"We've Made A Horrible Mistake"
These are not the words you want to hear from your PH immediately after you shoot your kudu, but more on that in a minute. I recently returned from my second safari with KMG Hunting Safaris, a 7-day, 2x1 hunt done with a friend, and guided by KMG owner and PH Marius Goosen. But let’s start at the beginning.
My friend Chris and I took the Delta 200 from Atlanta to Johannesburg, spent the night at City Lodge, and then flew Airlink into East London the next morning. There we were met by Marius for the approximately one hour drive to the lodge. In the Eastern Cape, KMG operates from Outspan Lodge, which is near the small town of Komga. To say that the lodge’s location is picturesque would be an understatement. We were shown to our comfortable rooms to settle in for a minute, before heading to the range to check our rifles.
The views from Outspan Lodge are nothing short of incredible.
I brought two rifles with me, a Ruger American in 6.5mm Creedmoor, and a Ruger Gunsite Scout rifle in .308 Winchester. I planned to hunt primarily with the 6.5, leaving the scout rifle as a backup. Chris had brought along his Mossberg Patriot in .308 Winchester. Unfortunately, problems surfaced quickly at the range. For some reason, we simply could not get Chris’s rifle to even shoot a group…never mind where the group was. He shot it, I shot it, and no matter the adjustments we made to his Nikon scope, rounds were hitting all over the place. Our best assessment was that something had gone wonky with his scope, and that it was not going to be fixable for this hunt. We both then shot my 6.5, and were stacking rounds in the center of the target, so we decided that it would be best if we just shared the 6.5. I had brought plenty of ammo (Hornady ELD-X 143 grain), so no big deal. Or so we thought.
We began our first hunting day on a nearby ranch looking for nyala, the number one target species on Chris’s list. I was pretty pleased with myself that I was able to pick out an nyala bull myself on a nearby hillside, but it wasn’t a shooter, so we moved down the ridge to a spot where we could glass several fields down below, along the Great Kei River. After some time, Marius located a good bull in the corner of a field about 1000 yards away, and we decided to make a move on him. After a rather frantic scramble down the ridge through some thorny lantana and acacia, we reached the river bottom and began to close distance. Sadly, by the time we got into position to observe the corner of the field where the bull was last seen…he was gone.
Marius Goosen, professional hunter and owner of KMG Hunting Safaris, glasses for nyala.
We then moved to another part of the property to look for a warthog for me, and quickly spotted some warthog piglets feeding at a bushpig bait site near an old barn. Marius figured the sow and her boyfriend were probably nearby, so we decided to have a look. As we moved through the grass and acacia towards a likely location for the boar, Chris…who was third in line behind me and Marius…suddenly whispered “he’s right there!” The warthog boar had just sat up from under a bush no more than 20 yards away, and was looking right at us. We all froze as Marius whispered urgently, “shoot!” But the rifle was slung on my shoulder, and as soon as I moved to unsling it for a shot, the pig hit the afterburners and was gone.
After lunch, we returned to the field where we had seen the nyala bull that morning. He eventually appeared in the woodline, but behind a fence which prevented a shot. While we waited for an opening, a beef cow in the field spooked at something (?), which in turn spooked the nyala. As we were leaving the field, our tracker radioed that he had spotted several nyala bulls in another nearby field, so we headed that way. Some belly crawling was necessary to get to about 170 yards, but the five bulls just weren’t giving Marius an opportunity to identify which of them was a good shooter. As we waited and watched for the right bull, the sun set and shooting light was gone. We returned to the lodge empty-handed.
Day Two began with the hunt for my kudu, and here’s where it gets, um…interesting. Marius was confident that there was a really good bull in the area, and was dead-set on finding it. After about two miles of walking and glassing, he spotted a good bull up on a mountain ridge above us. So we climb, practically tunneling through the thorny vegetation until we got into a small clearing within shooting range. Marius spotted him pretty quickly, and got me into position sitting with the rifle on short bipod sticks. I wasn’t able to pick up the bull at first, but Marius patiently talked me to the location, and eventually I saw the face of the bull…looking right at us, with his vitals obscured. So we sat and waited. And waited. Back aching, legs cramping, I sat there on the rifle for a good hour before the bull moved a little and gave an opportunity. The bull was quartering pretty sharply towards me, so I held on his shoulder and squeezed. The shot went off, and although I lost the bull in the scope, I heard the bullet smack kudu flesh 268 yards away. Marius and Chris both reported seeing the bull go down, and then Marius made the prophetic comment, “I think we’ve made a horrible mistake.”
