One Heck Of A Ride

97 Darryl had said, it was not the big male whose tracks we’d seen, but it was a beautiful cat. I almost had to pinch myself. Never in my wildest dreams would I have dreamed that I would take a lion and a leopard the same day, but I had. With the pressure off, we went looking for a trophy buffalo. Two days later, we found a small herd with a good male and followed it into a thicket. When Darryl nodded at one of the black shapes standing broadside to us, I settled my rifle in the shooting sticks Phineas had set up, found the buffalo’s front legs in my scope, raised the crosshair to about one-third up its body, and fired. The bull bolted and ran only a short distance before going down. I remember thinking as we approached it cautiously with our rifles at ready that it was strange that the animal hadn’t made a death bellow as the buffalo I’d shot in Zimbabwe seven years earlier had done.We were only a dozen yards away when the bull suddenly got on his feet and headed straight for the PH! It was dead on its feet, but it wasn’t ready to give up. Darryl jumped out of its path as I shot and put it down for good. A Cape buffalo deserves its reputation for toughness. When the trackers opened up that bull, they found my first bullet had punched a hole through its heart before exiting on the opposite side. After loading the carcass into the Land Zambia’s Big Cats I’ve been told that you will know when you have instantly killed a leopard in a tree by the “thunk” the animal makes when it falls to the ground. There was no such sound. This leopard was on the limb one instant, and was gone the instant after I fired. The moon had not yet come out and it now was as dark as it gets in darkest Africa. Following up on any wounded leopard, even a small female, is serious business, especially in the dark, but Darryl got out the flashlights and loaded his shotgun with 00 buckshot. Phineas carried an ax made from a tree root and a sharpened piece of a truck’s spring that he’d shaped on a crude forge fired byAfrican hardwoods. I’d read that shotguns and axes have saved more than one professional hunter and client from death or serious injury when a wounded leopard decided to attack, but I had only my scoped rifle, which definitely is not the best choice for close-up shooting. We all breathed easier when we came upon the dead cat less than a hundred yards from the bait tree. As -- Author said that never in his wildest dreams would he have dreamed he would take a lion and leopard in the same day