Hunting Free-Range Kudu

Northern Cape, South Africa — 5 June 2025

10 year old, free range kudu bull from the Northern Cape.

“The thing about hunting free-ranging cape kudu is that it’s either going to be extremely easy or very hard. The problem is that you don’t get to choose.”

Richard Mann

Empty Cases

Sometimes you’re just driving along in the bush and there, right beside the two-track, the bull stands. So elegant and regal for all the other kudu and the non-hunters in the world to see, so confident in his ghostliness he’s believing he’s invisible to anything that could do him harm. You stop the truck, get out with your rifle, and whack him.

Other times you walk — miles — looking for kudu that seem to have been declared extinct the previous day. You go up and down hills not meant to be walked on, with grass hummocks hiding holes that will swallow your foot and snap an ankle, and with boulders sized from golf balls to beach balls, interspaced in the grass and thorn just far enough apart a foot won’t fit between them.

Other times you sit in the sun, and in the wind, and in the rain, warm to the point your melting and moments later, cold to the point you’re in a perpetual shiver. Your eyes are glued to $3000 dollars worth of glass, clear and defining enough to read your boarding pass at a half mile. You’ll look at a section of bush the size of a football field 1000 yards away for an hour, scanning every shaded section of ground. Convinced there are no kudu you take a break to rest your eyes, look back, and there he is; grey, ghostly, and as large and grand as a decaying Scottish castle, with the sun electrifying the ivory tips of his horns turning them an iridescent gold.

You hastily readjust your position to get a better look at his curls, look again, and his gone. Five minutes later you see him again, resting in the shade of a thorny acacia, 300 yards from where you just saw him five minutes ago. That’s when you start planning a stalk. A stalk that might take another two hours to execute, to only discover the bull is gone, leaving you to wonder if he was just a specter or an apparition conceived by Mother Africa to punish you because you thought you were worthy to walk over her red dirt and seek her seemingly unattainable spiraled wonder.

It’s either easy or hard, and it’s the kudu who decides, not you.