His writing style remains undated, as readable as a tabloid newspaper and as exciting as any Forsyth thriller. Are you all right? I tried to arouse those tired, intrepid hunters, Steiner and Sherwin, but I'll be damned if they had not slept through the whole thing and told me I was nuts to wake them out of a sound sleep with such a wild tale. ""As night closed in, we retired to our cots and mosquito netting. When it was clear, the man-eater straddled the corpse and, holding it by a limp shoulder, dragged it across the open and into the blackness of bush.The lion easily carried his kill for three miles, pausing only twice to shift his grip. If they were made the night before, the standard procedure is to say your prayers, load your heavy rifle, and follow the tracks to the point where the lion has "lain up" for the hot daylight hours, usually sleeping in the thickest tangle of crud it can find until it cools off and darkness falls.The impossibly slow and hopefully soundless creeping through the blast-furnace heat of midday, with visibility often less than ten yards, is enough to rattle the nerves of a snake charmer. Three more unearthly screams followed. After leaving Wall Street, the New Jersey native hunted in Central and South America before going to Africa, where he held pro hunting licenses in Ethiopia, Zambia, Botswana, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Colin Matthews has had many operations on his hand, but it is not expected to be of much use to him again. As she neared the hut again with steel nerve, there was a scuffle of movement, and although she was a young woman who had never listened to anyone die, the sound that came through the darkness left no doubt that Len Harvey was beyond help.Banging on the De Beers' door, she poured out her story and collapsed. I felt the first lukewarm slug burn the dust from between my teeth and form a small, liquid bonfire in the pit of my stomach. Still conscious, Len screamed for his wife to get out of the hut and run. I wonder how many more there were who were simply reported as "missing" or, considering the primitive conditions of the more remote tribes, never reported at all.Certainly, there are any number of cases of men being killed but not eaten by lions. They were dimly-lit in the semi-darkness of the camp. Based on Capstick's own experiences and the personal accounts of his colleagues, Death in the Long Grass portrays the great killers of the African bush-- not only the lion, leopard, and elephant, but the primitive rhino and the crocodile waiting for its unsuspecting prey, the titanic hippo and the Cape buffalo charging like an express train out ""Where were my guns? Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. ""There was a large tree in our camp area. Seconds pass, then the lioness rises and begins to ooze forward, gliding like a tawny wraith between deep clumps of shadow. It dawned on him that the lioness must be standing on the stock. Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2023. Like New/Fine. A pulsing fountain burst from the wound in a tall throbbing geyser as I thrust it back again, working it with all the strength of my arms. In tangles like this, a long charge would be twenty-five to thirty yards, which gives you some idea of the time left to shoot.Ahead of me, Silent stiffened and solidified into an ebony statue. The movie "Ghost and the Darkness" is one of my very favorite of all. Except for the arm and some claw marks on his chest, he seemed to be unhurt. Too late. An inch or so higher or lower would have broken either her upper or lower jaw and prevented her from snapping off Colin's kneecap a few seconds later. I finally decided, after locking eyes with her for at least six months, that I would prefer the devil I didn't know to the one lying there watching me like a butcher reading a cuts chart. Silent wrapped the pitiful fragments in, bark fiber and we started back to the village. It is, in fact, man against himself.Over the incalculably hoary ages, lion hunting has been considered one of the most noble sports, and the lion the most respected adversary of the hunter. Actually, all of the man-eaters I have shot or inspected after someone else killed them have been in the blush of health with the exception of one old lioness in Ethiopia who had a horribly deformed lower jaw, from the bone of which I extracted a two-and-a-half-inch chunk of iron curtain rod shot there by a hydrocephalic moron with a muzzle loader. Death in the Long Grass: A Big Game Hunter's Adventures in the African Bush Kindle Edition by Peter Hathaway Capstick (Author), M. Philip Kahl (Photographer) Format: Kindle Edition 964 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle $19.94 Read with Our Free App Hardcover $34.89 1 Used from $34.45 6 New from $33.51 During the course of a safari, one or more lion kills of natural game are usually discovered. that the lion coughed before beginning his charge. It is the clearest case of not just the ancient confrontation of man against beast, but also of man deliberately putting himself in harm's way. A single hyena had crossed the blood spoor and followed the lion, but a threatening rumble from the man-eater kept the other animal shuffling twenty feet away.The big cat rolled the body over and, holding it down with his forepaws, began to feed. A low, incredibly sinister rumble welled up through the dark, and the hut shook under a heavy shock. I marked aspot on the trail that would allow me to go over the edge out of her reach. As if brain-shot he instantly collapsed as the edge of the blade found and severed the spinal chord, killing him at once. I released a very large breath that I had been holding for the past hour and wandered over to the dining hut for a similarly proportioned Scotch before the shakes arrived.The whole camp poured out and came over to view the punctured pussy. At five yards she gathers her hind legs beneath her flattened, lean body, the hind claws gripping the earth for purchase. I had refilled the magazine but was afraid to shoot since I did not know where the other lion was and dared not risk a zero-range charge while working the bolt. Hans Besser, a German hunter early in this century, told