Cat Hunting in Mozambique
September 9–25, 2012

Professional Hunter: Guy Whittall
Outfitter: Matimbo Safaris
Area: Nungo Concession
Bow: Matthews Z7 60#
Arrow: Carbon Express Blue Max
Broadhead: Montec G5 100gr

September 2012 was my third safari with Guy Whittall and my second with him in Mozambique. I’d first hunted in Africa in 2008 with Roger Whittall Safaris in the Save Conservancy of southeastern Zimbabwe. On that trip I shot a fine bull elephant with tusks of fifty-three and forty-nine pounds, along with numerous plains game, including a giraffe, all with my bow. Guy had been my professional hunter then, and I hunted with him again in 2011 hunting for buffalo in the Delta. I knew he had some good leopard on his concession in Mozambique near Niassa, so I sought him out at the SCI convention in Las Vegas and firmed up the particulars.
I flew Air Canada from Calgary to London, then SAA to Johannesburg and Maputo, and lastly, LAM airlines to Pemba. I had a 10-hour layover in London but that was sufficient to organize some business meetings in the West End where I keep a Club membership. During the layover in Johannesburg, I had breakfast with my friend Richard Lendrum, publisher of the African Hunting Gazette.
Transferring and customs in Maputo was a bit of a nuisance, but as I waited at the carousel for my two large bags and my SafariCare Blue Bag, I was adopted by a teenage boy who through sign language indicated he could help me. I suspected that this would make my life a lot easier, and it did. I decided early that I would over-tip my young helper. I got exemplary service and he got a bit of a windfall.
The Maputo customs personnel had never seen modern Western bows or arrows, but desperately wanted to flex their bureaucratic muscles. I ended up with a temporary firearms permit, with the poundage of one of the bows as its serial number. As they dithered over the permit, I snapped a few pictures. I was immediately surrounded by guards who insisted I erase the offending images. I never did learn what they determined was the security threat from me, but it added another interesting factor.
Several hours later I was on the plane for Pemba via Marupa. Any other pictures I took in airports were taken on my iPad. No one associates an iPad with a camera.



Guy Whittall was waiting for me in the late-night crowd outside the Pemba airport. It was good to see his gap-toothed grin again.



He brought his Land Cruiser around, and I hustled my bags out the doors of the tiny arrivals room. A quick handshake and a bro-hug and we were on our way. Because of some gearbox troubles, we were not going to drive straight to the concession. Guy had booked me into the Pemba Beach Lodge for the night.
The lodge was a pleasant treat, with elephant-bone accents in the spacious rooms, towel racks are made of ribs and soap dishes are vertebrae! However, I was happy when we were on our way again a few hours later.



On the outskirts of Pemba we were pulled over for a broken headlight. The police told us we could resume our journey at first light. We offered to pay a cash fine, but no go. Having failed to learn my lesson at Maputo Airport, I compounded the problem by taking a picture of the police. They promptly impounded my camera. We finally got on our way when we suggested that we would willingly go to the police station to talk with the policewoman’s supervisor about my crime and punishment. She had no appetite for that, and waved us on.
We traveled on the highway for the next five or six hours. Like many African roads, it began as an urban paved and street-lit road, but ended up as little more than a bike path.



Near Nungo we abruptly we came upon massive new road construction.



This really will be a serious highway across the north of Mozambique. Access to the area will be improved dramatically as the two construction crews, one Chinese and one a Finnish-Italian consortium, complete their work.

The concentrations of construction workers who fly to and from China in their own chartered airplanes have revolutionized the business of poaching. No longer do the poachers need to get their booty to Beijing to sell it; they only need to get it to the work camps.



There, the Chinese workers and contractors are glad to buy up almost any wildlife, the more endangered, the better. Planeloads of poached wildlife fly out regularly with the eyes-averted, palms-out approval of corrupt government officials. I think of all those contractors and work crews as big vacuum hoses sucking up any and all wildlife parts from a significant distance and sending them to China. They`re very efficient and very deadly. Tanzania has also toppled over to the Chinese influence and we see and hear of poachers armed with AK-47s.

