The Elephant Grove - by Pete Swanepoel

There’s a road that runs from Lusaka into the west, straight and unbending through country that is lush and green with clear flowing rivers – it is beautiful country that once teemed with the many great beasts and birds of Africa – the bush in it's true form, wild and untouched heading into Lozi country.

If you left Lusaka early you would arrive amidst the Miombos as the animals were stirring, some on their way to sleep in slow hesitant motions, others rejoicing in the pink hues of morning and the safety of light. You would pass lush green forests of bright Brachystegia trees, their leaves olive and lime limp in the silent oncoming light, with Impala and Hartebeest and Eland and great mighty Elephants gently gliding against the soft dawn.

Every now and then you’d pass those long winding dambos that stretched into the depths of the miombos with morning mist rising from the still waters beneath where the regal Sable antelope and surly black masses of grazing buffalo fed on the glistening grass shoots. Scattered grey termite mounds peeked their tops over the grass with an occasional coucal warming in the morning sun.

Mile after mile of millions of Brachystegias, flowing grass dambos, great herds of elephants, buffalo, eland, sable, roan, hartebeest, impala, warthogs, flocks of guinea fowls, coveys of francolin. The drive was never long or tiring or boring, you always looked forward to it, and then when you arrived at the strong deep green waters of the Kafue river, where you crossed over into Barotseland over the heavily guarded 'Kafue hook' bridge, you knew that the journey had just started.

The Last Elephant hunter

We waited in silence and listened to the shots going off ahead of us, not too far off, they were heavy and deep, a rapid burst of individual fire, three shots in close unison, first one then the other two like a heartbeat – dumdum so close together you could hardly distinguish them, then silence and then sporadic shots again as they reloaded the bolt rifles, again silence – all this within a matter of seconds.

My cousin George and I sat in the open landcruiser, eyes wide, searching ahead, any sign of the bull would put us into a wild panic although we had no idea of what we would do if he did come this way – hide beneath the cruiser was the first thought. We could not drive yet but had a pretty good idea, and the lone tracker left with us could hardly speak English let alone start the vehicle. He was old with hair white at his temples and wore one of those makeshift doctors coats that factory owners gave to their workers as uniforms. I had never seen him in any other form of dress, the faded grey overcoat with black nylon pants and a set of old leather boots that were dried hard as a buffalo hoof and smelt pretty good too. He stood stock still staring ahead - where he always stood, behind the back seat with his wrinkled hands clutched around the sidebars – no sign of excitement or fear gripped his face – he simply stood listening – his given name was Poison – however everyone pronounced it Paison (Paiaaysun) and the meaning of the name was lost when he was a young boy.

He had been my grandfather, Oupa Dicks' right hand man and in his day he commanded respect throughout the local beerhalls and sunday brew drinking sessions around Lusaka west where we had our family farm. Paison had grown up with Oupa Dick, they had driven the wagons together from Westwood to town, 16 oxen spanned in to pull one load of maize, taking 2 days, they'd shoot birds with their slingshots and share the heaped bowl of 'nshima' porridge, they'd sleep beneath the wagon, they would spar as boxers, barely older than George and I were now. They had remained constant friends and companions till the day my grandfather had died and although the times did not allow a black and a white man to act freely in friendship Paison was a lifers – he had seen my mother born and witnessed my early childhood – in short he was part of the family and after my grandfathers death he stayed on with us.

Paison knew this hunting area well, he was from here and it always amazes me how our trackers look upon their native habitat as we would look upon our own neighborhood, knowing each road here meant knowing which tree or anthill led to a pool of water or a hollowed out tree where a Leopard mother would give birth every couple of years, it is like an old neighborhood you once lived in, you never forget the twists, turns and shortcuts. He accompanied us on our hunting trips more for this knowledge than his ability to walk up and track anything these days and without fail would always show us something new each trip and draw the respect and envy of our younger more energetic trackers.

Kaoma open was named for the town which lay in this part of western Zambia, a kind of half way point between Lusaka and the great waters of the Zambezi at Mongu, where you would cross the river and still be in Zambia on a vast open sandy floodplain where the Lewanika made his annual transfer of royal abode when the waters rose. The region was known as Bartoseland in Northern Rhodesia days, some still call it that to this day yet what distinguished this western swathe of Kalahari fringe from the rest of the country was that they had a king known as The Lewanika. When Zambia was still a colony, he was granted royal amnesty by the great Queen across the waters and was left pretty much to his own devices, there was even an act of parliament called the Barotseland Act – no one interfered with his domain, he received protection under the flag of England, to this day they still recognise his sovriegnty and to this day his people tend to keep pretty much to themselves – they are known as the Lozi tribe and much of western Zambia belongs to them.

