Next Stop: Africa?

Got this friend—uh, acquaintance, accomplice, abettor?—what wants me to take a little trip: “Let’s go to Africa!”

He ain’t much on mincing words.

Africa. Just, wow! AFRICA!

Cause he knows that’s the place(s) of my dreams: North-Eastern Rhodesia, Luangwa Valley, Kalahari, Lado Enclave, Caprivi Strip. (Plus all the new names they’re tagged with once we all got politically corrected…)

I have quite a few sagging shelves in the bookcases to my left as I write this, featuring names like Capstick, Lyell, Kittenberger, Hemingway, Ruark, Foran, Buckley, von Blixen-Finecke, Finaughty, Neumann, Foa, Pease, Roosevelt, Stigand, Bell…

You may recognize a few of them; the others wrote about the Africa I truly wanted to go to: 200 years ago.

Now? Not so much.

“You know I’ve been over there,” he rattled on, “and the way you like to track stuff down and do rude things to it, why, you’d fit right in. Jump on the back of an open truck, rip right through the dust until you pick out a likely target, then ask the guide how much it’s going to cost you to shoot it. Everything you see has a price on its head!”

Well, then. That’s hunting, eh? Back up a mite and read Neumann or Stigand or Bell…

And while we’re back there, let us take a look from a redneck’s point of view.

It is my understanding that before even getting permission to head in the general direction of Zambia, one must be inoculated for everything from dandruff to wharf-rat-itis.

I don’t do shots. With needles. Strike one.

Then, there’s the trip itself. The invitation was accompanied by information: it’s only a 19-hour plane ride. Over open ocean.

Strike two.

You see, I learned to walk, to swim and to drive. Flying, I ain’t so good at.

I always go back to my compadre Charlie Elliott. When an exasperated magazine editor finally managed to pin Charlie down on exactly why he wouldn’t accept an assignment to go on safari, the Ol’ Professor replied: “Because I can’t walk home from there!”

Pure, unadulterated logic! What’s not to understand?

And NINETEEN HOURS?

It’s been three decades since I’ve had a beer, but after what it would take to get me on that jet, the top 11 executives at Anheuser-Busch could retire tomorrow.

Full benefits plus bonuses.

A keg a mile ought to just about do it. Nautical miles. I figure the safari would end at roughly the same time as the hangover, so we could start right up again heading home…

One of the books I’m glancing at now is from the baron of the bobwhites, Havilah Babcock. Its title? “I Don’t Want To Shoot An Elephant.”

Me neither. (Plus, the price on that fool’s head would likely be about the same size as said head—and incite an infarction…)

Further, how we going to get all that meat back and how many freezers we gotta buy?

Wait, what? You DON’T bring meat back? Are your three remaining brain cells on vacation?

If you ain’t gonna EAT it, why you gonna SHOOT it?

Man. I can just see it now: impala liver on a stick… roasting over an open hickory fire… in my front yard… neighborhood moms rushing kids inside away from the lunatic chef down the street…

So what you’re saying is that following a 19-hour drunk I shot a forty-leven-dollar whitetail-looking something with straight-up horns and now I got to leave the hams and backstraps with a bunch of goobers decked out in nothing more than  broomstraw skirts and bones through their noses?

Ohhh, I see; so we do get to eat SOME of it. Like, while we’re on the premises. Assuming that there ARE premises.

Admittedly, I’m a big eater. But  how long does it take to inhale a hippo? (If it’s being fried over camel dung, not very long; just throw it to the dogs. There are dogs, right? Plotts? Any bears in Africa? Sorry, I digress…)

Sounds like strike three to me.

On the other hand, it may well be that I could use a vacation.

(And as my girlfriend laughingly says, “When YOU go on vacation, something’s gotta die…)

But I really would like to teach my bud about hunting. Sans truck.

Such as a four-hour stalk through blistering heat, bathing in salty sweat and with a throat full of bile because you’re on the heels of a very displeased lion that will happily reduce you to a large red spot on the sand while he’s processing the protein that you truly are.

Then, once he’s finally in the scope, you realize he’s not up to standards set well beforehand. So, in perfect satisfaction you snick the big bore’s safety on and back quietly out. Tomorrow…

That’s hunting; to me.

Can’t really speak for lions on a personal basis, but bears—two hours from home—do that to me. I imagine it would work equally as well with leopards, cape buffalo and other critters capable of tearing one into tatters.

The one inescapable fact in all this is that I have a lifelong weakness for wild game. That impala liver? In all seriousness, my mouth waters just thinking about it. Venison  pretty much replaced beef for me 50 years ago, except for maybe the odd store-bought ribeye.

I ain’t going to Africa. That’s a done deal. But I simply can’t stop wondering: does DoorDash do kudu…