It was February, and time for the annual extravaganza we call the Harrisburg Sports and Outdoor Show. I usually spend a lot of time working J. P. Brand’s booth helping him sell safaris. Our friends Tom and Pam Keefer were there to book a buffalo hunt. It took them most of two days, during which Tom interviewed most of the outfitters there. Finally, he settled on a hunt with Motsomi Safaris, and outfit run by Pieter Potgeiter. Tom asked Doris and I if we wanted to come along, so I asked Pieter how much it would cost for us to accompany them as observers. He quoted me a price, and, after discussing it with Doris for a moment, we were in. Our friends Ed and Beth Carter provided a solid reference for this outfit. Tom’s first African adventure was scheduled for June 6 through June 16. We began preparations, including booking airline flights, and settled in to pass the time until we left.
The alarm awoke Doris and me at 3:00 AM on Monday, June 6. Of course we had not slept well, our few paltry dreams being about the adventure ahead. We had packed and unpacked and repacked our luggage several times during the preceding days, so that chore was done. A quicky breakfast of sorts and a cup of coffee was all that was necessary. Pam and Tom arrived shortly before 4:00, and we loaded our stuff into the back of the van. Now it was time for us to leave Saint Thomas for the Dark Continent.
Our first flight left Dulles International shortly before 8:30, so with Homeland Insecurity things in mind, we wanted to be in the airport at least two hours before our flight boarded. Things seem to have streamlined a bit since our last trip out of there and we had over three hours to kill before our flight. Some of it was taken up by the folks examining Tom’s gun case. For this trip, Tom took along the .416 Remington Magnum I used on my own buffalo hunt back in 2003. It is a Winchester safari grade rifle with a 2-7X Leupold scope. Tom took handloads along, using the Barnes-X triple shock bullets. He intended to use the rifle for everything from small antelope through Cape buffalo. As the reader will see, it worked very well, but I digress. The first leg of our trip took us from Dulles to JFK in New York, and after a short trip from one terminal to another, we boarded a South African Airways flight at 11:18 AM and settled in for the 17 hour journey; one of the longest air flights you can find.
It is nearly impossible for me to sleep on an airplane, but with 17 plus hours to try, I managed to get a few hours of shuteye. The other three did a bit better than I did, but when we arrived in Johannesburg’s Oliver Tambo International airport at 8: 30 AM local time, we were all tired and already suffering from jet lag. Getting a rifle through the South African police is a lot better than the last time I went in 2005. Back then it took nearly four hours, but this morning, the task of getting everything through customs took less than half an hour and now we were forced to wait for our driver to pick us up. We waited nearly 90 minutes due to him having “broke a tyre,” but he eventually showed up and loaded our stuff in his van for the 6 hour drive east toward our camp in the northeastern Limpopo Province. Pieter, our driver, proved to be a wealth of information about his country, and while most of us slept for a bit during the drive, those who were awake got a running commentary including both geography and history.
We arrived at the town of Hoedspruit mid Tuesday afternoon and were met by our professional hunter, Roche DuPreez, who loaded our stuff into his Toyota safari truck for the short hop to the Inkasi Lodge and game preserve, a huge property that would be our home away from home for the next eight days. Upon arrival, we were greeted by Roche’s wife Ansu who would be our chief cook and hostess for the hunt, and our two trackers, Daniel and George (no relation to me). Ansu ensured that we would find it impossible to lose weight while in her charge with her excellent cooking. On three prior trips to Africa, I found the skills of trackers there to be far superior to my own. I have sometimes joked that they could track a butterfly over a plate glass window, and that is not far from the truth. We settled in to our humble thatched-roof hut (a three room lodge with two bedrooms and two baths) and unpacked our gear. Tom and Roche went to their designated range to check the zero on the rifle and we went for a short game drive before the evening meal. We settled in for the evening after a session at the campfire swapping stories and slept well for the first time in a few days.
Revile sounded at 5:00 AM Wednesday morning. The chore for the day would be to find the resident buffalo herds on the property, and after a breakfast of fresh fruit and muffins we set out at daybreak in temperatures close to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. This was after all South Africa’s winter season. The tactic used was to drive the dirt roads with hopes of either cutting a fresh buffalo spoor (track) or sighting the animals, and we drove for an hour or so before finding a promising track. We got off the truck and hunted on foot for a few miles, but other than dust and an occasional black flash, we did not get close enough to really see our quarry. After getting back on the truck, we drove a few more miles and finally sighted a smallish sort of herd with about ten animals, two of which appeared to be decent bulls. We looked them over carefully with binoculars at a considerable distance, but decided that neither would be good enough to try for the first morning, so we returned to the lodge for brunch. Along the way, we sighted herds of wildebeest, impala, and waterbuck, and also individual bushbuck and duiker, but the mission for this first part of the hunt was to be buffalo so we did not make any stalks for them.