When we hunted here I knew little of the Lewanika or his people except for Paison and the old game scout Zozi who would accompany us on our trips each day. He was officer in charge of this western boundary of the Kafue national park, overseeing a line of wildlife camps along the boundary road which ran from the main Mongu road all the way through to the strip road that ran south joining Lusaka and Livingstone, about 500 km's of miombo wilderness still untouched and pristine. The colonial government had done a good job of demarcating the national park boundaries with wide graded roads and wildlife camps – I guess in these days it seemed more people obeyed the law, poaching was at a minimal and the wildlife scouts still received their monthly salaries on time. They were proud of what they did and protected the wilderness as it was meant to be preserved.

My uncle Willem used to joke that only an Englishman could have cut a road like this one, the one that ran along the Kafue park boundary, with hunting allowed on one side and off limits park on the other, it was wide and soft as part of the kalahari sands reached here and the soil was forgiving. However it was the nature of the road that puzzled one, a long and almost unbending stretch except for sudden right angle turns, literally, as if the surveyor had suddenly realised he was off track by 1 degree and the urgent need to rectify it by a 90 degree angle left turn and then right again or right and then left again when the correct line had been reached. Oupa Dick's younger brother, Kobie would frighten the hell out of the trackers on the back of his old series land rover as he approached one of these turns, he was short of sight and his aged landrover needed a few pumps of the brake pedal before responding often ending up in the bush asking them where the hell the road had gone and they would have bailed off the back long ago running up to the stalled vehicle laughing and relieved at the same time. The road was mostly straight and was demarcated with beacons, unordered and randomly placed along the roadside and used by the wildlife scouts to explain locations – they were great big concrete tubes filled with concrete and slammed into the soft soil with a number stamped atop of them – starting at beacon 24 near the Mongu road.

Zozi was a short wizened warden and wore the green drab scout uniform with pride, he always seemed to puff out his chest and carry his rusted and beaten up old Parker Hale .375 as high as he could when he walked with us on game trails and on some occasions, like when we had shot an elephant and were taking photos, he'd bring out his ceremonial felt hat. He knew this area better than Paison, it had been his domain for 25 years, first as a junior scout when Norman Carr had been the Kafue's chief warden and then when we had met him he was the newly promoted Officer in charge of Mafunta wildlife camp and carried this with the respect it deserved. Kaoma was still untouched, probably because it was a good deal further than the local resident hunting hotspot closer to Lusaka - a small paradise harbored along the crystal waters of the Kafue river at a place called the 'eyetie rocks' (or Italian rocks). However these days it was crowded, the game had become scarce and people regularly hunted in the national park and at night with spotlights – it was also frequented by 'honorary rangers' - private citizens empowered to carry out the work of regular game scouts and although many of these men were of good temperament and deed, there were also those who had turned vindictive and would, after a few shots of whiskey come into your camp and make life miserable.

The relative absence of hunters in Kaoma made Zozi suspicious of us at first yet after the first trip, he softened his officious stance of checking our game licenses each day and started becoming an asset on all our trips into the bush showing us the large almost unending dambo's or vlei's as we called them, the open expanses of plain stretching in a winding manner through the miombo woodlands, a harbor for all the game especially after a fresh burn.

It was the middle beacons, the 9 thru 14's that had the secret roads leading off them, into the seemingly endless mass of miombo yet once you'd driven about a mile a dambo suddenly enfolded and you were in the most incredible hunting habitat in Africa that carried on until eventually Paison had said he saw the lights of Kaoma. Zozi knew these roads, the water holes that never dried up, the elephant routes and short cuts through the bush and most importantly he knew where to find what we had on license.

Hunting the Miombo woodlands of Zambia is a specialised affair as it takes resolve and endurance, you need to cover many miles in a day and hunting by foot is not an option until you had sight game. You also needed to know where water and grazing were and often you could spend a full day crashing about the leafy green woodland in the droning landcruiser without seeing a bird, just vast tracts of brachystegia trees with that typical sparse grassland beneath and the occasional startled duiker bursting away from under the cruiser. For a kid this was torture and then when you did see something, before you were awake they had already shot it and all you got to see was the animal dead. Miombo is a woodland that best portrays Zambia's hunting as it provides habitat to the best of her beasts – the great gray elephant that you'd see melt into the trees before your eyes, pitch black Sable bulls, sometimes in bachelor herds of 20, holding their horns high and mighty, the magnificent muscled Livingstone's eland bulls with their vertical white stripes and bushy foreheads and their throngs of women and kids, the dogmatic herds of Roan and Hartebeest, regal Kudu on the dambo fringes shining their horns, curious Oribi and Warthog in the burnt black grass. Kaoma was not buffalo friendly as water was scarce, but when we first rode into the green dambos it seemed like we were hunting in a national park. Compared to the overcrowded mumbwa open with it's 'weekend warriors' as uncle Willem had put it, Kaoma was paradise – at least for a few years.

