African Hunter II
Edited by Craig T. Boddington and Peter Flack
The best books about hunting in Africa make you dream so hard about the word “safari” that they are entirely responsible for the day you find yourself slogging through the equatorial forest during the rainy season, fighting flesh-tearing thorns and biting ants, filthy, soaked and miserable in a quest for the beautiful and elusive bongo.
Sometimes it is a single book you read years ago that brought you to that place. James Mellon’s African Hunter, published in 1975 when this generation of PHs and hunters were young men, was the inspiration for literally thousands of hunters to go to Africa to hunt.
That book was magic, and although it can never be surpassed because it is the stunning result of one enlightened hunter’s full-time five-year continent-wide African safari career, Safari Press’s group effort, African Hunter II, comes as close as is possible to reaching that standard. There is not a single reader of African Sporting Gazette who can live without this updated, reinvented, invaluable tome. In fact, you should probably own two copies: one to keep in pristine condition for a favorite nephew or granddaughter; and the other to be thumbed and coffee-stained as one flips for weeks – and for years to come – from Chad to Namibia, from Zambezi sitatunga to Nile buffalo, and everything and everywhere in-between.
The entire 600-page publication is done with dedication and intelligence. The maps are good, the overviews are excellent, the photographs are beautiful, the hunting stories are all a good read. The appendix would have benefited from larger print, but it is “do-able;” the list of animals with their scientific and common names, distribution and best places to hunt/observe is definitive; the sidebars are interesting; and the index is outstanding. All of Africa’s wild game is covered in depth, including the Big Five, and the nine species and all the subspecies of spiraled-horned antelope. If the animal appears in the SCI Record Book, it is covered somewhere in these pages.
Twenty-five countries are covered by 22 authors ranging from the expert storytelling of Craig Boddington and Peter Flack, to the many excellent tales by PHs such as Geoff Broom, Lou Hallamore, Joe Coogan, Rudy Lubin, Volker Grellman, Franz Wengert, Hugo Seia, Alain Lefol, John Oosthuizen, Graham Hingeston, Tony Tomkinson, Rolf Rohwer, Piet Hougaard, Mike Murray, and, of course, Robin Hurt and Tony Sanchez. And there are also great stories by highly-experienced hunters like Irvin Barnhart, Chris Kinsey, Rex Baker, Reinald van Meurers, etc. whose accomplishments and insights are invaluable.
Mellon himself agrees that this format of country overviews plus informative stories about each country’s classic hunts is a thorough and enjoyable method for presenting each country’s special place in African hunting: its geography, hunting areas, game species, etc. It worked for Major Maydon before Mellon, and for Mellon himself in 1975, and it works beautifully again here.
Mellon has seen the transformation of African Hunter (I) from indispensable practical hunting guide to “a chronicle of the Africa that was,” and is content that a book of such quality is available again to this generation of hunters. If any of us wondered whether Mellon’s book signaled the end of an era, one can’t help but ponder the same question for African Hunter II. Where do we go from here with the odds so heavily against African wildlife?
If tradition is followed, and an African Hunter III is published in 2030, it is good to think that some of us will still be around to look back to the 2004 SCI Convention in Reno, when African Hunter II arrived in the Safari Press booth. The sons of PHs who are PHs today, like Derek Hurt, Jason Roussos, Eric Pasanisi and Johannes Vermaak will be old men, and nearly everybody on the pages of African Hunter II will be fond memories or dust. Thank you Craig and Peter and Safari Press for witnessing our era in Africa, and for immortalizing these people, places and stories. It is our deepest prayer that the sons of sons, and the sons of sons of sons, can still dream of a big game hunting safari in Africa. And our daughters, too.
This 9-inch by 12-inch, 600-page, 7-pound masterpiece containing hundreds of photos costs a mere $20 a pound or $ 135.00. It is published by Safari Press.