One Heck Of A Ride

87 Zimbabwe 1981 tracking and a lucky shot, I had a record-class ringed waterbuck. To my great relief, we had an early meal and slept late the next morning before driving about an hour to the town of Victoria Falls. As did everyone who stayed in the elegant colonial hotel with the same name as the town and the great natural wonder in those days, I stopped to talk with and photograph the tall African doorman. His suit’s coat and his hat were totally covered front and back with small pins and badges of every type imaginable that the hotel’s guests had pinned on him. This must have added at least fifty pounds to the weight of the coat, and he wore it with pride. After checking into a room, I walked past the statue of David Livingstone and took the path along the awesome falls and looked across the Zambezi River into Zambia. At the time, although I knew I would return to Africa someday, I had no idea I ever would hunt in that country. Thenextmorning, Chris and I flewtoSalisbury and I got rooms at the Meikles Hotel. On the drive from the airport to the hotel, I noticed that several of the buildings looked as if they had been hit with mortar fire. When I joined Chris in the bar, he was sitting at a table with Mike Rowbotham and two men I’d not met. It took only a few minutes to realize the guys were mercenaries, and listening to the four of them talking about their experiences in African bush wars was downright fascinating. Before Chris and I left them to have dinner, one of the men took off a necklace he was wearing. I hadn’t paid much attention to that necklace. Until that moment, I had thought the wrinkled leather-like black things strung on a leather thong might be dried bean pods. “Here’s a memento from Zimbabwe,” he said as he handed me the necklace and I could see those weren’t bean pods. They were human ears, trophies cut off the men he had killed in the bush war! I held it only long enough to verify they were the real things before handing his grisly necklace back to him. “Thanks, but I really couldn’t,” I said. He was genuinely disappointed but there was no way I would risk being caught with his trophy. Mere possession would have sent me straight to a jail from hell. Chris picked me up the next morning and we flew back to the Buffalo Range Airport and returned to the Hippo Valley Lodge where we had hunted earlier. We spent the next two nights there until we were displaced by a group of politicians and we moved to a nearby tent camp. Chris had heard about a hippo that was feeding at night in an orange grove and asked if I was interested in trying to take it. Of course I was. We spent the next couple of nights hunting with flashlights, and when we found the beast his eyes were bright red in the light. Chris told me to aim low and behind the shoulder, which I did. My bullet struck too low, though, and the hippo ran to the Runde River behind the grove. We returned at daylight and found him at the river’s edge, but he got into the water before I could shoot. The next time we saw him, only his nose and eyes were visible on the other side of the river. When he exposed more of his head I tried to hit his brain, but missed. We tried crossing the river and approaching from the opposite side, but when that tactic failed we left to give him time to calm down. When we returned, we brought sleeping bags and prepared to spend the night, hoping he would return to the orange grove. Chris and I slept on the sand while the trackers took turns keeping watch, and we woke up to find a light rain had left our bags wet outside and damp inside. Over a fire, Chris prepared a breakfast of deep-fried marble bread and bacon he said was a Hallamore specialty. The trackers reported the hippo had spent the night in the river grunting and snorting as hippos do. When they said the animal apparently was not seriously