"Shot it with this.” he said. The rifle looked as weathered as the kudu horns, cracked and checked after decades in the sun. They weren’t big horns. It wasn’t a big rifle. “Dead with one bullet,” he added.
Said bullet had been a 40-grain lead missile that barely cracked the sound barrier. The single-shot turn-bolt rifle had few more parts than a garden hoe and weighed about the same. Hunters stateside would call it a twenty-two. Ditto its cartridge — packed 50 to a box small enough to tuck in a bakkie's ash tray.
About the time that lad in southern Africa was squinting over open sights at his first kudu, I was aiming at a black disk that appeared as a dot through my aperture sight, in preliminary tryouts for the U.S. Olympic Team. In disk's center was a real dot the diameter of a finishing nail. To advance, each shooter had to erase nearly all 60 of his/ her dots. Missing the 9-ring, thinner than a bullet, was a colossal blunder. While my rifle and ammunition were built to tighter tolerances than were the kudu hunter's, they shared a blood-line. It dated to 1857. That year Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, working in what was called “Gun Valley” in America's New England states,