Elephant found the soft sand and leafy miombo an excellent playground and we'd find herds in the dambo's that would stretch as far as the eye could see – 500 Zozi remarked one day as we approached this spectacle before us - with cows and young busily ripping up saplings and digging into the soft sands with their massive pads, teenagers squeeling and chasing each other and the bulls always hidden in the midst of the herd showing a flash of white tusk stretching as far as the eye could see along the endless dambos. They crossed from the park when the rains came, foraging on the fresh grass and leaves of the woodland with a plentiful supply of water at hand but it was the fruits of the Marula trees that brought them across, those soft delicately scented golf ball sized Marula fruits were irresistable to elephants and when they ripened it was like a shining beacon to them.

The Marula trees are not distinctively part of the Miombo, they are stout, stark grey and black barked trees you often see in those romantic sunset pictures – when their leaves are down in winter they make classic trees of Africa and then when they are in fruit, they play host to parties of turaco's, green pigeons, vervet monkeys - warthogs and bushbuck forage in their shade and elephants pay daily visits to them. Often when hunting elephant you can see how they wander from tree to tree and eventually a worn path forms and if you know where the trees are you can often get there ahead of them - for the trees are far apart - and set up for a good shot. They will nudge the tree with their head and shake loose ripe fruit sending birds and monkeys scattering and then without so much as a chew, they swallow them whole only to be passed out again at some distant location ensuring the seeds are dispersed almost as if the elephant forms part of the natural cycle of the tree.

The Marulas start forming just after the heavy rains turn and the herds that frequent them at this time of year make quick work of any that are even half ripe, butting the trees with their heads and searching the floor below with their delicate trunks. They rip off the branches and gouge the bark, they push the younger trees over leaving them at half tilt or snapped like a pencil and then as the rains had suddenly disappeared, the great herds do too, back into the depths of the Kafue National park, their fading tracks and flattened trees the only sign of their rampant and energetic foraging.

The trees are then left in peace and so too are the birds and the monkeys, the warthogs and bushbuck find decaying ripe fruit below and walk away without finishing everything, their bellies taught and grugly, it is as if everyone breathes a sigh of relief from the heavy beasts. Yet it is the older bulls, the ones who are slow and worn, the ones that walk with heavy legs and sway dangerously from side to side that now take up residence, walking the marula route each day and filling up on the sweet yellow nectar. By July the marula trees have lost most of their leaves but as winter sets in you still find fruits, bursting with sweet juice, clinging to the last warm days, drawing the old elephant bulls and often if you are in the right place and your luck is in then you'll find them standing in the shade cooling their ears in the heat of the day.

One year, in our search for the herds of Roan and Eland that walked together with the elephants on the edges of the dambos we stumbled upon three elephant resting in the shade near a clump of marula trees and having already shot an elephant we drove up to them without caution. Two of the elephant stood head to head, their trunks hanging limp to the ground between their tusks, their giant ears slowly fanning back and forth every couple of seconds – we had stopped about 50 yards off sitting quietly in the landcruiser. Suddenly Zozi started fidgeting at the back, making hurried 'sssss' 'sssss' 'sssss' sounds – a sign we all knew to mean he had seen something worth shooting or danger. At first I thought he had perhaps seen some Eland or Roan off in the distance yet when I looked at his face it was awash with excitement, his eyes almost frantic as he tried to get the words out and push forward over the seat to my stepdad. The other elephant stood with his back to us obscured by the mottled gray marula bark, he was motionless as if in a deep slumber and all we saw was his boney spine and wrinkled skin.

