One Heck Of A Ride

88 Professional hunter Chris Hallamore prepares a warm lunch in the bush Zimbabwe 1981 injured, Chris suggested we move on. I agreed. I still had a buffalo and a bushbuck to hunt. The next few days were spent driving around, looking for where buffaloes had crossed roads, and following their tracks on foot to check out the bulls. Although there were plenty of mature males around, Chris urged me not to shoot any of them. As does every buffalo hunter, I wanted a bull whose horns had heavy bosses and were wide with deep curls. We did not find such a bull until the fourth day. He was with a herd of perhaps thirty or forty bulls and cows that were moving across a meadow and a dry riverbed. When the buffaloes were out of sight, Chris and I went after them. When we reached the bank above the riverbed, I reached out to grab a branch to steady myself — and suddenly, just before my hand hit the branch, a tracker tackled me. The next thing I knew I was on my back in the riverbed! “What the hell was that for?” I asked. The tracker pointed back to the branch, which was not a branch but a green mamba (an extremely venomous green tree snake). It was quite a wakeup call. Until then, I hadn’t thought about Africa’s snakes and the first one I encountered was among its deadliest. The experience unnerved me so much that I didn’t take a photo of that snake. Worse than that, we never caught up with the big bull we’d seen. The next morning, we found buffalo tracks entering a marshy area with lots of thick cover near the river. Hoping to see where they had gone, Chris sent me with the two Africans while he made a loop to the right of us. We hadn’t gone very far when I suddenly heard Chris shoot. Both of the trackers had climbed trees when I ran to help Chris. A hippopotamus was the last thing I would have expected to encounter when hunting buffalo, but I’d temporarily forgotten these giants leave the water to feed on land. Chris apparently had gotten between a female and her calf and he had to shoot the mother in self-defense. “I only wounded her,” he said. “Be careful. It’s a bad situation. We have to finish the job.” Hippos are said to kill more humans every year than elephants, lions, buffaloes, rhinos, and leopards combined. I was glad I was carrying my .458. It was a better choice for stopping a wounded and angry 6,000-pound beast than my .300. We waited a few minutes, hoping the hippo would do us the favor of dying before we went after her. The two Africans joined us and helped Chris sort out the tracks. Neither seemed embarrassed or apologetic for leaving me alone. I was in a better position than Chris when we came upon the hippo looking very sick several hundred yards from where Chris had shot her. My first shot had little visible effect when it struck where I guessed her heart would be, but she dropped with all four legs kicking when I shot her again. My third shot killed her. Chris ran to me and was ready to shoot, but lowered his rifle when he saw it wasn’t needed. While one of the trackers left to drive the Land Rover to the lodge and report the kill before returning to the carcass so it could be cut up and loaded, Chris and I and another tracker looked for the orphaned calf without finding it. I felt bad about having to leave it. Lions would eat that calf, probably while it still was alive, if not that night then the next. While looking for the calf, we found evidence