When European settlers first arrived in Africa, they brought with them trusty muzzleloaders that, though they may have served them well in the old country, proved far too anemic to dispatch the thick-skinned, heavy-boned dangerous game native to their new home. After a few close calls with cantankerous critters the size of pickup trucks, they
Among the innumerable tales of close encounters with dangerous game, few send chills up the spines of hunters quite like that of the Tsavo Man-Eaters: a pair of maneless male lions that, together, terrorized the Tsavo region of Kenya in the late 1800s. Their story, and that of their eventual demise, captures the essence of
If you’ve ever considered walking away from your mundane day job to do something reckless and conspicuously masculine—join the French Foreign Legion, live like a hermit in the Alaskan wilderness, or become a big-game hunter in Africa, for instance—you’re not alone. Peter Hathaway Capstick, one of the foremost big- and dangerous-game hunters in Africa and
Evolution is an amazing thing. The fact that creatures can form habits and adaptations necessary for survival, and then breed them back into the population until individual species form from those adaptations, is almost incomprehensible. Life as we know it was shaped by such evolution, and few other creatures’ evolution is more baffling than that
Although the Bengal tiger is endangered today, back in the mid-1800s, it was considered premier dangerous game on the Indian subcontinent. Measuring up to 10 feet long and weighing as much as 400 pounds, these apex predators could summarily disembowel prey or its human pursuers with its four-inch-long canine teeth or retractable claws. The tiger’s
Big-game hunter John “Pondoro” Taylor developed a formula he claimed codified the “knockout” power of rifle cartridges. Is it a reliable measure of a round’s efficacy, or an antiquated theory with dubious origins? The study of ballistics has filled numerous textbooks through the ages and remains a contentious topic full of conflicting theories and mathematical