Zozi was now able to speak 'yena lo, yena lo' – that is him, that is him he kept saying – 'chaya bwana, chaya bwana' – shoot, shoot - upon which the other trackers also started murmuring that we should shoot, not quite knowing why but it sounded good to have meat anyway. Then as if it had been planned, the two front bulls raised their heads in unison, for a second they stood listening – then stepping back and raising their trunks above their tusks – the wind had changed and now our scent filled their nostrils deep and strong. When elephant want to warn you to back off they raise themselves upwards, looming over you and, it seems, with the force of 10,000 pounds, they will shake their head clattering their ears and step out towards you, ears spread and trunks hanging down limply, sometimes a deep gurgle in their belly – a challenge designed to scare you into some kind of movement so they can locate you. They did this now and before us, not more than 30 yards off two elephants stood on the edge, a thin haze of dust kicked up and floated across their view, half obscuring them.

Then out of the dust and the confusion the third elephant appeared in the gap between the two, he still stayed back under the tree, just standing alert staring off to our left – and we all saw the tusks, those magnificent tree trunk like yellowish pipes that ran from his lips down into the ground, thick and heavy and smooth. Zozi had talked of an elephant that could not walk far without having to stop and rest his tusks - one day we even took the tracks of a bull that seemed to be dragging his tusks as he walked and now in our sight stood an elephant of this like - a once in a lifetime meeting. His gaunt frame seemed too small for what he carried before him, the skin around his mouth and cheeks sagged and looked dried and cracked and his eyes were sunk deep into his skull. It was only an instant that we looked on in silence at this magnificent beast before Zozi again said shoot him bwana and the back of the cruiser broke into a hubbub of trackers – they had heard about this elephant many times and had started to believe he was a phantom – for they would never doubt Zozi's word – yet in their world, phantoms and spirits do exist. This would have been the spirit of a very powerful chief from long ago who appeared to taunt the hunters and then challenge them to a chase.

At this the old bull had caught our direction and slowly turned to face us, his ears ripped at the bottom opened up in a half challenge but his head stayed down for the weight of the tusks, he looked in our direction but saw nothing except the comfort of the other two bulls near him. Without any sound one of the closest bulls whirled about and headed towards the old man, upon which he turned and as the younger drew in to touch his side he started to move slowly at first slowing the young bull and then picked up speed as he found his gait. The young bull was shepherding him away and you could see how he pushed and leaned into the bigger frame to give him direction. Our silence would have continued yet the remaining elephant stood his ground now closer and shook his head again, dust flew off his head and neck, his ears clattered, he kicked the ground and rocked back and forth on his hind legs. Then like the first bull he dropped his ears, his body relaxed, he turned on his back heels and started running, that hurried pathetic type of run that makes elephants look awkward and scared - in a matter of seconds they had vanished into the brachystegias and were gone – forever. Zozi kept urging my stepdad to follow and shoot the bull but without success, no matter how many promises he made, Ken would not take the risk of already having filled his elephant license.

Before George and I the shots being fired were at a very old elephant bull we had seen a couple of times across the road in the national park. He remained oblivious to us as we watched him feeding, raising up on his hind legs to get a little extra reach for the high stubborn marulas. Even from here we could see his frame was gaunt and wrinkled, that of an animal who had seen many years, we did not own luxuries like binoculars in those days so had to rely on the naked eye and it was clear he carried heavy ivory. At first we saw the left tusk, beautiful and full, it stretched out ahead of him in a thick ring of yellowish ivory – Zozi twittered on the back saying that this was one of the big ones. When he turned he revealed a broken tusk, perhaps thicker than the left but to me it seemed as long as the other and when my stepdad calmy drove off I wanted to protest but realised we were heading away as slowly and quietly as possible, the bull was feeding towards the road and the marula trail led to a clump of trees about 5 miles into the hunting area – we knew he would cross.

Elephant on license was pretty common and each year Ken would hunt about 3 bulls in Kaoma, one on our annual family hunting trip, when my uncles and aunts and cousins were with and then the others, during the rains when the bigger bulls crossed out of the park. A few times he drove out to Kaoma in his company car, a 4 door toyota Corona, with a sleeping bag, a couple of tins of bullybeef with our houseboy David. They'd drive the boundary road with David perched on the hood looking for tracks and then follow the big pads and shoot the bull. Usually Zozi and a couple of his scouts were with and would help with chopping out the tusks – it never took more than a day to shoot the bull and have the tusks in the trunk of the Corona ready to head home. Sometimes he'd shoot a Sable or Hartebeest and bring back the fresh meat to make biltong and give to our staff and friends. Zozi and the scouts would alert the local and closest village as to the elephant carcass and the scene became one of families crowded and encamped around the bull, all helping and vying for the meat which would see them through many months of protein. Inevitably quarrels would break out usually over the choice cuts yet everyone left with something and in the end all that remained would be the smouldering fires, flattened grass and the mound of half digested fodder from the bulls intestines and stomach, the Marula seeds and all. There was nothing wrong with this kind of Elephant hunting, no waste and no impact upon the populations of these magnificent beasts, there simply were too many elephant to consider that one day they would come close to being wiped out of Zambia.

