One Heck Of A Ride

84 Zimbabwe 1981 Look closely and you’ll see the author standing near the trunk of this large old baobab tree sable bull Chris was told had been seen there. We were returning to the house when Gappi spotted a sable standing in the shade of a mopane tree. Chris and I stared at the bull’s horns with our binoculars, but it was impossible to tell how long they were until he turned his head slightly. “Shoot him,” Chris said when he finally saw the tips of the bull’s horns, and I did. Other than a bongo, amore handsome antelope than a sable does not exist in Africa. My bull had long, curving ribbed horns that swept back like scimitars over the top of his glossy black coat. His white belly and facial markings only added to his beauty. I was surprised to see he was nearly as large as a kudu. After we loaded the sable, Chris decided we would pick up our gear and head straight to our next camp in the Deka Safari Area that night. We stopped briefly for a drink and something to eat at a restaurant owned by one of his friends and left the sable’s meat there. Our Land Rover with its defective starter was loaded with all of our gear, plus food and kitchen supplies, a cook, three trackers, Chris and me when Chris picked up another African who was seeking employment. We reached the government’s Deka tent camp a few minutes before midnight. After breakfast, we set out to hunt the world’s largest land mammal. Although Chris had been giving me crash courses on where to shoot an elephant fromvarious angles, and I had confidence inmy ability to shoot my .458 accurately despite its brutal recoil, it was not without some trepidation that I climbed into the back of the Land Rover with my .458 and a box of 500-grain cartridges with solid bullets. An elephant is not a gentle giant. Wounded, it can become more mean and deadly than a seven-ton rattlesnake. We saw our first elephants at Deka almost as soon as we left the camp, but there were no mature bulls in that herd or in any of the other herds we encountered that afternoon or the next three days. We spent each day driving roads, and stopping to check tracks and the basketball-size dung balls elephants leave behind wherever they go. We would follow the largest tracks if the dung was fresh, especially those left by solitary animals, until we came upon the elephant that made them. I soon learned the trackers could distinguish individual elephants because the cracks on the soles of their feet are as unique as our fingerprints. After six hours of following some very large tracks I also learned a bull with big feet won’t always have big teeth. Chris said we were hunting a bull with at least forty pounds of ivory per side. They were there. We just needed to find one. There is something about elephants that those who haven’t hunted them might not know: A big bull may be as big as a pile of Volkswagens but his dull grey hide reflects no light and he can be almost impossible to see in thick cover when he