One Heck Of A Ride

86 Zimbabwe 1981 Author sits next to elephant’s massive feet to provide scale. African trackers say footprints left by individual elephants are as unique as fingerprints presents a grey mass that is twelve feet wide and twelve feet high. A hunter must place his bullet into a target about the size of a loaf of bread deep inside a head the size of a washing machine. To give the animal an even greater advantage, the angle the hunter’s bullet must take changes drastically every time the elephant moves its head. My first shot hit the bull between his eyes without hitting his brain. Because of the angle, I should have aimed lower for the bullet to reach it. “Shoot him again!” Chris yelled. “Get him on the ground!” Fortunately for both of us, the elephant was totally disoriented. He threw up his trunk and trumpeted. When he turned his head slightly I aimed lower and hit him between his ear and eye, but missed the brain again. My third shot only made him angrier. My fourth shot went into the eardrum and he went down screaming. It was a good thing because my rifle was empty. Winchester’s Model 70 rifles hold only one .458 cartridge in their chambers and three in their magazines. All this happened in the time it takes to read about it and was about as exciting as anything can get. Looking back on it, even now, I’m convinced I felt the ground shake when that elephant fell. While Chris was telling me to reload and be ready to shoot again if the elephant suddenly tried to get up, local people began arriving with knives, machetes, axes, plastic bags, boxes, and garbage cans. I had no idea where they came from or how they knew there was meat to be had, but there they were. Chris and the trackers and game scout had to warn them to stay back until we had removed everything we wanted from the carcass. Using a radio, he called the camp and asked someone to bring a trailer. In the meantime, the trackers began cutting the carcass into chunks of meat that could be loaded without a crane. When the truckwith a trailer arrived, everyone helped load it with all of the meat it could carry as well as the bull’s tusks, ears, feet and tail. As we were driving away, the hungry locals were swarming all over what was left of the bull with their knives and axes. Chris said the elephant would be nothing but a grease spot in just a few hours. We stopped at Deka Camp only long enough to get our gear, and then drove about ninety miles, stopping only for gasoline and something to eat, to the Rosslyn Safari Area. Along the way to the camp, the old Land Rover’s headlights grew dimmer and finally went out, but we kept going.) At the camp, Peter Johnstone’s crew helped cut the meat into strips for biltong (the African version of the dried meat we call “jerky”) and transfer the meat to another trailer. We were covered with blood when we finished. I worked until dinner and left Chris to finish up while I showered and ate. It was almost sunup when I finally crawled into bed. Meanwhile, Chris showered and we took the meat to Peter Johnstone’s place. (When I checked a map later, I learned we were in the Gwai Valley about halfway between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls, in a region known as the Matetsi.) I’d been asleep less than two hours when Chris woke me and asked if I wanted to hunt a waterbuck. I did, of course, and we set off again. Three hours later, after a miss, nearly a mile of