Matimbo Safari’s concession lies in the heart of northern Mozambique. There are two camps, with the village of Nungo between them. Most of the forty or so staff needed to run the two camps come from the village. Accommodations are large twelve by twenty foot Zimbabwe-made tents with attached bathrooms and showers. Each tent is sheltered under a large thatched structure to keep them cooler in the midday sun.



There were two tents for hunters and guests, and one for the PH’s.

I was treated to the arrival of Guy’s parents on the second day of the hunt.



At the Las Vegas show, I had asked if Roger and Ann Whittall could coordinate a long-overdue visit to their son’s Mozambique concession with my hunt, and they made it happen. During their stay, Roger drove all over the concession, checking out the wildlife and assets. Ann relaxed by the tent and got at one of her books. We had plenty of time to visit and catch up. Ann had recently had a run-in with her supposedly tame buffalo, and had the bruises and cuts to prove it. Though she told the story nonchalantly, it had been a serious situation: she’d had to play dead, then climb a tree to save herself!

On the first day of hunting, we ran over a black mamba on the track.



They are very fast creatures and, though he wrenched the wheel wildly, Guy was unable to avoid the snake. This bad omen was to overshadow our luck for the next few days.
Guy’s men had been hanging yellow baboons as bait, and some were beginning to be hit by leopards. The camp goats were also being attacked and killed by a female leopard.
On the second night of the hunt, we set up a blind twenty-eight yards from a promising bait.



After an hour or so, we could hear the cat crunching bone and pulling meat off the bait. We opened up the front window of the blind and Guy activated his remote light. There he was in all his glory!



A full-sized heavy male leopard, side on, reaching up to the bait. Stunned by the magnificence of the animal before me, I missed the opportunity as I fumbled with my bow. He returned to the bait, but my shot passed just over his back, leaving a discernible part in his hair. The narrow escape did not deter him from coming back the next night. But that night I missed him again, the arrow passing harmlessly in front of him.
I had been shooting well before this trip, practicing mostly at night. However, I hadn’t realized that the suburban sky at home would be so much brighter than the inside of a blind in remote Mozambique. I decided to add a red headlamp to my equipment.
Over the next six or seven nights we had several missed chances, and several nights no cats came in. Many of the other baits went untouched. I wounded one leopard with a hard shoulder shot, but we were unable to recover it. It was getting depressing. I had discussed the possibility of a lion with Guy, so he had hung some baits a bit lower and dragged scent trials. No takers.




We tried a few daytime stalks of plains game, but this was unproductive. We also walked a river for hippo and croc one day, but no luck. That was fine, because I was really there to hunt cats, so we concentrated on the baits being hit.






On the tenth and eleventh nights we set a bait in the far eastern area of the concession, several hours’ drive from the camp. Leopards had been recorded on the trail cams, along with hyena. We sat in our blind and strained our ears each night but caught no leopards in the tree.




Because of the run of bad luck, I asked about the local tribes making an offering to the local gods. Guy and I had done this the previous year in the swamps of the Zambezi and had enjoyed immediate success, so I thought we should try it again. Guy said that he would call the chiefs together for a jointy-jointy—a ceremony to their gods. In a sacred clearing off the track grew a sacred tree.



Two chiefs and a queen from the three area tribes came together, along with all the trackers, my houseboy, Guy, and his head Zimbabwean tracker. They placed my bows and a few of my arrows at the base of the tree, and then each black spoke in turn, the others respectfully listening as he told his hunting story and entreated the gods to smile on me. It reminded me a bit of an AA meeting.




As each hunter spoke, he sifted a tiny stream of ground cassava flour between his fingers, forming a white “anthill” at the base of the sacred tree. At the end of his prayer, the supplicant washed his fingers in a bowl of water. The last chief to speak took some cassava paste and marked my wrist, each bow, and one of the arrows. Finally, the queen gave a strident speech.



