What happens when a hunter goes into Limpopo with a heavy revolver and red dot only and leaves the rifle in camp? During a first safari in South Africa, in the Limpopo province, the mythology of “Old Africa” met the reality of a tracker taking a cell phone call in the middle of stalking. The magic did not vanish it merely transformed its form. The bush still required silent tread, keen eye, confidence without any common language, expressed by pauses, by signs of the hands, and by the unconscious rhythm of going through mopane and acacia bushes in which an impala, or kudu, or something much greater might be standing one turn ahead.
That contemporary advantage has also transformed the management of a part of the ranch country along the Limpopo River where great estates have traditionally depended on high fences part boundary, part security, part management. With the stability of situations, landowners started reconsidering the purpose of those fences to habitat and the hunting experience. One was the Maroi Conservancy, a shared venture and grew to approximately 23,000 acres, with which adjacent holdings hauled internal fences to allow game space to drift to seasonal nourishment and water. It is not only the wildlife, but the flora, the habitat, and the cultural heritage of the region that the conservancy is all about, said Hannes Nel. Although it is one of the objectives to come up with a sustainable numbers of animals, we are also vested with a mission to take care of some of the archaeological places here. In reality that was early labor, unromantic and necessarial, which overtook the removal of fencing, the dragging of snares, and the conduct of anti-poaching patrols to the point where the land could be hunted as one, bigger, area.
To that scenery was added a more serious limitation than the fences of a farm, the choice of using handguns to hunt. A revolver is not a forgiving gun, like a good rifle and a good rest can sometimes be. Minor adjustments in the hand pressure can shift point of impact with a handgun, and follow-through issues in a manner that is more akin to archery than centerfire. Field accuracy to 100 yards is achievable with the same consistency, but it is hard-earned, particularly when the revolver is an X-Frame in.500 S&W Magnum.
Power was not the question. The.500 was powerful enough to handle any feasible plains-game situation; and the actual engineering difficulty was to maintain the aiming mechanism in place during the recoil which causes lesser optical constructions to tremble. In this instance, red dots constructed to rough service remained in rest and bore zero through many a shot, a unpaid condition until it is proved unsatisfactory in service.
The remainder of the system was equally useful: shooting sticks to make a standing shot steady in the country where prone shots are seldom afforded, and hearing protection since the muzzle brakes make the reduction of recoil seem like a concussion. The hunt remained honest even at that time. Days were spent with cover and unsound shots that were never to be. Kopjes provided standpoints and a share of perils, such as a shed snakeskin as thick as a forearm, which chilled all ardor at blind running.
When the break did finally come, it was as though the handgun hunting had been designed on a situation like this too close to be too difficult, too far to be too real. One herd of impala lay in bed, moving between rocks, the wind persisted on the right, and a ram quartered 90 yards away. One .500 shot ended the dry spell.
That shot did not alter the greater lesson in any way. Even the conservancy could not do without walking, reading spoor, and empty-handed evenings were still a part of the bargain. The machinery might do its part, but the bush would choose when and whether the hunter was to do his.
