Category: Client Stories

Here is a story from a previous client, Mark Tabert:

With day 10 rapidly approaching I was starting to wonder if I was going to need to make a return trip to Africa for my Kudu. Our evening hunt ended such doubts as we spotted several nice bulls from a dry riverbed and took off in pursuit of them. The bulls would stop at the timber line and spot us as we came into range, running off in their peculiar rocking gate each time. With them headed for a far mountain and safety, Vaughan decided we needed to run after them or lose them. It was a run, stop, set-up and run again scenario that didn’t seem like it was going to end. Finally the bulls stopped at the base of a mountain and Vaughan set up the sticks and told me I needed to shoot now if I was going to get my bull. Vaughan indicated which bull was the best and I held for the top of his back and squeezed the trigger. The bull kicked both back legs, ran 10 yards and fell. Vaughan thumped me on the back in congratulations yet I saw the bull get up and run off. Vaughan assured me we would find him as he thought he was well hit.

We waited a while and then started tracking him. I was higher up on a ridge allowing the men to follow his trail without me stepping in their way when I heard rocks rattling ahead. It was my bull trying to escape, busting out of a steep rocky ravine, trying to get away from his pursuers. I put one shot into him, not slowing him down so fired again breaking his spine at the shoulders and dropping him. The second shot had destroyed his liver so he would have been mine soon anyway, but I’ve always felt it’s better safe than sorry to have another round in them. I don’t think a dram of scotch out of a flask has ever been better than that dram taken in celebration of my Kudu.

Mark Tabert

Here is a safari story from a previous client, Mike Robinson:

We saw hundreds of elephant, and tracked and observed many, many shootable trophy bulls.

On one evening alone, as the sun set in a red and darkening sky, we saw a herd of well over 200, and perhaps as many as 300, elephant. These elephant included bulls of all ages and sizes, and cows and calves by the dozens. They had been feeding in a dense forest, and as we approached them, they winded us. At first, some of them ran, but then, the vast bulk of them lumbered calmly away from us, across a wide plain to a farther feeding ground deep in the gathering dusk.

Elephant stretched from our left to our right, from the farthest reach of our sight on one side, to the farthest on the other. And they were sixes and sevens and tens and dozens deep. A solid wall and column of elephant from horizon to horizon.

It was a sight that none of us who witnessed it will ever forget.

Mike Robinson