The Chowgarh Tigress

The Chowgarh Tigress

Jim Corbett’s adventures with man-eating tigers have made his name famous in tiny villages of the Kumaon Hills in India.  The man-eater is the rare tiger, usually one so weakened by old age or wounds that it cannot do its usual hunting and is forced to prey on human...

Song of the Kalahari

Song of the Kalahari

In the latter part of her life, Karen Blixen wrote wistfully of her one-time home in East Africa. The story became the book, Out of Africa and the movie of the same name. Africa still called to her decades after her departure. And I think I understand. Unlike her, I...

Death in Sidamo

Death in Sidamo

May 1979 Ethiopia, much like Nicaragua, ain’t what it used to be. It’s the same problem of Marxist incursion that has so altered life there that the country I knew really was a last horizon. There is still safari hunting in Ethiopia, but I think things have a very...

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...