The red arrow and circle indicate the approximate location of the kudu bull.
The realization quickly sank in that we now had a kudu bull down…way up on a mountain ridge, with not as much as a game trail anywhere near. We spent the next hour climbing through dense cover until we reached the bull, down but not dead. My bullet had hit farther back than intended, and slightly high. The impact near the spine had put the kudu down, and would have been fatal eventually, but I used Marius’s 9mm pistol to dispatch the animal much later than it deserved. Now, as the sun climbed and the temperature rose, the work began.
Marius and his team quickly arranged the bull for the hero pictures, and then our tracker/skinner and a helper went to work gutting the animal. They then cut it in half for the trek down the mountain. Over the next three hours the five of us dragged the halves of the bull down the mountain…sweating, cursing, falling, and cut to pieces by the ever present thorns. Every one of us, regardless of age or fitness level, was absolutely wasted by the time we reached the truck. The only other times in my life that I have been this exhausted was after the four full marathons I’ve run. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. After a few minutes just sitting one the ground and drinking water, we heaved the pieces into the truck and loaded up for the journey back to camp. Once the kudu had been dropped off at the skinning shed, Marius, Chris, and I headed straight to the lodge for a cold beer to be followed by a cold shower.
Best beer ever.
After a late lunch, we decided (somewhat half-heartedly) to go back out and look for an impala for Chris, though we all agreed that we weren’t going to kill ourselves…we’d already pretty much done that. But in the afternoon heat, there wasn’t much going on, so no one complained when daylight began to fade and it was time to return to the lodge. Data captured from my Garmin watch tells the tale of “the hardest day” pretty well (and it was off my wrist and in my pocket for an hour)…
The next morning saw an early start, heading out to another property to look primarily for a warthog for me and a bushbuck for Chris. It was another warm day, and the only stalk we made was on a distant warthog boar. After driving a few hundred yards down the hill to close the gap a bit, we headed uphill in the heat, pushing through a thorny thicket of lantana to crest the hill within 60 yards of the boar…and here’s where it gets bad. As we approached, Marius whispered and asked if I had a round chambered. I was confident that the rifle was loaded and said so, as he motioned me to get on the sticks. I lined up on the pig and squeezed, and…click. I had been so certain that there was a round in the chamber that in my mind it had to be some sort of misfire…light strike of the firing pin, dud primer, or something. Not wanting to take my eyes off the warthog, I slowly opened the bolt partially and felt for a round with my fingers. Feeling what I thought was a round, I closed the bolt and tried again. Click. I couldn’t understand why the gun wouldn’t fire, and though I’m normally pretty unflappable, I admit that I was getting pretty flustered. I cycled the bolt fully…slowly and quietly as I could…and pressed the trigger a third time. This time, the gun fired but my nerves had gotten the best of me and I jerked the shot and missed clean. It was a total mess, and it was my fault for not verifying the status of the rifle before the stalk. Lesson learned, but I spent the rest of the day in a funk while we searched fruitlessly for a bushbuck.
The next day began with a hunt for impala for Chris, and it was another rough start. Marius spotted a nice ram, and we moved to get a shot. You’ll recall that due to issues with his scope, Chris was shooting my rifle. He had shot it at the range with no issues, and he is already a better rifle shot than I am. But once set up on the impala, his shot inexplicably landed too far back on the ram and failed to put him down. Even worse, two follow-up shots missed completely. What the hell? In order to reduce noise and get Chris as close as possible to try to finish the ram, Marius asked me to stay back and let the two of them try to close the gap. So I hunkered down behind an acacia and waited. After a bit, another shot and the impala was down. But at this point, neither of us had any confidence in my rifle*, and Marius suggested that we use his rifle going forward. We agreed, and headed in to the range to shoot it.
