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Magron Publishers

Postal Address: P.O. Box 733, Hartbeespoort 0216, South Africa.

Tel.Fax: (012) 2530-521. E-Mail : magron @ ripplesoft.co.za

This attachment serves to introduce a new series of hunting book publications planned by Magron Publishers the first volume of which is nearing completion. If you are interested in these books you are invited, without obligation, to register with us your name and address, your fax number and your Email address. We will then advise you when each of the volumes has been published.

Ron Thomson's Big Game Hunting Memoirs

Ron Thomson is best known in southern African for his books and articles on wildlife management. He has a passion for informing nature-loving people about the principles and practices of wildlife management/conservation.

Only a few know that he also has a passion for hunting. Even less know that he has VAST big game hunting experience.

Those who DO know him, and know of his experience, say he is, perhaps, THE most experienced big game hunter in Africa today. He certainly ranks amongst the greatest.

Big game hunting - the control of problem animals - was one of his duties when Ron was a government game ranger in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). ALL his hunting experiences comprised fair-chase hunting in the wide-open spaces of colonial wild Africa - when Africa was still relatively young - mostly outside the protected areas. He normally hunted alone except for his beloved Bushman trackers. Although he led, and was chief hunter, in the first elephant culling operations that were conducted inside the Gonarezhou National Park in the early 1970s, he does NOT rank this work as "hunting" - although it required a great deal of hunting expertise.

Ron was a member of the Rhodesian Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management for some 24 years. He rose from the lowly rank of Cadet Game Ranger to Provincial Game Warden-in-charge of the country's premier national park, Hwange. In between, he commanded many of Rhodesia's other renowned game reserves.

He was forced out of what had become his mission-in-life by the diabolical political machinery of the now infamous Robert Mugabe - after Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. He emigrated to South Africa in 1983. He believes that had he not moved to South Africa when he did, he would have been killed by Robert Mugabe's notorious Central Intelligence Organisation, the CIO, that same year. He knows that the only reason he escaped with his life - and was able to leave the country with his family - was because he had befriended the British High Commissioner who intervened, on his behalf, with Robert Mugabe himself. This is a story that, on its own, makes fascination reading.

In South Africa Ron worked for a year as the Chief Nature Conservation Officer in the Republic of Ciskei. Then, for three years, he was Director of the Bophuthatswana National Parks Board. He later qualified as a Professional Hunter and worked for three years in that capacity.

Professional hunting - conducting hunting safaris for international hunting clients - however, was not a career that really appealed to him. He then went into working-retirement, writing books in his spare time - books on wildlife and hunting. He has published six books and many magazine articles.

During his national parks career Ron qualified as a field ecologist with the University of Rhodesia. For twenty-five years - until his retirement - he was a member of the Institute of Biology (London) and a registered Chartered Biologist for the European Union.

Since he was a small boy Ron has always been a passionate hunter. His planned six big game hunting memoir volumes will be an autobiographical account of his big game hunting career covering the period mid-1950s to the mid-1980s - when Rhodesia was still very much a wild pioneer country.

Considering the fact that he has hunted some 5000 elephants, 800 buffaloes, 50 or 60 lions and 30 or 40 leopards, you can imagine that he will be telling some exceptional hunting stories in these books.

Ron also pioneered the capture of black rhinos with dart-guns and he was the game ranger-in-charge of the Rhodesian black rhino capture team for seven years. Three of his colleagues were badly gored by rhinos. He himself has

been knocked down by black rhinos a number of times. On one occasion he found himself underneath a big rhino bull being kicked around between its front and back feet like a football. He was fortuitously never seriously injured. During this period of his career he captured 140 black rhinos using conventional hunting-and-tracking techniques, on foot. In the early days of these operations his average darting range was between 6 and 13 yards. His final 100-yard approach to these large and very dangerous animals - to get within effective darting range in the Zambesi valley's dense thicket-bush - was always conducted alone. All he had in his hands, then, was a dart-gun and one dart - a dart that, after it had injected its venom, took 15 to 30 minutes to put a rhino to sleep. Absolute silence was the essence of these final approaches so there was no place for a second game ranger carrying a protective heavy calibre weapon. He estimates that he has had something like 3000 very close encounters with black rhinos in the densest of Africa's thickest bush. The stories Ron has to tell about these hunt/capture adventures will surely, one day, rank as the most famous hunting stories ever told.

For 16 years, on a part-time basis, Ron also used his hunting and bush craft skills to track down and to engage ZIPRA and ZANLA terrorists. These were the freedom fighters of the Zimbabwe black-nationalist organisations, ZAPU and ZANU - the rival Ndebele and Mashona tribal factions led by Joshua Nkomo and, ultimately, Robert Mugabe. This was the era of the Rhodesian Bush ar - Zimbabwe's War of Liberation! He was not alone. Ron and many of his colleagues formed a hunter-tracker-fighting unit that became known as the National Park Volunteer Tracker Combat Unit (NP-VTCU). The story of the VTCU has many facets and has never been told. Its essence, at least, deserves to be recorded for posterity.

The life and times of Ron Thomson's big game hunting career are unique. His hunting stories are laced with raw guts and self-confidence. They will never be repeated because they happened in an Africa that is gone forever.

This, then, is the basis for a series of extraordinary hunting books that will be published by Magron Publishers over the new few years. They will come out in separate volumes. Each volume will stand alone yet be part of the same series. The first versions of these books will be limited editions, numbered and signed COLLECTOR'S COPIES. Only when these have been sold will standard editions be published.

M.C. de Jager. Editor, Magron Publishers