Start Game Warthog Kudu Impala Rhino Wildebeest Duiker Blesbok Contact Pictures Tip&Gear Walk Equipment Method Camp Bad shot?

This is the third day for me in South Africa on the game farm and it is a lovely morning in the beginning of februari with light wind from the south blowing gently in my face. The ground is soft from yesterday’s rain and the temperature is low. My choice of path today is to follow the winding road to see what adventures it decides to show me during the morning hours. For more than one hour I walk slowly and silent as a ghost along the road, follow some game trails beside the road and back on the road again. Lots of fresh tracks everywhere tells me that there is a lot of game around, but I just don’t see a single living animal! Not even a bird! I find it very strange, because here is an abundance of game. I decide to go up a small hill to see if the animals have called for a crisis-meeting since there is some dangerous Viking ancestors in the area armed with bow and arrows . On my way up the hill my body starts to remind me that it is time to give back to mother nature what was given to me yesterday. But now is not a good time to return the processed food. So my decision is to show who is the boss, me or my butt. So I fight the needy feeling by squeezing my butt muscles as tight as I can. I stubbornly continue my walk and stalk, pressing by butt cheeks so hard together that I can hardly walk. Sweat start to slowly trickle down my forehead as I continue my hunt. I am loosing concentration, unmotivated, and soon it is no fun to hunt anymore. It takes me about ten agonizing minutes to realize that this is a fight I won’t win. The hardest part is to accept the fact that I was defeated by a stubborn small, bad smelling, brown little piece of shit .. I search the immediate area for a good place to get rid of what is stopping me from having a good days hunt. I find the perfect place for my quest, a tree that is suitably bent to hold on to. Quickly I put my bow on the ground and take out my knife to manufacture a couple of flat cleaning sticks as I forgot my toilet paper at the camp. I drop my pants and initiate the fertilizer spreading procedure. Up to this I haven’t seen a single game! Now when I am in a bit of an awkward position with my pant below my knees, two springboks come casually walking by on a distance of only 25 meters, without giving me as much as a look. 30 seconds later a young impala male strolls by about 40 meters from me, not paying me any attention at all. When the impala have passed by I get the feeling that someone is watching me. I glance slightly to my left and spot a blue wildebeest standing in a dense bush, shamelessly staring directly at me! Not single animal the whole morning and now when I am unarmed they just stroll by, I think that it is sad that some parts of our life is controlled by a piece of shit and there is not much we can do about it . The rest of the morning is quite enjoyable. I get really close to a warthog sow with three very small piglets. Within two hours I get as close as 30 meters from kudu females at three different locations and is able to slip away without spooking them, witch I am quite proud of. Slowly I walk towards our camp without any hurry; I mean after all, I am on a holiday. Later on the afternoon I spot a warthog male and a female that is grazing 200 meters from me. I start to stalk them as I see that the sky is getting darker. When I am 100 meters from them I hear thunder and a very light rain start, hardly enough to get me wet. But I see that the pigs are affected by the thunder. They start to do some short runs with the tail held high, only ten meters or so and then continue to graze. The rain increases a bit and so does the pigs anxiety. When I get to 65 meters from them the sky just opens up and it rains so hard that both pigs decide to run for their life to the closest shelter they could find when lightning strikes 25 meters from me with sparks flying in all directions and the following thunder sounds like a second world war tank fire its main gun close to my ear. The speed I manage to produce with my legs on my way home was not all that far from the warthogs speed. As sudden as the rain starts it stops and the sky is blue and clear after only half an hour and I decide to get out on in the nature again. After two hours of nothing I give up and just walk on my way home. I pass a ravine with fast flowing muddy water from the earlier rain. When I come up from the ravine I see a heard of blue wildebeest grazing 60 meters from me. I go back down in the ravine and crawl to the left to get in position for the wildebeest. After an 80 meter crawl hidden in a small depression I hear the warning signal from the wildebeest. I or something else spooked them. But not worse than that they stay at the same place grazing and sneezing their warning signals at the same time A beautiful full grown impala male comes running from the same direction as the sneezing wildebeests. He stops behind a tree about 35 meters from me, after ten minutes I have gained five meters on the impala, if he is still there, haven’t seen him for ten minutes. Slowly I move sideways to see if he is still behind the tree or if he is gone. I spot his tail moving to chase some flies away when I hear, the ripping of grass to my left. A big warthog male is grazing towards me. So now I have a warthog to my left (30 meters) impala straight forward (30 meters) and wildebeests to my right (60 meters). My options to move closer to the impala is very limited if I want to stay undetected. So I decide to just stand on the spot and wait for things to happen. The warthog is now 20 meters from me but I have no shot on him. Now to complicate things a bunch of guinea fowls noisily decide to join the merrily grazing warthog. About 20 guinea fowls is now busy with feeding, fixing their feathers, arguing on who have the right to be where, making loud noises just for fun, just like a bunch of teenagers getting drunk for the first time. All this goes on around the warthog who is getting irritated at two guinea fowls that is fighting just next to him. The warthog grunts loudly a couple of times at the two fighting guinea fowls that just ignore him, so he make a small irritated attack and chase them away. All the guinea fowls decide that it is time to move on and hurry along the path towards the impala as I undetected draw my bow, The warthog is looking at the running guinea fowls for a few seconds and start to feed again, now perfectly broadside to me. The same second his head is behind a small bush I release my arrow. Guinea fowls fly everywhere as the warthog run like a rocket through the terrified flock of birds that just passed him. He go 45 meters to the south and the almost do a 180 degrees turn and come running to the northeast with the same rocket speed. He goes over a small ridge and another big flock of guinea fowls flee for their lives as the hog race towards them. When the flapping and screaming from the guinea fowls settles, total silence is the only thing I hear. I try hard to hear branches break as the hog was heading up the mountain for safety. But it is dead quiet. Even the impala looks confused; he is standing 70 meters from me with a look in his eyes like a man that just forgot his name, where he is and why! I call Henry ( the managers son) on the radio and give a short briefing. After 20 minutes he arrives and we begin to track the hog, arrow has blood on it, but we find no blood trail at all! And I am starting to doubt if my shot was a perfect hit as I was sure of. We stop before the small ridge after tracking the hog about 70 meters, on the other side of the ridge it is quite dense and we don’t want to mess things up for Henrys tracking dog. Out comes the dog and Henry start him up where we stopped before the ridge. He goes up the ridge (2 meters) and stop, he look ahead, then he looks at us with a confused look in his eyes and just stand there. We walk up the ridge and there is my hog on the other side, no wonder that the poor dog looked confused, why bring him out for such an easy task, have his master gone totally mad . We all laugh out loud at the dogs confused look and the tension of a suspected bad shot is released. We load the hog on the bakkie and when we arrive at the camp I get amazed at the speed Henry skin and slaughter my hog, in less than 20 minutes the pig is hanging in pieces in the cooling room! To do that would take me much longer time. Henry have obviously done this plenty of times. As we examine the inside of the pig we see that the arrow went trough both lungs and severed the arteries above the heart. This night I sleep well with tomorrow’s dinner hanging In the fine cooling facilities.