After the ceremony, Guy, the chiefs, the queen, and I walked back to the camp, where I paid them about $15 each.

That evening, we drove to the blind, which was positioned less than thirty yards from a sable bait in a tree over a waterhole. The grass between the blind windows and the bait was flattened to give me a clear shot. The truck drove several hundred yards away, dragging a scent-bag behind it. Guy and I settled in, he read his book and I had my iPad.



When it grew too dark to read, we put away our reading material and just listened. We could hear animals at the waterhole, but nothing came to the bait.
At eight o’clock, I heard a distant rustle. It moved rapidly toward us, becoming a loud crashing through the bush. As the animal passed by the side window of the blind, I had the sense of a large, stiff-legged creature stomping past, then slowing down. It reminded me of a bull entering a rodeo ring, stiff-legged and swinging its head and shoulders in both directions.

“It’s an eland bull!” I whispered excitedly.
“It’s a lion,” Guy said quietly. “Get your bow.”

The lion had halted in the long grass behind the blind. Through the door slit I saw him facing away. I swiveled on my stool to grab my bow, which was positioned for the normal shot out the front of the blind. When I swung back around, I was looking through the door at the moonlit full-maned face of a lion coming out of a crouch directly toward me. He was about fifteen yards away.

At about ten yards, Guy shone his torch onto the lion’s face. A split second later he gave me the word: “Shoot!”

The full face of a lion offers no kill shot for an arrow. I was thinking of a possible shot just below his chin, when he swung his eyes away from the light. That motion cleared his shoulder so that I could visualize getting an arrow past it into his body. I have no memory of aiming or releasing. The next thing I saw was the Lumenok lighting up as I fired. We saw the red dot hit home and then arc sideways as the lion bounded off.

“Holy shit!” I said. “A fucking lion!”

Guy didn’t say anything. He was listening to the cat growling in the bush nearby. After ten minutes or so we could no longer hear the growling. Another hour passed and we came out of the blind and radioed the truck. We checked for blood, and found plenty on the grass where the lion had disappeared into the bush.
As soon as the others arrived they told us that a lion had been circling the truck half an hour earlier. They wondered if I’d seen it.

“See it?” I shouted. “I shot it!”

Tracking a wounded lion in the dark through long grass might be one of the most dangerous tasks a PH and his team can undertake. Everyone piled onto the Cruiser, flashlights taped to the rifles. I was on top with another arrow nocked, and Guy sat on the front bumper directing the driver. Over the next few hours we only covered about a hundred yards. We found where the lion had stopped, changed direction, shit, and thrown up. But when he doubled back a second time, the collective enthusiasm to continue dwindled to nothing. The decision was made to go back to the camp and return at daylight.

A few hours after sunup we resumed tracking.



We soon lost the blood trail, but continued on in the direction the lion had been heading. The head tracker gave a shout, and I looked up to see his big grin. He was pointing at a blond pile of fur on the other side of a clearing.




Though the lion was obviously dead, Guy insisted I put another arrow into him for insurance. I walked forward to thirty yards and made the shot. The arrow hit him like he was a sack of sand. Then there were smiles, high-fives, and that funny three-part handshake the locals do. After the pictures, I looked around the area and found the arrow about twenty yards from the lion. The broadhead was broken off and the nock had been chewed down to the bulb. It must have fallen out just before he died.

About halfway back to camp, the singing began in the back of the truck. When we drove in, the camp staff joined in seamlessly and the camp was soon in an uproar. As Guy removed the tailgate to expose the lion, the singing became even more intense.

http://youtu.be/trT-9f3G4Gs

The lion was lifted down off the Cruiser, to much applause and cheering, and carried over to the skinning shack. Here, more measurements were taken, along with lots more photographs. When we opened the lion up, we found it had recently killed and eaten a young pangolin. The scales, claws, and snout were easy to identify when the stomach was opened. The cook took the lion’s backstraps for our dinner.



