Innehållsförteckning för July/Aug 2022 från Man Magnum

MY FIRST encounter with waterbuck was in the old Eastern Transvaal near Klaserie. I was a student and worked on a game farm during the December holidays. While being showed around on the first day, we stopped at a waterhole and the farmer asked whether I could smell anything peculiar. When telling him that I could detect a strange musky odour in the air he simply said, “Waterbuck. Follow me.” We walked along a dry riverbed leading away from the water and within 100m came upon a shady spot littered with heart-shaped spoor and droppings where the air was thick with the strong musky odour. The farmer then told me that waterbuck always stay close to open water and rest up in the shade during the hot part of the…

WHAT do you do with your dead after the culmination of a battle? If you win, the decent thing to do is to bury them. If you lose, you’re too busy back-pedalling to worry about it – at least until later. This was true of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, during which the British only got around to burying the remains of their dead at Isandlwana (22 January 1879) some four months later. Most of the men killed at Hlobane (28 March 1879) also had to be left where they fell. For the Zulus, unless the deceased lived in the vicinity of the battle site, the possibility of transporting bodies to distant homesteads before decomposition set in was remote. What was more important was to get the ancestral spirit, the…

SO YOU are an aspirant hunter, or an established small game hunter, who is about to expand his/her hunting horizons. The question now, is which rifle/cartridge to choose? It is incumbent on all hunters to dispatch their quarry as humanely as possible. The modern hunter is faced with many options in choosing a suitable rifle/cartridge combination. Some choices are better than others and occasionally, depending on the category of the game to be hunted, the best choice may already be in your gun safe. Firstly, the hunter must have a good working knowledge of the anatomy of the quarry. And it goes without saying that accurate shooting requires skill and practice. But once the shot is fired, it is unquestionably the projectile, the bullet, that does the work. The calibre…

GIANT CROCODILE I would be very interested to hear if anyone knows about this picture and what the length of this extremely large croc was? Judging by the number of people in the background and allowing about 400mm per chest area it would appear this croc was absolutely enormous!! I recall when living in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in the ’50s and ’60s there was a croc in a concrete tank outside Livingstone which was enormous and measured seventeen and a half feet. – Bruce Gardner, Gauteng Reply: I am not familiar with the photo, but the crocodile appears to be extraordinarily large for a river-dweller. Saltwater crocodiles grow largest, due to their abundant food supply, and can reach around 22 feet in length. Most river crocs in the wild…

Gutting Tip I read with interest the reprinted May 1989 article “Bloody Imperative” by Gregor Woods in your Looking Back section of the May/June 2022 edition of Magnum. Part 1 is about gutting an animal, and I offer the following tip I received from a PH in Zambia many years ago. When gutting an antelope, do not discard the gallbladder (or the bile) after detaching it from the liver. When done with gutting, one’s hands and arms are covered in blood, fat, etc. Take the bile and pour it onto your hands and rub onto the affected areas. Bile does not lather up, but rub on well. It may be bitter but it does not smell unpleasant. Then wash your hands. You will not believe how clean they have become…

I HAD wanted to hunt a red hartebeest for some time but never had the opportunity. Namibia’s severe drought during 2019/2020 made it even more difficult. Red hartebeest require good rainfall and grasslands to survive, and many had been lost to the drought. Almost all the responses to my enquiries had been negative, so you can imagine my relief when I heard that Jamy Traut Hunting Safaris would be able to assist. On a bitterly cold morning we parked the bakkie under a camelthorn tree, grabbed our gear and started walking across dunes, down into the ‘streets’ between the rolling dunes, scanning for any sign of hartebeest. We saw plenty of springbuck and black wildebeest and we just had to hope they wouldn’t get spooked and chase away any hartebeest…

IT IS generally accepted by collectors that approximately 127 000 original sporting rifles featuring the famous M98 action were manufactured by Mauser at their Oberndorf plant, and this figure is often quoted in the literature. Production of these Oberndorf Mauser sporters began in 1898, and continued until April1945, when the factory was occupied by French troops in the late stages of WW2. Some ‘occupation’ rifles were produced during 1945 and 1946, but these were assembled from leftover parts and are not generally considered to be genuine factory-built Oberndorf Mausers. After the Mauser factory had been completely stripped and all the machinery shipped off to various countries as ‘war reparations’, in July 1948 the French blew up the empty buildings, bringing all further production to a rather final halt. Since Mauser…

