One Heck Of A Ride

92 I will never forget the time and date, and what happened at 6:05 AM on 26 August 1988. It was the eighth day of my safari in Zambia, where I was hunting specifically for a lion and a leopard, and what we experienced early that morning was something that could have been taken from one of Peter Capstick’s adventure books except that it happened to me. My first safari in 1981 only whetted my desire to return to Africa. After taking an elephant and a Cape buffalo in Zimbabwe on that first safari, I lacked a lion, leopard, and a rhino to have taken the continent’s five most dangerous big game animals that hunters call “The Big Five.”Although the cost of a rhino hunt was far too expensive for all but the wealthiest of hunters then, hunting the two big cats still was affordable. (Actually, it was a downright bargain when compared to having to pay as much as $50,000 for a lion hunt and $20,000 for a leopard hunt as I write this nearly thirty years later.) Then, as now, the country offering Africa’s greatest odds for success on big lion and leopard was Zambia, and that’s where I chose to hunt them. Chapter 9 Zambia’s Big Cats This “1-hp pontoon” powered by a horse pulling a cable took hunters and their vehicles across the Luangwa River. Zambia 1988 Professional hunter Darryl Higgins was waiting for me near the terminal’s baggage drop when my South African Airways flight from Johannesburg landed at Lusaka International Airport in August 1988, and he helped me get through Customs quickly. Thirty minutes later, we were on the road, en route to Darryl’s camp on the Lower Luangwa River Valley in the Chisomo game management area. I will never forget that drive. I’d been traveling for forty-eight hours with next to no sleep, and although I wanted to take in all the sights, I had to force myself to stay awake. The camp the outfitting company, Mogambo Professional hunter Darryl Higgins. Comfortable en suite grass-thatched “chalet” was author’s home for his lion and leopard safari in Zambia Safaris, had built on the banks of the river consisted of three “chalets” (each with twin beds