Out of the blue, I received an e-mail from 60-year-old Texan Bruce Dorn. A total of 40 years had passed since he came to hunt with me, accompanied by his parents.
In the interim, his parents had passed away, his father being the last to go. While clearing out his father’s personal effects, he came across my book titled Hunting for Trouble, agift from his brother Mac to his father. My name rang a bell, and guilt gnawed at him: the family had not kept their promise to send me the photos of our hunt in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley.
GOING BACK 40 YEARS…
At 75 years of age, I only have a vague memory of their 21-day hunt. If my memory serves me right, there is only one place to start, namely at the airstrip hacked out of mopane woodland. The local Chewa people named it Baka-Baka after the call of a yellow-billed duck.
It must’ve been almost midday. There wasn’t a breeze, and the windsock was hanging limp. My routine when expecting clients by charter was to check the airstrip before they arrived to chase puku, impala and zebra away and look for freshly dug antbear holes.
With this done, I would leave
