I also do not want this considered in your contest, and agree the prize should be presented to a first-timer. For your enjoyment only, here is part of the introduction to the chapters on my African hunts from my latest book, "Sixty Years A Hunter," from Safari Press. It will be introduced at the SCI convention in Reno in January. I'll be signing them at the Safari Press booth but don't yet have the schedule.
Bill Quimby
AFRICA! I Wanted To Pinch Myself
MY FIRST-EVER SIGHTINGS of elephant spoor were round, dusty prints the size of the lids of small garbage cans spaced five feet apart and piles of alfalfa-colored dung as large as basketballs. These were scattered across the two-lane tarmac road that led to a hunting concession an hour's drive from Victoria Falls. I wanted to pinch myself. I was in Africa!
Just before turning onto a dirt road, Stephanus “Fanie” Pretorius stopped the Land Rover so that his wife, Joyce, and I could watch a herd of sable antelope in the thick brush a few yards off the road. The young bulls stared at us and allowed me to take several photographs. Fanie and Joyce must have seen thousands of sable antelope during their lifetimes along the Zambezi River but I was thrilled. I took it as a good sign that the first herd of antelope I encountered in Africa would be the most beautiful animals on the continent.
We went through a wire gate across the graded road and drove up on a group of Africans who were repairing a culvert. One of the four workers was armed with an AK-47 automatic rifle, which Pretorius, the outfitter for my first African safari, said the men carried at all times because of the possibility of encountering dangerous game.
Even a greenhorn visitor knew that an automatic rifle and military ammunition were not appropriate if an inexperienced shooter had to stop a charging elephant or buffalo, nor would they be likely -- unless the same novice shooter was exceptionally lucky -- to make a hungry lion immediately change its plans for dinner. Zimbabwe's revolution against white rule had ended just twenty-eight months earlier and the African majority now controlled the country. The end of colonialism had not brought good things, however. News reports in South Africa in 1983 told of unspeakable atrocities by government troops in Matabeleland. As had happened after America's Civil War, a few scattered groups of guerrillas had become outlaws. The difference ended there. In Zimbabwe they were using tactics and weapons given to them by North Koreans, Chinese and Cubans before Ian Smith's Rhodesia collapsed in 1980.
We waited while Pretorius spoke with one of the men in his language. When he returned we learned that a half hour earlier a cow elephant with an injured foot had walked across the road exactly where we were parked. This was the Africa I had read about and dreamed about. I always knew that I would see and experience it one day. Here it was, finally, just as I had imagined.
I was in Zimbabwe thanks to C.J. McElroy, the founder of Safari Club International, and SATOUR, the South African Tourism Department. When I took over Safari Magazine a few months before this trip Mac said I needed to get to Africa so I would understand what the club's members and the magazine's authors were writing about.
He first arranged for me to hunt an elephant and a bongo in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) with a safari company managed by Adelino Serras Pires, whom I later would come to know very well. The U.S. State Department and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta both suggested that travelers visiting Zaire undergo an assortment of inoculations. I had taken all the shots and was packed and ready to leave the next morning when I received a telegram from Brussels warning me not to leave home. The government of Zaire had suddenly banned all hunting, it said.
Mac, who often said he envied no one except someone on his first African hunting safari, then arranged a week-long hunt with Pretorius's company in the Matetsi region of southwestern Zimbabwe for me. At the same time, SATOUR was inviting journalists on two-week junkets to South Africa, all expenses paid, including first-class airfare. My first safari would cost me the price of a room at the Victoria Falls Hotel for two nights and U.S.$900 in government trophy fees for the buffalo, sable antelope, and southern greater kudu I would shoot.
So, in June 1983, I flew from Tucson to New York, and then on to Johannesburg on South African Airways. I was so excited that I stayed awake during the nineteen-hour flight from New York. I was thrilled when I finally saw the narrow strip of beach on the coast of what then was called South West Africa (now Namibia) below me. I felt what an Olympic medal winner must feel when standing on a platform while his or her national anthem is played. I had reached my lifelong goal. I had arrived!
When we landed at Jan Smuts International Airport I had no trouble clearing my two rifles -- a .458 Winchester Magnum and a .30-06, both super grade Winchester Model 70s. I had bought them especially for my first safari. The people at SATOUR had said that I should take a taxi to the Carlton Centre Hotel in downtown Johannesburg, where a room was waiting for me. During the drive to the city the taxi driver, a black woman, asked if I'd like to see Soweto. When I said I was tired after traveling half way around the world and wanted to take a shower and get some sleep, she told me all her fares from America wanted to see Soweto. Under Apartheid, Soweto was where black citizens who worked in Johannesburg were forced to live. U.S. media portrayed it as an awful place. That was not entirely accurate. True, much of the town consisted of brown shacks thrown together with scavenged cardboard and sheet metal. But there also were large, freshly painted, modern homes with manicured gardens. I was told on another trip that the largest and best-cared-for home in Soweto belonged to Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela, who would become South Africa's first democratically elected president in 1994. In 1983, Mandela still was imprisoned on Robben Island after being sentenced to life imprisonment as a terrorist in 1964.
