10. THE HUNTERS

Somaliland – the ancient art of hunting revealed in a cave – an outdoor show in Germany’s Bavaria – meeting hunters, sellers and killer dogs – the trophy-lined showroom of one of the oldest gun companies in the world in London – on safari in South Africa’s Eastern Cape – a death and remorse

This stony, arid land had once teemed with wildlife: spotted hyenas and hyraxes, leopards and Barbary lions, cheetahs, oryx and dik-diks. But then the guns of civil war had sounded in the closing decades of the twentieth century, and these animals were hunted and hunted again to feed the Somali troops that fought in these ochre desert lands. Now the plains were silent.

The war in the late 1980s had been a brutal one. Somaliland, seeking to liberate its people from the brutal governance of Siad Barre, Somalia’s vicious dictator, had begun to establish itself as an autonomous republic in the far north of the Horn of Africa. Barre had responded with hard force; about 350,000 people died from the violence and the famines that followed. Countless animals died too.¹

So today you see mainly bush pigs and camels roaming the desert sands, and the only reason the pigs survived was because Somalia is a Muslim country, and the pigs were considered haram.

We weren’t interested, though, in the hunted of the present. The hunters of the past drew us here. We were speeding across this thirsty earth to see some of the oldest rock art in northern Africa and, as the tourism minister of Somaliland, Mohammed Hussein Said, was with me, it was not proving to be your conventional tourist trip. First, there were no other tourists here, and had not been any for months. There were also six men with AK47s guarding us.

There was an underlying fear that Islamic groups would target Westerners here, wanting to grab a hostage or make a theological point in blood. A few days before, working on a BBC documentary, the crew and I had met a group of suspected terrorists in the main prison in Hargeisa, Somaliland’s capital. They had been paraded in loose manacles before us, and all had refused to return our gaze. They were said to be Al-Shabab gunmen, responsible, a few months before, for the shooting and killing of Richard and Enid Eyeington, a British aid couple in their sixties. The Eyeingtons were good people who, according to their friend, the late film director Richard Attenborough, were ‘an inspirational couple, selfless and courageous’.² If affiliates of Al Qaeda would do that to a gentle couple, what would they do to a bunch of journalists?

The tourist minister was taking no chances; our escorts went armed.

After an hour’s drive, the dust blinding and coating, we saw a smooth granite escarpment rising from the north-east. Up there, after a scramble across ancient boulders, the minister showed us caves that contained some of the earliest paintings known to man, some dating back 11,000 years. Ten caves contained scenes of striking antediluvian beauty: animals captured in elaborate ceremonial robes, necks embellished with white plastron, hunting dogs and wild animals crouched beside them and hunters stood beneath them all, their arms outstretched.

‘Under here,’ said the minister, ‘you can see the person. That means they were praying. They say these pictures are the best they’ve seen.’

He was right, this intense and refreshingly unpolitical man: the paintings were impressive, and not just to archaeologists. Here was art speaking to us of ancient hunting skills and the deities that watched over the kill. In these dry lands, and to the south-west in modern-day Tanzania and Kenya, man had first learned to hunt for his meat, long before he had learned to paint for his gods. Even today Bushmen hunters taint their arrows with the poisonous exudate of the Diamphidia beetle – so powerful a mere scratch can kill a kudu or a man.

Africa’s history is, in this way, not revealed through soaring cathedrals or brooding sky-framed fortresses. Rather, dry and secluded caves reveal the continent’s historical past in bones laced with stone-tool cut marks. Other caves revealed how the bow and arrow or spear were first used here tens of thousands of years ago. And in those caves, where there were remnants of painted animal gods, you saw man’s love of meat, hunted and cooked.

What these vermillion and citrine paintings really showed me was just how deep-set hunting is on our collective psyche; how it has been intrinsic to the evolution of societies, cultures and religions; and how man, underneath our civilized carapace, is a hunter to his core.

The way religions around the world approach the issue of hunting reveals how societies see the world. Many Buddhists and Jains believe that every life is sacred, so they do not hunt. Jews and Muslims do hunt, but generally only for food, not for sport. And they are both forbidden to hunt other trained hunting animals, such as birds of prey, possibly echoing doctrinal views that food needs to be kosher or halal before it is eaten. Christians can hunt, the only exception being Catholic priests, who are not allowed to – a position that sounds very similar to the Vatican’s attitude to sex.³ And Hindus are positively encouraged to hunt, their scriptures describing it as a sport of the kingly. Even the god Shiva is called Mrigavyadha, ‘the deer hunter’.

