Binding An Elephant
After long days of hunting with no luck, it finally took a bit of native sorcery to make the difference on an elephant hunt. The flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg provides those unwilling to embrace the charms of Ambien with ample opportunity to think. In point of...
Betrayal and Death Hunt Unseen
An insensible threat was at fore, a primordial evil. The calico dog stopped dead-still, using the dusky shadows of the bush to secret himself from the revealing glimmer of the building moon. He had the fragile night breeze in his nose. On it had been borne the...
The Great Emu War
Ugly, shaggy, wide in the hips, quarrelsome, six feet tall, prone to grunting, sneaky as the cagiest Appalachian gobblers, with spurs that can rip down steel fences and a brain the size of a small walnut ... no, not your mother-in-law, but potentially a new game...
The Smile of Death in Africa
Largest of all reptiles, the crocodile is arguably the deadliest creature ever to walk or swim the face of the earth. Water beckons to most of the world. The inland bodies: lakes, streams, rivers and ponds, shimmer blue and tempting, time of passage, a respite from...
Whiskey and Palaver at the Dying of the Sun
“We had no lion tag and there was no game scout to give permission." Moses threw another load of sticks upon the coals. The fire crackled, sparks flew and smoke rolled. Zambia, in the valley of the Great Zambezi. Out on the sandbars, hippos were grunting up dates,...
The Big Sixth Should Be a Hippo
Hippos will fool you. Fat, slow, benign and slightly cartoonish. Except they aren't. This two-and-a-half-ton herbivore kills more humans every year than lions, leopards, elephant and buffalo combined. The Big Five should be the Big Six, and the biggest of the lot...
Death in the Wild African Dust
We were standing three abreast when a cow charged through the dust. It was Rick Stoeckel’s second African hunt, as with most he had cut his teeth on plains game and couldn't wait to return for something big. By the time our plane bounced down hard on the old military...
The Fury of A Lion
We were camped on the edge of Pom Pom Lagoon in the game-filled Matsebe concession, located deep in northern Botswana’s 4,000-square-mile Okavango Delta. Here, brush-covered islands, mopane sand and big herds of buffalo, primary prey of the area’s magnificent lions....
Legends of the Elephant Tail
Aspiring elephant hunters dream of large tusks and an elephant hair bracelet on their right arm. Before the turn of the 20th century, natives living in remote regions of Africa begrudgingly shared their home ranges with elephants. They were often forced to defend...
The Other Side of the Dream
Webster was adrift in time again. For 30 minutes, or it could have been hours, the leopard fed. The sun was setting behind the dangling bait, a shoulder from the zebra Webster had killed two days before. Forty yards away, Webster watched through a peephole in the...