I HAD felt it coming on for years, a vague, unholy niggling that popped up now and then, but it wasn’t until 1970 that I really lost faith. I was a professional hunter with Ker, Downey and Selby in North Western Botswana and was crawling through a fringe of grass with a doctor client from California, edging up for a shot at a bull Cape buffalo, one of a herd of about 200 in a wideopen vlei before us. Reaching the side of a screening termite hill a hundred yards from the bull, I could feel the awe flooding through me as the doc snicked the safety off the Weatherby .460 and snuggled up to squeeze off a 500-grain soft-point. At last I would see it! The fabled .460 in action! At 100 yards, I knew that thumb-sized slug would arrive with better than 6 000 of those lovely footpounds still in tow and the hydrostatic shock would shrivel up that bull like a cockroach in a campfire.
The muzzle blast blew a cement sack of dust off the hill and I lost the buff in my binoculars just as the bullet impact echoed back with a thump. I got the glasses back into place and was startled to see the bull casually wandering off across our front, far from the bloom of health but by no means incapacitated. I saw the wound, a bit far back, and told the client to bust him again. He shucked a fresh round into the action and settled down for his squeeze. This time, I saw the big
