Point and Shoot
Friday, May 9th, 2008 by Andrew Braithwaite | 1 Comment »KRUGER NATIONAL PARK—Hemingway, furious, would have shot me in the head. Orwell would have offered dignified applause, acknowledging my restraint and humanity.
Here we were, nine of us—including two of us brandishing powerful .458 calibre hunting rifles—tracking a herd of elephants on the southern edge of South Africa’s immense Kruger National Park. One of our guides, Lourens Botha, had spotted the herd in a nearby valley. Marching quickly across the African forest, we scaled a hill next to the valley and descended onto a rocky ledge. Beneath us, a mere twenty metres away, were elephants—lots of elephants. They were enjoying a substantial breakfast, ripping large branches off the trees with their powerful trunks. And they were standing right out in the open.
Lourens and his partner, Obakeng, both young guides from the park’s Berg-en-Dal lodge, confirmed the elephants hadn’t noticed us. They put down their rifles, rather than passing them along to one of us to line up a shot. They unpacked some juiceboxes and cheese and crackers, and we enjoyed a light breakfast alongside eighteen pachyderms doing the same.
No, we didn’t shoot the elephants. The .458s that Lourens and Obi carried were for protection only—a required precaution for a walking tour in the park. And watching these creatures tear up the forest floor in impressive fashion, and trample large swaths of bush in their wake, I never once felt the impulse to fix them in the cross-hairs of the rifle and pull the trigger. Nothing about that hypothetical encounter struck me as sporting. (more…)























