SA Free Range Nyala and Kudu

by Ron Spomer

Two hours east of Durban, Chris turns onto a dirt road angling down through woodland hills. The gate looks like a hundred others I’ve opened from Oregon to Missouri. So does the three-strand cattle fence. Hoof prints in the dust look like elk tracks, but the animals that dash across the ranch road do not.

“Kudu cows,” Chris says, pronouncing it “coulda”. Gray. Pink ears. White icing dripping down their sides. Cape kudu are the heaviest subspecies, but a 50-inch horn is big, a 55-inch huge. “Let’s walk ‘round this bend and check a waterhole. We’ve been seeing a big nyala.” It sounds like “Leet’s woke” and “beeg nyella” because Chris Broster, like the nyala he hunts, is a South African. He grew up on a cattle ranch in the Stormberg Mountains. One gets the impression he prefers hunting.

“There,” I touch my guide’s shoulder. He’s already seen them. Impala. A half-dozen delicate, buff-and-white ewes stare, megaphone ears swiveling. Then they are leaping, flashing through thorn scrub. A mixed flock of iridescent green starlings and spotted rock pigeons flee a spreading euphorbia. There are no nyala, but plenty of tracks in the mud. Tiny, small, medium, large. Steenbuck, impala, nyala, kudu. This is a nyala hunt with kudu on the side and everything else gravy. “If we get them early we can drive to our Stormberg lodge for vaal rhebok, mountain reedbuck and black wildebeest.”

“Sounds great.” But the nyala sounds best. One guide-book describes Tragelaphus angasii as a dry-land, hairier version of a sitatunga, that swamp-dwelling member of the spiral-horned antelope. Nyala are confined to eastern river valleys from Malawi to South Africa, bleeding west into Zimbabwe. The 24- to 33-inch spiral horns of a mature bull are but a shadow of cousin kudu’s 60-inch corkscrews, but the nyala’s robes make up the shortfall. This is the Liberace’ of antelope, a mammalian peacock decked in ostentatious display to impress the ladies and intimidate rivals. A white roach spikes down the backline to merge with a black and white skunk tail. An elaborate, black tassel runs down the brisket and over the belly, flaring to broad skirting round each leg. White dots brand each flank. All of this outlines a charcoal torso striped by vertical bands perched above bright, chestnut legs. That color is echoed on the forehead above a white chevron that gives the impression the nyala bull is wearing spectacles. When competing bulls flare hair during a dominance display, it’s visual carnage.

We spot no well-dressed antelope the rest of the way into camp, which sits in a green meadow in the bottom of a big valley, past the orange groves, hard against a river laughing over rock ledges. Cliffs break through forest that climbs up the far side. The “lodge” is open in front to let in the campfire. Thatch roof, rock wall, a bar and rows of horns and heads of the usual suspects—gemsbuck, kudu, bushbuck, springbuck, eland, nyala—to whet the appetite. Our green canvas tent tops a raised wood floor with an expansive deck overlooking the river. A queen-sized bed fills the back, animal skins rug the floor. It’s all very African and quite lovely.

“Shall we sight your rifle?” Chris suggests. “Andrew and Elvis are on the way back from scouting.” Bathini Elvis Mageduka is Crusader’s star tracker. Andrew Pringle is another South African rancher with a preference for pursuit over husbandry. He and Chris started Crusader Safaris to guide hunters to the free-range game they and Elvis had been chasing since kids in the Baviaans, Stormberg and Umkomasi regions.

I adjust the Swarovski until the A-Bolt .325 WSM is printing three inches high at 100 yards. The 200-grain Accubonds will climb to 3.6 inches at 150 yards, drop just 8.5 inches at 350 yards, maximum point blank range for kudu. Andrew rolls in as we are finishing up, all six feet thirty inches of him unfolding from the white Toyota like a newborn giraffe, wound up, vibrating. “Ron!” This sounded like “Run!” but I didn’t despite Andrew’s intimidating size. “Yayss, yayss! Nice to meet you. And this is Bitsy?” At five feet, two inches, my wife tops out at Andrew’s chest, but she looks him in the eye and shakes his hand. Betsy isn’t afraid of anything. “This is Elvis. Give him your rifle and let’s go.”

South Africa has long offered the most accessible and least expensive safaris in Africa. But little is what you’d call “wild.” Europeans pioneered Cape Town before Plymouth with much the same results. Game was shot out to feed hungry families, generate cash and make the country safe for domestic livestock. A few species went the way of dinosaurs, others were whittled to token status. Only within the last 30 years have ranchers recognized the economic and environmental value of native game. They’ve been reintroducing and managing them behind high fences since. You don’t want your prize eland running off anymore than your prize Hereford. Most high-fence ranches are so vast you never see the boundaries and game has more than enough room to evade detection. Still, for some purists, the magic is missing.

“We fill a niche,” Chris explained. “Free-range ranch hunts. We have leases in several areas and access to quite a few species including some rare ones like Vaal rhebok.”

Crusader Safaris can do this because secretive species have sneaked back thicket to thicket, slipping into grain fields to feast by night, hiding out in brush pockets and forests by day, just like elk, deer and black bears in the U.S. Since landowners have little invested in these clandestine opportunists, they let friends hunt, just like farmers do here. “It’s not like the Selous wilderness,” Chris explained, “but it’s less predictable than game ranch hunting. You never know what will pop up. Could be a big bull we’ve seen in the past, could be something entirely new that wandered in.”
Little wanders in that first, warm, sunny evening. We hike to grassy knolls and glass. A swath of the Umkomaas River glides far below. “Watch the edges of those meadows.” Chris says. Andrew is across a side valley glassing additional territory.