As expected the bull with the broken tusk had crossed into the open area and we had followed, with the cruiser in tow, trackers about 200 yards ahead with Ken and uncle Willem and the rest of us in the cruiser. My uncle Kobie sat in his usual place in the front passenger seat, half asleep, his head bobbing back and forth, his felt hat tilted low over his eyes and his one hand – which had an involutary twitch – seemed to always point the way for the driver to take as we hit potholes and stumps, it was slow going. Once we heard a massive crash ahead of us and all went silent, listening in the green canopy of miombo hoping to hear the bull breaking branches and grumbling – but all was silent. We continued until the trackers found sign where the bull had slowed down and started feeding again, the saliva on the bark of a brachystegia told them he was close enough to hear us and the hunters readied themselves – Ken with his .375 Bruno, a dark stocked rifle with the classic ebony and ivory forend and my uncle Willem with his .375 Winchester, a rifle George and I grew up with as it was easy and forgiving on the recoil.

Now, as they fired into the soft skin of the bulls ribcage, just at the point behind his elbow where the skin is whiter and softer and smooth, the solids sped through to his heart, two bullets in perfect placement and Oom Kobie's 30-06 too high and into the lungs – the second round of shots hit the bull back in the ribcage as he wheeled about and then one, the shot George and I would remember most, directly into his back left leg just where the haunch ends and the skin on old elephants folds inwards towards their scrotum, a tiny hole which saw the bullet hit the massive femur.

All was silent for a while - then our worst fear, the bull appeared ahead of us as suddenly as a match strikes, heading dead towards the cruiser, his great tusks bobbing ahead of him as he moved with speed, his eyes seemed wild and searching for the enemy. Paison was at our side in an instant and half lifted, half threw us into the back saying checha checha which means quick in chilapalapa. In our minds he was upon us with intent to kill, surely this bull had flattened all before him and was now heading for the offspring – intent on wiping them from the earth. Paison pushed us down into the back bed of the cruiser and uttered his usual 'ssssss' 'ssssss' through his teeth, he stood looking ahead.

We lay there in silence, our cheeks pressed to the rough rusty corrugated bed, there was dirt and blood from yesterday's sable on our chests and necks yet we lay silent – I would give a million dollars today to have seen our faces and eyes in this moment, not knowing what was upon us and yet the struggle to jump up and look immeasurable. I heard some branches breaking and then a sound which remains at the back of my mind to this day, a slow steady rumble, like a jackhammer in slow motion - the elephant was talking in a gurgled voice – his lungs filling with blood and calling to his mates. He was a loner yet in this moment – his death cry – strong and resounding in our ears was made to any nearby elephants.

Paison yanked me up and propped me onto the seat, George came next - kangela bwana yena yifa – he's dying – and then I saw the elephant bull – what had stopped him was his leg, he was on his knees about 50 yards away his great tusks pegged into the ground at an angle, his trunk in a tangle beneath them, but his back leg, the left one was caught and locked straight behind him holding him up, a sad sight as his gaunt backbone, looked magnified – in this position he was stuck, tusks driven into the ground and his left leg pushing him forward. George and I looked on, and then out of nowhere we both started to cry, silently. I would not admit that I had started first and neither would George but hot tears streamed down our red cheeks and ended up on our brightly colored shirts, just tears, no sobbing or wails, we felt the liquid run down our faces and stared into the bulging eyes of the dying beast, the one we had assumed wanted us dead.

The elephant lay motionless in the dirt, his tusks buried deep into the soft sand, his eyes, tiny for the beast, had closed and his skin sagged on his body, his bottom lip limp and hanging dead, there was no life left and he had not been heading to pulverise us, he was fleeing the shots and had merely turned back to the boundary, directly on his tracks. He was huge, what we called a proper elephant, one of the big ones, not like the pigs you get in the Luangwa Valley, this was a bull of many years. As Paison stood in front of him and clucked to himself the bulls head towered above him, George and I decided it was safer to watch from the cruiser, there was no need to run up and clamber on the bull yet, we would wait for the guns to arrive and they did after a short while, breathless the trackers, Ken and uncle Willem came trotting up while Oom Kobie was nowhere to be seen.

