ROY WEATHERBY – LEGENDARY MAVERICK

I“met” Roy Weatherby in the Indian store at Arnot, a railway station between Middelburg and Belfast on Paul Kruger’s line to Maputo. That is where I went to school with 40 other farm kids way back then. Apart from the school and the railway station, Arnot had an OTK co-op office and silos, a one-man post office and the Indian shop owned by Musa. Musa sold everything from fuel, bicycles, spices, sorghum (for indigenous beer-making) and some household essentials to sweets and cloth.

One day, as I entered Musa’s store, he beckoned me into his stacked little office in the back. He had been to America, and from the top of a pile of dusty papers about a mile high, he took down a fairly thick book and gave it to me. On the cover was written Weatherby Guide. Musa had brought it especially for me from the US.

Until then, I only knew and Mausers and the odd Winchester or Brno – in terms of colour, all pretty bland rifles. The pages of the thickwere a revelation, though: white-line spacers, diamond-shaped inlays, machine engraving, gold plating, Monte Carlo combs and racy fore-end tips. I was as overawed as Musa with all this bling. I read about cartridges I had never heard of before: Weatherby Magnums!