On the hunt
It was the last day of my safari in Coutada 11 in the Zambeze Delta of Mozambique, and I was cursing the weather. Evidence of yesterday's torrential rain was everywhere. Six inches had fallen in less than 12 hours, I reckoned, by the overflowing water glass left on a table outside – a water glass that had been empty before the rain started. I had that impromptu rain gauge in mind as we made our way in my PH Julian Moller's Land Cruiser.
We passed through miombo sand forests and palmetto-acacia woodlands as we headed back to the series of pans we had been checking on-and-off for the last two weeks. The rain was due to set in again later in the day and if we did not make it out to the pans now, I would leave without the main focus of my hunt, the promise of getting a clean shot at the coal-black, scimitar-horned sable bull my PH had spotted earlier in the year.
Over the previous two weeks, we had run across several exceptional sable bulls, and Julian's advice had been to hold out for the big lone bull he had in mind for me.had seen in months, in a million-acre remote area of Mozambique that had never seen a fence; an area now, thanks to the rain, almost impassably flooded.