The elephant was more white than grey, sometimes you see them in the distance and you'll know it is an old bull except if the rains were in – mostly though – the older bulls had the white wrinkles and weathered skin and their bodies were gaunt and boney. We had never shot an elephant this old and his one full tusk, thick and yellow was also the biggest we had shot so far. We clambered about the beast, running up his trunk onto his back excited at the size of his body, ready for the work that lay ahead, working the meat and chopping out the tusks. The men stood around smoking with shaking hands and eventually uncle Kobie appeared amidst the trees with one of the trackers carrying his 30-06 and felt hat.

This was one of the last elephants we shot in Kaoma, the full tusk weighed in at 86 pounds with the broken one being 63, still stored in a bank vault along with another set of 60 pounders. I never asked Ken why he stopped hunting elephant, we hunted some in the Luangwa a few years prior to the ivory ban yet I have a feeling he perhaps saw the end coming. He had shot 23 elephant over the years, since my mom had introduced him to our family tradition and when you speak to him about it today you can detect a glimmer of remorse in his eyes – simply saying that this is what we did during those times, we did not know any better.

He'd met my mom after she had gone through the divorce, when I was still too young to realise what was going on and why she and my dad shouted at each other a lot or why he stayed away until 3 in the morning. I guess a childs mind blocks out all of this unwanted mess and you focus on the things that make you happy, those that take you away from the reality. In those days my dad had not yet started hunting professionally but he did spend a god deal of time in the bush hunting with his friends and sometimes with the family but seldom did I accompany him on these trips, my mom said they were just drinking binges that the men went on and they'd most likely forget me under a tree out in the bush somewhere. I was usually left with my grandparents on their farm on the mumbwa road and here I would wander the yard and the cattle pens with my pellet gun and rule the skies and trees. It is where I learnt to shoot with open sights and where my love for the solace, the calm and the joy of being out in the bush alone started.

Ken came from an english family, he was born in Broken Hill, a small mining town roughly in the centre of Zambia, near the junction with the great north road and the copperbelt and was more inclined to fishing than hunting. My grandfather called him a 'soutie' meaning salty – a derogatory boer term for the english from the war days and laughed at the prospect of my mom and my uncle, his younger brother, teaching Ken to hunt. He believed that hunting was the given right of all boers and that no englishman would ever be able to show him or to learn anything about the hunting way. His rifles were all mausers, he sided with Hitler in the war, he grew up in a world that the automobile had not entered yet and he lived his life at the edge of the colonial frontier – he had no time for englishmen nor any other disturbance.

I never went on the first trips that Ken was inducted into hunting by my uncle and my mom – I was on the farm happily shooting mourning doves and bulbulls out of the fruit trees. However I remember going with him when he bought his first rifle, a dark stocked 375 Brno out of czechkoslovakia, from another elephant hunter called Aurther Hetherington – a barrel chested man with dark hair and heavy coke bottle glasses just like Ken's. His house was dark and it smelt of old tobacco and chemicals, books lay about the floor and tables and a couple of rhodesian ridgebacks greeted us with a lazy eye. This was where I saw my first set of buffalo horns, a massive sweeping gnarled mass of black hanging over his chair in the study. I stared with such intent that he laughed a little at this and said 'the bugger almost got me from behind, damn tracker had walked past him not 10 feet away'.

The rifle was heavy and solid and smelt of oil and gun blue, it's mauser action smooth and worn – it was the first time I ever held a rifle this big and could not even lift the barrel to half way level. The deal was done and the money paid, now we had to wait for the transfer of paperwork from the police which would take many months. Ken talked about the hunting he had done, eland, roan, sable, hartebeest in that old favorite Lusaka hunting spot mumbwa open near the italian rocks. Aurther laughed at this, almost condescending and pulled out a heavy cardbord tube from which came a roll of maps which he spread across the table with his hairy sunburnt hands and motioned for us to stand closer.

This was the start of it as I remember, Ken's obsession with hunting elephant, almost as if this would set him apart from the rest of the hunters in our family. As a rule my grandfathers and uncles had never hunted elephant, there was no need, the meat was of no use to us and it was simply too much effort, the prize of ivory never stood as priority, we were there to stock the larder with biltong rather than hunt ivory.

It was also the start of our trips to the new open hunting area called Kaoma, Aurther had hunted here and his voice dropped to a whisper when he showed Ken the large swathe of land which lay at the western boundary of the Kafue national park – ask for a scout called Zozi he had said, he knows where to find the elephant!

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