by David E. Petzal
I grew up watching safari movies in which African professional hunters were portrayed by Clark Gable, Stewart Granger, Gregory Peck, and Rock Hudson, all splendid specimens of manhood. Then I went on safari, eleven of them, and encountered a great many PHs, not one of whom could pass as a matinee idol. They were a highly diverse lot of people, both in looks and personality, but what they had in common was an excess of courage, and a highly dangerous profession.
On one of my first safaris, in Botswana, our destinies were in the hands of two PHs, both South Africans, who had started out together 15 years earlier, gone their separate ways, and then reunited by sheer chance in the Kalahari Desert. They caught up on old times and old comrades, and discovered that of perhaps a half-dozen men, every one was dead. The causes were what you might expect: elephant, Cape buffalo, and neglected blackwater fever and sleeping sickness.
But there were two deaths that were really grotesque. One involved a PH who was speeding o’er the veldt in a Land Rover when a tree branch punctured the floor of the vehicle and went on to skewer his femoral artery. He bled to death, pinned in his seat. The other was a PH who ran a small cattle ranch in the off season, and whose marriage was breaking up. His wife heard a noise out where the cattle were penned, and told him to see what it was. When he refused, she called him a coward, which was intolerable, so out he went. What caused the commotion turned out to be a very big male lion which padded silently up behind him, slapped his head off his shoulders, and wandered off into the dark.
If you go on one safari, your chances of coming to a violent end are infinitesimal. However, if you participate nonstop for four months of the year, year after year, the prognosis is altogether different. In fact, I know of only two PHs who were at it a long time and escaped more or less unscathed. One was Harry Selby, who started in 1949 and retired in 2000, and the other was a French PH whom I met in Zambia (and whose name I’ve forgotten) who had more than 40 years on the job and whose sole mishap came when a Land Rover hood latch failed and cost him a finger.
PHs are not menaced merely by animals. Sometime their clients shoot them. Sometimes one PH will shoot another in a melee. A PH with whom I hunted did this to a colleague, and he was as careful, cautious, and level-headed as you could want, but when a wounded leopard comes at you like a rock out of a catapult from a few yards away, all bets are off. The colleague lived.
Many clients are atrocious shots, and lousy shooting on dangerous game means tracking down and executing something that wants to kill you very much. Forty years ago, a PH told me that Americans were the best marksmen around. Thirty years later, a different PH said that Americans were the worst — over-scoped, over-gunned, and unwilling to shoot unless it was over a bench rest. I think the current mania for long-range animal assassination has much to do with this.
A PH must be able to deal with all manner of people. A lot of them have a lot of money, a lot of ego, and will not be told what to do. A Zambian PH told me about a French nobleman who fell into that category. “I finally got fed up and told him that he was endangering himself, me, and the trackers, and that if he didn’t start listening I would bloody well drive him to Lusaka and put him on a plane. Not only did he reform, but he sort of fell in love with me. I was the first person who had ever told him he couldn’t do something.”
Or this from another Zambian PH: “I had two couples from Texas, and one of the men wounded a leopard that I had to follow up and kill. The other three called him a coward for not going with me. It never stopped. I finally told them, ‘This ends right here. I get paid to finish off game; he doesn’t. I didn’t ask him go with me. The lot of you shut up or the safari ends now.’”
Or this from a South African, hunting in the Kalahari: “This fellow was tremendously overweight, the heat was terrific, and the sand made walking difficult. He got about 100 meters, lay down, and said, ‘I can’t go on.’
“What I wanted to do was kick him in his bloody ribs and tell him to get on his feet or we’d leave him there, but I couldn’t, so I persuaded him to get up. Then I coaxed him into walking to the truck, which was right behind us. Then he sat down and drank most of a sisal water bag.”
But there are good clients: in shape, uncomplaining, able to accept failure as part of hunting, handy with their rifles, and thrilled just to be in Africa. That’s one incentive. The other is, professional hunting in Africa does not involve sitting in a cubicle and staring into a computer screen five days a week.
I think the saddest sentence I’ve ever read in an email came from a South African PH whom I have known a long, long time. He lives in Canada now, and it read: “I will never see Africa again.”
Dave Petzal has refused a PH only once, and that was when he told Dave to shoot an unwounded buffalo in the pitch dark just to see what would happen. Dave thought the idea was rash and imprudent and said so, although not in those words.
*This title being adapted from “A Policeman’s Lot Is not a Happy One,” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta The Pirates of Penzance.