Despite rifle issues, the hunt ended with this nice old impala ram in the salt.
After verifying that Marius’s suppressed .300 WM was on for both of us, we headed back out to make another try at warthog. By this time, we had made five unsuccessful stalks on warthog (including my miss), prompting Marius to comment that maybe the warthog was my spirit animal and that bagging one simply might not be in the stars. Mind you, some of these busted stalks were completely baffling, even to Marius. More than once, we were still several hundred yards out, moving quietly with the wind in our faces, when the pigs would just up and take off for no apparent reason. But stalk number six worked out. Circling the group of warthogs to keep the wind right, we eventually closed to within 70 yards of a good boar, and the sticks went up. I rested Marius’s .300 WM on them, lined up the shot, and squeezed. With the noise reduction of the silencer, we could hear the 180-grain Sierra GameKing smack into the pig. He ran about 75 yards and collapsed, and stayed down. The jinx was broken. Interestingly, the entrance wound just behind the shoulder of the pig was fairly large. Apparently, the bullet had just clipped the front leg of the animal, causing it to begin expanding before it struck the body, causing the larger than normal entry hole. Regardless, the bullet passed diagonally through the boar’s body and did its job. We spent the rest of the day looking for an nyala bull for Chris. We saw a few, but none worth shooting so we called it a day.
Remember the warthog we had walked right up on earlier in the week? Now that he had evaded us on a couple of different occasions, Marius was beginning to hold a grudge. It was personal now, and Chris had agreed to shoot it if we could find him again. So we started the next morning returning to his stomping grounds and glassing for the warthog.
That warthog is out there…somewhere.
But while we watched and waited for the old pig to appear, Lloyd, our tracker, called on the radio that he had seen a caracal on the opposite hillside. Normally, these cats are hunted with hounds, which will bay the animal in a tree where the hunter shoots it. But Marius felt that although actually spotting and stalking a caracal was a long shot, it was too good of an opportunity to waste. So we took the over/under shotgun and a couple of the dogs to see if we could find it. Again, this was an unusual way to hunt a caracal, and Marius instructed me to stay ready and that if the cat broke and ran for it to take a shot. We worked through the clumps of scrub trees on the hillside, but if the cat was near, he didn’t give anything away and we walked back to the truck empty handed. It was worth a try!
We took a long lunch before heading back to our prime nyala area, hoping to let the heat subside a bit and catch them coming out late in the day. Once in the area, Chris and I took up a glassing spot on a ridge overlooking a couple of large fields, while Marius moved to a vantage point where he could observe another field out of our view. We soon saw three bulls below, but not being expert judges of nyala quality, we called Marius on the radio to come have a look. After looking them over, he assured Chris that there were better bulls in the area, and none of those three were up to scratch. As we continued to glass, Chris spotted another bull, and Marius quickly judged this one to be worthy…and the stalk was on. Once we had slipped down the ridge to field level, Marius determined that this would be a tricky approach, and asked that I hang back as he and Chris closed the last bit of distance. I pulled up a stump at an old hunter’s cabin and waited.
With views like this, it’s easy to forget you’re supposed to be looking for nyala.
Before long, I heard the suppressed crack of Marius’s .300 WM, followed by radio calls for me to come on up and for Lloyd to bring the truck. There was an nyala on the ground. As I walked up to the field edge where Marius and Chris stood, I saw an nyala bull walking out in the middle of the field and Marius grimly announced, “He shot the cow by mistake.” Huh? My brain simply did not compute, trying to reconcile that statement with the fact that I knew Chris to be a very experienced hunter, and not the sort of person who would make a mistake like that. Chris grumbled that he was just going to consider that as his nyala tag, and settle for a tanned flat skin as a trophy. Although I couldn’t get my head around what they were telling me, they seemed serious enough, so I bought in. At least until we walked up to the quite dead nyala bull! Very funny, guys. But it was in fact a really, really nice old nyala bull, and definitely worth all the waiting, glassing, and passing on inferior animals.
