One Heck Of A Ride

81 Zimbabwe 1981 government game scout, and I drove around the area’s two-track roads. Chris and I rode on the high seat behind the cab while the tracker and game scout stood and watched for game and tracks in the red sand. We saw several greater kudu, a duiker and a klipspringer, and many impala, zebra and warthogs that morning, as well as a sable antelope standing on a far-off hill, but my .300 Weatherby and Chris’s .375 H&H never left the padded gun rack behind the cab that morning. Chris said we’d seen nothing large enough to shoot. We went out again for an afternoon hunt after brunch and a nap, and drove to a place where Chris said we might find a zebra. We set off on foot with the tracker taking the lead, followed by Chris, me, and the game scout. The driver stayed with the vehicle. We hadn’t gone far when we spotted a herd of zebra and were stalking its stallion when we bumped into several impalas that spooked the zebra. On the way back to the truck, Chris walked up on a warthog hidden in the brush. He was yelling, “Shoot that pig! Shoot that pig!” as it went past me. I promptly did as asked. My first African animal had long tusks and easily qualified for the SCI record book. We found another zebra herd an hour before sunset. I was working a cartridge into my rifle’s chamber as we began our stalk when the rifle fired when I closed the bolt! It fired again when I brought up another round and closed the bolt. Our hunting was over for the day, of course. I stripped the rifle at the lodge and found the trigger assembly was loose. Cleaning it and tightening a screw seemed to solve the problem, but I wouldn’t know for certain until I closed the bolt on a live round. The next morning nothing happened when I cautiously loaded a round. Only another hunter would know how relieved I felt after working the bolt multiple times. With no backup rifle, I would have to shoot everything with the .458 Winchester Magnum I’d brought for elephant and buffalo if I couldn’t get my .300 Weatherby working properly. The first animal I shot with the .300 that day was a baboon, and Chris hung it in a tree for leopard bait. The next was an impala ram whose liver Chris and the crew sliced for their lunch. I like liver, but it has to be cooked all the way through, not rare or raw as this piece was. Instead I ate one of the sandwiches the chef had prepared for us. Before heading back to the lodge, we left the impala carcass at the home of Jannie Meyer of Lowveld Safaris, one of the outfits that had donated hunts to SCI for my safari. (The others were Hippo Valley Safaris, Peter Johnstone’s Rosslyn Safaris, and Chris Hallamore Safaris. Although they were competitors in business, the professional hunters and outfitters I was meeting on this trip obviously were close friends.) Lou Hallamore and his Texas clients joined us that evening for dinner, and we had a great time swapping stories until one of the Texans laughingly told about his partner shooting a window at Lou’s home that day. His rifle hadn’t malfunctioned; he didn’t know it was loaded. It was no excuse and no laughing matter as far as I was concerned. The next morning, I collected the first of several impala rams I would kill on this safari, and we returned to camp for brunch and a nap. Before falling asleep, I unpacked the .300 Weatherby cartridges I had loaded with the Nosler Partition bullets I had decided to use for what remained of this safari. I’d loaded several brands of bullets for the .300 and brought some of each. The Sierra bullets I’d been using had exploded in that impala and knocked him down, but another shot was needed to kill him. I used Chris’s .223 to shoot a duiker and a klipspringer that afternoon. The “klippie” was aptly named. These little antelope live on rocky hills and easily spring long distances from one boulder to the next. When they stand it is on the very tips of their hard-rubber-like miniature