BallisticsGuy
Well-Known Member
The trip is an annual one. I just love South Africa. It's like a San Diego that spans a thousand miles but has epic hunting. Last year I got my eland, springboks and impala. This year was more about that legend of all that is Africa hunting, kudu. Different regions of the country have different kudu. Some have wide horns, some have tall horns, some have both. Seeing that big curling shofar on the hoof though, that gets your blood running. This hunt was pretty darned exciting. My good friend KVK who owns the place had set aside a very old bull specifically for me, much to the chagrin of the several hunters who'd seen it before I got a chance. I can just hear those conversations...
Hunter: "What do you mean not that one? It's a good mature bull."
KVK: "Sorry that's BallisticsGuy's kudu."
Hunter: Shakes head and cries a bit.
I have quite a number of friends down there and they're all into long range precision rifle shooting. The long range competition thing in the way that it's done in the USA has really just started taking off there. They have their own unique games they compete in as well as some that are the same as in the USA. What they don't have is a lot of competent long range shooting instructors. I have some experience providing training to long range rifle shooters so I spent a day with the homies doing various drills to work on speed and accuracy and wind reading. Everyone got to a kilometer and those with rifles capable enough got to 1350m (~1500yrds) on man size steel torso silhouettes.
During some of the instruction time I got behind a spotting scope looking at our 1-mile target and what do you know, kudu. At one point while I was shooting at the 1-mile target there was a female kudu under my line of sight by a few hundred feet. When the bullet passed over you could see her trip out a little wondering what it was but she didn't run. The one in the pic below is not that one but it is one we spied at an extreme distance and got through the spotting scope.
After humping it to the lower set of hills you see in the background we got our stalk on for a few hours. During the stalk we discovered that the turret on the IOR Recon scope had come loose and we wouldn't be able to dial with it, also we didn't know if the zero had been twisted. So we took a single quick shot at 100m on a rock and it was where we expected so we sallied forth. After a while we come to a spot where two hills come together (you can actually see that spot in the pic) and form a fold. I noticed that there was a good rock ledge that overlooked both hills and had some usable bushes for cover so we jumped off the trail and tucked in under a bush and waited.
I got my skinny butt stuffed under a bush in the company of some oh so friendly ants and very courteous ticks and we waited about an hour for the kudu with me looking through the scope the whole time. We know they like these hills and they're likely to be found on them but they're very skilled at using the bushes for camo and one can be standing there staring at you and you'll never notice. Must use magnified optics if you're going to find one in a bush and even then, it's supremely difficult to see them hunkered down in a bush.
My neck was BURNING from being on the scope so long and I had a couple ant bites and had to flick a couple ticks off my skin by the time the kudu come around the corner. Literally 20 cows pulling a couple young bulls come around the corner at the top of the hill just over 400m away. I'm about to line up on the big grey one and it goes behind a bunch of bushes. My hunting partner who we call Kudu van Klipspringer for his habit of literally running up steep hills keeps an eye on the herd and I relax my neck for a second. While I'm hanging my head ANOTHER herd curls around the corner and what do you know but this old grey bull is in front.
It's a longish shot with a gusting 10-20mph wind. It's more distance than KVK will normally let someone take a shot at large game at but he knows I'm pretty good on the trigger. The distance is right at 400m and it's walking so I lead it a just in front of the nose and hold over 1.8mils to deal with the 430yrds+ distance between us and miss in front of it by millimeters. Much of the remaining herd on the hill got a little spooked and started clearing out in various directions. A cow and calf walked over directly to me and KVK and posted up about 30ft under our position where they hanged out a good while. They were so close you could literally smell them.
The bull spooked too but only a very little bit and instead of flat running it just ducks into a bush maybe 20m from where the bullet hit the dirt and it was now vanished. Well, half vanished. It was for sure in that there bush somewhere but I could not see it. I know it didn't come out and I know I missed my first shot so I figure, well we'll just wait. Which we did for about another hour and then we got sick up and fed with the 3 little pigs and decided to encourage the situation to develop.
