A Reprint from Maganport's Founder
Larry Kelly
Poaching, commercial hunting and reduction of habitat has sharply reduced the numbers of several species such as jaguar and ocelot. Even leopards are nowhere near as numerous as they had been three or four decades ago.
of Magnaport
The result, in the case of the leopard, has been an excep-tional rebound in the population over most of its African range. In Zimbabwe, for instance, leopards are so common they raid suburbs of major cities like Salisbury, hunting and feeding on household dogs.
The U. S. Government finally has responded to reliable data supplied by the export managers of African wildlife through groups like Safari Club International and has taken leopards off the Endangered Species List. That means that U. S. hunters in future safaris can now return with leopard trophies.
In three safaris to Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, two trips hunting almost exclusively with handguns, I’ve taken three leopards among the 100 or so head of the game. Until now, although Zimbabwe has authorized permits for me to hunt the cats, American Bureaucrats have not allowed me to bring the hides back into the country.
On my first safari in 1978, I saw five leopards in one day. But I didn’t have a leopard permit. On a 1980 hunt, I made sure I was properly licensed.
Baits were set out carefully, for leopards have keen senses of smell, sight and hearing. We checked the baits daily for four days, but didn’t get a tumble from the cats so we concentrated on elephants in tribal trust lands for three days, hoping to provide meat for the black Africans and driving the remaining elephants away from crops. When we returned to base camp, as yet unsuc-cessful on tuskers, we decided to check the leopard bait.
Our chief tracker, Sergeant Major Giyai Nyika, and his men had cleared a 300-yard trail leading to the bait, a requirement for an absolutely silent approach. As we entered the finely con-structed brush blind and removed a small “window” panel, we could see a leopard sleeping on a tree limb 20 feet from the bait, about 40 yards from the blind.
It was then it dawned on me that I hadn’t loaded the Thompson/Center Contender! Knowing I couldn’t open and close the action without the cat hearing me, I retreated sheepishly 400 yards, put a shell in the gun, and returned cautiously to the blind.
The cat was still there, asleep, all four legs dangling, body slouched slightly sideways toward the opposite side of the limb. The shot would have to be placed precisely to strike a vital spot and at the same time avoid hitting the branch.
Using the rest built into the blind, I put the crosshairs of the Leupold 2X Scope on the cat and touched the trigger. The leopard flew straight upward, biting its shoulder. When it hit the ground, it was stone dead.
“Good shot,” Ollie Coltman, my host, exhaulted. “Right through the heart. If there is one thing I didn’t want to do, it was trail a wounded leopard.”
Leopards are not particularly heavy, the largest going only 160 to 180 pounds. But they are lightning swift, so fast the eye can t follow them. And when they attack, they go for the throat with their fangs, holding the shoulders with the forepaws and bicycling the prey’s guts with raking rear claws.
Consequently, though it doesn’t take much gun to put them down, the shot must be perfect to avoid wounding the game and precipitating an attack.
I’ve been a handgun hunter more than 25 years and have taken numerous trophies, from whitetails in my native Michigan to brown bear in Alaska. But I marvelled at the beauty of this animal, a tom of about 140 pounds, certainly the prettiest of all dangerous game.
Handgunners in general have taken a lot of flak in recent years about the tools they use in their sport. By meeting the African big game challenge, I hoped to illustrate again to detrac-tors that hunting with a handgun is a viable and growing sport worthy of serious consideration and refinement.
The recent success of the Mag-Na-Port recoil reduction system I developed and own has allowed me to spend even more time doing what I like best, hunting with the extra skill it takes to place a shot in the right spot with a hand-held, short-range gun.
Oliver Coltman, at 35, with whom I hunted in 1980 and ‘81, is district game warden for the Zambezi Valley, one of only five district wardens in the country. Ollie has been employed in one capacity or another for the game department all his adult life, working himself up through skill, knowledge and wisdom of African animals and their environment to a post of revered authority among the villagers of the bush, and respect among his peers.
Tall and lean from constant rigors of the job, Coltman bears scars from numerous brushes with Africa’s dangerous game in-cluding a 45-minute wrestling match with a Cape buffalo six years ago in which he lost a lung and had to spend more than a year in a hospital.
For the 1981 hunt, I brought along five handguns, although my favorite—scoped Thompson Contender single shot chambered for J. D. Jones’ wildcat .375 J.D.J. necked down from a .444 Marlin with which I’d taken several elephant, buf-falo, and numerous smaller trophies on the 1980 hunt—had been lost in transit and would not arrive until a week and a half into the hunt. I did have another TIC, unscoped, in .375 J.D.J., a prototype of Sterling Arms; EXP 4 single shot in .44 magnum, a Smith and Wesson Model 29 five-inch .44 magnum backup, and another .44 mag, a Ruger Super Blackhawk in Mag-Na-Port gunsmith Gerry Kraft’s custom “Stalker” version with eight-inch Mag-Na-Ported barrel, SS Mag-Na-Life finish, 2X Leupold scope and carrying sling.
My wife, Barbara, and I met Ollie, his wife, Sue, and their two children at their home where, over tea, we talked of past hunts and planned our trip. Barb and Sue left the Coltman home by truck with game scouts, skinners and camp boys while Ollie and I went up the Zambezi River by jet boat to get started on our base of operations. “It’s about 125 miles upriver to camp,” Ollie said over the engine roar. “There hasn’t been any hunting there since the war started. There should be trophy-size specimens of big game.”
Ollie exercised extreme care in setting up the leopard baits. In a couple of days, we had two of the spotted cats working them.
The cat was already laying on the tree bait as I entered the blind. Facing me with only a very little of his side showing, the leopard presented a difficult target. I placed the crosshairs on the little bit of shoulder I could see and touched off.
An orange blur was all I saw as I shot. I never saw the leopard jump from the tree or run on the ground. I didn’t know if I’d hit him. “I don’t know,” I told Ollie Coltman, my host. “God, I hope he doesn’t give us a problem.”
We approached the tree cautiously, both of us worried we may have a wounded cat on our hands. “Well, I don’t think he left his liver here on purpose,” replied Ollie, holding the mangled organ in his hands.
We knew we had our cat, but were not aware that it had run blindly on adrenalin through a 50-foot tunnel of rock which ended at the brink of a 200-foot deep precipice. The cat, a 150-pound male, lay at the bottom of the canyon, as dead as the rocks on which it fell.
A few days later, I took another leopard, a smaller female which, had I been able to tell her size at the time, I would have passed up.
Leopards are among the most beautiful of big game, a truly magnificent trophy with an element of “Big Five” danger in-volved in hunting them.
Now, with the U. S. import restrictions relaxed, more American hunters will have an opportunity to utilize this highly-valued resource both for their own satisfaction and the benefit of the wildlife and people of the African countries in which they hunt.
Already I’ve received word from Zimbabwe that depredations by leopard are again taking place. Eight were shot by wildlife managers for raiding livestock in one small area recently. Which means this summer, I’ll be going back for leopard again.
Magnaport.com
Leopard and Kelly • Zimbabwe
c 1981
c 1981
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