As with religion, hunting reflects people’s own views of what is right and wrong. Very few argue that societies which need to hunt for their basic survival are morally wrong for doing so.⁴ But many have a problem with people who go hunting for leisure or pleasure. The social-media storms of bile that ensued after an American huntress was photographed posing with a downed lion testify to that.⁵

I take the middle ground. I cannot see why you need to hunt a leopard that is not posing a direct threat to your community. But I have little problem with hunting bountiful, normal game, provided the meat is for the pot. I certainly can’t understand those who gladly eat hamburgers or lamb chops but object to those who hunt properly husbanded animals.

Having seen the ugly, mechanised slaughter of modern abattoirs [slaughterhouses] up close, I see no moral difference between meat butchered there and meat that’s been hunted.⁶ Both, admittedly, are not necessary for survival, but vegetarianism is one virtue I’ve yet to embrace.

Of course, I’m not alone in my love of meat. Fifty years ago global meat consumption was 70 million tonnes. By 2007 it was 268 million tonnes, a rise of almost 300 per cent. In 1961 we ate about 22 kilograms of meat per person; by 2007 we were eating 40 kilograms.⁷ This rise in meat consumption occurred as the world saw a huge shift in urbanisation. Today over 50 per cent of the world’s population live in towns and cities,⁸ and given that some cities have only 8 per cent of the bird species and 25 per cent of the plant species to comparable undeveloped land,⁹ it’s clear that billions of people are consuming meat without really living in sight of the natural world from where it comes. Despite our deep ancestral links to a shared hunting past, the death of animals for food in many parts of the world is witnessed only by those who work in slaughterhouses or by those who hunt.

I count myself among those who know neither world. I live in a large city and do not have a garden. I only really see nature when I escape the chokehold of an urban ringway.

This is not to say I had never hunted before. I had sought to catch sharks with lassos in Papua New Guinea. I had been on crocodile expeditions armed with spears. And I had butchered ewes and pigs. I had never, though, shot an animal for the sport as well as for the meat. The other worlds of the gun had shown their faces to me long before this book was conceived. The world of the rifle hunter, though, was totally new to me. I had much to learn.

There is the battue, or the beating of sticks, where you drive animals into a gun’s range. You can go calling – the art of mimicking animal noises to lure them to you. There is blind hunting, which involves waiting for animals from a concealed hide. There is stalking, the practice of quietly searching for your prey. Persistence hunting is done by running your prey to exhaustion. And then there is netting, trapping, spotlighting and glassing.

These things I did not know, but I was trying to learn them as I battled with an immense German breakfast of Aufschnitt und Käse, in a functional hotel on the outskirts of the Bavarian town of Nuremberg. In an hour the IWA Outdoor Classics – an international show for hunting guns and a wide range of shooting sports – was opening. Given it was filled with huntsmen, it felt appropriate to fill myself with heavy meat and to learn the secret language of poachers and trackers while so doing.

About 40,000 hunters from over 100 countries had travelled to this town in southern-central Germany, and it was, simply, the best place for a novice like me to be introduced to the worlds of chasers and deerstalkers.

Finishing my plate of sliced sausage, I headed to the subway. Nuremberg’s metro was teutonically punctual and shifted smoothly through this quiet town. The air was brisk and cold, the sky a blank white. Outside, large functional and faceless office buildings sped past. From time to time men in smart suits pulling petite roller briefcases joined the train; they were on the way to the shooting show, too. Gun sellers.

A Frenchman boarded, wearing a light-brown moleskin jacket and fox tie, speaking loudly into his phone. Behind me two Englishmen with broad faces and even broader Cornish accents talked about profits. The train slid to a stop.

As we stepped out, the sprawling convention centre lay on all sides, up a covered slope. It was a broad cathedral to commerce, struck in minimalist white and glass and steel. Thousands of people were striding with intent, and a pianist played the Roberta Flack classic ‘Killing Me Softly’ inside. Armed with a press-tag lanyard, I walked in.

The first stall was not discreet, despite its attempts to be so. J. P. Sauer & Sohn. Established in 1751, it was clearly a gun manufacturer that wanted you to know where you stood in the order of things. A large and largely empty VIP section was cordoned off behind a line of glass cabinets, in which stood the manufacturers’ history in gunmetal – shotguns from 1899, 1894 and 1885, the earliest a Kal.12 Perkussion-Doppelflinte from 1835. It had an exquisite hunting scene engraved on its stock, and these detailed intricacies spoke of privilege and clear class lines. Yet, for all their implied elitism and advertised good taste, J. P. Sauer & Sohn were still willing to make expensive kitsch. There stood a Steampunk rifle, decorated with fanciful flourishes in an attempt to capture a sense of apocalyptic industrialism, sold to a man whom the Sauer rep disdainfully called ‘an Arab buyer’ for $154,000. Beside it lay a bespoke ‘Genghis Khan’ hunting rifle, engraved with mystical symbols from the East, its stock a maze of Chinese exotica. It was mounted on a dais beside a Moorish helmet laid out upon a bed of desert sand. It had the price tag of $119,000 and looked like a Disney nightmare.

