Every single person I met at FTW Ranch was kind, supportive, helpful and enjoyable, and I am leaving here not just with new knowledge, but a lot of new friends.
Fredo and I met at 6 a.m. to hunt for hogs again this morning. It had just finished raining and was still dark out when we left. Again we saw the most incredible wildlife as we drove through the mountains in the Jeep. Today we saw markhor, fallow, blackbuck, axis deer…and finally, finally we spotted a hog.
It was down in a canyon, so I set up in the prone position to take my shot. I watched through the scope as the pig walked back and forth, taunting me. He’d face me head-on, then walk behind a tree, then turn his back to me. Every second felt like an hour until he, for a split second, turned broad-side. I had the perfect opportunity.
I took the shot but because of the moist ground, neither Fredo nor I could see the impact. The pig ran and I followed him with my scope until he was stopped for a moment. In a rush and panic, I forgot to adjust my scope to the yardage. I took a second shot and missed again. The entire experience was absolutely thrilling. I had a blast. I will surely get one next time.
As for the rest of the day, our group came to an agreement that we all wanted to go on the safari course. This is where you drive to different parts of the ranch to practice shooting types of African game, but first we had to practice shooting at moving targets. We did a few drills where we shot at an automated target that moved from right to left and back again. This was challenging at first, but we all got the hang of it pretty quickly. Then we began our dangerous-game safari. First we had to shoot a buffalo target that wasn’t visible until Fredo hit a button on a remote. Then the buffalo rose up from the tall grass and we had to quickly put our reticle on the kill zone and shoot. This made the buffalo’s friends mad, so two more buffalo came charging toward us. We had to shoot the one on the left from our shooting stick, but we didn’t have a clear shot for the one on the right, so we had to move around a tree to get him before he got us. It was so exciting and fun; we all got a kick out of it.
We spent the rest of the afternoon all over the ranch “hunting” for kudu, leopard, warthog and elephant moving targets. They were well hidden. I couldn’t see them at all until Dave pointed them out to me. He made it even more thrilling because he treated the simulations as if we were on a real hunt. He’d point out tracks and make sure we stayed quiet so the animals wouldn’t see us. Once we shot one, he’d say, “Look, he’s running, he’s running! There he is! Get him again!” And another moving target would pop out from behind the trees. The first time we did it, it felt so real and overwhelming that I forgot to aim for the kill zone. I just shot in a panic because I thought a buffalo was going to trample me. And he would have, because I shot him in the horn and that would have made a live buffalo pretty angry. After that, I made sure I aimed for and hit the kill zone on every target.
After our safari adventure, we headed back to the range by the lodge where both groups and all the staff met to watch the famous (or infamous) FTW cannon. I got to place the bowling ball inside the cannon before they sent it toward the canyon wall where they have a white target painted. It shot so fast I didn’t see where the bowling ball hit, but I saw the cannon fly backward and the cloud of smoke in front of it. Then we all took a group photo with the cannon.
Once we settled down from the fun, it was test time. Both groups lined up across a range to shoot targets under a time limit. I had big guns blasting on either side of me, I had people counting down from ten behind me. I was getting stressed and not shooting nearly as well as I had been all week. Dave told us this intensity is meant to replicate how it would feel when you are on a real hunt and only have so much time to hit the kill zone. We had to find the target, remember to breathe, adjust our scope, remember our trigger control techniques, reload, shoot again at a different target in under ten seconds—a combination of all the fundamentals we learned on Day 1. Intense is the right word for it.
Finally, after four days of hard work, we celebrated our successes with Grad Night. After a delicious brisket dinner, Tim and the staff handed out our graduation certificates that came with a printed copy of our group photo with the cannon. It was the perfect memento to remember the experience I had there and all of the interesting folks I got to know.
Owners and creators of the FTW Ranch and the SAAM course, Tim and Susan Fallon, made me feel right at home in a new place where I didn’t know anyone. After one conversation with Susan, I learned that she is from the same area of South Carolina as my own family and we talked a while about people and places we had in common. On our very first day, one of the students in the advanced class, Daron, told me he keeps coming back to FTW because of the people he meets when he’s here. After my first FTW experience, I have to agree that every single person I met was kind, supportive, helpful and enjoyable, and I am leaving here not just with new knowledge, but a lot of new friends as well.
Mike Miller’s first sixty-three African safaris—including trips to Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, and Cameroon—form the basis for Facing the Charge. A gifted storyteller, writer Scott Longman makes Mike’s African stories come alive on these pages, describing in page-turning detail a tremendous range of experiences during which Mike and his colleagues faced charges from the Big Five—Cape buffalo, lion, leopard, elephant, and rhino—as well as from man-eating crocodiles, slithering pythons, vengeful baboons, and a hormonal Chevy Tahoe-sized mama hippo who had Mike squarely in her front-view mirror. Buy Now
