Could you pick a favorite? Most memorable? Most difficult? Did any not live up to the hype? If you had to pick just one more to hunt, what would it be?
Those are tough questions.
My favourite might be the lesser kudu - it's such a beautiful animal, and I wasn't well, so the hunt nearly killed me (we actually thought I was having a heart attack walking the dry river bed!). It's not usually a difficult hunt, although in Ethiopia, where I found this one, the Danakil isn't a place most people would want to visit. Friendly isn't a description you would use for the local population, most of the male members of which are armed.
The most difficult hunts were definitely the bongo and the giant eland.
The jungle is hot, humid and close - there is no air movement and you sweat from the first step. Everything in the jungle - foliage as well as living things - wants to sting you, bite you, suck your blood or just eat you (or all of the these). Sitting down is a challenge (armies of ants are everywhere) and you have to carry everything you might need (water above all). You are constantly warmed by bugs, particularly if you slow down or stop moving. You move at a snail's pace and have to watch your rifle (vines are everywhere), your feet as well as your head - the trackers cut paths with machetes, but they are more than a foot shorter than me . . . And then there's the fact that you literally see nothing. I shot my rifle once on that hunt and it was on day 12 of a 14 day hunt (some do get "lucky" and get a bongo early, but you generally will battle for it).
The hunt for the Lord Derby might be a bit easier, but not by much. The temperature on the savannah is beyond hot and the ground is very difficult to walk on - golf ball size worm casings are are everywhere and hard as rocks, so walking is difficult and there is the ever-present danger of twisting an ankle. You can track for hours and the eland are always in groups, so the odds of getting busted are high. And the shots tend to be difficult - they call it savannah, but it's not open country by any means, and you will generally have to pick a shot through a lot of bush and brush. And my luggage had been lost so I was hunting in flimsy leather crocs!
Having said that, if you've read my report on the mountain nyala hunt, you will see that we hunted hard for about a week with no sightings, and then I wounded the animal and thought I'd lost it. We found it again limping around 5 or 6 days later and I finished it off. That was hard on the morale. The fact that the mountain nyala is the most expensive of the three didn't help (I didn't want to have to do it again). If you aren't used to higher altitudes, climbing and hunting at 9,000 to 10,000 feet can be challenging, and shots tend to be long here - over 300 yards is typical and over 400 not unheard of.
These three are my most memorable hunts and all exceeded the hype. The only hunts which didn't really live up to the hype were - and I want to be clear that I'm not denigrating anyone here - the hunts in South Africa. We knew we'd get what we were looking for, if not today then tomorrow, and the PHs know where the nyala and the eland like to hang out, so even on the biggest properties, they are usually pretty easy to find. And in many cases I could have shot from the vehicle if I'd been minded to. I don't mind shooting - I've done a lot of it - but I don't confuse it with hunting and I didn't want to take any of the nine that way. In fact, I took the nyala in Mozambique even though I didn't need it just because I wanted to tell myself that I shot all nine free ranging in their normal habitat. I've shot plenty of transplanted kudu, eland, etc., but at least one member of all nine of the spiral horns were shot in their normal habitat.
I don't think I can decide which I would do if I could only do one again, so likely I'd do all three! But thanks for asking. It's been a treat re-living the hunts!
