One Heck Of A Ride

96 out of the bushes and going for Darryl. It was something most hunters only read about, and it took at least thirty minutes for me to compose myself. When we inspected the lion, we found my first bullet had struck him in the mouth, missed the spine, and gone out his neck. He was one sick cat, but he could have killed all three of us. The day still was young when we triumphantly delivered my lion to our camp’s skinning camp, and we still had a leopard to collect. After brunch and a nap, we headed to where we knew the pair of leopards had been feeding. We had spent several evenings sitting in the blind without seeing anything, simply because the tracks had indicated one of the cats was a big male. Just minutes before it would be too dark to see anything, Darryl nudged me and nodded toward the bait tree where a leopard had suddenly appeared on a thick branch. He was checking the animal carefully with his binocular. “It’s a female,” he said as he leaned toward me and whispered in my ear. “I think the male pushed her up in front of him. It’s not a big one, but she could be your last chance.” My rifle already was on the shooting sticks with its barrel sticking outside the grass blind, and I was watching the cat through the scope. With no more than five seconds of light left, I held the crosshairs dead center on the cat’s shoulder and fired. Zambia’s Big Cats up growling and roaring, then tore up the ground and brush in a ten-foot circle around him before disappearing into a thicket. Try as we might, we did not hear him make a sound after he was out of sight. After giving himfifteenminutes or so to stiffen up, we cautiously climbed the bank hoping to find a dead lion a short distance away, but expecting the worst. Darryl was on my left and Phineas was on my right. Darryl and I both had our rifles at the ready with their safeties off when we saw the big cat on the ground in the first brush. He had been waiting for us, not twenty feet from the edge of the bank. We took only one or two more steps when he suddenly jumped up growling and went straight for Darryl! As he twisted to get away, Darryl shot the cat in the foot. Almost simultaneously, I shot and laid the lion to rest, literally at our feet. Phineas was to our right and missed the action. Everything had happened in an instant, but I will never get my mental picture of that half-dead lion pouncing This big lion, wounded by a frontal shot, waited in thick bush to ambush the hunters. When it charged the professional hunter, author put it to rest