My hotel, the Carlton Centre, was a modern high-rise. Out the window were tall buildings rising twenty or more stories. Below the hotel was a three-level underground shopping mall with dozens of shops. Outside and down the street was a world-famous store called “Safrique.” It carried every imaginable item needed for a safari -- from gasoline lanterns to canvas bathtubs to bush clothes. After a shower and an hour's nap I walked to the store (downtown Johannesburg still was safe in those days) and bought Jean khaki culottes with a matching blouse straight out of the film “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
I flew on to Bulawayo the next morning and sat in its airport with Cuban soldiers injured in the war then under way in Angola while I waited for my flight to Victoria Falls. Parked outside was a Soviet military aircraft that was as large as a Boeing 747.
Fanie and Joyce Pretorius met my flight and drove me to the historic Victoria Falls Hotel, a stuffy colonial institution where each staff member wore a white jacket and a red fez. We had lunch outside under a huge tree and watched monkeys scamper through the branches above us. When Fanie and Joyce left me I walked to the falls on a trail that led through a rain forest and past a statue of Dr. David Livingstone, the explorer said to be the first European to see the falls. There were only a few people along the path that runs along the canyon and I walked slowly, enjoying every inch of the short hike. Incredibly, there was a place where I was able to stand overlooking the falls and hold a rainbow in my hands. It was an unbelievable experience.
That evening after dinner I bought a ticket for “The African Spectacular,” a show staged by a dozen male performers wearing tribal dress. I will never forget how one of the men was able to place an unattached sixteen-foot pole on its end and then climb all the way to its top and stand on it. There was nothing to keep the pole from falling except the man's incredible sense of balance.
Fanie and Joyce joined me for breakfast, then drove me to the other local tourist attractions: the “Big Tree” (a huge baobab said to be Africa's largest) and a crocodile farm with literally hundreds of crocs, including a monster that had to be five feet wide and twenty feet long! We then made a quick stop at my hosts' home and were on the road to my first African hunting adventure in their new Range Rover.
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A wooden sign with carved letters proclaiming we had entered a concession called Westwood Wildlife Safaris Pvt. Ltd. of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, marked the entrance to their camp. The posts that supported it were topped with the sun-bleached skull of a Cape buffalo. A baobab tree almost as large as the one in Vic Falls stood just past the junction. A waterbuck bull walked slowly across the road as we made the turn toward the neat, tin-roofed and stuccoed ranch-style house about fifty yards above a shallow ripple across the Zambezi River.
Flowers, trees, and Bermuda grass were being cultivated around the house. In the bed of a Toyota Land Cruiser that had arrived a few minutes before us was an African lion killed that morning by Marie Greco, an executive for a newspaper chain based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although she had never hunted before this trip she said she had always dreamed of going on safari and shooting a lion. She had come halfway around the world by herself to make her dream come true. Her trophy was a young male with a scant mane. Unlike those in East Africa, even Zimbabwe's oldest lions are rarely found with thick manes, Pretorius said. The big male we saw roaring at the start of those old M.G.M. movies obviously did not have its hair pulled and snagged in Zimbabwe's thornbush country.
(M.G.M. now is using a young male with a mane much like the one on Greco's lion.)
While his men took my baggage to my room, Pretorius took me to his skinning shed where we checked out the skulls and skins of recently killed Cape buffalo, kudu, bushbuck, eland, and sable. Weathered skulls of various antelope species were nailed to the posts around the high fence that surrounded his compound.
A man named Harry, a computer programmer for Federal Express in Louisiana, was packing his luggage for his return to the United States the next day. He had spent two weeks at Westwood and killed a Cape buffalo, a southern greater kudu, a Livingstone eland and a Chobe bushbuck and all would make Safari Club International's record books. He and I shared a bedroom that night and when we were settled in our beds as the generator went off, Harry said I would have a wonderful time hunting there, because he had.
He warned me not to leave the fenced area without a rifle because lion tracks had been seen just outside the front entrance. I also shouldn't go near the river behind the buildings, he said, because of its crocodiles. I followed his advice. I had read somewhere that as many as fifty humans were eaten by crocs along the Zambezi every year. That's nearly one a week, if those reports were true ...
