I can show you the veld

There’s an old joke amongst South Africa’s professional hunters: “What’s faster than a blue wildebeest with four legs? A blue wildebeest with three – it waves its ‘arm’ over its shoulder and says: ‘Come on, I’ll show you the whole veld, the whole bloody veld!’”

In other words, wound a blue wildebeest and you are in for a very long tracking session.

Often underestimated by novice safari hunters, the blue wildebeest or brindled gnu is referred to reverently by PHs as ‘the poor man’s buffalo’ and provides a fitting challenge for the plains game hunter to earn their safari stripes. ‘Old blue’ very quickly commands the respect of those who trail its bovine tracks.

They’re gangly and ungainly looking, certainly, but there is nothing quite as spectral on a foggy bushveld dawn as the charcoal silhouette of a roaming wildebeest accompanied by the nasal booming, GNU… GNU… GNU. The haunting