I'd shot more than 2,000 leopards in the recent past, but the one I was presently watching was about to escape. This particular leopard was in Mozambique. Specifically, it was in Simon Rodgers' (Safaris de Mozambique) Bawa Concession on the southwestern shores of Lake Cahora Bassa.
This was day nine of our hunt, and we'd all left camp just before 5 A.M. My PH, Greg Michelson, parked a mile or so from our bait tree. We left our crew, Obert, Rodgers, and Anibal, with the truck, and rode the rest of the way with my friends Bob Jensen and Jack Hodnik, and their PH, Bryn Jolliffe. It was still really dark when Bryn dropped Greg and me off at our trailhead, even though a sliver of a moon was showing low through the trees.
We could hear the sounds of bones snapping and the occasional grunt and growl even before we got into the blind, so we knew there was a leopard feeding on the bait this morning. We had slowly and quietly crept along the trail to the blind in our stocking feet, guided by Greg's barely visible toilet paper markers. Reaching the blind just before 6:00 A.M., all we could do was sit and listen as a leopard consumed the impala wired to the underside of a nearby tree branch.
While checking our baits yesterday morning, we'd found that a large male and a female had discovered this bait and consumed nearly all of it. We replenished the bait with another impala, my ninth, and built a blind. We had sat in this blind the previous evening until full dark, hearing baboons curse, guinea fowl chatter and flush, hornbills squawk, and vervet monkeys scream in the distance, but no leopards appeared.
Now, at 6:20 A.M., there was just a hint of light in the eastern sky. From 80 yards, the distance from our blind to the bait, we could barely make out the outline of the bait tree in the gloom of the predawn morning. Through binocular and riflescope, details slowly became clearer, but one of the unwelcome details confirmed that this leopard was leaving the bait and slowly making its way down the tree before we could identify its gender. Only males are legal game in Mozambique. It was heartbreaking to glimpse the cat leaving the bait just as it got light enough to see. What a bitter disappointment!
A True Friend
My friend Jack came over one snowy Alaskan afternoon the previous February and announced, "I inherited some money last fall, and I'm going to use it to take Bob Jensen (my next-door neighbor and another of Jack's long-time friends) on an elephant hunt. He's always wanted to hunt elephant. By the way, you're invited along to hunt that leopard you're always talking about. You'll have to pay for your own transportation over and back, but I'll pay for everything else. All you have to do is tell me your stories when you get back to camp each night."
Jack, an educator in Alaska's bush for many years, retired and moved to Haines after suffering a heart attack and stroke several years ago. His stroke left him unable to get around in the woods, so Bob Jensen and I were to "proxy hunt" for him on this safari. He planned to ride along and video whatever he could from the vehicles. Bob and I would then recount our experiences as we all sat around the evening campfires.
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Bob Jensen and I both had reservations about this, for several reasons, but Jack eventually convinced us that we would be helping him fulfill his lifelong dream of going on an African safari. We both finally accepted Jack's invitation.
An Internet search led Jack and Bob to a crop-raider elephant hunt in Mozambique. The details of our combined elephant and leopard hunt were then arranged through Jeff Neal's Worldwide Hunts. Bob decided that he also wanted to hunt Cape buffalo, while my goals were leopard, impala, warthog, and bushbuck. Neither Jack nor Bob had been to Africa before. I had collected kudu, sable, gemsbok, zebra, steenbok, ostrich, and Cape buffalo on a hunt in Botswana in 1993, but leopards had eluded me. Jack was giving me the opportunity to try again.
Everything I'd read about leopard hunting led me to believe that Mr. Spots has a mysterious and disconcerting effect on people. Hunters who could normally hit running rabbits at 300 yards tended to panic and fire their rifles into the air when a leopard was their target. As soon as I realized that this leopard hunt was really going to happen, I decided to practice, and practice, and practice some more.
I fired more than a thousand rounds of ammunition at leopard and plains-game paper targets during semi-weekly trips to our local rifle range. In addition, I pinned two 8x10-inch leopard photos to my den wall, one quartering toward the viewer, one broadside. A camera tripod served as a rest for my rifle. Every evening, I carefully dry-fired fifteen or twenty times at one or the other of "my" leopards. Mentally coaching myself, I repeated over and over again: Pick a rosette ... hold your breath ... s-q-u-e-e-z-e the trigger ... follow through.
Over a period of four months I "shot" well over 2,000 leopards, and now the real thing was at hand. I was in Mozambique hunting real, live, flesh-and-blood leopards, and the first one I'd ever seen had just left the bait and climbed down out of the tree.
