Three bulls, sixteen kilometers, no trophy

Felix’s client last year shot an eighty-six-pounder on the thirteenth day of his safari. Today is our thirteenth day. Lucky, maybe.

At ten to eight the tracks of three big bulls on a dirt road. Walking together, feeding and sleeping along their line, no cows mixed in. Two and a half kilometers of the thickest bush in Nyae Nyae. The ground was baked hard from all the rain; the grass and weeds were tall. Everyone fell into four or five holes — elephant prints, rooting holes, animal dens — hidden under the grass. I dropped into one neck deep. Lucky not to be hurt: the hole was not a straight drop, I slid in.

The country was full of ripe raisin berries. Old and new sign everywhere in the bushes. We found and lost the line many times. After three and a half hours one track brought us back to the dirt road, with the bull’s print on top of the cruiser’s. Half a kilometer more and we spotted him — five hundred meters out at a mud pan, putting sunblock on. Fifty to fifty-five pounds.

Felix sent the trackers back for the other two. Forty minutes later they were back: the bull at the mud pan was a fourth bull who had passed through. The three we wanted had circled — that was why we had lost them.

We resumed. Five more losses, five more finds — the trackers did astonishing work. By a quarter to twelve the three were heading straight southeast. A mud-bath stop at a pan. We caught them at twenty to two, nine kilometers from the cruiser. None of the three carried the ivory we wanted. Sixteen and a half kilometers on foot, back at the cruiser at ten to two. A lucky day for finding a track. Not the right bulls.