One Heck Of A Ride

95 Zambia’s Big Cats 3:30 or 4:00 PM. We eventually had a small group of lions feeding on one of our baits and a pair of leopards on another, but all were visiting the sites only at night. None stuck around until daylight. As I mentioned earlier, our eighth day of the safari was the most memorable, exciting and potentially dangerous day I ever experienced while hunting. Several lionesses and a big male lion had been feeding on one of our baits across the Luangwa about two and a half miles from our camp, so we left the camp at 3:00 AM – a half hour earlier than usual – and we crossed the river on what some might call a “one-horsepower pontoon.” (A single horse hitched to a cable attached to a pulley on a tree and the pontoon pulled us and our vehicle across.) A single fruit from an African sausage tree can weigh four or five pounds, so its best not to walk under one when it is dropping ripe fruit We reached the bait before first light and parked the Land Cruiser about a half mile away, left Benson and Benton with the vehicle, loaded our rifles, and Darryl, Phineas, and I began walking toward our blind, trying to move as silently as we could. We had gone only a hundred yards or so when we heard a lion roaring at the bait tree in the distance. As we got closer, we could hear teeth crunching bones and the sounds of cats squabbling over meat that we had chained to the base of a tree. It was too dark to see anything, but we could hear the lions moving around in front of us. The best word I can use to describe the situation is “unnerving.” Our blind was a single wall of tall elephant grass the trackers had hastily woven a few days earlier. There were no sides or back. As the black night began morphing into gray pre-dawn, we heard a noise no more than fifteen feet behind us. Two lionesses were heading for the bait, and we were between them and the meat! Darryl quickly knelt and tried to locate them, but couldn’t. When he slowly stood up, a lioness roared and ran off. This alerted the male, which had been at the bait tree, and he moved to a dry riverbed about fifty yards away and stared at our makeshift blind. The sky was slowly turning orange in the east and visibility was quickly improving. Hoping to get a shot, Darryl and I bolted out of the blind and ran to the bank of the dry river, but the lion already was gone. The three of us were following the lion’s tracks down the sandy riverbed when Phineas spotted the lion’s head in the brush on the opposite bank. He was 140 yards away and watching us. “Can you see him?” Darryl asked. “Yes.” “Shoot him!” I used Phineas’ shoulder for a rest for my rifle and placed the crosshairs under the lion’s chin for a frontal shot, which is not the best choice for dangerous game. When I fired, the lion jumped