Inside Twin Propllers
At the dining table Felix must has been very impressed with my build as he is about 195-200 cm tall whereas I am 167 cm. "An old and beat up city man" he must have thought. He asked whether I could walk? Since Felix has just left a Hosital three days ago and has not fully recovered from the encounter with a buffalo which has left three holes in his body and leg. Plus he was pretty much still limping. I decided to tell him "Please do not worry, I will be okay with your condition like this too". Felix replies was " You'd better watch out what you are saying". Well, I was right, at least most of the time.
Sunday August 19-First hunting day.
Felix's plan was to leave the camp at 05.00 am every morning to look for fresh old bull tracks. It was still dark at that hour when we left the camp, but only within ten minutes, we saw eight roan cows right off the road. We also noticed some fresh elephant tracks but there were too young. At the first water pan, we saw two groups of elephant tracks, about five to seven bulls per group, but they were nothing to our interest. We drove on and spotted a couple of elephant bull 600-700 meters away. We walked in for a closer look. One of them has a big body with left tusk broken in half and the right one weighting around sixty pounds. The other bull was a much younger one. He saw us and started to walk toward us..... Wait he is walking with FIVE legs though.
At about 9.20 am, we saw two hartebeests in a distant away from the road. Then we saw a big heard of kudu cows at the next water hole with about seventeen to twenty cows. At 10.00 am we arrived at a massive water pan full of flamingos, various birds and water flows. There were also two large herds of springboks and few cows and calves tracks here. We had made a good round trip this in morning and came back to the camp around 11.50 am for lunch.
Our search for a couple of dream bulls resumed at 14.30 pm by looking for a good track on the roads and checking at water holes. We drove east until we hit a Botswana's fence, then headed north along the fence. Only five minutes later we had a left rear tire punctured. After we had the tire changed and within a hundred meters ,the tracker spotted a large kudu three hundred meters away. Felix decided to have a closer look at him, os we went after this kudu but in the end it took off very far. Both Felix and I did not manage to see the horn size of this kudu. So we changed our course toward a water hole. Felix told me that Mr. Denker had seen a ninety-pounder elephant at this water hole last November after the hunting season. We walked for an hour but fortunately the water hole had dried off for a while. But there was a wild dog about a hundred meters away. He saw us and walked closer to us to have a better look.
Monday August 20- Second Hunting day.
We left camp at 5.05 am to a new water hole. Once we arrived, the trackers found a large elephant spore coming out off the water hole. We went after this spore for about thirty minutes when another bull crossed and mixed up with our track. So the trackers had to back track to trace the first bull track. While waiting for our trackers, Felix had spotted a heard of Onyx moving toward us. They came as close as thirty meters from us in a fairly open terrain and two of them had very long and thick horns. Unfortunately to us that were on an elephant track.
The trackers returned after one hour and twenty minutes, said they had found our bull track but this time they saw this bull track clearly in a soft mud sand. Even though his track is very big but his print has fine cracks in his feet indicated he was a young bull, not an old bull we were looking for. As elephants get older, cracks underneath of their feet will become larger while their sole would wear out.They are a lot of elephant activity at this water hole than any others we had seen so far. We made sure to come back to check this area again tomorrow.
We drove around checking various water holes and pans for a while. We spotted a couple of kudu within two hundreds meters. One has a horn broke off and the other kudu is about fifty four inches. Later on, we spotted a young elephant bull at seven hundred meters away. Around 11.00 am, we found found a nice old bull track but Felix decided that we will come back to check tomorrow morning as the day was getting warmer at a very fast rate.
Tuesday August 21- Third day
We arrived at a water pan at 5.20 am but only saw one young bull track. On the way to another pan we spotted a lone young Roan but his horns were short. Just five minutes after that, we noticed two large old bulls tracks. These tracks are large but not massive, but as their tracks show large crack print, we decided to go after them.
Felix drove around a couple of kilometers to see if these bulls have crossed the road or not. On the way, we spotted a small heard of Roan cows. We decided to come back to the tracks as they did not cross over the road and we started to follow them at 7.20 am. We could observed that our bulls were joined by another two-three bulls. We saw the first bull around 7.50 am as he was slowly feeding in thick bushes. He was an impressive big old body bull. He was standing broadside around fifty meters away from us, his right tusk was very thick and long. It was not taper but it was thick all the way to the tip with round blunt tip. Felix and I both agreed that his tusk can easily make over seventy five pounds. Felix said if his left tusk is good, we will take him. As he moved and turn, we saw he has no left tusk, it had broken off at his lip.
We saw two smaller young bulls and another old bull with both long and thick tusk but he was very far away. We think he should be a seventy pounder but we did not really have a good look at him. We could not get in any closer as the one tusk bull was closed to us and he was downwind from the rest. We had to circled right and left several times, spending more than an hour and a half trying to get a good look at the other old bull. Then we saw him moving away from us but the first one tusk old bull was again in our way and downwind.
About 10.05 am they moved off to find a place to bed. Felix found a chance to bring me closer to the second old bull but the area was full of very thick brushes. The one tusk old bull was standing under a shade to our right fifteen meters away to our right. Felix and I stalked closer to be within ten meters from the second old bull. There was another bull standing very closed to him. Everything was happening very fast and I did not get a chance to look at his tusk as I was too busy watching every steps where my feet would land on the ground. The second old was standing broadside with his head to our left, unfortunately I could not get a clear shot neither at his head nor his heart/lung area as he was behind several bushes. I decided to cat- walked closing to about eight meters to him. The second old bull then caught our movement, turned his head and starred at us. His head was now totally being blocked by some brushes, I had no chance for a clear shot at all. He was staring at us almost two full minutes to come to senses that something was not right. For all those long minutes, my legs were shaking badly from adrenaline rush of excitement and from being so close to the old bull. He slowly moved back ward and moved off. We had to stay still for a while trying not to spook the whole group.
Half an hour later we had another chance to get close to them to about twenty meters. This time these two old bulls were five meters away from each other. And we we had a chance to really look at this bull but it turn out that he was not the same one we had seen in the beginning. We backed off and sent one of the tracker up the tree but he could not locate our seventy pounder. We saw another two bulls twenty five meters away. Upon closer look, one was a young bull and the other was a very old bull with forty to fifty pounds tusks.
In the afternoon we saw a massive track of an old bull on the road, it was last night's track. If we had seen it in the morning, we would had followed him. We spotted three young bulls feeding six to seven hundred meters away from the road on the way back to camp.
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