Not a cow.
We began the next morning picking up the hound pack and their handler, in order to take them to the area where we had seen the caracal before. After thoroughly working the area without success, we spent the rest of the day looking for bushbuck for Chris…also without success. This next to last day of hunting was a bust…we had one day left to collect my caracal and Chris’s bushbuck. Since the cat was pretty much out of my control, we planned to head out in the morning to look for bushbuck.
Big country.
The universe had a different idea, however. Before leaving the lodge the next morning, the call came…the hounds had bayed a caracal and it was go time. We loaded up the truck and headed out. We located the hounds and their handler in a dense creek bottom, and began to work our way into the thicket. The cat was high up in a tree, with most of her body obscured by vegetation, so PH Nick (who had come along to help out) advised that the only real shot available was a frontal shot through a small opening in the cover. I got into position with Marius’s bolt-action Mauser .22 LR, bracing against a tree. Through the scope I found the cat’s eyes and followed down its nose until I had the crosshairs centered on its chest…then steadied the rifle, exhaled, and squeezed. “Perfect,” said Nick as I broke the shot. The caracal spasmed briefly and died…but did not fall. Fortunately, the native houndsman was johnny-on-the-spot. He climbed part way up the tree, and then used his machete to cut and trim a long branch to use as a pole to dislodge the cat. [NOTE: Caracal are to South African farmers as coyotes are to us in the United States. They are capable of taking prey six times their size, and predate livestock and game species. The cat I shot was thought to be responsible for killing a sheep just a few days earlier.]
This female caracal was believed to have killed a farmer’s sheep just a few days earlier.
After getting the caracal back to the skinning shed, the only thing left to do was to find a bushbuck for Chris. We spent the rest of the day glassing a nearby farm for an old ram that had been spotted in the area, but with no luck. While we did see a few rams, they were too young and not the old guy we were looking for. Shooting light expired in beautiful South African fashion, leaving that one tag unfilled.
A magnificent South African sunset was the consolation prize for an unfilled bushbuck tag.
The spectacular sunset lasted until we arrived back at the lodge for our last night…the perfect punctuation to a challenging week of hunting which blended difficulties and disappointments with the beauty and joy which only Africa can provide. Will I be back? Going into this safari, I was pretty sure it would be my last one. I’m not getting any younger, and I still have a lot of other things I want to do. But as always, my mind returns to the closing lines of Robert Ruark’s classic, Horn of the Hunter:
“There was a part of me out there that would stay out there until I came back to ransom that part of me. It would never live in a city again, that part of me, nor be content, the other part, to be in a city. There are no tiny-gleaming campfires in a city.”
So will I be back? I don’t know. But what I do know is that, like Ruark, part of me remains there until and unless I can come up with the ransom.
Last night in Africa. Unfiltered beauty.
As always, tremendous thanks to Marius Goosen and the entire team at KMG Hunting Safaris for an amazing hunt. I have now completed two safaris with them and will happily recommend them without reservation or qualification. No one will work harder to ensure you have a great hunt.
KMG Hunting Safaris owner and PH Marius Goosen, holding court in the field.
Thanks also to the crew at Outspan Lodge for the comfortable accommodations and for making sure that no matter how many calories I expended during the day…they were always replaced in delicious fashion.
If you can’t be happy with kudu backstrap cooked over a wood fire…you just can’t be happy.
Departure morning. Farewell, Africa…until next time?
* Another of the KMG professional hunters, Jeremy, is a knowledgeable rifleman and long range shooter, and he took my rifle to the range for diagnosis during some down time. He found that the barreled action of the rifle was not perfectly centered in the stock, and because the stock material was pretty flexible, hand pressure could cause it to contact the barrel and create a shift in point of impact. As long as the fore end was not pressured, the rifle shot perfectly, but it took very little pressure to create that issue. As a result, I’ll be replacing the factory Ruger stock with something stiffer, and replacing the factory trigger (probably with a Timney) in the near future. I’ll write up that process here once it is complete.