The Leopard Returns
For eight days Greg and I had driven up and down the primitive one-lane tracks that penetrate Simon Rodgers' million-acre concession. Some days Jack went with us, and other days he chose to go with Bob and Bryn. Rarely would the speedometer in Greg's Toyota Land Cruiser reach 25 kph (15 mph). Most of each day was spent checking our growing number of baits and then hunting for more impala to put up still more baits. Greg is extremely particular about leopard baits, which undoubtedly contributes to his 91 percent-plus career success ratio.
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Each day the truck crawled up and down the steep banks of the myriad dry sandy riverbeds and over promontories pockmarked with rocks and huge boulders, and studded with caves and cliffs. The hilly mopane woodland habitat along the lakeshore was ideal for leopards. The suspense and anticipation grew stronger day by day. When would a shootable leopard be attracted to our baits?
Every day we'd see lots of other animals, and if we saw impala or something else on my trophy list, I'd jump out and grab the shooting sticks that Obert, Greg's head tracker, had waiting, and make a stalk. Often the animals would run, but occasionally curiosity would get the best of one, and my rifle would come up on the shooting sticks, a bullet would thread its way through the thornbush, scrub mopane, and tall grass, and another leopard bait or incidental trophy would be procured. One morning Jack was able to video the entire sequence as I spined a nice 21-inch impala ram.
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Another morning we surprised a good-sized warthog that decided to run along the track instead of turning into the thick bush. Obert whistled and stopped him for a few seconds, but by the time I got out of the truck and set up on the shooting sticks, he was running again and just about to disappear over a small rise. All I had was a "going straight away" shot. I didn't hesitate, and rolled the warthog end over end in the middle of the track. He got up, limped off a few yards, and then went down for good.
On this ninth morning Jack was really excited about the possibility of videoing a leopard in the tree, but he finally decided to go with Bob and Bryn instead. He was concerned that he might spook the cat while trying to sneak into the blind with us in the darkness. I really wanted him to be in on the action, but in hindsight we both think he made the right decision.
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After the leopard left, Greg motioned me to sit back down and remain quiet. We sat there dejectedly for several minutes. Then, suddenly, we heard the unmistakable sounds of a leopard feeding again. As we looked cautiously, I saw that a leopard was back on the bait, but couldn't positively identify its gender. It fed for several minutes, changing positions occasionally, and finally turned so we could definitely see that it had male plumbing. He continued turning until he was standing broadside on the limb. Through the riflescope, he looked almost close enough to touch. What a fantastic sight!
"Shute the bawsterd," came Greg's English-accented whisper. All my practice paid off. The cross hairs came to rest on a prominent dark rosette behind the leopard's right shoulder. Half a breath ... hold it ... and the .300 Winchester Magnum went off almost by itself. I'd practiced the same scenario hundreds of times. As Yogi Berra once said, "It was deja vu all over again."
I lost sight of the leopard during recoil, but seconds after the shot, we heard a thud followed by a low grunt. Then, total silence.
"How did your sight picture look?" Greg whispered.
"Perfect!" I responded.
"Well," said Greg, "he ran off." I was stunned.
Greg said he would walk back and get the truck, "and my shotgun; then we'll go dig him out of the brush" and emphatically warned me to stay in the blind until he got back. I replayed the scene over and over in my mind. Everything had looked flawless, but I still spent the next thirty minutes worried sick that I had wounded this beautiful but very dangerous animal and now we were going to have to go into the thick brush after him.
Greg drove down a little side trail to within fifty yards of the bait tree. I heard the vehicle grinding closer and closer and then stopping. A truck door slammed. I heard Greg load his shotgun and cautiously start through the brush towards the tree. Then there was a pause before he shouted, "Bob! He's right here under the tree! He's dead! Way to go, buddy!"
A tidal wave of relief and euphoria swept over me. The trackers were ecstatic, and Greg was as pleased as he could be. Greg and his crew did a first-class job of putting me in position to take the leopard I'd dreamed of for more than fifteen years. They had all worked really hard for eight full days, and then allowed me to pull the trigger.
My leopard died instantly and fell out of the tree into a dry, sandy riverbed. There was no sign that he'd even twitched after he hit the ground. We surmised that it must have been the female that ran off after I shot. In any case, we would have an exciting story for Jack around the campfire tonight!
As we waited for the sun to come up enough to take pictures, Greg radioed Bryn, Bob, and Jack with the news of our successful leopard hunt.
During their conversation, Bryn told Greg that Bob had just shot an elephant, and Jack had been able to witness it all. They caught a small herd ravaging a village maize field, he said, and, "We took the herd's leader. She still had corn on her breath."
However, that's a story for another campfire.
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