Hunting

The Hunt, Spirits and Nature

Look, you ask me why I have so many photos of animals I shot, so many teeth, horns and skins? Pictures of antelopes shot in 1917, 1929, 1937 or 1943. I understand your puzzlement if I then tell you how much I regret that the landscapes I loved are now barren and blighted, the herds have disappeared and the mystical waterfalls of my youth dammed into suburbs. That is not Nature to me. It is just a landscape. Hunting is not about taming nature, it is about becoming one with it. 

A successful shot is the apogee of a communion with Nature at its most primal. 

I always caution people about big game hunting and avoid sharing this lifestyle, this passion. It is never what they picture; it is simply not about a boot on the neck of a dead animal. I did recommend it once. It was a young doctor that had just arrived. I recommended him to pick up buffalo hunting to fill the weekends, and he did. He thought he did. He got the guns, the tracking team. I added some pointers as I was then, for most, a bushman in anything but name. 

But hunting big game means a flawless shot. If not, Nature will remind you of it. 

You see, on one of his first hunts, our young doctor did not kill his mark outright. He just wounded the buffalo. You know how dangerous that is for anyone hunting in that area? For the villages nearby even? You only shoot when certain of the angle of penetration, light, wind and where you will hit. Everything must be there for a perfect shot, an instant kill. You should not even be able to see the entry point after it. 

It is skill. It is art. Hunting is also self-discipline out of very practical reasons.

The doctor looked for the buffalo for hours and days. I even went there myself several times, looking for it. We never found anything. It had just vanished. Trust me, a ton of wounded buffalo leaves a clear trail. Until, one day, as the young doctor is hunting in the same area, the buffalo bellows out of the bush, charges the doctor, rams and gores him before anyone can lift a finger. Trampled to death. As if the buffalo had been lying in ambush for days.

Nature, animal, spirit? All three? I don’t know. 

To me, this true story shows perfectly why hunting is not hiking with guns or shooting on a range. It is about melting with Nature in a complete symbiosis of geology, flora, fauna. You feel it in your gut, or you don’t. That is why I only ever hunt alone, with a handpicked team. Always the same local guys as much as possible. They have outstanding bushcraft, hunting knowledge and each one of them has his area of expertise. An off-road driver, a nurse, and two hunters. Donatien, François, Mulandu, Evariste… I speak to each of them in their own individual dialect; I like the bond it creates between us. Back at the office, they call me a Bushman because of it. We all pile into the pickup truck on Friday nights and drive off to the area chosen for the weekend. I have a shotgun, a Mauser 98 and a .416 Rigby, an elephant gun.

A surgical hunting team, and the tools to match. 

It is never about putting holes in animals like at a shooting gallery. You select in priority old males. That protects the livestock. Identify the prey through its tracks and spoor. Track it. Spot it. Confirm the conditions. And only then shoot. Lining up the perfect shot can take several weekends. That is why I never shot a Great Kudu. That is my greatest regret. Oh, I saw several, but the conditions were never right … Oh well, next time maybe.  

Hunting must have a purpose. It is a passion to me and my team, but also the meat goes to them or is shared with the village to eat or sell. I get the horns. 

Everything is used. No time to lose. To keep the meat from rotting, a pole, two men each at least, and a steady run. I keep the best photos. You saw them in the albums. The horns or teeth you ask? Well, Nature gives me a hand there: enormous maggots to clean the meat, leaving behind gleaming bone. They are not gruesome mementoes of death. They are memories of moments of perfect communion. Hemingway got it exactly right in The Old Man and The Sea – that is the final novel on the essence of the hunt. 

That is what it means to be a hunter, to me.

That is why I will not take you with me to hunt. 

~ François Dulière ~

I never had this conversation with my grandfather. Nobody did. It is not AI, but a collage of fragments of discussions captured in family tales and diaries, overheard conversations, and memories rarely shared by my grandmother. 

Frans – as he like to be called – died a few months before I was born. I never heard his voice, never listened to him talking, saw him smiling, smoking, drinking, having a laugh at the Cercle de la Fraternité in Claviers. I know he did. Recently, I had to wonder how kudu antlers ended up one of the restaurants in Claviers. A possible, yet improbable local trophy hunt.  

He started off working as an electrician at 14, but studied at the Travaux Publics in Paris, loved his family, the hunt, Africa, English and American novels. How would he speak? 

All the tales are true, and photos to prove them. They are family parables, François and the wounded Buffalo. 

And yet, they would always shoot my mind across time and space in endless questions. How to reconcile polar opposites? A geologist that lovingly documents landscapes, trees and anthills, measure them up, to then dig mines. A nature and animal lover that shot elephants, buffaloes, antelopes, warthogs, anything really, only to disapprove of indiscriminate shooters in his personal photo album. I know his ideals, at least the ones he shared.

And finally, and tellingly for me, a man, that always refused anyone else to share his passion. Share himself? He lives on through tales, letters and diaries. 

They all said he would have liked me. 

I would have liked him. 

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