of a missionary of the White Fathers in Tanganyika being carried off and taking fifteen minutes to die while the lion ate him. I had come close enough, theoretically, to being a statistic on both occasions to never again underestimate a man-eating feline.I rigged the mosquito netting and took my weekly malaria pill as Silent maneuvered the extra thorn bushes across the barrier. If you're watering multiple times a day in mid-temperature weather, you're giving it too much. I went back into the hut. It grabbed the boy by the skull from between the unarmed mother and father and dragged him out of the Land Rover, severely mauling him until, somehow, the father was able to reclaim his son. The first time a lion returns to a human kill to finish his meal and receives a whiplash of bullet from a bad shot, you can bet the beer money he won't make the same mistake twice. I used to watch nature shows and cringe when the lion caught the little antelope. To be on the safe side, I would sleep in the open car with the big rifleagainst my leg. The man was still staring in horror, mumbling gibberish. I should have known better since Martin, my head waiter, had reported seeing a lioness with three cubs that very afternoon close to camp. By the time I'd finished the first chapter of his first book, Death in the Long Grass, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me to abandon my burgeoning career as Capstick had and try my hand as a professional hunter as Capstick did. Reprinted by permission. Death in the Long Grass: A Big Game Hunter's Adventures in the African Bush is written by Peter Hathaway Capstick and published by St. Martin's Press (Macmillan US Trade). His wife had reached it and was gripping a crossbar that formed a frame for the lashed-on, grass. His jaws opened and the long, white canines drove into the unsuspecting victim's temples, piercing the thin bone past the eye sockets, and sank into the brain like driven spikes. On the anniversary of Watan's death, some people went up to the mountain to lay flowers, complaining that the city government hadn't held any commemorative activities, that there were mounds of dirt and weeds in the park that hadn't been cleaned up . Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 9, 2014. Marie, Marcel (Marcel Brochard, owner of the Studio de Bologne, a major Paris movie studio and Cox's nonhunting companion), one of our trackers and I were the only ones left on terra firma. It seemed obvious that these lions were regrouping for another raid on the camp. He must have already cleared it through my company or he wouldn't have known I was free. My mind raced like a flywheel: What'll it be, boy, lion or crocs? Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2022. St. Martin's Press, 1978-01-15. My dear, dumb friend, who had never fired a gun in his life, Marcel, had unloaded it without my knowledge. He shrugged with typical African fatalism. Hippo is is at the top of the list for herbivores, and crocodiles lead the category of man-killers in the carnivore section, yet neither are true sporting animals in the classic sense. As if I was walking on a pile of sleeping mambas, I dismounted and approached the lion. ""I then entered into the stupidest misadventure of a mis-spent life. Crawling into the nightmare tangles of thorn on your hands and knees after a big male lion may have very different consequences from kicking a cottontail rabbit out of a Connecticut brush pile, although in each case the sport is called hunting.But for his skin as a personal trophy, the lion is hunted entirely as a personal challenge. The Death in the Long Grass: A Big Game Hunter's Adventures in the African Bush book is in average demand now as the rank for the book is 35,593 at the moment. A dark green stretch of towering, loomed ahead in the moonlight, and the killer made for it, dragging the man deep into one of the tunnels of the tangled boughs. It's one of the more interesting lion-in-camp tales I have heard.It was the first shooting day of Cox's safari with the French hunter M. Cornon, and the party had driven all day from Fort Archambeau, on the Bahr Aouk, to their hunting area on the Chari River. I stopped by the Italians' hut to advise them of the state of affairs and was able to talk them out of their .460 Weatherby magnum elephant guns, figuring that a pair of tyros opening up blindly at some night noise with those cannons could well have tragic consequences. Can you give it a try before the trail cools? At ten feet he put his .458 bullet into the center of a growing, dark shape that seemed to float up at him and was fortunate to remove the top of the lion's skull.As they built a fire to skin the cat, two men had to stand guard against the other several lions and lionesses who came practically up to the fire. Another yard and she seemed uncertain. That's a very long charge, longer than I have ever seen in our thick central African hunting grounds. Death in the Long Grass: A Big Game Hunter's Adventures in the African Bush Hardcover - Illustrated, 15 Jan. 1978 by Peter Hathaway Capstick (Author) 992 ratings See all formats and editions Kindle Edition 10.44 Read with Our Free App Hardcover 21.11 5 Used from 17.00 6 New from 20.92 Mass Market Paperback 20.00 3 Used from 20.00 It's been written by someone who knows more than most about the subject having spent decades there. If I had let it eat maybe a leg or two before shooting it, all would have been well. Most of her frontal lower teeth were missing, but she stillmanaged to gum fourteen Galla tribesmen with quite definitive results.Possibly, the practice of the early explorers to consider all man-eaters as "mangy brutes" is better rooted in psychology than fact. As thrilling as any novel, as taut and exciting as any adventure story, Peter Hathaway Capstick's Death in the Long Grass takes us deep into the heart of darkness to view Africa through the eyes of one of the most renowned professional hunters. Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon, St. Surprised at her audacity, the cat dropped the man, and the woman was able to pull him into the hut, closing and jamming the door shut. 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