KVK's son was over in a neighboring valley so we had him drive up to the top of an adjacent hilltop about 1km away from us and about 500m from the kudu and literally bang rocks together to try to get the kudu to stand up. He had to get pretty raucous about it before the beastie stood up but it did stand up and promptly faced what I thought was directly at me. Darn it, I wanted that to be a broadside shot. Well that's not going to stop me and the second it stood up I got my 1.8mils of up which was still good to go for the now ~410yrds gap between us and held the reticle just off the body to the right for the wind and let fly.
The Howa 1500 in .338wm with 225gr SST's and a Recoil Reaper suppressor coughed and lightly bucked with absolutely none of the drama one would expect. The suppressor greedily soaked up the recoil and the muzzle blast making for a pretty mellow experience as .338WM's go. So greedily in fact did it suck up the recoil and blast that we heard the bullet hit with that classic "thwoooop" that says you got a very likely body cavity hit. I quickly shucked the spent casing out as soon as I recovered from recoil and as soon as I heard the casing hit the ground that bolt went right back into battery and I got to setting up for a follow-up shot and was ready in about 3 seconds.
The kudu took a quick jump at the bullet impact and moved left into the clear. It was pouring blood from the nose so I know I've put lead into the boiler room and it won't go far but I don't want it going anywhere at all. After a quick discussion about that KVK and I agree to take another shot just to anchor it and I let fly and we hear the thwoooop and the kudu puts its nose in the dirt and takes a half roll down the hill before giving us the 3 leg kicks in the air that signifies it's run up the curtain and joined the choir invisible. We do the hoots & hollers and "yeah"s and high fives before standing up to begin the hike over to my kudu. The hike started well enough but if one was to criticize it they'd probably say that it went on a bit long and was much much much steeper than it looked from the firing position. It was very steep and very rocky and my out of shape bootay was struggling to keep up with KVK. In fact, I had to rest twice on the way up the hill while KVK and his son trotted up effortlessly like there were powered by gazelles.
Upon reaching the kudu we noticed that the hide wasn't looking very good and we're happy that we pulled this specific one from the herd. This animal wasn't going to make it through another winter and probably would have not made it through the rapidly approaching summer. The teeth were worn down pretty badly, the hide was bare in places, one horn was badly chipped and it had numerous scars and markings suggesting it was fighting a lot. You could feel the ribs on the back a little too well so it also wasn't getting the nutrition needed to build or maintain proper body weight. We elected to gut it on the hillside and then drag it the half mile to the nearest spot that we could get a truck into. The dragging didn't do the hide any good but it was pretty rough to begin with.
I tuckered plum out about halfway into the drag and straight up needed water and 5 minutes to cool off. I'm not used to much heat and with the ultra arid environment and that much strenuous exercise and, as my American friends would chide, "my vagina started to get sore." So I headed to the pickup ahead of them and watered up, then brought the water back to share with the guys. It was about 80F that day and hauling a fairly large critter out of the bush is tough work. It took over an hour to pull it out and get it on the bakkie (a pickup, pronounced buck-ee).
Once we got it back to the ranch we pulled it into the butchery and got the head off and the feet off and weighed it. Without head/feet/guts we got 95kg which is 209lbs. From that we got a return of 40% usable meat. During the necropsy we discovered that the bullet had entered the top of the back right thigh (no real meat damage though) which was only about 2 inches thick where the bullet went through. It stayed under the skin and entered the abdomen below the last rib, nicked the rumen (yuk), punched clean through the liver and diaphragm and then blew a large hole in 1 lung and at least 1 large blood vessel before coming to rest in a bit of meat that sits above the heart on the spine. The 225gr SST ditched its jacket half way through the penetration and penetrated over 24" of meat and organs (no bones hit) which is exactly how those seem to always perform. Here's your happy hunter shading his face from the brutal sun.
