouts, the Rhodesian National Army’s elite special forces unit whose charter charged them with “the clandestine elimination of terrorists/terrorism both within and without the country.” Chris had red hair and a neatly trimmed beard when he met me that morning, and the shorts, sneakers, short-sleeve shirt and baseball cap he wore gave no hint of his previous life. (I would read years later that the Scouts were nicknamed “Armpits With Eyeballs” because they were encouraged to grow shaggy beards to camouflage their faces.) After we collected my bags and gun case, Chris and I walked to the parking lot where he introduced me to the tracker who had stayed with the Toyota Land Cruiser while Chris was inside the terminal. I knew vehicles were driven on the left side of the road in southern Africa, but I went to the right side of the vehicle without thinking and was surprised to see a steering wheel when I opened the door. Chris grinned but said nothing when I walked around and settled into the passenger seat on the left side. After we were underway, I experienced brief feelings of panic whenever a vehicle approached us on what would have been the wrong side of the road back home. After stopping briefly to meet Mike Rowbotham of Hunters Tracks Safaris, Chris and I got rooms at a hotel. We were on the first flight the next morning to Buffalo Range Airport in the southeastern corner of the country where we were met by Chris’s friend, professional hunter Keith Vincent. We soon were driving past sugar cane mills and large and well-kept farmhouses and outbuildings and fields of sugar cane and groves of citrus trees. Even before we left civilization behind, I saw a warthog with her piglets on the side of the road and baboons near the cane fields. Our first stop was the farm owned by Chris’s younger brother, Lou, to drop off some supplies. The brothers had grown up on their family’s farm near Bulawayo and hunted every type of antelope and dangerous game in Rhodesia before joining the army while still in their teens, and both became respected and well-known professional hunters after their military service. Lou greeted me warmly and I enjoyed chatting with him. (A few years later, Lou would become widely known as the author of books such as “Chui, A Guide To Hunting The African Leopard” and “In The Salt.”) Our next stop was Hippo Valley Lodge, our “base camp” for the next few days. We’d seen a slow-moving giraffe, impala and flocks of guinea fowl on the way there. This part of Zimbabwe was covered with brush and trees and was nothing like the plains of East Africa we’ve all seen in the movies. Visibility probably was less than forty yards almost everywhere except for the larger openings. August is late winter in the southern hemisphere and the leaves on the trees and shrubs were muted shades of lavender, straw, and orange, even pink. The effect was beautiful. Before sitting down to dinner we were greeted – in French – by the chef, a man named Giovanni. The meal he served us that evening consisted of a salad and four entrees (including spaghetti), multiple side dishes, freshly made warm bread, and a dessert. Before I said goodnight, Chris said I should leave my clothes outside my door after hunting each day and everything would be washed and pressed and ready to wear again by morning. My first day of hunting inAfrica began at 6:00 AM with coffee and a twice-toasted hard bread called “rusk” before Chris, a driver, a tracker, a