The biography of Eric Balson who guided some of the most famous people on earth as a professional hunter. As a senior game warden, Eric Balson guided some of the most famous people on earth on their East African safaris Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia, and famous wildlife artist Guy Coheleachand their hunting adventures are all told in this book. On one safari, Balson and Prince Bernhard were charged five times in four days by a leopard, buffalo, crocodile, hippo, and the same croc again! In his youth, Balson had the extraordinary job of catching poisonous snakes for a living; as an adult he dispatched man-eating lions that were thought to be under a spell of witchcraft by the evil "lion-men of Singida." On other adventures he goes after hyena men and hunts with a Hanovarian hound named Artus. Balson devotes a special section of the book to the hundred-plus-pound elephants he hunted, some with success and others without, and he recounts the story of the biggest tusker he ever saw in the Rungwa Reservewhich his client refused to shoot! As a game warden, Balson was assigned to deal with problem animals and poachers alike and was at one time responsible for an area of 100,000 square miles. Then in the late 1990s, he was asked by the Mozambican government to establish a wildlife refuge there. After arriving, he was beseeched by some terrified natives to shoot a huge rogue tuskeran experience that ranked as the scariest episode in his long, full life as a hunter. When Balson decided to retire to Canada, he asked an artist to paint him a picture of elephants walking in front of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the scene he had kept so vividly in his mind from the time when he was a young boy in East Africa. A fascinating, exciting, colorful biography of a rewarding life full of amusing anecdotes and famous people.