Here's me and KVK sharing the moment. Can you believe we're basically the same age?
Here's the noggin. You can see on the horn on the left evidence of damage from fighting. It's not as big of a set of horns as some, it's not as wide as others and by "trophy hunting" standards it's not exceptional. By my standards it's world class. To me it's full on bucket list material and I could never have even asked for as much, much less more. It was a hard hunt with lots of drama and excitement, pain, exhaustion, hard work, fellowship and friends and ended with a trophy that will always remind me of 3 amazing weeks spent with KVK and his wonderful family. Everything I could want in a hunt.
After we let it hang for a few days we cut off the biltong (large leg muscles get made into biltong) and set that up to marinade. Then we took nearly all of the rest of the meat off and mixed it with some fresh sheep meat and fat (you need some fat in it) and mixed in droewors (pronounced dry-wors, it's a dried preserved sausage, kind of like a slim jim but WAY better) spices and took it over to the grinder and ended up with quite well over 150lbs of ground ground meat. We took that with a fresh pile of natural gut sausage casings to the sausage stuffer and made >100ft of droewors which was then set to hang to dry for a few weeks. We also took one of the back straps and grilled that. It tasted like blacktail deer (I MEAN 100% could not tell the difference) but it was literally fork tender. Keep in mind we didn't slow cook it or marinade it. We cut it up and put it on the fire with salt and pepper.
I'll be doing a European mount with the skull and placing it directly underneath my eland skull. I won't be able to pick that up for about 10 months though. On the wall with the eland are some of my other lifetime hunting accomplishments: a trophy springbok and a 5x5 + eyeguards blacktail deer rack. Next year I'm really wanting a gemsbok but a blue wildebeest would be pretty darned cool too however, either raises big decorating questions. There aren't a lot of walls in my house suitable to mounts of really really big game like Africa offers and my bride has been very understanding but I think her patience is on the thin side. She gets scared by my eland skull. It looks scary.
For those mentally flipping me off while thinking, "Africa is too expensive." No it is not. It costs about the same to hunt there as it does to do a guided hunt in the states. The best way to start is to start small with something like a springbok hunt so you learn the ropes and then to poke for the big stuff. If you never try to make it happen it never will happen.
Hunter: "What do you mean not that one? It's a good mature bull."
KVK: "Sorry that's BallisticsGuy's kudu."
Hunter: Shakes head and cries a bit.
I have quite a number of friends down there and they're all into long range precision rifle shooting. The long range competition thing in the way that it's done in the USA has really just started taking off there. They have their own unique games they compete in as well as some that are the same as in the USA. What they don't have is a lot of competent long range shooting instructors. I have some experience providing training to long range rifle shooters so I spent a day with the homies doing various drills to work on speed and accuracy and wind reading. Everyone got to a kilometer and those with rifles capable enough got to 1350m (~1500yrds) on man size steel torso silhouettes.
During some of the instruction time I got behind a spotting scope looking at our 1-mile target and what do you know, kudu. At one point while I was shooting at the 1-mile target there was a female kudu under my line of sight by a few hundred feet. When the bullet passed over you could see her trip out a little wondering what it was but she didn't run. The one in the pic below is not that one but it is one we spied at an extreme distance and got through the spotting scope.
After humping it to the lower set of hills you see in the background we got our stalk on for a few hours. During the stalk we discovered that the turret on the IOR Recon scope had come loose and we wouldn't be able to dial with it, also we didn't know if the zero had been twisted. So we took a single quick shot at 100m on a rock and it was where we expected so we sallied forth. After a while we come to a spot where two hills come together (you can actually see that spot in the pic) and form a fold. I noticed that there was a good rock ledge that overlooked both hills and had some usable bushes for cover so we jumped off the trail and tucked in under a bush and waited.
