A one-tusk bull, a seventy-pounder blocked

Five-twenty at a pan: one young bull track. On to the next pan — a lone young roan, horns short. Five minutes further, two large old-bull tracks. Big, not massive, but with broad cracks. We decided to follow.

Felix drove the perimeter first to see if they had crossed a road; they had not. We started to track at twenty past seven. Two or three more bulls had joined the line. At ten to eight we spotted the first bull, feeding slowly in thick bush. Big old body, broadside at fifty meters. Right tusk very thick and long, not tapered, thick to the tip — easily over seventy-five pounds. Felix said if the left was good, we would take him. He turned, and we saw — no left tusk. Broken off at the lip.

We glassed two smaller young bulls, and another old bull further off with both tusks long and thick. A seventy-pounder, we thought — we could not get a clean look. We could not close: the one-tusk bull was between us and the group, downwind. We circled for more than an hour and a half. The big bull moved before we could see him clearly.

At five past ten the bulls looked for shade to lie up. Felix found me a way to the second old bull in very thick brush. The one-tusk bull was fifteen meters to our right, under shade. Felix and I crept to ten meters of the second bull. Everything was fast. I was watching the ground for every foot- fall and missed the read on his tusks. He was broadside, head to our left; I could not see brain or boiler through the screen of bush.

I cat-walked to eight. The second bull caught our movement and turned — his head now fully blocked. He stared for two full minutes. My legs shook the whole time. Slowly, slowly, he backed off. We held still to keep from spooking the rest.

Half an hour later another chance — twenty meters. The two old bulls five meters apart. When we finally had a look, we saw we had been watching the wrong one all along. Not our seventy-pounder. We backed off and sent Xhau up a tree; he could not relocate the bull we wanted.

Close by, twenty-five meters out, two more bulls. One young, the other an old bull with tusks forty to fifty pounds.

In the afternoon, a massive track on the road — last night’s. If we had seen it in the morning, we would have followed. On the way back to camp, three young bulls feeding six to seven hundred meters off the road.