WHEN I flew to Africa to hunt a buffalo, as the plane’s wheels left the ground, I thought about the ultimate intersection of our two trails, mine and the buffalo’s, at first thousands of miles apart but relentlessly converging until we would be within a stone’s throw of one another, maybe looking into each other’s eyes. Is this karma?
As it turned out, in the dense bush, stare as we might, all we could see of this buffalo, a colossal, mud-caked, worn-horned old loner that set the bar for dagha boys, was the sporadic flick of his tail. In the African heat, he stood drowsing in a thicket; I stood frozen behind the shooting sticks, waiting. Not 30 metres separated us; to try to reposition the PH, assistant PH, two…