It was clear this was a show where money talked, where it could buy you a lesson in prescribed taste or cause the self-same arbiters of etiquette to look the other way. So, if you took your Genghis Khan shooter from its rifle case and signed up to an over-priced safari the people here would, you imagine, follow the lead of one of the advertising flyers and insist you were ‘hunting in elegance’.

I carried on through the high, vaulted space. There were huge stalls, each themed, each drawing your eye with carefully considered marketing allure. Despite the early hour, people were sipping white wine at a Scandinavian bar made of bleached wood, pelts and furs. Opposite them was a tent for the British shotgun manufacturer John Rigby. It was a safari fantasy in zebra skins and wicker chairs. Even its whisky spoke of a rugged past: Monkey Shoulder – a nickname given to the lopsided look that maltmen once got after endlessly turning the barley by hand.

Then an enormous wolfdog, a 30-kilogram monster with amber eyes and a high-set tail, walked past. A beast that came out of a 1950s programme that sought to merge German sheepdogs and Carpathian wolves, it had been bred as an attack dog for the Czechoslovak special forces. It turned and stuck its muzzle into my crotch. I gently pushed it away, and it followed me until I darted behind a screen to come face to face with a woman in a white shirt and a high-waisted black skirt tapping meticulously on a long barrel fixed firmly in a vice. Her movements were steady and sure, and I stood momentarily enamored of the delicate skill of her art. She was marking an elaborate design into the metal upper housing of a shotgun. Small circles showed upon metal and were expanding under her guiding hands into a subtle rococo flourish.

Her name was Lieben. She was in her mid thirties and had been an engraver for thirteen years now, her role one of the chief engravers for the Belgium arm of the shotgun manufacturer Browning. She was based in Liège, the centuries-old home to gunsmiths, and worked in a unit custom making about 100 bespoke rifles a year. She could tap like this for hours, she said, taking her craft seriously and slowly. One day she might like to do knives or jewellery, but for the moment she was content with beautifying firearms. Lieben found this gunmetal work meditative, her attention to detail part of a tradition that spanned back to medieval Walloon artisans.

‘Let Our Craftsmen Create The Gun Of Your Dreams,’ said a Browning advert on her right. Twelve workers could take up to a year to produce bespoke guns like these – the engraving alone on a rifle takes 500 hours.

The head of sales for the custom shop walked up. His name was Lionel Neuville, a youngish man with a filled-out face and a high forehead. He was clearly in love with the artistry of the weapons here. When he was a child his mother once took him around the grand museums of Europe. Now, though, she’s mystified at his hunting lifestyle, hating the idea her son sells such instruments of death. But it seemed to me it was more the allure of beauty in the gun, not blood, that had inspired Neuville’s enthusiasm.

‘I’m not really here to sell guns, more to show the quality, the feeling of the gun – what is possible,’ he said. ‘Our customers are mainly self-made men and are really into stunning things: guns, cars. They want a “wow” item to show to their friends, and we are that: the Aston Martin of the gun.’

His usual client is a rich man in his mid fifties who has been hunting for a while. He invites them over to Belgium to view the factory; they are chauffeured from the airport and given a $550 luxurious French meal to seal the deal. He pats his stomach, and you can see he’s sealed a few of them. One thing that he does not do, though, is discuss the price with the client. That would be gauche.

Of course not all customers want the same thing. He can’t sell gold-plated pistols in France – ‘It’s a bit “bling-bling”’ – but the Germans or Americans buy such things happily.

‘The French and the English may not like each other, but they are similar in that they know what they like – even down to the colour of the wood,’ he said. ‘The French want a yellowish wood, the British a dark red.’ Such bespoke taste does not come cheap. The double-barrelled shotguns he sells run into the upper tens of thousands of dollars. But for many of the buyers, price is never the issue.

‘The Russians have the money, but they want to buy a piece of history,’ he said. ‘They like to buy the Side-by-Side because this was what the Tsar had.’ A shotgun made for Tsar Nicholas II recently sold in auction for a record $287,500, so it was clear the Russians were prepared to dig deep for the right image.¹⁰

‘They want people to see their guns, but they will be discreet about it. It’s not “take a look at my new gun”, but they leave it purposefully at the entrance to the house. It starts a new conversation.’

