Page 68 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

It is a kudu that Terry, the craggy, white-haired hunter from Oklahoma, wants to shoot. He’d prefer a sable he says, but Andreis, the game reserve owner, does not have any he’s willing to part with, and it will take a few days to get one lined up with one of the other reserves he occasionally shares hunting space with.
Dawn is just creeping in a filmy mauve behind the trees when we rattle down the drive in the Land Cruiser. Jabu, the tracker and skinner for this small hunting operation is driving, and I am wedged in the backseat listening to Terry and Andreis reminisce about Terry’s seventeen previous South African hunts. As the only female of the group, I do not feel as uncomfortable as I thought I might. I took my practice shots with the rest of them on Andreis’ .30-06 —held my own. But when he offered me a gun this morning, I told him maybe not this trip. By which he knew I meant, maybe never.
It is four or five bumpy miles down dirt roads to the Andreis’ other property, 20,000 fenced acres where the bigger game stays. The road varies quickly be- tween the washboard death rattle, boggy, cratered pits in the low places, and rocks I am certain will shred his tires. We cross a bridge that is almost wide enough for one car, the concrete cracked and pitched sideways, patched in the middle with steel plates.
“A car fell through this last summer,” says Andreis, turning back to me. He is stocky and balding, with a lilting Afrikaans accent and dark bronzed arms and neck—right to the edges of his kaki guide shirt. “It had needed to be fixed for years, but vehicles usually have to fall through before someone pays attention.”
I want to tell him it isn’t just bridges that are like that. It’s not just South Africa. So many things in life need something to fall through before anyone pays attention.
The sun is just cracking the horizon when we get to the 28-strand, nine-foot game fence that surrounds the hunting track. The sunrise does not have the same burnt umbers and dark teals of the sunset, the same feeling of being soaked in a dusky gold. But
as the mauve sky turns to coral and peach, and an ostrich struts across the field in front of a few tatters of fuchsia cloud, I think I see why people love it here.
Would come thousands of miles just for the sunsets and sunrises.
I am watching a small, pale female giraffe pace the game fence on the other side of the field when Jabu makes a low sound—his eyes catching the movement before anyone else’s. The kudu steps from the tree line, and its spiraling horns are some of the biggest
I have seen yet. I will learn later that they are 48 inches from base to tip. It is massive, and yet moves with a lithe, delicate ease, showing no sense of its maybe seven hundred pounds. I cannot quite get over the extravagance of these South African animals.
“That’s him,” Andreis nods. “You can wait until he gets further from the trees. Or, if you feel confident...”
Terry rests his rifle barrel, a well-used bolt action Remington firing a .300 Win-Mag, on the roll cage and something in me clenches tight as he sights down the length.
The bull starts at the rifle shot, takes an uncertain step and stares at us for a second or two before turn- ing and vanishing back into the woods.
It takes Jabu only a few minutes to find blood. Just a few speckles, but that is all it takes—if you wound an animal you pay for it. And $3500 is too much to just let waltz off into the sunrise. But Jabu is a good tracker. While Andreis and Terry discuss if they saw the bullet hit him high or mid ribcage, Jabu follows the broken branches, stumble marks in the loose leaves and dirt, and occasional blood spots.
A few hundred yards into the trees we find a clot of mucous-y blood the size of my palm, bright and shiny on a dewy bed of leaves. “He’s coughing up lung,” says Jabu. “He won’t go much further.”
When they find the kudu—pitched on his chest, still gurling, with blood flecking his muzzle and the grass in front of him—I leave before Terry takes the final shot. Walk back to the Land Cruiser with Jabu and help him clear a path through the brush so he can back it in and winch the Kudu up into the back. They are taking pictures when we get back to where it fell. The bull is propped up now, his legs folded under him, nose on the ground, a handful of bloody grass tossed a few feet away. Terry crouches behind the
61
Some Kind of Resonance
larissa spreCher