Originally published in African Sporting Gazette Volume 14 Issue 4

“He’s the one standing broadside!” was the last thing I heard George say before I centered the crosshairs on the buffalo’s shoulder and squeezed the trigger. After nine days of tracking buffalo and elephant, I had finally shot something!

My hunt started in June of 2008 when I flew from my home in Victoria, Minnesota half way around the world to Zimbabwe. I had hunted with PH George Hallamore of HHK Safaris in 2006 on a leopard and plains game hunt that had surpassed all of my expectations. Before leaving camp on the first hunt, we were already planning my second hunt for Elephant, Buffalo and Sable in the Matetsi Safari Area to take place in 2008.

When I got home in 2006, I quickly acquired a .416 Remington rifle built on a Montana Rifle Company 1999 action to use on my next trip. Before the end of the summer, I had developed two loads using 370 grain Northfork Solids and Softs at 2500 fps. With my loads developed, I had everything I needed for the trip. Now all I needed to do was wait two years!

When the plane landed in Bulawayo, I was pleasantly surprised at how friendly and helpful the various airport and customs personnel were. Unlike South Africa, nobody tried to shake me down or ask for anything “extra.” The whole process of getting my rifle permits and going through customs only took about 15 minutes.

On my first trip, George had been given the incorrect time of my flight arrival and wasn’t there to pick me up. It turned into a running joke between us as we got to know each other over the next two years. Much to my surprise, I found that he wasn’t there when I cleared customs. This time, I had his phone number with me as well as a satellite phone. I could actually hear the panic in his voice when I informed him that I was waiting for him outside of the airport! Once again he was late, as he’d been given the wrong arrival time for my flight.

The drive to Matetsi took us about five hours. While there were multiple police roadblocks set up, we were waived through all of them with no issues.

As was to be expected, camp was very comfortable. They had arranged for us to stay in a camp inside of Wankie National Park about a mile outside of our assigned concession. The next morning we began driving the various roads that cut the concession into blocks, focusing our attention on the boundary between our concession and the Botswana border.

In the first week, we saw and tracked a lot of elephants, but didn’t find anything to our liking. We also tracked a couple of old dagga boys, but when we finally caught up to them, George felt we could do better. In addition to the buffalo and elephant, we also located a very good sable, which managed to give us the slip several times that first week.

By the ninth day of the trip, everyone was getting a little antsy. We were doing a lot of walking and driving, but hadn’t done any shooting. As we drove down the border road, we could see several fresh piles of buffalo dung in front of us. The soft dust of the road held the fresh tracks of at least one hundred buffalo that had just crossed into our concession from Botswana.

We hadn’t been on the tracks for more than fifteen minutes when we spotted the first buffalo. For the next five hours, we kept circling in front of them, trying to get a good look at what was in the herd. In addition to the cows and calves, there were at least a dozen hard-bossed bulls mixed in.

A little before noon, the herd arrived at Nyoni Pan, a familiar place to us as we’d been checking it for spoor at least once a day. When they arrived, the whole herd crashed into the remaining water. While they were preoccupied, George, my videographer Richard Rauch and I made our final stalk. As we approached the edge of the trees surrounding the pan, George spotted the bull he wanted me to take. After days of tracking, the time had finally come to do some shooting!

The bull was standing broadside about sixty yards from our position. Using a large Mopane tree for support, I centered the crosshairs low on his shoulder and squeezed. At the shot, I saw his shoulder collapse before he took off with the rest of the herd. “Good shot!” George said to me as he slapped me on the back. “Let’s let them settle down for a few minutes and then go find your buffalo.”

I was feeling very confident a few minutes later as we started off after the herd. “Take the scope off your rifle and make sure you’re loaded with solids,” George instructed me. “If he’s not dead, you’re going to want to be able to use your open sights.”

Richard found the first spoor from the bull, an inch long chunk of bloody bone. We followed the tracks for another hundred yards, with me expecting to find my perfectly shot bull lying ahead dead any minute. I could not have been more wrong…

After following the herd as a whole for a few hundred yards, George had the trackers go back to where he had initially been hit and start tracking him individually. With the tracks of over 100 buffalo going over the same ground, this was a very slow process. They did make some progress and managed to find blood spoor in several places. The herd had moved into a very large vlei behind the pan. The trackers were of the opinion that he was still with the herd and that we should follow them into the vlei. After some discussion, George finally agreed. He had Richard, Absent (the head tracker) the game scout and I wait at the pan while they went to go get the truck.

As the four of us sat down in the shade at the edge of the pan to wait for them to return, the game scout pointed across the pan. About three hundred yards away, a lone buffalo with a bad limp was trying to make his way towards us through the minefield of elephant tracks. “Could our luck be any better?” I thought to myself as we slowly moved further back into the trees. My wounded buffalo was coming to us!

It was obvious that he had a really buggered-up right shoulder. That was exactly where I had been aiming. As he approached closer and closer, it became clear that he wasn’t the same buffalo. The one I had shot was a wide, hard-bossed bull. This bull was both young and soft. Now my mind was really racing. Had I shot so poorly that I had a pass-through and had wounded two buffalo? What a mess!