THE DEATH in early May this year, of the renowned and much-loved cartoonist, Fred Mouton, came as an immensely sad and serious loss to the world of art, cartoons and our local publishing industry. For more than 40 years, Fred’s incomparable cartoons graced the pages of Magnum, and our magazine will not be the same without his hilarious touch. As part of Magnum’s 45th anniversary celebrations in 2021, we honoured Fred Mouton by publishing a special booklet titled The Lighter Side of Hunting & Shooting, dedicated solely to a collection of his cartoons published in Magnum during that period. I am so glad this appeared while Fred was still with us, so that he could know just how much we appreciated and respected his talent and his unique sense of…

IN OUR previous edition, I told of sharing a campfire with Dave Westerhout of Zimbabwe, but related only a part of our conversation. As that evening wore on, our discussions became more philosophical – as campfire talk is wont to do. Dave said he’d enjoyed an earlier column in which I told of a lion locking itself in the long-drop toilet of a remote mission station, resulting in the complete destruction of that hallowed edifice. It reminded him of a well-known incident which occurred in the old Rhodesia. However, before I let Dave tell his story, I feel it is incumbent on me to instruct our younger readers who may have no knowledge or experience of long-drop history or tradition. Most farmhouses of my youth were without electricity or much…

DURING the winter of 1871-72 Duke Alexis of Russia visited the United States. The young Duke was the fourth son of Tsar Alexander and the highlight of his Grand Tour was to go on a buffalo hunt in Nebraska. The spectacular event had been organised by William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody and the famous showman included a party of Indians and the flamboyant George Armstrong Custer, who was to die later at the battle of the Little Big Horn. During the exciting buffalo hunt, Alexis shot a magnificent bull and this was celebrated with much popping of champagne corks because it also happened to be the Duke’s 22nd birthday. An interesting aspect of the Duke’s visit was that at some time he handled a Smith & Wesson .44 calibre revolver –…

MY SHOOTING mate, Simon Neville, was the first to call my car a “Shooting Brake”. Having never heard the term, I had no idea what he was talking about, so I Googled it. It is a car for transporting shooters and their gear from shooting stand to shooting stand. In the old days it was a wagon or a cart with some kind of braking system to hold back frisky horses. These days, shooting brakes are smart looking cars, mostly station wagons. Aston Martin even tried their hand at a shooting brake. The Aston Martin DB5 Vantage shooting brake is the ugliest car I have ever seen – a stretched-out fusion of an Aston Martin DB III sports car (think James Bond in Goldfinger) and a station wagon. My shooting…

The most obvious difference between male and female African elephants is their size. Males are much larger (heavier and taller) than females. However you cannot use size only, to determine an elephant’s gender because the herd you are looking at may not comprise of fully-grown adults. Obviously, if it is a lone animal, there is nothing to compare it with. Both males and females have tusks, though both genders can be born tuskless and remain tuskless. Tusks on males are usually longer and heavier. The females have one set of pectoral mammae. You can also tell them apart by the shape, and sometimes the size, of the head. The male’s head is broader between the eyes and forehead, and more rounded. The female’s head is narrower between the eyes and…

THAT WAS the title Jack O’Connor gave to his May 1946 Outdoor Life Arms & Ammunition column. The gun was a 1943 K98 Mauser battlefield trophy that he had P.O. Ackley barrel and chamber for the .270 Ackley Magnum. Stocked in Tessier French walnut by Keith Stegall, it hunted in the Yukon where it harvested two caribou bulls at nearly 300 and 325 yards with 140gr Barnes spitzers at about 3 200 to 3 250fps, it eventually landed in Albuquerque gun dealer Ron Peterson’s personal collection. Ron invited me to see if I could make it shoot again, since .270 Ackley Mag ammo is not readily available. Very fortunately semi-retired and highly regarded professional gunsmith Frank Wells was interested in the project and set to work. Ackley had access to…