Day 4
Day 4 was a transfer day. We left Serapa early in the morning, heading southeast towards the Eastern Cape. A few stops and many hours later, we arrived in Cradock, a nice Eastern Cape town, but perhaps not as nice as Graaf-Reinet, not terribly far away. Many of these Karoo town are quite pretty and seem to have retained much of their old fashioned charm. And they all have at least one magnificent church. If you're passing through, many of these towns (not all - see Richmond for example - well worth a miss!) are worth a short detour.
From Cradock it was about a 45 minute drive over a mountain pass to the home of Niel Schoeman, who maintains both a sheep farm as well as a game preserve covering I don’t now how many hectares, but a lot. Niel has a beautiful home, vaguely Cape Dutch, large, and abundantly furnished with antiques, both of the furniture and firearm variety. He is the fifth generation of his family to live at the property. His bar has what I thought was a great feature – an indoor braai, built in. You put wood in a metal box in the middle, and as the wood turns to coals, they fall under, and are then swept under grills, where they are used for cooking. We had game steaks and filet every night, cooked by Niel on this grill. It fills the house with tantalizing aromas, as well as providing a great deal of much-needed heat – it was freezing during our visit. It also allows you to bbq meat even when the weather is terrible, which is always a good thing.
We were here to cull, and Niel filled us in on the drill. Most of our time would be spent on his properties but we would also venture to another property where springbok were kept in substantial numbers. I was looking forward to this, but I still hadn’t quite grasped in my mind what it was we were exactly going to be doing. I decided to let things unfold.
I should add a note about the financial aspects of this. You can hunt trophies on Niel’s place, and when you do, you pay the trophy price, which in this case is Tootabi’s price. But when you’re shooting culls, you pay the cull price, which I will show next to each animal. And if you shoot a trophy during a driven shoot, you still pay the cull price for that trophy.
Niel's Farm
Another view of the farm
Day 5
After a substantial breakfast, John and I head out in one direction while Beans and Grant head out in another. After a 10-minute drive, John suggested we get out and walk. We quickly saw large numbers of fallow deer on a mountainside some distance away, as well as blesbok and springbok.
Within a few minutes I was up on the sticks, taking a shot at a fallow deer ($150) a few hundred yards up the mountain. Well, a swing and a miss, as they say. Not sure what happened, but I wasn’t even close. After that, we decided to keep on walking, and an hour later, John sent our tracker back for the vehicle. Meanwhile we were standing in a sort of bowl-like area, with hills on two sides and a treed ravine on our right. John mentioned that fallow deer often like to hide in the ravines, so he threw a stick into the trees. Nothing. We chatted, and a few minutes later, he threw a stone further into the ravine, and we immediately heard the sound of movement. We then saw a herd of fallow deer heading up the mountain. John put the sticks up and said just wait, they’ll stop. And stop they did.
The "bowl" where we found the fallow deer
I lined up on a female and took the shot. She dropped on the spot. John said “reload and find another one.” I think it was a combination of the suppressor and the bowl, which caused some unusual echoes – but I don’t think they really knew where the sound was coming from. There was much milling about, so I kept shooting. Within about 40 seconds, I had taken five shots and dropped five fallow deer! When they had finally run off I told John I might have shot a young one in the process, and he said not to worry – all were fair game and in fact it was better to shoot various generations rather than just one. I asked why I hadn’t seen any males, and it seems the rut was over and they had retreated to the high mountains. In fact, we saw very few males and no old ones (although we weren’t looking for them) while we were shooting.
We loaded the deer onto the truck, and then headed back.
When I say "we loaded the deer" I mean "they loaded the deer!
Almost as soon as we were in the truck, we got a message from Beans. Apparently, Grant did not know the meaning of culling. He had seen a buffalo and decided he wanted to have a go at it. A few shots later, the buffalo was down. We joined them to help with the recovery. I gave Grant a bit of a tutorial on the meaning of culling for future reference.
That afternoon was to be our first experience with “driven shooting.” I shoot pheasant regularly, and have participated in driven hunts many times. I wasn’t exactly sure how this would work with animals, but it turns out it’s much the same. Grant and I were stationed on hillsides looking across a valley at other areas (a hill in my case). Neither of us could see (or hear) the other. There were about 12 beaters, all wearing reflective vests, whose job it was to keep the animals moving. This would have worked better with more shooters, since there were spots the animals could hide, but we would do the best with what we had. I was a little worried about the beaters, but John assured me they knew what they were doing, and that they wouldn’t be in front of us (the first part may be accurate, but the latter part wasn’t!).
So we got set up. I had the .25-06, and John had a couple of boxes of bullets. This would be interesting.
We quickly saw some animals on the opposite hillside, but John said, “Shoot anything except the lechwe.” Oh. Well, from my angle, there were no lechwe, at least none with horns. It turns out it was a group of females. OK, no shooting the lechwe, even though they spent the entire afternoon on the hillside, almost taunting me.
As it turned out, we really needed the extra shooters. The animals would run past, and keep going, never stopping or even slowing down much. I did get a couple of fallow deer, two springbok ($100), an impala ($150) and a kudu (mid-age male) ($470). The kudu was interesting. I saw a small group on the hill and said “kudu”. John said “And?” I said they were kudu, and surely we can’t cull kudu with horns. John’s response was “Is it a lechwe? “No”, I replied. “Then shoot” was the command. Kudu dead.
Since this was proving difficult, we called the hunt a bit earlier than we would have otherwise. John and I then set out to look around the property a bit. We headed to a wide open area called “Serengeti,” stopping along the way to shoot an imprudent impala ($150). Within a few minutes in Serengeti, where we saw a good number of animals, I had shot two more fallow deer and a female waterbuck ($240), all culls.
For the day, that gave me 9 fallow deer, a waterbuck, two springbok, two impala and a kudu. 15 animals. A new record for me - by a country mile. But one which wouldn’t stand for long.
