Into the Thorns – Hunting the Cattle-killing Leopard of the Matobo Hills
By PH Wayne Michael Grant
Yes, I read all 570 pages of this five-pound oeuvre devoted to the pursuit, in Zimbabwe, of a special breed of leopard: the human-habituated, private-land, cattle-preying Matobo leopard.
“The hunter has to outwork, outthink and out-luck the most adaptable chess master of them all,” writes Grant, who recounts more than a dozen engrossing leopard-hunting tales, including several featuring his 170-lb-plus, ‘Tyson-headed,’ 17-inch-skull ‘Supercats.’ Grant’s cats have personality, like the tom who feeds once on a bait and never returns. Outsmarting the best of them is pure art. “There is no free lunch in hunting educated leopard on private land.”
Hunting ‘farm’ leopards, which know about traps and poison and that “the smell of tobacco means people, dogs and danger,” attracts a certain kind of hunting client – the one who can spend 12 nights without a shower, campfire, hot meals or cold beers, and accepts that he still might go home empty-handed. Although most hunters take their leopards between 6 and 9.00 p.m., “Who is so successful that they can afford to throw away 20% of their chance at success” at a 3.00 a.m. tom by abandoning the blind for the comforts of camp?” asks Grant.
But the book explores much more than campfire stories of hunting leopard. It is the story of thorny, boulder-strewn south-western Zimbabwe where “hundreds and thousands of acres of jumbled granite hills” and whaleback and castle koppies “sprawl in broken rugged splendour all the way to the west, where the hills melt away into the dry scrubland of Botswana’s semi desert.” Blessed with 2,000-year-old Bushman paintings, the Matobo Hills’ mystic soul remains intact, even if species like lion and buffalo are gone.
Descriptions of Zimbabwe’s pre-colonial and post-colonial history in his hunting grounds form the book’s background. Grant recounts how Mzilikazi and his people fled the Zulu king, Tshaka, and settled in south-western Zimbabwe in 1837, founding the warlike Amandebele nation. He tells about Mugabe’s Matabeleland slayings in the early 1980s, which killed more natives in two years than 11 years of bush war, and recalls the road to independence and the impact that “shambolic chaos” has had on wildlife, especially since uncompensated farm seizures picked up pace, starting in 2000. Decades of improvements to private land, from fencing to dams, have been destroyed, and poaching is out of control.
Nevertheless, successful leopard hunting continues in Zimbabwe as demonstrated in chapters like ‘Season of Monsters’, and ‘Unexpected Gifts’ in which plain old luck far outweighs hard work.
He lovingly describes all the attributes and foibles of this ancient, eroded landscape that maintains its edge of wildness even as bought-out white cattle operations were converted into African Rural Development Authority (ARDA) land. Today, Grant’s Ingwezi Game Management Project helps protect leopard from being exterminated by trapping and poisoning, by passing on the leopard’s economic value as a hunting trophy.
He provides the facts and figures of leopard ecology and analyzes guestimated field weights – think twice the next time you hear about a 180-lb monster! (Grant’s heaviest cat weighed 187 pounds with an empty stomach.) He also gives an in-depth look at the challenging hunting of Matobo’s other species, like kudu, blue wildebeest, zebra, and the sable that feed in the terminalia woodlands and grassy meadows between the koppies. Grant also celebrates his staff, paying tribute to their individual life stories and important role in safari success.
His goal is not give lessons on leopard hunting, but rather “to share our triumphs and heartbreaks and to show what has worked for us.” He and his colleagues, like childhood friend Graham Robertson (whose client bagged a leopard with a 18.5-inch skull!), are practised and efficient hunters, benefiting over time from trial and error. For example, a leopard sawing at a bait means something has gone wrong and the leopard is leaving, not arriving at the bait. Both killing and wounding shots are carefully analyzed.
They log leopard movements and keep track of tracks; 10 inches is the magic number for a leopard pad measurement here (see diagram), although Grant has seen up to 12-1/4 inches. They keep statistics to reason their way to success. “Remember, Mr. Murphy is patient, and he has that horrible sense of humour,” writes Grant.
For example, because Matobo is not sufficiently game-rich to ensure that the client quickly downs several bait animals, they purchase goats, donkeys, cows, and even zonkeys for bait, although they’ll gladly snatch an expired animal from a poacher’s snare. (They already take some 40% of their cats, and 70% of their supercats, off natural calf kills.) These ‘beef baits’ allow them to immediately ‘flood bait’ an area without firing a shot in order to keep a cat feeding.
