Hunting - My First Bison
In my ongoing preparation for the African safari to seek a Cape Buffalo which would never happen. I bought myself several more African hunting books for Christmas. I sought the memorable experience of the 1950's writer Robert Ruark as noted in one of my new books: "I...looked at Mbogo (the buffalo) and Mbogo looked at me. He was 50- to 60-yards off; his head was low and his eyes stared right down into my soul. He looked at me as if he hated my guts. He looked at me as if I had despoiled his fiancee, murdered his mother and burned down his house. He looked at me as if I owed him money. I never saw such malevolence in the eyes of any animal or any human being before or since. So I shot him."
I distinctly remember "my" bison at the Wilderness Hunting Lodge in central Tennessee. I had signed-up for a cow meat bison and we had found the one in the herd in the grassland portion of the operation’s remote lot in the morning. The guide, my wife and me walked within 10-yards of the meandering animals - which in retrospect meant that, they were semi-tame, unlike the bison in Yellowstone National Park which regularly “airlift” foolish visitors who approach that closely.
The guide, my hunting buddy and I returned that afternoon with the truck and trailer and spent an hour 4-wheeling up and down hills in the woods. I had my unloaded 375 Holland & Holland on my lap along with my African shooting sticks and a box of my handloaded ammunition, with the “de rigueur" 300-grain Woodleigh Protected Point (TM) African-style bullets, in the spacious pockets of my shooting coat with the my sewn-in PAST(TM) Magnum Recoil Shield.
We finally saw the bison herd slowly meandering along the back fence of the large property, and came to an abrupt stop. I bailed out of the seat, followed by my hunting buddy to whom I handed the ammunition box and asked him to get three rounds. I forgot that my CZ Safari would hold 4-rounds. As the herd approached, I frantically screwed the three sections of each of the three legs of the shooting sticks together and expanded them in the correct orientation such that the two long padded top sticks made a “V” facing the herd. I quickly loaded the three rounds, and double-checked with the guide where the heart was. His answer was “behind the front leg” which I thought meant about the usual 1/3 body height up to the rear of the front leg.
By this time the bison was only about 15-yards away and passing to the front of my setup. I looked through my 2-10 Nikon and was dismayed to see only hair somewhere on the bison’s hide. In my amateur mode, I had put the scope on maximum zoom instead of minimum zoom. I quickly racked the zoom knob and took a steady-aimed deliberate shot exactly where I thought that I was told. The shot that I remember is that the bison totally ignored my insult as if it never happened and kept on calmly walking away with no eye contact.
As noted in “The Perfect Shot” by Craig Boddington, which I subsequently purchased and subsequently met at a Dallas Safari Club Exposition, “unless angered, the bison is a phlegmatic beast, not subject to bullet shock…[and] usually takes a bullet through the lungs calmly and then lies down dies. By the way, the book showed the my error with the heart 1/3 up in line with the leg. I later saw that the bullet had gone clean through and exited as a complete double lung shot.
Mercifully, I was a fan of the books by Capstick and Ruark on hunting Cape Buffalo and took two carefully aimed calm and steady shots off my shooting sticks in the mode of the “rear quartering heart shot”. Despite being a rank amateur, I did not make the classic mistake of shooting the bison in the butt nor in the stomach/intestines.
The bison turned and went out of sight behind the trees and my hunting buddy came back yelling, “Get some more ammunition!”
I retrieved the ammunition box from the truck seat where my hunting buddy left it, extracted and loaded two more rounds and walked quickly to where my hunting buddy was. By this time he was standing over the dead bison.
After the obligatory pictures, I went back to my shooting sticks and grubbed in the leaves for a few minutes to retrieve the cartridge cases as souvenirs.
When the bison was processed, her guts fill most of a large plastic trash can. Her chest area was like Grand Central Station and her heart had a hole in the side.
On this year’s bison hunt, I will take the heart shot and have put two extra grains of powder in my cartridges to max-out the velocity at almost 2,500 ft/sec.