Of course, there is a long, deep history of European hunting with guns. The Lithuanian, Finnish, Czech and Polish national hunting associations all recently celebrated ninety years since their founding, while the granddaddy of the Union of Hunters and Anglers in Bulgaria had its 115th birthday in 2013.¹¹ By and large, European hunting is incredibly popular. Today there are about 7 million European hunters.¹² Finland, for instance, has the third-highest rate of firearm ownership in the world, and over half of its firearm permits are for hunting.¹³ There are an estimated 1.3 million hunters in France, and 980,000 in Spain, while the island state of Malta has the highest hunter density of anywhere in Europe – possibly the world – with fifty hunters per square kilometre.¹⁴

It is even more extreme, as many things tend to be, in the US. There, pro-hunting groups claim almost 14 million Americans hunt every year (some say as many as 43 million Americans hunt, but that seems to be overstating things);¹⁵ 58 per cent of all those who carry guns reportedly do so for hunting;¹⁶ and there are over 10,000 clubs and organisations across the US dedicated just to hunting, such as the Safari Club International, the National Wild Turkey Federation and Ducks Unlimited.¹⁷

Not surprisingly, it’s big business and always, in a sense, has been. In the early days of the American frontier the hide of a deer was worth a dollar – which is how the term ‘buck’ for a one-dollar bill came about.¹⁸ Today, American hunters are said to spend 38.3 billion bucks on their passion, more than – the hunting lobby claims at least¹⁹ – the revenue of Google.²⁰ Hunting supports an estimated 680,000 jobs: the $26.4 billion in salaries and wages being larger than the entire economy of Vermont.²¹ And it’s reportedly growing: between 2006 and 2011, the number of hunters was said to have increased by 9 per cent.²²

Of course, with this much money and enjoyment at stake, the US has a very strong political voice that shouts loud about the benefits of hunting and the right to bear arms. They argue it is safe and humane, environmentally sound and economically beneficial. Some disagree, clearly. According to the International Hunter Education Association’s own historical data, over 1,000 people in the US and Canada are accidentally shot by hunters a year, with about eighty of those accidents being fatalities. Hardly safe.²³

Amid Nuremberg’s artisanal beauty, though, you could hardly envisage danger and death. Here was luxury and life. The sections spun off into different gun genres. Some focused on selling decoys and targets of ducks and geese; others sold high-quality ear protection; some just made their living by selling gun-care oil. There were multi-pull clay pigeon systems for training, or shooting-range ventilation manufacturers (yours for $33,000). A Scottish-based gunbox manufacturer from New Zealand would make you an elaborate storage system in walnut for $8,800. There were optic sights and gutting knives, thick stalking boots and wrap-around sunglasses. Everywhere was a microcosm of economic supply and demand – accessories for weapon and hunter alike.

Robin Deas, an old-school Brit, summed this up. He showed me how he had built a flourishing business by focusing on a very specific aspect of gun-hunting culture: namely, feet. At seventy-three, he runs the House of Cheviot and sells knee-high, luxury stalking socks to the hunting classes: merino wool reared in Australia, spun in Italy and knitted in Hawick on the Scottish borders. And he told me, in a crisp English accent, that these socks, in the colour of cinnamon and moss and bilberry, sell for as much as $445 a pair.

‘To presidents and kings, sultans and queens’, he said with a smile. I was sure most of them wouldn’t want the world to know their socks cost close to their subjects’ living weekly wage, but it was testimony to the rich micro-climate of the hunting economy.²⁴

I wandered on: into a world of skull mounts designed for bleached trophies from East Africa; enormous bronze sculptures of stalking leopards; Slovakian hunting furniture built in an explosion of jutting wood and wrought iron; and Italian stands selling delicate silver trinkets of pheasant and fox. It was a marathon just to wander the endless aisles.

Slowly, a feeling of claustrophobia began to grip. The entire place was so focused on hard selling and slick marketing that the romance and open space promised by the hunt diminished and died. Here was a good place to see merchandise: luxury, bespoke and of the highest quality. It was also a good place to be an anthropologist studying Europe’s landed elites. But it was not a good place to understand the motivation of the rifle hunter.

Loaded down with brochures and name cards, I walked wearily back to the metro. But my stalking had paid off; I had caught what I set out to get: an introduction.

The office was in a run-down street in a run-down part of my home city. I walked past a fly-poster-daubed corner shop, continued opposite a washed-out council estate, then, skirting a line of under-the-arches businesses offering cheap car repairs, came to a bleak south London side road.

It was still a far cry from the open plains of Africa or the medieval charms of Bavaria, but I had travelled a short distance from my home, heading south of the river, to talk to Marc Newton. I had first met Marc at his African fantasy pavilion at the IWA show, and as he was the managing director of John Rigby & Co., one of the oldest gun companies in the world, I had asked to see him again. He had agreed, knowing that I wanted to talk about the culture of the huntsman and he was well placed to have such a conversation.

