18" Chobe Bushbuck - Hunting Zimbabwe with Buzz Charlton of CMS Safaris

Heading back to camp after a day of elephant hunting I spotted an animal off the road in the bushes looking at us. I'd already seen hundreds of impala so initially thought this might be an immature impala. But as I was processing what I was seeing I realized it was a spiral horn and was about to bring it to Buzz's attention when he spotted it and said it was a very big bushbuck. At the same time one of the trackers riding on the back of the hunting truck leaned over to the side window and said "big bushbuck".

We drove past him not changing our pace nor making eye contact in hopes he wouldn't panic. We continued down into a gully which, along with some big bushes, effectively hid us and the vehicle from his sight. We left the engine running, dismounted the truck and proceeded on foot up the gully until we got past the heavy bushes where we climbed out of the gully slowly peaking around the bushes to locate him.

It took maybe 5 minutes to find him. He had moved into his own gully, which was closer to the dirt track we were just on. All we could see were the tops of his horns. He walked his gully looking like he was headed to the dirt track. As he started to come out Buzz whistled to get him to stop which he did.

In the excitement of having something to shoot at after four days, and the size of this Chobe Bushbuck, and bushbucks being one of my favorite plains game, I forgot I was in Africa and instead of shooting him on the shoulder I shot him behind his shoulder (a little too far behind actually). He jumped and ran across the dirt track something less than 50 yards before falling over.

Buzz did measure him multiple times and indeed it was 18". The biggest Chobe Bushbuck Buzz had ever seen in his 25+ years of hunting.

Fantastic hunt with a fantastic team.

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