Eight Days in Africa: The Story of an African Safari

By Sean Jeffries

This is the story of the author's first African safari. But it's more than just the story of the hunt, it's a roadmap showing all of the steps that the author took to plan his trip. Not quite a how-to manual, the book tells you the things you need to know about planning a safari while presenting the information in narrative prose designed to keep you turning pages to see how the hunt ends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sean Jeffries
• Release date: Aug 23, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452339764

Sean Jeffries

Sean Jeffries is a life-long hunter who has a passion for sharing his experiences afield with others. He has kept detailed journals of every hunt that he has undertaken since 2000, and is the owner and operator of the Wingshooters.net website. His books include "Eight Days in Africa", "Always Take Your Rifle", and a Christian Living piece entitled "Deer Hunter's Devotional", which ties Biblical passages in with the outdoors. "Deer Hunter's Devotional" is the first piece in the "Hunting For the Heart of God" collection, which will later include a novel and a book of church-related essays. Sean lives in Clover, SC with his wife Micki, their two dogs, and their newborn son Paul.

Book preview

Introduction

I am, by no means, a safari expert. I’ve only been to Africa once, and that was only for plains game. This book is the story of that safari; it’s an expanded version of the journal that I diligently kept as I planned and executed every phase of the trip.

As you read the story, please keep in mind that this was indeed taken from my journal entries, so in the first few chapters we’re actually looking into what I was thinking in real time rather than looking back historically at the trip. When I edited the journals and made them into what ultimately became this book I chose not to change those initial chapters, but instead decided to present the planning to you as if it were happening in real time.

The purpose of this book is twofold. First, I wanted to share my story with you. I wanted to take you along with me as I first dreamed of seeing Africa, then began putting the trip together, and then made it actually happen. Second, I wanted to lay out the steps involved in booking a safari in a unique format. Rather than tell you to do this or that, I simply documented everything that I did, and now present it here for you as a rough blueprint of what you might do if you want to plan your own African adventure.

There are a lot of people who helped me along the way on this long journey, and if I forgot you here I apologize in advance. Thanks go to my parents for buying me that first little Harrington & Richardson shotgun and for letting me hunt with it on the little fields and farms near where I grew up. Also to Arnold Kirk, for being such an inspiration to my own hunting by opening up his property to me and for helping me to get my first deer all the way back in 1991.

To Ted Leonhardt and Pete Tschantz, two of my hunting buddies. I’ve enjoyed our time in the woods together boys, and as always I look forward to our next hunt. Thanks also to folks like Kathi Klimes, Carol Rutkowski, and Tim Macmanus for the help you gave me in making everything come together.

Thanks are also in order to the folks on the internet who answered questions and wished me luck along the way. Pete Odland, Paul Wilson, and the folks on the Accurate Reloading message boards. Thanks also to Ted Nugent for answering the occasional question that I threw his way on his own internet forums.

I’d also like to thank Matt Brinton, my longtime friend at work. Matt and I have had a lot of good times together as we worked as programmers and DBAs, and I really appreciate his efforts at proofreading the original edition of this book. This second edition would not have been released so quickly without his help.

The people both in the forefront and behind the scenes at Limcroma Safaris were an absolute pleasure to work with. Hannes, Zwei, Magda, Eric, Edward, and the rest of the staff and crew all worked very hard to make my safari the incredible experience that it was. Thanks go to all of you.

And, of course, the biggest thanks of all go to my wife Micki for supporting me not only in this safari, but in all of my hunting adventures. Our house is now filled with the heads of deer, wild boar, antelope and a great many other game animals, but most of all it is filled with my love for her.

Dreaming of Africa

It is March of 2005, and I’ve been thinking about a safari for years. My desire to hunt in Africa was inspired by Robert Ruark’s book The Old Man and the Boy, but my days of hunting go back even farther than the time that I first read that great story. My earliest memory involving hunting deals with a time when I was just a young boy. I couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old.

My grandfather had a cabin on Badin Lake, near Albemarle, North Carolina. He had built the place himself, and for many years the family would gather there on summer weekends to enjoy the water and spend time together. The fishing was great too, and that was always my favorite part of our visits to the cabin.

On one particular trip to the lake, my grandfather, my dad, and I were crowded into the cab of the old man’s truck and were on the way back from a little country store that was just a few miles down the road from the cabin. We’d gone to pick up some groceries -- or maybe it was some bait -- and as we headed for home my grandfather suggested that we take a quick detour down a dirt road to take a look at a long abandoned gold mine.

