Spending decades exploring, safari guiding and hunting for the cooking pot, I told my dear wife Eileen when we married over 40 years ago that she would be marrying adventure as well.
Even as a little boy my love for nature and the curiosity to explore was intense and I’m sure many of our SSAA hunters feel the same.
It is vital to teach children the importance of fauna and flora as well as disciplined ethical hunting and conservation. And it’s a good break from mobile phones, apps, laptops, Facebook and professor Google.
When hunting for the pot, I always explored and enjoyed collecting many items from the bush in South Africa. This consisted of skulls, curious pieces of dead wood, stones and other ornamental and interesting oddments lying loose in the bush or sand and rocks.
One of my favourites was a leopard carcass that I found rotting away while stalking a bushbuck. The area hunted was among the bushveld mountains of northern South Africa known as the Soutpansberg (Salt Pan Mountain).
The bush was dense in parts and I was tracking a bushbuck near a stony, dry creek. Suddenly the bushbuck announced its alarm call, which sounds like a combination of a single, hoarse dog bark and a snort. It retreated in haste further into the thick
