Shotgun safari - hunting birds in South Africa
Francolin, teal and snipe in the Orange Free State
By Gary Lewis
Some peoples live lightly on the land while others rip their livings from the ground. Farmers build and cultivate. Miners move the earth and peel back the layers and sometimes strip it to extract the minerals. Subsistence hunters record their passing inside caves and on rock walls.
They leave scars that never quite heal. Some change the land for the better and some for worse, but no group of humans leaves the land the way they found it.
Their stories are, for me, in the hunt that connects the past to the present, and, I suppose, the past to the future, for the present is fleeting, but the past we have always and the future too.
They came from Europe, from Holland and the Netherlands and from Germany and Ireland. In South Africa they call them the Boer, which means farmer, but it means so much more.
In the Boer there was a desire to shape the land, to work it. Their stories are written in the contours of the savannah and in the lines on their faces.
On one farm we found an old British barracks, hewn from rock. Now the grass pushes up where the earthen floor once shined. And we found Isabel, who cooked for us, the old meals, and when I pressed her, served the stories of her ancestors, the people the British beat but didn’t quite subdue.
Out on a dike at a place called Vaaldam, on a river called the Willow, we waited for the ducks as they passed back and forth between resting and water on the lakes and the fields of maize behind us. I used a borrowed over-and-under 12 gauge and took a bird that we jumped out of the reeds close to shore.
This was the first day of our safari. We were in the Orange Free State for a couple of days and over the course of the next nine days, we’d hunt in the Limpopo. For my friend Brian Smith and I, this was not our first time in the country, but for Brian’s son, Mason, Sam Pyke, from Oregon, and Jim Linder from North Carolina, this was a first safari.
Mason, Jim and I carried shotguns, while Pyke and Smith shot with cameras. Watching us like a father with his children, Wighardt crouched behind the dam and spotted for the red-billed teal and the Egyptian geese that flew out of the sun.
We had two dogs, a greyhound and a blue heeler, hardly the hounds you’d expect along on a waterfowl hunt, but I wouldn’t have traded either one. The blue heeler, when coaxed with thrown sticks and rocks, figured out what we wanted him to do.
Headed back for lunch, we spied a hare and moments later Sissy, the greyhound, caught sight of it. She leaped out of the back of the safari vehicle and gave chase. I used to have friends that would bet on the hounds. I never heard of anyone betting on a rabbit. In the course of the next half hour, we ran four rabbits and only one got away when it blasted under a fence that slowed the dog down.
We surprised a covey of francolin in the road and dismounted. Mason took the left flank and Jim the right. We followed uphill through chin-high grass toward a small kopje.
I turned to look for Wighardt. He has a sense for these things.
Birds, when they try to escape don’t run straight away. These would go left, I thought, and, so apparently, thought Wighardt.
We turned on Mason’s position and swept toward a fencerow and that’s when we bumped them. Mason, surprised, didn’t fire and I missed a left-to-right.
Wighardt clapped his hands like a basketball player calling for the ball. We were on them and they took to the air.
One towered trying to make its escape right over me and I stroked the front trigger even as I swung the barrel in an arc above my head to take the bird with the back half of the shot pattern.
When Jim almost stepped on one, it rattled out of the grass and he dropped it on our side of the fence. In hand, we realized we had both Swainson’s and crested francolin in one drive.
Riding back with Leon in the Land Cruiser, I fingered the black seeds that clung to my clothing.
"Those were brought by the British," Leon said. "All these bad things, these thorns, came in their 'orses ‘ooves. And now they grow 'ere and 'ere, he pointed.
Leon was quiet for a moment.
"The British. You had your fights with them too."
"Yes, two of them. Seventeen-seventy-six and eighteen-twelve."
"But now you are kissing," Leon said.
I call it 'ugging.
When gold and diamonds were discovered in the Transvaal in the late 1800s, the struggle for control of the Transvaal and the Free State began. The Brits waged a classic European campaign while the Boer fought like men of the land, striking when the advantage favored then retiring to their farms to put their crops in. The tide turned when Lord Kitchener’s army put the farms to the torch and herded the women and children into concentration camps where thousands died. Demoralized, the Boer capitulated.
Back at the farmhouse, I told Isabel about the francolin and the seeds we brought back.
“When the British took over, it wasn’t a bad thing,” Isabel said with the charity of the third generation. “They began to plant trees. All these trees you see were brought by the Brits. They also brought infrastructure. Our spirit was broken, but now we had trees and we had hope.”
And they had birds and the birds are still there, as are the farmers and the trees, planted along a river of hope named the Willow.
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Gary Lewis is the host of Frontier Unlimited TV and author of John Nosler – Going Ballistic, A Bear Hunter's Guide to the Universe, Hunting Oregon and other titles. Contact Gary at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.
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