As we drove along with dust from the road flowing out behind us like a smoke screen, a massive whitetail buck jumped out in front of us. I was astonished, having just seen my first deer in the wild. I don’t remember much about the rest of that ride, but when we got back to the cabin I burst through the door and ran to tell my mom about the deer that we had seen. I can clearly remember saying one day I’m going to hunt deer like that.

A prophetic statement.

Hunting became the focus of my life. My parents gave me a little single barrel 20 gauge shotgun at an age that today’s politically correct crowd would be appalled at. They turned me loose with it on the day that a friend called and asked me if I wanted to go hunting squirrels on the little 7 acre piece of property that his parents owned, and my hunting days were born in earnest.

Even as I think back on that brief squirrel hunt, I look at where my life is now and see how deeply the love of the hunt is ingrained in my soul, and in that of my old friend. My friend is the owner of one of the finest treestand companies in the country. And as I write this, I look around my office walls and see the antlers of the deer that I have taken over these long years. Behind me on the bookshelf is a pair of wood ducks. To the left, the snarling head of a Russian boar. That one moment of time when my friend called to ask me to go hunting will forever be marked in my memory as the time when my life's compass chose its heading.

Some years after that first hunt, my dad approached me and asked I had ever read Ruark’s book.

"You’ve read The Old Man and the Boy, right?" he asked.

"The Old Man and the Sea, you mean?" I responded.

No, this is a different book. It’s about a boy growing up hunting and fishing in North Carolina.

I told him that I had never even heard of the book, and he immediately went down to the bookstore and got me a copy. If I had loved hunting before, I was soon even more immersed in it. Ruark showed me a world that I had never even dreamed of, and at his first mention of Africa I knew that someday I would go. As he looked over the body of his first deer, Ruark said that he didn't know that he'd go on to hunt lions and elephants and such, but that the feelings he had over that first deer were matched only by those of his first Cape buffalo, many years later. And so at that young age, having never even myself hunted deer, my thoughts turned for the first time to Africa.

As I got older I continued to hunt. My college apartment was just 45 minutes away from my grandfather’s cabin, and at about that time my father told me that he had done some checking and had found that the lands all around the cabin were game lands. That is to say, they were open for free public hunting to anyone with the proper license. I arranged my fall semester class schedule in such a way that I was able to stay at the cabin every other night. From there, I would be able to spend my Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays hunting deer.

For the next seven or eight years, I used that cabin as a base of operations for my hunting. In those days, it seems that there was a steady progression of friends who hunted with me. In the first year or two it was just me, but as time passed there was almost always a partner along for the ride.

Andy, a friend from my high school years, was first. I was never really sure that he actually enjoyed the hunting. More than anything, it seems that he was just interested in spending time with a friend. The last time we hunted together was one bitter cold Thanksgiving morning. We weren't in the woods for more than ten minutes when I heard him shoot. Shortly after the woods had quit ringing with the echoes of his shots, I ran over to him and asked if he had gotten a deer. He told me he was sure he had missed. I wanted to go look for blood, but he insisted that it was a miss. I realized then that he had taken the shots as a way to end the hunt and get back in the warm truck. Although I wasn't mad, I knew this would be the last time that we hunted together. His heart wasn't in it.

Ernest, another high school buddy, was next. His first trip was also his last. I didn't know it until after the hunt was over, but he had brought along a little something that I was not expecting. Mushrooms. The illegal, hallucinogenic kind. I was not happy when the game wardens chose us for a random vehicle search as we were leaving the woods. They didn't find the mushrooms, and I only found out about them after the search was over and Ernest was sighing in relief. That was the last time I ever spoke to Ernest. I don't have any tolerance for illegal drugs.

Dan, a friend from college, soon followed. He'd been a bird hunter for many years, but never had gotten the opportunity to hunt big game. He was excited about the chance to go deer hunting, and I was glad to have found someone who appeared to be seriously interested in the hunt. Unfortunately, he was loud in the woods, loud in the truck, and loud in the cabin. A man wants peace when he's off on a hunting trip. Besides, he had a bad habit of getting drunk and eating all of the food in the camp during the night. All of it. Dan didn't last long either.