He gives full treatment to situating, building and baiting blinds, as well as blind etiquette. No coughing, no snoring. Utter silence. UTTER SILENCE! if you want to fool a private-land leopard. Sandwiches and cough sweets are unwrapped, water bottles unscrewed.
Grant is not a ‘hunting with hounds’ outfitter, and believes the practice could result in overshooting Zimbabwe’s already troubled leopard population. Still, Blueticks and Walkers play their role in following up wounded leopard. He looks at conservation and the ethics of hunting leopard with hounds, at night with a light (not allowed on government concession land), and over bait. (In 25-plus years of hunting leopard, Grant has only taken a dozen leopard by bumping into them.)
There is much to be learned from Grant’s sophisticated, yet natural hunting methods, like his ‘double-blind’ technique with a forward shooting blind and a ‘sleeping blind’ behind; rigging an 80-pound deep-sea line into a nifty ‘warning stick’ to signal the leopard is feeding; collecting urine from a dead cat’s bladder, to rub on and around the bait tree. Site placement and distance (80 to 120 yards) from the bait, wind direction, and the cat’s direction of approach are all meticulously calculated. Grant is not big into dragging, saying leopard like their meat “clean, fresh and appetizing.” Lights: yes. Listening devices and rheostats: no. (Grant declares 90% of night vision equipment worthless.)
He writes that in 15 hunts, two hunters will fail due to pure bad luck; five to six leopards will be wounded, missed or escape without a shot being fired – despite two sandbag rests for the rifle’s rear and forend and a shooting distance of 100 yards. He attributes failure to buck fever, flinching, and trouble identifying the target. “Unfortunately, we cannot afford to sit there with the spotlight on, waiting for the perfect shot. The hunter must take the one that is on offer,” reminds Grant. “And we cannot afford to have a big male leopard leave the bait without a shot being taken. Big males are scarce! The time and work involved in getting one into shooting position for a hunting client has to be witnessed to be believed. We need to avoid ‘educating’ cats at all costs.”
Conducting some 25 leopard hunts a year leads to its fair share of spine-tingling follow-ups. Maulings, and studying them, are a natural campfire subject. Grant, who walked passed one wounded leopard three times before it sprang, warns that maulings result because there’s always a moment on track “as blood is lost and the day gets warmer… when nobody covers anyone else. Rifles and shotguns go onto the shoulder or into a one-hand carry.”
He is unequivocal about his firearm preference for following- up on wounded leopard: his .460 Weatherby magnum, loaded with three soft-nose rounds. (His brother, Sean, was severely mauled, carrying a 12-gauge pump gun loaded with 00 buckshot.) He also packs a 9mm and a knife. To reduce the chance of missing his furious target, “When facing a charge, I make sure I hold my fire until the absolute, absolute last second. Point blank for a leopard, for me, means just that.”
Grant’s use of language is pleasant and professional, and the book feels both edited and proofread – a too-rare pleasure in today’s hunting press. Describing the spoor of a wounded cat, he writes: “The blood was not orangey-red, frothy, bright lung blood. It was not watery, stomach-content, gut blood. I could find no bone shards. This blood seemed like muscle blood.”
The reader will also enjoy his funny and frank account of his mischievous youth, and life in boarding schools like Plumtree that already in 1968 placed him on the edge of the Matobo Hills. There, 12-year-old boys practised with .22s in the school’s shooting club and hunted rats for the thrill of the kill.
Military life and marriage to Margie followed. By 1983, Grant was freelancing for Clive Lennox, Piers Taylor, Dan Landrey and Dave Masson. By 1985, he’d started his own company and grew it by acquiring hunting rights on both small and large commercial ranches, Graham’s family ranch, and on communal land (formerly known as Tribal Trust Land). Farmers welcomed their hunting clients and they “began leopard hunting with a vengeance” in the mopane woodland, acacia savannah, Mangwe sourveld, and gusu or teak forest typical of northern Matabeleland. Very soon, they were enticing more old toms than hungry females to bait.
Into the Thorns is the tale of that road to success. It includes plenty of good colour photos, diagrams and maps. Even the captions are good!
With 570 pages and 88 colour illustrations, Into the Thorns, by PH Wayne Grant, and published by African Hunter in 2007, costs US$100 plus shipping.