Guns Over Africa

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

A Hunter’s Tale—Alpha and Omega

Too Late for Rhodesia

The Ho-Hum Impala

Warthog Adventures

South Africa

Birds on Safari

Northeastern South Africa

Safari in Zululand

South Africa’s Eastern Cape

Charge!

Guides and Outfitters

Taxidermy Art and Craft

About the Author

Guns Over Africa

A Memoir Collection

by

Jamel DuBois

All rights reserved

Copyright © July, 2011, Jamel DuBois

Cover Art Copyright © 2011, Charlotte Holley

Gypsy Shadow Publishing

Lockhart, TX

www.gypsyshadow.com

No part of this eBook may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission.

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ISBN: 978-1-61950-426-4

Published in the United States of America

First eBook Edition: July 14, 2011

Dedication

This book is respectfully dedicated to

Dave Hetzler

Dave Masson

George Martin

Carl Labuschagne

and my other safari companions

who have gone ahead and marked the way

1A Hunter’s Tale—Alpha and Omega

I’ve had a good hunt, but I don’t hike the game trails anymore. I’ve hung up my guns, but I hang on to the memories, and the memories are pretty good.

It would be romantic nonsense for me to claim having been a shooter and hunter all my life, although I often have thought of myself as such. The truth is in my early boyhood my shooting was restricted to a scant few .22 rimfire rounds at tin cans under the watchful eye of my father. It was his single-shot rifle, and cartridges were precious. We didn’t fire many on an outing. A box of fifty rounds was a 1treasure to be enjoyed sparingly over many months by the three of us—me, my older brother and our father.

Dad was left-handed. He instructed, Here’s how you do it, as he shouldered the rifle port-side. Although I am right-handed, I imitated him, and to this day I shoot a long gun left-handed.

I was fourteen before I owned my first rifle. I bargained with the gun shop, not realizing then I actually made the first contract of my life. I merely extracted a promise from the shop owner that he would not sell it to someone else if I made regular payments and paid it off in a specified time. I just wanted the rifle awfully much and knew that there was no chance of getting it except to come up with the twelve dollars on my own, but I never held such an enormous sum at one time. It was a proud day when I went into the shop with the last payment and took possession of the rifle.

In retrospect, I have to marvel I could do it at all. My parents were not involved; the handshake was between the dealer and me. It could not have happened in any but a small town, and not anywhere under today’s gun laws.

My father certainly was surprised when I brought the rifle home, and envious too. Mine was equipped with a five-round 1clip. I was to find his single-shot rifle was the reason a box of cartridges lasted him so long. My five fast repeat shots used up an allotment of cartridges much too quickly. Later on, when I traded the bolt-action in on a tubular-magazine pump rifle, I went broke feeding it.

I was shooting more, but had not become a hunter. I stalked the cunning Prince Albert tobacco can. With its reasonably large rectangular area it could absorb numerous hits before being transformed into artistic tin lacework. In that age of ecological innocence, I enjoyed the destruction of a Coke bottle with a well-placed shot. Once in a while I did shoot a squirrel, but to my shame, in light of my later education, I did not salvage the meat. Dad didn’t hunt, so I received no guidance in the art. Many were the times that we supplemented the family larder with fish from the Ohio River and its feeder creeks in my part of Western Kentucky, but we did not hunt. Why? I don’t know. It would have made sense for us to have hunted in those poor times but Mom didn’t clean the fish we caught; it was Dad’s chore. Perhaps he didn’t know how to skin and care for game. I learned how to myself much later in life.

When I left home at age seventeen, my rifle stayed 1behind. My father worked for the Illinois Central Railroad repair shops, and one of his benefits was courtesy rail passes for family. My rite of passage to independence was aided by steam-train passage from Kentucky to California. You can’t take the rifle on the train, Dad convinced me, so I left it behind. I think he just wanted my repeating rifle.

A cousin in California took me on my first hunts, once for ducks and once for deer, and I counted myself a hunter from that time on, although my hunting opportunities for the next several years were limited. The U. S. Navy disrupted my hunting education for a while, and later as a young-married, the economics of raising a family interfered with any sort of regular hunting. I was into midlife before I was exposed to, and became financially able to take advantage of, opportunities for serious hunting.

The milestone making it possible for me to partake at last in more than the occasional rabbit shoot or local deer hunt was my going to work at Petersen Publishing Company in Los Angeles. As a staff editor of Guns & Ammo and Petersen’s Hunting magazines, I was exposed to hunting opportunities usually reserved, in my mind at least, for those who were financially 1well off. At times, hunting actually became part of my job. The windfall of being in the right place at the right time resulted in my participation in promotional hunts in Canada, Honduras, Spain and several states that, as far as my ever considering hunting in them, might as well have been foreign countries too. The perquisite carried over to my subsequent position as a field editor with Guns magazine after I moved to Arizona years later.