The bull had a good drink at the pan and started back towards to vlei. We filmed him as he was drinking less than fifty yards from us and showed George the footage when he returned with the truck. He also confirmed that it wasn’t the same bull. When we looked at the footage from the initial shot, it was clear behind him, so the odds that he was wounded by a pass-through were very small. What we did know was that we now had two wounded buffalo to deal with in the vlei.

We followed the herd that afternoon until the sun started going down, but never caught up with them. We didn’t find any additional blood spoor and no evidence than an animal had left the herd. As we walked back to the truck in the fading light, everyone was quiet.

The next morning we spotted the herd from the truck about eight miles from where I had taken my initial shot. After glassing them for about twenty minutes, the trackers were convinced that he was still somewhere in the herd. George was of a different opinion. “There’s no way a buffalo with a broken shoulder could keep up with the herd for this distance. We’re going back to where he was hit and we’re going to start over from the beginning.”

We arrived back at Nyoni around 9:30. Going to where we last found blood spoor, everyone started circling, looking for sign that we might have missed. George worked ahead, focusing on the edge of the vlei. After about an hour, he found that our buffalo had not entered the vlei with the rest of the herd, but had entered it further to the west.

As we entered the long grass of the vlei, the tracking got a lot easier. Within a few hundred yards, we found a large pool of dried blood where he must have stood and watched us the day before. Another half a mile into the vlei, his tracks were joined by the tracks of four hyenas drawn by the scent of blood. “That’s going to have put him in a VERY good mood,” Richard commented to me. “Those hyenas have been harassing him all night. He’s going to be ready for a fight.”

The deeper we went into the vlei, the higher the grass got. Soon, it was head-high. For safety’s sake, George went back for the truck. With Richard driving, I stood on the rack, providing cover for George and the trackers. After several more hours of tracking, we came to the edge of the vlei, where a dirt track separated it from a large area of scrub mopane.

“Let’s stop here and have some lunch,” George said as Richard pulled the truck onto the track. As we were eating our lunch, the game scout suddenly pointed into a large thicket. “Something big just ran out of there!” she said to George. Grabbing our rifles, we circled around the thicket. Much to our chagrin, we found the fresh tracks of our buffalo exiting the backside of the thicket. He had been laying up twenty-five yards from where we were having lunch. At least now we knew we were getting close.

After lunch, we started slowly following the tracks, with George in the lead, followed by Absent, Jameson, then me. As we entered some very thick brush, I saw Absent grab George and excitedly point into the shadows. George raised his rifle and fired a shot. We couldn’t see what he was shooting at, but we did hear the solid from his .416 Rigby ricochet off of a tree. He cycled the bolt and fired again. This was followed by the sound of our buffalo taking off through the brush.

“Did you hit him?” I asked. “I think so on the second shot, but I’m not sure where. All is could see was a small patch of black.” As we moved forward, we found a good blood trail. George’s second shot had connected, and now the tracking was a lot easier.

Given the thick cover, George and I had our rifles at ready as we followed the spoor. After another quarter mile or so, George signaled for everyone to stop. He put his finger to his lips to let everyone know to be quiet, then handed out cigarettes to everyone. After we finished smoking, George signaled everyone back up and we very slowly took up the trail. We hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when we noticed something strange. There was a lone tree in front of us that was about twenty feet taller than the rest of the surrounding brush. What made it stick out was that it was rocking back and forth,

even though there wasn’t any wind. “Get ready!” Richard whispered to me. “That’s him.” As we approached the tree, both George and Absent raised their rifles and fired. As I saw the buffalo get up, I raised my rifle to shoot, but found that Jameson had moved in between us, blocking my shot. As the buffalo turned and ran, George and I took off after him. We hadn’t gone more than another hundred yards when we both spotted him and put another three shots into him. As I fired the third shot, I saw him go down.

Heart racing and nervous fingers finding it difficult to reload, George signaled me to move up on him. We couldn’t see him through the brush, but we could hear him thrashing. We approached to about thirty yards before we could see him. He was on his side, trying to get up. All I could see was his head. Not really caring about what the mount was going to look like and just wanting him dead, I put three more solids into his head. What really surprised me was that while he was down again, we could still hear him moving. George signaled me to follow him around the thicket to get a better shot angle. As we were changing position, we heard him give a final bellow. With one more shot behind his shoulder, it was all over.

As we took pictures and finally loaded the bull into the truck, everyone was in a good mood. We managed to finish the job and nobody got hurt. I guess you can’t ask for

much more than that. At the skinning shed that night, we looked at the results of our shooting. My first shot had hit the bull in the shoulder just below the joint, shattered the upper leg, and passed through chest coming to rest up against the opposite side leg bone. It got a piece of one lung, but missed the heart and the other lung by a fraction of an inch. The best part for me was knowing with certainty that the second wounded buffalo we saw wasn’t one wounded by me. George’s first shot had been very effective, passing through the tail and ranging far into the body. These two shots, combined with George’s decision to track the bull very slowly are probably what kept him from coming at us in those last few moments.

With the buffalo in the salt, we continued our search for an elephant, but that’s another story altogether…

Tags: Cape Buffalo Hunting, Matetsi, Safari, zimbabwe