A question - to help me out with a project I'm well into already.

If you were to select a short story (or passage from a book) as your favourite dangerous game hunting story, what would it be? Maximum length about 5,000 words.

Let me refine that a little further, you can choose two, but:
1. Must be out of print.
2. Can be still available.

http://ezine.nitroexpress.info...Asia-PDF/Asia309.pdf


If it can be a magazine article out of print,
Maneater of Bastar.

http://forums.accuratereloadin...=930106631#930106631

This is a jaguar hunt that I posted on AR, May 28, 2004 titled Monster of the Pantanal by David Lauzen.

Kathi:

I remember that article well. I bought it from David, edited it, and designed the pages it appeared on in Safari Magazine.

A year or so after it was published, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local law enforcement agencies surrounded his home before dawn and raided his trophy room, looking for anything from his jaguar.

He knew better than to bring even a whisker home, though.

Unfortunately, anti-hunting groups also saw that article and successfully put pressure on South American governments to shut down jaguar hunting.

Bill Quimby

P.S. Say hello to David for me.

Samllbore and Bill,
Gene Hill wrote a couple of pieces on Africa in one of his books - here is the one I really like.

Giving and Taking

By Gene Hill

A few years ago I was in Africa. Only a year ago, but it seems far more distant than time. I find writing about it strangely remote and unreal. How does one describe the way the lion tells you he is in charge of the night how much you believe him? Nor can I properly express the combination of beauty and dignity, and the elusive shyness, of the great antelopes like the kudu and the sable, or put real meaning into the dark sullen tonnage of the Cape Buffalo.

The good writing about Africa, by Isak Kinesen, Hemingway, Ruark, and a few others, deals in the main with how the continent affects and changes the thinking of those who spend much time there. But their good words are like pebbles thrown in a pond __ you see a little rippling on the surface, hear a splash, and then everything is just the way it was before. The country closes behind you as the writers take you through it. The animals move back a little, the baboons and birds resume their barking and singing. You are, in very short order, made to fell insignificant. As much as I’ve enjoyed sitting, as it were, at their campfires, looking over their shoulders at the stalk and the kill, it is not remotely like being there.

I could tell you, in detail, about stumbling into a lioness and her three cubs, and how frightening it was in an absolute way. But then, fright is not a strong emotion, secondhand. I could tell you about being chased by half a dozen elephants or almost walking into a hippo in the dark, but in print it’s just another brush with a big animal. And if you wander around Africa, these things are bound to happen anyway. If you drive a car long enough, you are going to have a blowout or a skid or an accident. Who is going to know what you felt? Who cares about your life the way you do?

Enough of that. Let’s hunt for a day I remember very well.

I have never felt quite so good after a week of walking all day, with the very comforting weight of my .375 riding on my shoulder. Back at the tent camp, I’d sit in front of the fire, have a little warm whisky, some good talk, a streak or two from the animal I shot yesterday or today, and then go to bed early to read for a little while. In the dark I’d listen to Africa, falling asleep with the soft voices of the camp help somehow cushioning the heavy bellows of the short-tempered hippos and the egotistical threats of a nearby lion.

In the morning its cold and you stand around the fire waiting for breakfast and the first light to extinguish the last of the stars. You check the rifles being put into the hunting car and go over your cartridge belts one more time. I slip four big 270-grain Noslers in one pocket of my shorts and full clip for the 7mm Magnum in the other. Four more 300-grain solids for the .375 go in a shirt pocket, just in case. My old theory is, “if you don’t have it in your hand or pocket, it might as well not exist.” The professional checks the car one more time—extra gas, lunch boxes, water jug, spare tires, ropes. One rifle is tied with rubber straps in the outside rack; the other one rides up front in my hands, three cartridges in the magazine and the bolt closed on an empty chamber. The ones in the rack are loaded the same way.

In the headlights as we leave the camp are the usual assortment of birds enjoying the warmth of the sand tracks, and now and then a rabbit or an elephant shrew. My binoculars are in a clip on the dash and I clean the dust off the glass and slip the strap over my neck. As we drive along the hunter and I play the old game. He says, “See that roan?” And I say, “Not more than 20 inches, maybe 21.” That’s a tie. We both saw it at the same time. You lose when you have to say “where?” I usually lose. He knows where to look, but I’m learning.