There were others; some good, some bad, but, for the first five years, none who were interested enough to make a go of it. That changed in 1990 when, fresh out of college, I took a temporary job at Winn-Dixie's regional headquarters. I was a simple mailroom clerk, and the job was only supposed to last a few weeks. On the first day, however, my supervisor, a fellow named Ted Leonhardt, and I struck up a conversation about archery.

Ted had recently bought his first bow, and, although he had never been deer hunting, he was really wanting to give it a try… he only lacked a place to go. I suggested that he come with me up to the cabin the following weekend and I'd get him going. That simple weekend trip became a weekly routine, and our friendship began. We hunted in the Uwharries for the next half dozen years, until my grandfather died and the cabin was sold. Even now, two decades after we first met, we still hunt together regularly.

Through all of this hunting, I managed to get several shots (all misses) at deer with my bow and arrow, but was never able to actually get that first deer. Then, shortly after Ted and I hunted together for the first time, my dad told me that a friend of his was a serious hunter and had recently purchased 160 acres of land, and that this friend would take me hunting there to help me get my first deer. It wasn't supposed to be anything long term; just a friendly offer to get the first one out of the way. And so, one day in the fall of 1991, I called Arnold Kirk and made the arrangements to go hunting with him. Although I couldn’t have known it, this was a huge turning point in my hunting career.

My first deer hunt on private land was exciting, but fruitless. I was disheartened, having gotten my one real chance to get a deer and coming up blank. To my surprise, Arnold invited me back the next week to try again. I gratefully accepted, and the following week my first deer was in the bag. Arnold extended the invitation to continue hunting with him, his brother, and a friend of theirs for the next several weeks. When the season was over and it was time to start doing the hard work of getting the land in shape, I made sure to let Arnold know that I was available to help. And so another great friendship was born.

I began to alternate my weekends, hunting sometimes with Ted on the game lands, sometimes with Arnold on his property. When Ted got married, he backed off of his hunting activities for a few years, and all of my hunts shifted to private lands. Arnold was an inspiration to my hunting. His house was full of trophies: elk, deer, antelope, and sheep – animals that I could only dream of hunting. Admiring his animal heads, I wanted some of my own.

And through all of this, Africa always remained somewhere in the back of my mind. When I left Winn-Dixie and got a job as a computer programmer, I set up a bank account that I would use to fund my hunting trips. In 1996, with a half dozen deer under my belt, I realized that it was time to actually take that first trip. Although I wanted Africa more than anything, I knew I needed to get some experience a little closer to home before taking that great safari, so I decided that I would go on a mule deer hunt in Montana. I would go it alone. This was my trip, and I wanted the whole thing for myself.

I got my mule deer, and in the following years killed a great many whitetails, some turkeys, and even a trophy wild boar. And as I began to approach 40, I realized that it was time to start thinking seriously about Africa. My first thoughts about this came in the weeks before I turned 38. Initially, I decided that I would ask my wife, Micki, how she felt about us going to Africa in two years; a grand celebration of my 40th birthday. The more I thought about it though, I decided that two years wasn’t enough time to properly plan and anticipate the trip. I would do it before I turned 45. That meant a wait of seven years at most.

Micki and I had been down to Texas on vacation the year before, and we had driven down to Mountain Home to take a look at the Y.O. Ranch. We got there too late in the afternoon to get a tour of the ranch itself, but driving along the area roads I was thrilled to see several black buck antelope. I had seen these pretty little antelope on television many times in the past, but when I saw them in the Texas wilderness I realized how beautiful they really were. I told Micki that I wanted one for the wall of our house.

And so, when it came time to broach the subject of my safari with Micki, we sat down on the couch and I told her that I had something that I wanted to talk about. I told her that I had been thinking about my safari, and that it was time to set some dates. She seemed receptive, so I pressed on.

I want to hunt the Y.O. Ranch when I turn 40, I said. I want to take a black buck and an Axis deer.

Why not next year instead, she asked.

Although her reply had surprised me, I didn’t want to push this thing, so I talked about 40 being a special year for a man, and that this would give us more time to set aside the money for the trip. She agreed that we could do it.

So I continued. And there’s Africa, I said. I want to set a date for it. I want to say that we’ll go no later than the year I turn 45. We can go sooner, but not later. Africa, I continued, is something that I’ve always wanted to experience. This is a must-do goal for my life. And I would really hope that you’ll want to come along with me, even if you don’t hunt.

She agreed, and in that moment Africa became real to me. My thinking changed; it was no longer something that I