He oversaw a venerable company that had, over the years, become renowned among big-game hunters for its powerful guns, particularly among a certain type of larger-than-life American hunter. It was the gunsmith of choice for bold whisky-touched men and for crown-touched kings. They had made rifles under Royal Warrant for the last three King Georges and for Edward VII.

Rigby were in the middle of a refit. As I rang the doorbell, the buzz of drilling and the murmur of polishing buffers sounded through the door. Inside, the décor was evolving; it promised to be in sharp contrast to the industrial grime outside. Here you were spirited away to a privileged world of deep-shine leather and aged spirits drunk from fine crystal.

‘Everything is here for a reason. We went for a colonial, East African feel,’ said Marc, pointing at the heads of impalas hanging from the wall.

Marc was an outspoken and yet disarmingly engaging man, and surprisingly young for the head of such a historical gun company. But then again, his father and his grandfather had both been gamekeepers, and he had been raised on the virtues of hunting.

He spoke plainly. ‘Let’s call a spade a spade. There is bullshit about guns in all their aspects. Something about guns seems to empower people, giving them a right to lecture others. Gun is just one word, but it says a million words. It’s one of the most emotive words in the English language,’ he said, settling into a leather high-backed chair.

I asked him what guns meant to him.

‘Hunters love guns; we have a deep passion for fine-quality items. We enjoy hunting because it’s so different from the society we live in, where we are trapped in front of computers. A fine hunting rifle is your ticket to transforming your dull life into those scenes you see in these black and white photos – back to a time of adventurers. When someone buys a Rigby they buy into that image, a key to that lifestyle. On a Friday night they can transform themselves into Denys Finch Hatton.’

Finch Hatton, an old Etonian and Oxford-educated aristocrat, was an interesting example to use. He was a big-game hunter, who, when on safari with the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, was asked to creep up on a rhino and stick the king’s head – taking the form of postage stamps – on its bottom. He did so, one for each buttock. When Finch Hatton died in a plane crash in 1931 his brother had a quote from Coleridge inscribed above his grave: ‘He prayeth well, who loveth well both man and bird and beast.’ I was not sure that most bankers picking up a rifle on a weekend had such noble sentiments or romantic sense of style, but I got Marc’s point.

Here Marc was selling a lifestyle as much as a weapon – the life of the big-game hunter in South Africa, a whiff of Hemingway in metal and wood. It was, at the very least, a good business tactic – because even though they sold only about 250 rifles a year, some went for $100,000 and more. The most popular of their line was the 1911-designed .416 Rigby, a $20,000 rifle that could take down an elephant. All of this epitomised, he told me, a certain spirit.

‘It’s a real roll-up-sleeves culture,’ he said. ‘What I find fascinating is that people look at me – a young man going out stalking, shooting, butchering – as barbaric and macho. Yet the same people see a National Geographic video, and all of a sudden that is “cultural”. But to that I say: “What about my culture?”’

Of course, this being England, I could not help but think that this culture was one notable for its privilege. Even this room, with its bespoke furniture and leather-bound books, spoke of inherited wealth or city bonuses. But it was not the first time that people I’d met in Britain had been defensive about their right to hunt. People were quick to claim they and their sport were misunderstood, even persecuted.

One bluff Yorkshire huntsman had sounded indignant on the phone when I suggested that hunting cultures in Britain were exclusive, even though his own website showed only photographs of middle-aged white men dressed in matching orange-brown tweed, sitting in leather chairs enjoying a post-shoot drink. He told me, in a hectoring way, that the people he employed to work on a grouse shoot were from all walks of life. Then he reprimanded me for describing shooting grouse as hunting.

Many, though, have a perception of hunting as the sport of the British gentry, one as much about class as it is about animal welfare – a measure of status. It is something underlined by things like press interviews where Princess Michael of Kent once claimed she was experiencing economic austerity, too: ‘I sew better than any nanny we’ve ever had . . . And my father had a farm in Africa. Have you ever taken the insides out of a stag?’²⁵

It’s not surprising, then, that left-wing polemicists saw class lines when the British Conservative-led government kept the cost of gun licences at $74, resulting in a government subsidy of some $25 million a year, just as they saw privilege at work when the subsidy for grouse moors was increased from $45 per hectare to $83. The left-wing critic George Monbiot wrote at the time: ‘So back we go to the hazy days of Edwardian England: a society dominated by rentiers, in which the city centres are set aside for those with tremendous wealth and the countryside is reserved for their bloodsports . . . our money is used to subsidise grouse and shotguns.’²⁶

But, for me, such issues spoke more about the hoary British class system than guns. So I steered the conversation with Marc back to hunting and asked about the controversies around big game – the horror many feel when someone is photographed kneeling next to a felled leopard or cheetah.