Today we’re looking for sable antelope. And I’m thinking about yesterday when we must have seen thirty sable bulls and I turned them all down. Three days in a row before that, we hadn’t seen one sable. But now we think we know where to start. It’s an hour’s drive past zebras, wildebeests, two giraffes, a family of warthogs, reedbucks, hartebeests, and one hear of at least eighteen elephants standing almost invisible at the gray edge of a stand of forest. The trackers, riding in the open back of the hunting car, are constantly tapping on the roof to make sure we see what they see. If we don’t we stop and ask “where?” Sometimes they do not understand why we pass by an animal we were looking for a few days ago. They stop us now to point out a good kudu bull that neither the hunter nor I could see. I fool with the glasses for a full two minutes before I make out the ivory tips of horns, but the body of the animal is invisible. I already have my kudu and I hope this one isn’t bigger because that’s happened to me several times already. The hunter says, “He’ll be a good 50 inches by next year if the poachers don’t get him.” By now the kudu has moved a step or two and I can see the white chevrons on his face. “Save him for me,” I say. “Tell him not to go away until I get back.”

About a mile from where we’d seen the sable bulls, we stop the car. I put a shell in the chamber of the 7mm, slide the glasses inside my shirt, and start to walk. We leave one tracker with the truck. The tracker with us carries my .375 and the hunter carries his own .458. All we need is a sable and all we see is an empty meadow. Disappointment is part of hunting, and the sudden vacancy is almost unreal. I still carry in my mind the picture of this field studded with the graceful black-pelted animals with their arching horns. I can so clearly see them clustered; it is almost like awakening from a dream not to find them there.

We turn and start the walk back to the car, the tracker in front and the hunter and me following behind, making plans about what to do next. The tracker stops with a low whistle and points toward the woods across from the clearing we just left. About half a mile away are some sables about to come into the meadow. Through the binoculars we can count eighteen, all cows. The hunter says there must be a bull somewhere. I tell him that I don’t have anything better to do this afternoon and why don’t we just walk over and take a closer look. Without too much optimism we start the stalk. With such a number of cows, it is sure, absolutely sure, that one of them will see us before we get much closer. We crouch and freeze, run a step or two, and freeze. There is only one small stand of trees between us and the herd, and that still leaves about 200 yards of nothing but grass and thirty-six eyes. We drop behind a slating tree and use the glasses. The hunter sees him first; standing in grass almost high enough to cover his back; all that is really visible is an arc of horn. But it seems high enough and far back enough. I rest the rifle on the tree, put the crosshairs under the front end of the horns, and wait. The cows are getting spookier and milling around as if waiting to be told what to do. The bull moves a step forward and I can see most of his front shoulder through the grass. The hunter nods at me. At the shot nothing much happens. The cows are milling a bit faster and the bull just stands there. I shoot again and the bull and the cows walk back into the woods and vanish.

The bull is no more than 100 yards into the trees. We stop and I shoot one more time—the “insurance policy”.

We get back to camp a little after dark and leave the sable in the capable hands of the skinners.

“It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” the hunter said as we stood around the fire. “Hunting has a way of adding something to you and at the same time subtracting something as well.”

I said that I’d taken a lot of animals before and hoped to get several more, but that it never got any easier.

“Would you throw him back?” the hunter asked.

“No,” I answered. “We know there are twenty other bulls or more for his harem. I need him at home to watch over me, to remind me of some things I don’t ever want to forget. Of Africa.”

“Why wouldn’t a picture do as well?” the hunter asked, and then answered his own question. “It doesn’t, does it?”

He held up his hand and I could see the scars that a leopard had put there.

“You should have asked the leopard to take your picture,” I said.

“No,” he said, “it wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. There wouldn’t be anything to this hunting business if you always won.”

That night the lions somehow sounded closer than ever as I slept. The next morning I found out they had come into the skinners’ tent and taken away my sable.

Africa giveth, and Africa taketh away.

Smallbore and Bill,
Here is my all time favorite from Gene Hill -

Unpacking Some Memories of Africa
By Gene Hill

Just about this time of year, a few years back, I was happily packing for Africa. After I got home I never really unpacked. I played at staying ready to return at a moment’s notice. I kept a few things in my little tin truck and a lot of things in my heart. But now that my part of Africa is closed t hunting, I guess I might as well shake out most of the things I put away.

I wish I could tell you about the dawns and sunsets, but I can’t. I could attempt to describe the colors of the sky, the ways the light shifted from dark olive to orange to yellow to blue-white, and the way the air went from bone cold to suffocatingly hot, but I can’t really do them justice. I can close my and see the colors change, but I lose the intensity when I open them.

What I would like you to hear most are the sound of mourning—a pair of shrikes, a male and a female, calling so melodiously to each other that you cry from the beauty of it. The baboons setting up an early leopard watch with their angry, vicious backing. And until the morning heat sends everything into a modest quiet, the rising susurrus of sounds: an animal newspaper with everybody reading items aloud to everyone else.

And the n evening comes on and the sun hangs there just the way Cezanne would want it to, framing a perfect acacia tree so long you’d think it was stuck. Then suddenly it’s dark and the night orchestra tunes up: one animal small-talking to others of its kind; another just bragging and shouting; others still going about their nightly business of getting supper and rounding up the kids.