“Warthog down there,” Betsy says, pointing.

“Sow. Big one. There’s her little ones. See?” Three piglets scurry through yellowing grass, antennae tails on full alert.

“Flock of impala by that waterhole,” I say.

“Same ones we saw when we drove in. Watch for that nyala.”

Before anything else shows, we see Andrew waving. “He’s seen something big. Let’s get over there.”
We arrive too late. The sun has set, the game gone. “Nice bushbuck ram. He fed across this meadow. We’ll get him in the morning. They like to stand in little openings sunning themselves.”

They do, too, but only females, red and spotted. We walk high meadow edges in the chill dawn, glassing pockets below, the air so still the dry grass crackles like fire underfoot. Stones rattle and dust rises like ground fog. There is a red and white farmhouse far off in the valley near a highway, a green field, rows of orange trees and kudu like insects moving through them. Chris and Elvis are with me. Betsy and Andrew are checking another valley. She comes back for lunch with a stunning nyala ram shot with a 620mm lens at f-5.6 in full sun. “Where’d you see him?”

“Just off the road on the other side of the river. He just stood there and let me take his picture. And look at this.” She pulls up a snake on the screen. A big snake. Some kind of constrictor, long and thick and blotched. “It was huge! Longer than the truck almost.”

We return to the nyala sighting in the afternoon, aiming for a high bluff from which we can strike. The trails are like ranch roads everywhere, dirt swaths cut with a bulldozer into the sides of hills and canyons, boulders fallen onto them from above, dust rising behind. Kudu leap the road, dust drifting above the brush to mark their escape. When wide, towering black horns follow a plunging bull into the thickets, we stop and give chase, dodging under thorn limbs, darting up tunnels. “There he is!” Andrew hisses. “Through the branches.” A glint of horn, wet black nose, glinting eyes. But the body is obscured. Then, with a bark and whirl, it is gone.

“He was a brute, an old, old bull. We should look for him again.” The next morning we do, but find nyala instead. Not just a bull, but three of them on the far side of the canyon, the sun already too far up. We are walking the road in shadow, pausing to glass meadows on the far side for lingering sunbathers.

“I see a bushbuck ewe I think. Right of that main side canyon about halfway up.” She is almost chestnut. Striped and dotted white. “See her? Right from that exposed rock. Head down feeding… Hey, there’s a ram. No! That’s a nyala. Nyala bull.” Elvis sees them now and is directing Chris to the location. As he does another bull flashes horns above. He is coming down through the woods. “There’s going to be an altercation.”

And than a third bull raises its head.

“That cow must be in season. They won’t leave her, but it’s time for her to move into the shade.”

“How long will it take us to get there?”

“Too long. We’d have to circle way back, cross the river and come at them from across that side canyon from above… An hour. Can you hit him from here?” Elvis pulls a rangefinder from his pocket. “Four tirdy,” he says in that soft voice trackers habitually use. “Long ways.”

I’m doing the math. Two feet of drop at 450. Chest about 20-inches top to bottom. Hold just over the back and it should drop in. No wind. “Let me see how steady I can hold.”

“If you hit him my dog can find him.” Like many Africans, Chris keeps a little terrier for trailing. “Harry’ll find him dead or wounded.” The nyala pose patiently. I open the tripod and sit. Crosshairs are reasonably steady, but not steady enough.

“I need something under this elbow, a stick or something.” Elvis says something to Chris in his native tongue and trots back toward the truck. I try to wriggle against the cut bank behind, but it is too shallow. Try a stick. Too wobbly. Elvis comes back with a cooler. Who needs drinks at a time like this? Then he slides it under my right arm. Ah. Perfect. “This is good. This’ll work.”

“The one on the top. Beside the big tree, half in the shade,” Chris directs. “Wait until he’s broadside.”

“He is now. I’m going to shoot when he puts his head up. Tell me where I hit.” At the shot the bull leaps like a scalded cat, dashes 20 yards down slope and starts to wobble. At the second shot he plunges into the side canyon jungle.

“Two in the chest. I think you got him.” Chris starts the long drive around the canyon to the other side. Elvis, the terrier and I scoot over the edge and pick our way down game trails, dry leaves and detritus cascading, dust boiling. In places we hang from limbs to lower ourselves down cliffs. The river is confined and boulder strewn. We leapfrog across. It is nearly 40 minutes before Harry barks. The nyala has plunged and slid deep into a shady ravine beneath broad, green leaves and tangled vines. The first shot struck the brisket just under the heart, the second broke the shoulders. Chris arrives a half hour later with reinforcements—Andrew and three additional ranch-hands. Everyone wants to see the big nyala. It’s horns stretch nearly 28 inches. They carry it out on a stretcher, stopping as necessary while Elvis hacks a path.

“Theese ees a beeg one, Run. Truly. Some guys hunt yees fo one lahk theese.” “Big” sounds like “beak” and “these” rhymes with “peace” and sounds wonderful to my ears. “Now we can go afta’ thet coulda bull.”

Why, yes. Yes we can. And then bushbuck, rhebok, reedbuck and all the rest of the wild, free range antelope that have reclaimed woodland haunts and grassland plateaus across unfenced South Africa. Chris, Andrew and Elvis know where to find them. They grew up finding them. This is their land and they are hunters.

Contacts: Email hunt@crusadersafaris.com or call 011 27 46 6851402. Tell them Spomer sent you and he wants to go back.