‘Anyone who can shoot a beautiful animal like this one,’ he said, pointing to the skin of a lion on the wall behind, ‘anyone who can do that without having a pang of guilt – well . . . I feel guilty.

‘But,’ he said, and I was expecting the ‘but’, ‘there is a use to the flesh. Within half an hour an elephant will be chopped up. We shot a hippo two years ago, and out of the bush people just appeared and chopped it up into pieces, and the meat went back to the local people.’

I did not buy this argument at all. Hunting for a deer, sure. Hunting for a lion that has killed someone, fine. But killing a lion just because you wanted to: I couldn’t understand it. I was pretty sure most didn’t kill them just to eat their steak.

A few months before, I had been in New York. The glittering heart of Madison Avenue had revealed a similar world of wealth and status. There I had gone to the sumptuous shop of the Italian gun makers Beretta. They had chosen to have their flagship store in New York, not Milan, but stepping through its heavy entrance door, framed by a hand-cut Italian stone façade, you were immediately transported into a European world of precise luxury. The ground floor was devoted to thick shirts and jackets that were a frenzy of buckles and pockets. The top floor was filled with shotguns whose price tags you had to look at twice to make sure you had not misread them. But it was the middle floor, the walls filled with monochrome pictures of Africa and bookshelves heavy with coffee-table hunting books, that caught my attention. Because there stood a line of DVDs, and one leaped out. Boddington on Cheetahs, it read. But this was no David Attenborough–style film; rather it was highlights of the fastest animal on earth being taken down by a hunting rifle. Others stood beside it: Boddington on Lions, Boddington on Leopards.

What Boddington had done was strictly legal, but the images on the back cover felt like the sort of footage, as an investigative journalist, I would have wanted for a film about the ugly world of animal abuse. It seemed unnecessary and cruel. I am sure I’d be dismissed as a naive, city-dwelling liberal for this sentiment. Those who bought these DVDs would argue that there is no philosophical difference between shooting a boar or a cheetah; the latter was just nicer-looking.

But as I shook hands to say goodbye to Marc, I couldn’t dispel the suspicion that perhaps he himself was not entirely convinced by the need to shoot lions and rhinos. I certainly wasn’t. But, perhaps to challenge my own prejudices – if that was what they were – I had made a decision. After my visit to Cape Town, meeting medics and police squads, and before I flew to the United States, I would drive north, through South Africa’s flower-lined Garden Route, to the remote frontier towns of the Eastern Cape.

The lodge lay about an hour from Cradock, a town of over 35,000 serving the farmers and traders of the districts that ran along the Great Fish River. Cradock had begun its life as a military outpost and was lined with neat, modest homes and wood-fronted shops selling the basics to live in this hard land. I had come here, to the western region of the Eastern Cape of South Africa, the poorest of all of South Africa’s nine provinces, to go on a hunting safari.

Cradock was the last town before the Veld, empty but for the endless grass and, for me, animals to hunt. The town had the feeling of a place once filled with people who would have fought for something passionately. Today, though, it seemed those who lived here could not recall exactly what they would have fought for. It was a forgotten place. Perhaps a sense of self-belief died with the killings of four young South African activists here in 1985 – shot by white security police in the darkest days of apartheid. I had meant to see a memorial commemorating them, but the rain had come down hard from nowhere, submerging the view of the city. Instead, I edged through the crawling traffic until I found a sign that read Route 61 and pulled over to get my bearings.

The name places here spoke of a Boer past: Graaff-Reinet, Hofmeyr, Sterkstroom. This land, with its rolling, fertile expanse, the sky huge over it, was to the Afrikaner God’s country. You could see why: here the winding light played across the plains, and the rain clouds could be seen for miles. I pulled out and drove on the empty road, a dark patch of sky approaching on the horizon.

The rain came harder this time, and then suddenly, through the water, a sign appeared: ‘Fish River’. I took its lure. Ten kilometres and eight cattle-grids later I reached my destination.

It had taken me nearly three days of solid driving to get here from Cape Town. But distance is a feature of all life here. The hunting ground for Richard Holmes Safari stretched for some 200,000 acres on either side, bordering the edges of the Karoo and Eastern Grasslands. And after much negotiation about hunting permits and emails that bounced back and forth, I had agreed that I would come to these spreading valleys and gentle hills to hunt two springbok, antelope-gazelles, the national symbol of South Africa. This was no easy decision. In a very basic sense I was coming to hunt purely for this book. In order to understand the hunter’s allure, I felt I had to do this. I had but one caveat – that whatever was hunted would grace the table later.

