Quicksand & Curses

Quicksand & Curses

Not everything in Africa that tries to kill you is even alive. Well, okay. I’ve since learned that that first sentence is a bit of trumped-up, deltoid-pumping rhetoric. Maybe you’ll forgive me, though, because at the moment it happened, I genuinely believed I would...

On the Spoor of a Spiral Horn

On the Spoor of a Spiral Horn

If I was going to take a shot at the kudu we’d been hunting all day, it would have to be now. And it would be like threading a needle. If I was going to take a shot at the spiral horned kudu we’d been hunting and tracking all day, it would have to be now. And it was...

Royal Hunter

Royal Hunter

On a trip to Nepal several years ago, I was making my way apprehensively along a maze of trails to a remote tent camp in the Chitwan area. Adding to my anxiety, I had passed several fresh pugmarks of tigers, and as the light began to fade I imagined a big cat watching...

A Splendid Old Fellow

A Splendid Old Fellow

In this fascinating excerpt from African Game Trails, TR lives up to his ‘stand firm’ philosophy as he takes on a charging lion. On this same evening we rode campward facing a wonderful sunset. The evening was lowering and overcast. The darkening plains stretched dim...

A Hippo For Christmas

A Hippo For Christmas

“I wanna hippopotamus for Christmas…only a hippopotamus will do….” Those lyrics kept running through my mind as I stowed gear in Omujeve Safari’s Ivory Camp on the backwater banks of the Kwando River in Namibia’s Zambezi Strip. The comfortable en-suite tent would...

Trouble with Lions

Trouble with Lions

For weeks on end, deadly man-eaters would plague Arthur Neumann’s safari. The English hunter, Arthur Neumann, was still recovering from a terrible mauling by an angry cow elephant in the Lake Rudolph area of British East Africa (now Lake Turkana, Kenya). The year was...