That afternoon, we spent most of the time looking for the herds of buffalo, but did not make any close encounters of the Nyati kind, so we retired that evening holding hopes that the next day would be better. Hunters always do that, don’t they? The evening meal included several gourmet quality concoctions of wild game and we sat around the campfire to our adult beverages and conversation to let it settle in, and then repaired to our lodge for sleep to be punctuated by dreams of African animals.
After a breakfast of coffee and rusks (some sort of biscuit you dunk in coffee) we left camp on Thursday morning around 6:30. Shortly we came upon a small group of impala rams, and dismounted for a stalk that culminated in Tom’s rifle barking one time. Perhaps some might see the .416 as overkill for an animal the size of a whitetail doe, but little damage was done to the skin or meat and Tom was in possession of a fine impala trophy. We loaded the impala on to the safari truck and set out for the skinning shed, intending to drop it off for the skinners to work on, but on the way back, Daniel’s sharp eyes spotted a buffalo at some distance into the bush. One buffalo all by itself is probably a dugga boy, which is what an old, loner buffalo bull is called. While Doris and Pam stayed in the truck, Tom, George, Roche and I dismounted and put on a short stalk until the bull presented us with a decent broadside shot. The tension was so thick you would have needed a chainsaw to cut it, but Tom steadied his nerves and made a great one-shot kill. The buffalo part of his hunt was now over. We now had two fine animals to deliver to the skinning shed.
Tom’s wish list for this trip included a kudu bull, a bushbuck ram, and a warthog, but from our two days of hunting on this property it seemed that pickings were going to be slim for the bushbuck ram, and while we were sighting a few warthogs, most were not trophy quality. Over brunch we discussed the possibilities. Tom decided that we should give the bushbuck and warthog a few more days, and if that didn’t pan out, we might substitute a blue wildebeest for the bushbuck. We hunted hard the rest of that day and the next two with limited success, that being on Saturday morning.
On his way to camp that morning, George spotted a small herd of kudu with one exceptional bull in it. He managed to get past them without spooking them and told us of it, so we boarded the truck to go closer. We got off the truck on the other side of a rise from where George had seen the kudu and carefully made our way toward them. Tom was the first to spot the bull and Roche put the shooting sticks on the ground for him. At the shot, the bull took off, but I observed that he slowed down with every step, and we heard a crash as he dropped on the other side of a thornbush. Three down for Tom and three one-shot kills for the .416.
On Sunday we decided to take a day to tour a small section of Kruger National Park. This huge tract of over 2 million hectares (or about 5 million acres) is kept mostly natural, with the exception of several rest camps with accommodations for overnighting. Pam’s goal was to see elephants, so we started out looking primarily for them and met with success within the first hour. Of course we were also treated to the sighting of many other species, including warthogs, impala, waterbuck, buffalo, wildebeest, giraffe, and zebra, just to name a few. At one stop we caught sight of a boomslang (a tree hunting poisonous snake) sticking its head out of a hole in a tree. Boomslang are highly poisonous rear-fanged snakes that feed mostly on birds and small lizards. Toward the end of our tour of Kruger, we came upon a pair of lions out for a stroll. One was a huge male. We watched as they chased a kudu bull across the road. One of the rules for Kruger is that nobody is allowed to leave their vehicle. Obviously, this is a good rule because for lions, man is prey.
As we left the park we spotted a puff adder along the side of the road sunning itself. This and the boomslang are the first two poisonous snakes I have seen in four trips to Africa. Those who avoid Africa on the chance they might encounter some of the deadly snakes found there are missing out on a whole lot. Like our rattlesnakes and copperheads, they are there, but seldom seen.
On Monday morning when George and Daniel came to camp they reported a small herd of wildebeest bulls were feeding in an open area. George, Tom, and Roche left camp on foot, since the open area was fairly close. Nearly an hour later, we heard a single shot. Pam, Doris and I got into the truck with Daniel driving as usual, and went to the area where the wildebeest had been sighted but found nothing. We sat and waited. Nearly another hour passed until we heart two more shots. It took us some time to get to them, but when we found the other three, they had a really nice wildebeest bull down. Tom’s first shot took out one lung, but African animals are tough and this bull covered nearly a mile before they could get an open shot to finish him.
We spent the rest of the day and Tuesday looking for a warthog or possibly a duiker or steenbuck to fill out Tom’s safari, but were unsuccessful in finding shooters of any of those species. We put on several stalks of warthogs, but never found one that was good enough. On one particular stalk we had a few anxious moments as a rhino was less than thirty yards from us giving us the evil eye.
Wednesday morning we packed up for the trip to Johannesburg, saying goodbye to Roche, Ansu, Daniel, and George. On the way, Pieter took us through the Waterburg Mountains, an impressive geological formation that is similar to our Rockies. We also stopped at several curio shops for the ladies to load up on stuff to bring home. Stuff is good. You can’t have too much stuff. By Thursday morning when the plane landed at 11:00, we were tired of travelling, but it was a good kind of tired. For Tom’s first African hunting trip and Pam’s first airplane flights, this was an exceptionally good experience. Would we recommend Motsomi Safaris? Most definitely. In fact we are thinking in terms of returning to hunt with them again.
