A Professional Small Boy in Africa

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Motsome and the Hippopotamus | The Seven Hour Kudu Followup: Kaas to the Rescue | The One Hour Buffalo Hunt | The Two Hour Red Lechwe Hunt | With the Youngs: Basie and Abraham in the Promised Land | Buffalo Heart | Impala | Botswana's Okavango: Cape Buffalo and Red Lechwe | Plains game from the Tuli Block | A Recap of the Six Critters Taken | Contact Me
The Seven Hour Kudu Followup: Kaas to the Rescue

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Seven hours after wounding this Kudu due to brush deflection, he was finally in the bag. Above, left to right,
Kaas and his skinner, Abraham, and yours truly.

Kaas was a salt of the earth sort of fellow. He could track like a bushman and spoke Afrikaans, Setswana and English. He was in his fifties, but could follow kudu spoor across hard earth through the bushveld at a jog.

This most memorable incident started with me grazing the brisket and shattering the left foreleg of the magnificent kudu at 8 AM. Basie, Abraham, and I tracked it for two hours, then marked the last spoor. We went to get Kaas and one of his men at his nearby farm. By 3PM we were all running after a kudu that could still jump over the brush piles on three legs. My second shot took it in the right rear flank as it cleared a six foot high brush pile. Then Basie hit it at the root of the tail as it ran (ran!) across a small clearing. It went down finally and I shot it in the neck at close range. Mea culpa. Brush deflection of that first bullet.

See the PH with the prize below.







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Above is Basie Riekert. "Basie" is pronounced "Bossie." This is short for: Balthazar Johannes Riekert. Basie is outstanding as a PH. The perfect gentleman, ex-soldier, encyclopedia of Africana, citrus rancher, and elephant hunting specialist. He is superbly fluent in English, Afrikaans, and Setswana. I was happy that he could free-lance for Tswana Safaris and lead me on my first African adventure.

Basie is six feet three inches to give some scale to the kudu, which he helped me bag.

I was about to shoot an impala when this magnificent kudu presented himself, given away by a flash of sunlight on his horn tip, as he ghosted through the brush, the gray ghost of the bushveld. I will prize this trophy greatly.