In 1983, Zeiss Optics Company arranged a safari in Zimbabwe to showcase some new products. The company selected four writers, myself among them, out of the entire United States and many sporting magazines, to be guests on the promotional trip. In 1985, the South African Tourism Board selected seven journalists representing print and broadcast media from the United States and Canada to investigate the recreational opportunities of South Africa. I was one of only three magazine editors to be part of the group, the others being newspapermen or television sports-host figures.

Like an addict, once injected with these 1complimentary doses of African safari, I put my own dollars into repeated fixes for my treatment. My domestic hunting also did not depend entirely on advertisers’ promotional junkets. I discovered hunting in general, and safaris in particular, are not really bank-breaking habits to support. I have been in safari and hunting camps with workingmen who have saved for their once-in-a-lifetime hunts, and who started planning for their never-in-their-wildest-dreams return hunts before ever leaving camp. I was one of them.

It was on my fourth or fifth safari I was forced to face up to the prospect of retiring from hunting altogether. One other legacy from my father, in addition to the handicap of shooting left-handed, was a flaw in my respiratory system. He choked constantly on the coal dust associated with his railroad job, and smoked heavily as well. Both conditions contributed to his dying of emphysema. I contracted asthma while I was of first-grade age, and in light of recent studies, I think my affliction was the result of the secondhand cigarette smoke filling our house.

I never smoked myself, but as my age progressed so did the asthma until it reached the irreversible stage and my doctor started referring to the condition as 1emphysema. Even before though, the advancing asthma and its treatment were taking their toll on my shooting. It’s difficult holding a rifle steady when your breath comes in labored gasps. I could relieve the difficult breathing temporarily with an inhaled medication, but this caused my heart-rate to accelerate—another condition adversely affecting rifle marksmanship.

Personal retirement has occurred in other sports where the participant holds too much respect for the game to allow it to be demeaned by an individual poor performance: a major league baseball pitcher or NFL quarterback recognizes the early warnings of no longer being able to place the ball where he intends it, and refuses, out of pride, to hang on for another season. With hunting, the indicators suggesting or dictating retirement come gradually, perhaps over two or three or more seasons. The early warnings can be put down simply to having a bad day, and in fact, they are only occasionally poor performing days, until they occur successively closer together. My unavoidable decision was to quit the game.

Though I have hunted much of the world and gathered experiences usually available only to a small fraternity, this collection of hunting accounts is limited to my personal memories of Africa. It is intended as an affirmation of sport hunting 1and its many rewards, even for those who start later and close out their season sooner than they might have liked. Rather than lament the hunting opportunities now lost, I celebrate the ones I have been afforded.

Too Late for Rhodesia

For a hunter, Africa offers the ultimate hunting grounds. No place on earth has more species of game to entice the hunter, and no hunting site carries the romance of Africa. I have devoured every written word I can find on hunting Africa, from Teddy Roosevelt’s clinical discussions in African Game Trails to Hemingway’s brooding Green Hills of Africa. I’ve enjoyed Robert Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter, and everything Peter Hathaway Capstick committed to print. Perhaps the most influential writer, though, for my education and excitement over Africa, is Frederick Courteney Selous, whose works started me thinking seriously I should hunt Africa, someday.

Of course, Selous influenced other hunters and hunter/writers. It was, in some measure, Selous’ influence that put Teddy Roosevelt in Africa. Selous started his African career in 1871. Nearly forty years later, Roosevelt sought counsel with Selous for his own safari which would put African animals into U.S. museums for the first time. Roosevelt’s journal was published in 1910, almost three decades after Selous’ A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa. Anyone planning a safari should read both Selous’ and Roosevelt’s work. Anyone reading their works will almost assuredly want to go to Africa.

If Roosevelt made Americans aware of Africa as a hunting paradise, it was Hemingway who romanticized it for us. His Green Hills of Africa was published about the time I was born. Ruark, whom I think first made it seem possible for the common man to hunt Africa, published his book about the time I was finishing high school.

It was a good number of years, though, before I could make my magical trip to Africa. In the interim, I became acquainted personally with Peter Hathaway Capstick. My editorial position required me to purchase articles for publication in the outdoors press, and I dealt with Peter on several occasions. I’ve dined with him in the city but haven’t hunted with him in the bush. However, his hunt stories profoundly effected my African hunting preparations.

When my first safari did come about, in 1983, it was to Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, one of the many hunting grounds favored by Selous. In fact, the camp where I hunted was set on the Umniati River, very close, as best this can be reconstructed after a century, to where Selous’ camp was established. At one time on the hunt, I stood at the very spot on the Gwazan River described by Selous in A Hunter’s Wanderings; big medicine for an unabashed fan of Selous and African hunting.

The outfitter who directed my first safari, and himself an avid Selous follower, was Dave Masson. The hunting world lost Dave in the early 1990s, and he’ll be remembered fondly by those whose hunting lives he touched. His outfit was Kavija