I was struck that its skinned paws looked eerily like human hands.



At some point during the skinning I was summoned from my tent by one of the chiefs who’d taken part in the jointy-jointy. It looked as if he had spent much of his jointy-jointy money on Black Label beer. He wanted to give me a piggyback ride over to the lion, to celebrate the kill. I hadn’t taken a piggyback ride in fifty years, but I’m always game for a bit of fun. Guy followed behind with his hands out to keep us from toppling, but the chief was sturdier than he looked. He made the forty yards over to the lion without breaking a sweat.

Sounds like a pile of fun, good for you for getting it done

I posted the trophy pictures separately....have a look.
Dave

Thanks for posting,you did well

Congratulations on your lion.
Enjoyed the report. Thanks for sharing.

Great report.

What did you see in the way of other game...elephant, buff, eland, sable, impala,
L hartebeest...?

Thanks

Holy Smokes! The ultimate hunt.

Great write up too, thank you for the post.

Nice!!!! Congratultions

Great report and pics.

Congrats

OVER THE TOP! CONGRATS!!!

Wow!!! Can it get more exciting? Lion with a bow at 10 yards! Excellent DAL and Whit, what an adrenalin rush, simply reading it! Truly the experience of a lifetime. Bad luck with the leopards but there seem to plenty in the area so that's great news. I have heard a bit about this area from Guy and Roger and can't wait to see it myself. Both Guy and Pete Wood's clients have taken some spectacular ivory there in recent times and I believe there are huge herds of Roosevelt sable...

David

Safari 2,

I saw plenty of plains game, and had I had a rifle......there were sable all over, Niassa wildebeest, waterbuck, l. hartebeest, HUGE eland, baboons, and we stalked up on, and followed without being sensed, two herds of elephants.

Thanks DAL

I think yours is the 1st lion taken with a bow in Mozambique since Fred Bear took one with Wally Johnson (PH) in 1965.

Yes, Safari2....that's what the trophy book shows. I never dreamt I would have my name beside Fred Bear's!

What an amazing safari! Congrats.

Best regards, D. Nelson

What an exciting hunt! Great report. It is disturbing though to hear about the Chinesse camps and poaching, but makes perfect sense.

Congratulations on a great hunt

Good on you...Quite a hunt indeed!
Big congrats

quote:

Originally posted by DAL:
Cat Hunting in Mozambique
September 9–25, 2012 I wounded one leopard with a hard shoulder shot, but we were unable to recover it. It was getting depressing. I had discussed the possibility of a lion with Guy, s

Congrats on the Lion but the wounded and lost Leopard must of been the pits.

Ozhunter, wounding is a rare but horrible experience....and expensive, too!

DAL,

Thanks for sharing the link and took a look at the two others as well...

http://youtu.be/trT-9f3G4Gs

Congratulatios on your hunt.I too was stunned at the beauty before my eyes on my leopard.

What an achievement! Congrats to you and Guy. I'm meant to be accompanying a client of mine on a lion bow hunt in Zambia this year, but that may change to Mozambique now.

Ozhunter, et al,
GREAT NEWS!! The next hunters killed the leopard I wounded.....over the same bait, no less. And the were bowhunting!
I met them at SCI in Reno. I already knew her, and she came up to me and said they had killed my cat. They had the pictures in their booth.
Weird, cosmic, karmic....I don't know, but I am thrilled.
(I had sworn off Reno because I don't like the town, but flew down at the last minute to have dinner on Friday with some Aussie and Zim outfitters. And got the good news!)

I can completely believe that as we once killed a Buffalo that had a Broad head in it from a previous hunter. Could easily be hard to believe in such a vast area though.

quote:

.....over the same bait, no less. And the were bowhunting!

Them cats in moz must be starving

Great hunt report. Congratulations.

Congratulations and thanks for a great report.
Scary human look-alike lions paws, and interesting re the Chinese and poaching.