I got my skinny butt stuffed under a bush in the company of some oh so friendly ants and very courteous ticks and we waited about an hour for the kudu with me looking through the scope the whole time. We know they like these hills and they're likely to be found on them but they're very skilled at using the bushes for camo and one can be standing there staring at you and you'll never notice. Must use magnified optics if you're going to find one in a bush and even then, it's supremely difficult to see them hunkered down in a bush.
My neck was BURNING from being on the scope so long and I had a couple ant bites and had to flick a couple ticks off my skin by the time the kudu come around the corner. Literally 20 cows pulling a couple young bulls come around the corner at the top of the hill just over 400m away. I'm about to line up on the big grey one and it goes behind a bunch of bushes. My hunting partner who we call Kudu van Klipspringer for his habit of literally running up steep hills keeps an eye on the herd and I relax my neck for a second. While I'm hanging my head ANOTHER herd curls around the corner and what do you know but this old grey bull is in front.
It's a longish shot with a gusting 10-20mph wind. It's more distance than KVK will normally let someone take a shot at large game at but he knows I'm pretty good on the trigger. The distance is right at 400m and it's walking so I lead it a just in front of the nose and hold over 1.8mils to deal with the 430yrds+ distance between us and miss in front of it by millimeters. Much of the remaining herd on the hill got a little spooked and started clearing out in various directions. A cow and calf walked over directly to me and KVK and posted up about 30ft under our position where they hanged out a good while. They were so close you could literally smell them.
The bull spooked too but only a very little bit and instead of flat running it just ducks into a bush maybe 20m from where the bullet hit the dirt and it was now vanished. Well, half vanished. It was for sure in that there bush somewhere but I could not see it. I know it didn't come out and I know I missed my first shot so I figure, well we'll just wait. Which we did for about another hour and then we got sick up and fed with the 3 little pigs and decided to encourage the situation to develop.
KVK's son was over in a neighboring valley so we had him drive up to the top of an adjacent hilltop about 1km away from us and about 500m from the kudu and literally bang rocks together to try to get the kudu to stand up. He had to get pretty raucous about it before the beastie stood up but it did stand up and promptly faced what I thought was directly at me. Darn it, I wanted that to be a broadside shot. Well that's not going to stop me and the second it stood up I got my 1.8mils of up which was still good to go for the now ~410yrds gap between us and held the reticle just off the body to the right for the wind and let fly.
The Howa 1500 in .338wm with 225gr SST's and a Recoil Reaper suppressor coughed and lightly bucked with absolutely none of the drama one would expect. The suppressor greedily soaked up the recoil and the muzzle blast making for a pretty mellow experience as .338WM's go. So greedily in fact did it suck up the recoil and blast that we heard the bullet hit with that classic "thwoooop" that says you got a very likely body cavity hit. I quickly shucked the spent casing out as soon as I recovered from recoil and as soon as I heard the casing hit the ground that bolt went right back into battery and I got to setting up for a follow-up shot and was ready in about 3 seconds.
The kudu took a quick jump at the bullet impact and moved left into the clear. It was pouring blood from the nose so I know I've put lead into the boiler room and it won't go far but I don't want it going anywhere at all. After a quick discussion about that KVK and I agree to take another shot just to anchor it and I let fly and we hear the thwoooop and the kudu puts its nose in the dirt and takes a half roll down the hill before giving us the 3 leg kicks in the air that signifies it's run up the curtain and joined the choir invisible. We do the hoots & hollers and "yeah"s and high fives before standing up to begin the hike over to my kudu. The hike started well enough but if one was to criticize it they'd probably say that it went on a bit long and was much much much steeper than it looked from the firing position. It was very steep and very rocky and my out of shape bootay was struggling to keep up with KVK. In fact, I had to rest twice on the way up the hill while KVK and his son trotted up effortlessly like there were powered by gazelles.