Getting out of the car, I looked around. I was in a shallow valley, and far away the tips of distant mountain ranges could be seen. Glossy starlings lined the road, high on branches that still dripped from the downpour, and the air smelled clean. And then, through the slanting rain, the owner of the Safari Lodge came out to greet me.

Richard Holmes was not who I had expected. Perhaps I thought he’d have a Henderson the Rain King spirit to him, a man with endless tales of derring-do. But instead he was considered and measured and had more the appearance of an accountant than a hunter. Of course, hunting was in his blood – he didn’t have to dress for the part. He was seven years old when he shot his first springbok and had taken down birds three years before even that. He had run safaris now for over two decades.

In that way he was like many others throughout this country. At the turn of the twenty-first century there were almost no game farms in South Africa. Today there are over 12,000 of them, with 10,000 permitting hunting.²⁷ It’s a big thing for these remote economies. The hunting industry generated 7.7 billion Rand – about $800 million – in 2011, with a third of that from the 15,000 trophy hunters who came here from overseas.²⁸ A lion hunt can cost up to $70,000, and a permit to hunt a black rhino recently raised $350,000 at auction.²⁹

But, unlike some others, Richard only hunted free-range animals that he could eat; he would not shoot a lion or a cheetah for its pelt and had only ever hunted in South Africa. His wife, Marion, had the same approach. They also ran a conservation trust from their lodge for servals, caracals, African wild cats and black-footed cats.

The lodge was modest and neat. A section for butchering and refrigerating stood beside the Holmes’s house, and beside that were a few thatched huts for the shooting guests. To one side was a flower-lined garden, filled with red and yellow blazes, the purple starlets of the African lily and the tight orange heads of gerbera daisies: an oasis of contained beauty in this wilderness. Further along was a dining room and kitchen. There was a filled fridge with vodkas and tonics, and outside was a fire-pit for a braai – a South African barbeque. I was told a dinner of game meat and vegetables would be served at dusk and was left to fall exhausted onto my bed.

That evening I went out to meet the other guests. There was one couple here: John and Doris White. John was a big and bluff American in his mid fifties, Doris fifteen years his junior. She was from Córdoba in Argentina, and he was from Minnesota – he had an identical twin who had also married an Argentinian. This he told me within a minute of meeting me, because like many Americans he was generous with his facts. I liked him. They had already paid for their hunt – four springboks, two blessboks and three ostriches – and both their faces were flushed with excitement at being here.

John had been raised with guns, like many American hunters I had met. He had been taught to shoot a .22 rifle by his grandfather, but years in the American Air Force flying Lockheed C-130s out of Panama, Spain and Greenland meant he had only recently returned to this passion. Now, with Doris, he was set upon taking down an ostrich – a hell of a bird to get up close to. The two of them, in matching camouflage T-shirts and trousers, were in hunting heaven.

The other guest that night was Jéane Grieve. He was a local taxidermist – in the trade for ten years after quitting his job as an aircraft engineer. American hunters like John made up almost all of Jéane’s clients, and that explained why he was here – to drum up some more trade. Americans like to commemorate their hunts. Between 1999 and 2008, two-thirds of the 5,663 lions killed in Africa ended up being shipped out to the US.³⁰ And when it came to their trophies, the Americans wanted them big.

‘They like full body mounts,’ Jéane said. ‘The rest of the world, except possibly the Australians, prefer bleached skulls.’ I had never met a taxidermist before and knew nothing of his art. So I asked which was the hardest animal to work on. He was quick to answer.

‘The porcupine. A full mount would be one of the hardest; the skin’s paper-thin, particularly around its backside. It’s a real pain.’ Sometimes the issue is not the detail, but the time it takes to prepare an animal, he said. Elephants take two years to mount – his company has to outsource the task to others, they are so big. His own outfit has a warehouse with thousands of carcasses in it that are being treated. One client had 146 mounts ordered in one go. Many others want to have the big five mounted – the lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, leopard and rhinoceros.³¹

I looked a little shocked that anyone would want all five in their home, but he had a straightforward attitude to the animals that were hunted. ‘I don’t see a difference between hunting a kudu or a leopard, as long as it is properly managed.’

Hot plates of meat and potatoes were brought through, and we sat down at a long table to a dinner of hearty red Cape wine and freshly hunted springbok – imbued with a taste so far from farmed meat you cannot call them the same thing. The conversation turned, naturally, to hunting.