But, as I said, I can’t do it justice and I won’t try. I can’t even get across to you one of the things that I still dream about. It’s a simple thing to say but something else to feel all around you. It’s space, or distance, or horizons, and it’s really no one of these things—it’s all of them; it’s Africa.

Perhaps more than anything I liked riding up in the back of the hunting truck with the trackers, trying each other’s tobacco and snuff. You’d look out in front as the truck topped a hill, and there was Africa everywhere—and you’d smile because that was just what it ought to be. You’d runt around and there it was, even more of it, all spread out behind you. And no one was there, except for a few Masai or Wakambas who you didn’t see unless you went looking, or got on one of the real roads—the kind that didn’t have trees and brush growing up in the middle.

Off in the distance you’d almost always see something: a band of ostriches, giraffes, oryx, zebras, gazelles, or—where we were—rhinos. It was an experience just being there, being part of Africa, part of something so right, so big, so exactly what could never get enough of that I didn’t want the truck to ever stop. In my mind we just keep driving on and around forever… Katheka and Josie and me, poking each other in the ribs whenever we see something, or chucking a little snuff under our lip to make spit. Together we form a kind of Africa Flying Dutchman.

I can’t really explain how this vastness drew something out of me, rid me of some emotional paralysis and made me feel as free and as natural a part of that landscape as the Masai or the oryx or the impala. But I have never been happier.

Another of the memories I didn’t want to unpack was of lunch time: cold meat from yesterday’s supper, maybe a kidney or a Tommy liver, along with a chop or two, some sardines, a fresh-baked bread, and a semi-warm bottle of Tusker beer. I’d lie on my back and watch the clouds play through the leaves of fever trees, or the giant figs. I’d watch the weaver birds in their sort of upside down nests, or the blue rollers doing their aerial chandelles. Then I’d sleep in the heat until Josie work me up for a cup of tea, and we’d be off again, sailing over the sea of Africa.

In the evening, or more often well after dark, we’d spot our campfires and begin wondering what we’d have for supper, what the others had seen or shot, and whether to have a scotch or a gin. At camp a huge fire would be warming our canvas chairs. We’d have a quick drink and chat about the shooting, and then a hot bucket shower, clean clothes, a down jacket, and on or two more drinks before dinner.

It was always early to bed, snuggled under three or four blankets, wish-dreaming like a child for tomorrow’s lesser kudu or a better than 40-inch oryx. The now-familiar night sounds were a touch of home. It was always a great temptation, now and then indulged, to sit up and listen until the small hours and marvel that even the fire smelled like nothing else but Africa.

I would be up early with the ripping sound of my tent zipper being opened by one of the kitchen men bringing me my pot of tea. He’d light the gas lantern as he left so I could see to dress and shave. Then I’d have 15 minutes or so to lie in bed and drink my tea before getting up. No king ever enjoyed such luxury more!

Then breakfast: oatmeal, more tea, toast, and bacon. Afterwards I’d check the rifles and ammo and be off into the chill of a 6 o’clock African morning, my fluting shrikes going slightly off-key in the cold and dark. I would have given anything to be able to whistle just well enough to join them for a minute, but was never tempted enough to risk spoiling it.

A day’s note from the most inadequate diary typically reads: “Morning hunt was a five-hour walk. Perfect day to see top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Cannot believe I am camped virtually on a side of it. Never want to go home. Watched four kongoni who seem to be practicing sharp turns. Shepherd’s pie for supper. Up tomorrow at five as usual. A lovely day.”

My lovely days went into a notebook with a few words designed more to job the memory than to attempt to capture the uncapturable. There are little notes like, “Saw fourteen fine heads of different species today: rhino, elephant, eland, lesser kudu, etc., etc.” Already I’d gotten too blasé to finish the note. But now I remember some of the others: cheetah, a pride of five that we literally stepped on and flushed, like so many brown-spotted, golden, land-bound birds; a red-maned lion that was far too elegant to shoot—and too smart to come to our bait for a closer look: a leopard at mid-morning that sat a half-mile distant and coldly stared into my eyes until I flinched and looked away.

There are those who will go back without a rifle, but I am not one of them… no yet. I like to hunt. I like to stalk, the tracking mystery, the shot, and the skinning. I suppose I could go without shooting, but that’s a decision I can only make with the legal rifle in my hand. I want both the right to shoot and the privilege of not doing so. I could see Kenya again without my heavy rifles—but I couldn’t experience it.

What I ought to do is keep my tin trunk packed, after cleaning out the despair and the regret, with a fresh notebook and a new pen. Add a box or so of .375’s, my old walking shoes, some fresh chewing tobacco and snuff, and a few pictures to show Josie and Katheka when I get back.

An artist once said that his eyes were stuck to a point and would bleed if he turned away, Just so, my heart has been pierced by the turning of Africa, and bleeds for it.

Excellent writer, Gene Hill.

Thanks for posting.