This was the first hunt on which I went out specifically wanting a hyena. Up to then I'd taken one as a target of opportunity off a leopard bait in Zambia in 2021, on a tag that came with the leopard licence, and I'd convinced myself I understood what was involved. Eighteen days in Botswana cured me of that.
The concession was on the southern fringe of the Okavango, well inland of the permanent water, where the ground is salt-pan flat and the mopane comes in dense thickets you can't see fifty metres into. Camp was four canvas tents around a fire pit, no fence, the nearest tar road four hours' drive in a Cruiser. The PH was a Botswanan in his fifties named K., quiet, direct, and patient with what turned out to be my impatience.
August is the end of the dry. The pans were white, the elephants were spending their nights pushing through camp's perimeter looking for the marula tree we hadn't bothered to fence, and the cats were on the move because the herds were on the move.
The original plan was straightforward: shoot a zebra early in the trip for bait, hang it in the right place, sit it from the second night on. Hyena, we hoped, in the first three or four nights. Anything else that came in we'd see what to do with on the day.
I shot the zebra on day three. The bait went up on day four. By day eight nothing had been on it but vultures.
K. was unbothered. He'd seen this before. The pride of lions whose territory we were on the edge of had moved south after a herd of buffalo, and the hyenas had gone with them. The bait would either start working when the lions came back or it wouldn't, and in the meantime there was springbok and impala to take and time to read.
On day eleven a friend of K's came by camp at lunchtime — there is a network of operators in that part of Botswana that all know each other and pass information by HF radio — and said a hyena clan had been seen denning twenty kilometres north, on a salt pan we hadn't been near. We drove up that afternoon and walked the last hour in.
The den was an old aardvark burrow, enlarged, with the unmistakable mess of bone fragments and dried scat that a clan accumulates around its main den site. There was no doubt the place was active. We didn't approach closer than two hundred metres. We sat the wind for an hour, watched nothing happen, and walked back to the truck before dark.
The next morning we came back at first light. Two adults and three pups out in front of the den, lying in the sun like dogs. Through the binoculars I could see one of the adults was an old male with a broken canine and a heavy mane on the shoulders. K. nodded once.
I will not pretend it was difficult. The wind was right, the rest was solid, the range was 140 metres on a steady animal who did not know we were there. The .375 with the 300-grain A-Frame did exactly what the books say it does. The other adult was up the burrow before the report had finished crossing the pan; the pups were out of sight before I'd worked the bolt.
The skinning took the rest of the morning. K. handled most of it; I learned by watching. The smell is the thing nobody warns you about. It stays in your clothes for days. The trackers who came up with the truck were polite about it on the drive back, and slightly less polite at camp.
I would not sit a bait set on speculation again. Not on a first hunt. The knowledge required to read a bait — to know whether it's working, going to start working, or has already failed — is not something a client picks up in a fortnight, and the time I lost on the bait was time that could have been spent looking for spoor and asking around. K. tried to tell me this on day five and I didn't listen. I would listen now.
I would also not bring a friend's lever-action .35 Remington as a backup, even though I did, even though he insisted I would love it, and even though I left it in the safe at camp every single morning for two and a half weeks.
The skull, after a long argument with customs in two countries, is on a shelf above my desk. The broken canine is still visible. I look at it most mornings.