Each flowing idea was to some degree bold and, to an urban creature like me, previously unconsidered. Why not have a rhino farm where you could shave the horn annually, like shearing a sheep? Condemning the hunting of rare animals is myopic. In any pride there would be ageing females and males no longer fit for breeding, so why not license those for the hunt? ‘They’ll die anyway.’

‘Human beings have caused the decline of predators,’ said Richard. ‘Now you have wild animals that need to be controlled. They need to be killed anyway. What is the difference between natural culling and a trophy hunter? You can’t put a wild springbok in an abattoir anyway. By the time you did, if you could, you would stress them out so much that you’d have to tranquillise them.’

He said that their reserve helps protect habitats for wildlife, on land that would otherwise be turned over to agriculture. ‘Sheep and cows create a farming monoculture of grazing that is deeply destructive.’ Safaris have revitalised the land. In the 1950s, there were 500,000 game animals on South Africa’s plains. Today there are 20 million, bred for hunting and conservation.³² The gun did that, he said.

What about guns, I asked. Didn’t all these guns increase the likelihood of people being shot?

‘People kill people,’ Richard replied. ‘Guns don’t kill people.’ And, from his perspective I could see why he might believe this – farm murders are few and far between out here. But I had not come here to talk about gun murders – at least, not the killing of people. Besides, it was late, and I was due to get up before the dawn.

The plains were laid out below us, and above us thick clouds that never seemed to rain cast long shadows across the stretching emptiness. The wind was light, pushing the rough grass with jagged jerks. I clutched my rifle. Through my telescopic sight I picked out distant antelope in the quivering crosshairs, but they were too far away. We had been out for two hours now and nothing yet.

Then, John Sihelegu, my guide, touched my shoulder and pointed to the right. There, above a rocky gully, stood a springbok female. Perhaps seven years old, she had not seen us and was high up, framed against the cobalt blue. Only her top half was visible. Fine thatching grass covered her legs and belly.

I turned and raised my rifle. It was an awkward shot; the red rocks behind me dug into my kidneys. I felt the smooth wood of the Finnish rifle’s stock on my face and closed my left eye. The sights lined up, and the crosshairs pushed down to the spot where I had been shown to aim, the best place to take her down: the heart, just beneath her shoulder.

My finger caressed the trigger, and I breathed in.

The shot rang out, and she fell. Then there was a flurry of noise as the staccato report carried across the plains and a push of pounding hooves as the herd rushed down the gully before us, leaping over the ochre rocks in their fear and confusion. Five, six, seven young springbok flew in front, muscles taut. They sped out down into the plain. I reloaded.

All had fled down, except the one I had shot. She lay above, unseen. Then I noticed that a small springbok, the last down to the gully’s exit, had stopped, her tail quivering. She turned and looked for a second back up the ravine. She was turning for her mother and then she too was gone, bounding after the others. I had a terrible, lurching feeling in my stomach.

I stood up, gripped the rifle and, pushing away from the jutting stones, turned up the hill. The springbok lay there, twitching. She was not dead. I hurried to her and she panicked through the pain and the sweat. She tried to run but she could not; her shoulder was no longer there, and she could not stand.

The guide said, ‘Take her. Quick. Put the sights to three and aim just there.’

I twisted the scope back from 6: 5 . . . 4 . . . 3. Then raised the rifle. I was five feet away and picked out the spot and again pulled the trigger. The springbok convulsed, and a small red dot appeared. Then she lay still, and that was it.

I felt nothing but sadness.

The guide told me to pick up the dead animal. ‘Time for a photo,’ he said. A large string of bloody snot was oozing from the beast’s nose. Her muscles quivered, and her eyes quickly glazed. I picked up the warm body and pulled her onto a termite mound. And in the flipping, saw what the bullet had done. It had left a small entry point, but the back of her shoulder had been blown clean open. A hole, a deep cavity was there, just below her spine, and all the bones and muscles were exposed in an open, bloody mass.

I shifted the antelope’s hind legs and placed it on the rust red earth. Then the guide told me to hold its neck. He wanted me to position it so that the best picture was possible.

‘That’s right. Just there. Take off your hat,’ he said. The muscles in the animal’s neck contracted. The picture was a good one. The scudding clouds behind me were full. The colours were vibrant, and the animal looked dignified. But my face in the photo was not one I had seen before: my eyes looked like the eyes of a killer, dark and full of bloodlust.

I stood up, and we got to work on the felled animal. A slickened knife opened up its gut, and its entrails spread in a slurry over the stony ground. Then it was lifted and hoisted down off the peak, its head lolling to the side, and with each step down I thought of the sharp crack of the rifle and the calf that looked back for its mother, and I wondered what this journey was doing to me.