Upon reaching the kudu we noticed that the hide wasn't looking very good and we're happy that we pulled this specific one from the herd. This animal wasn't going to make it through another winter and probably would have not made it through the rapidly approaching summer. The teeth were worn down pretty badly, the hide was bare in places, one horn was badly chipped and it had numerous scars and markings suggesting it was fighting a lot. You could feel the ribs on the back a little too well so it also wasn't getting the nutrition needed to build or maintain proper body weight. We elected to gut it on the hillside and then drag it the half mile to the nearest spot that we could get a truck into. The dragging didn't do the hide any good but it was pretty rough to begin with.
I tuckered plum out about halfway into the drag and straight up needed water and 5 minutes to cool off. I'm not used to much heat and with the ultra arid environment and that much strenuous exercise and, as my American friends would chide, "my vagina started to get sore." So I headed to the pickup ahead of them and watered up, then brought the water back to share with the guys. It was about 80F that day and hauling a fairly large critter out of the bush is tough work. It took over an hour to pull it out and get it on the bakkie (a pickup, pronounced buck-ee).
Once we got it back to the ranch we pulled it into the butchery and got the head off and the feet off and weighed it. Without head/feet/guts we got 95kg which is 209lbs. From that we got a return of 40% usable meat. During the necropsy we discovered that the bullet had entered the top of the back right thigh (no real meat damage though) which was only about 2 inches thick where the bullet went through. It stayed under the skin and entered the abdomen below the last rib, nicked the rumen (yuk), punched clean through the liver and diaphragm and then blew a large hole in 1 lung and at least 1 large blood vessel before coming to rest in a bit of meat that sits above the heart on the spine. The 225gr SST ditched its jacket half way through the penetration and penetrated over 24" of meat and organs (no bones hit) which is exactly how those seem to always perform. Here's your happy hunter shading his face from the brutal sun.
Here's me and KVK sharing the moment. Can you believe we're basically the same age?
Here's the noggin. You can see on the horn on the left evidence of damage from fighting. It's not as big of a set of horns as some, it's not as wide as others and by "trophy hunting" standards it's not exceptional. By my standards it's world class. To me it's full on bucket list material and I could never have even asked for as much, much less more. It was a hard hunt with lots of drama and excitement, pain, exhaustion, hard work, fellowship and friends and ended with a trophy that will always remind me of 3 amazing weeks spent with KVK and his wonderful family. Everything I could want in a hunt.
After we let it hang for a few days we cut off the biltong (large leg muscles get made into biltong) and set that up to marinade. Then we took nearly all of the rest of the meat off and mixed it with some fresh sheep meat and fat (you need some fat in it) and mixed in droewors (pronounced dry-wors, it's a dried preserved sausage, kind of like a slim jim but WAY better) spices and took it over to the grinder and ended up with quite well over 150lbs of ground ground meat. We took that with a fresh pile of natural gut sausage casings to the sausage stuffer and made >100ft of droewors which was then set to hang to dry for a few weeks. We also took one of the back straps and grilled that. It tasted like blacktail deer (I MEAN 100% could not tell the difference) but it was literally fork tender. Keep in mind we didn't slow cook it or marinade it. We cut it up and put it on the fire with salt and pepper.
I'll be doing a European mount with the skull and placing it directly underneath my eland skull. I won't be able to pick that up for about 10 months though. On the wall with the eland are some of my other lifetime hunting accomplishments: a trophy springbok and a 5x5 + eyeguards blacktail deer rack. Next year I'm really wanting a gemsbok but a blue wildebeest would be pretty darned cool too however, either raises big decorating questions. There aren't a lot of walls in my house suitable to mounts of really really big game like Africa offers and my bride has been very understanding but I think her patience is on the thin side. She gets scared by my eland skull. It looks scary.
For those mentally flipping me off while thinking, "Africa is too expensive." No it is not. It costs about the same to hunt there as it does to do a guided hunt in the states. The best way to start is to start small with something like a springbok hunt so you learn the ropes and then to poke for the big stuff. If you never try to make it happen it never will happen.
