Brown hyena was the headline species and what got me to apply for the permit nine months out, but the trip was always going to be a kudu hunt with the brown as a long shot. That is exactly how it played out. The kudu came on day six. The hyena, when it eventually happened, came on day thirteen of fourteen, and it came as a complete accident.
Brown hyena is not lightly licensed in Namibia. The quota is small, distributed by region, and a non-resident permit takes paperwork that is best handled by the outfitter and not by the client. Mine took five months from first enquiry to signed permit in hand. The outfitter, a third-generation Namibian named W., wrote me a single email at the start of that process saying, in summary: pay the deposit, fly out when I tell you, and don't ask in the meantime. I did as instructed. The next email was a flight booking confirmation.
I mention this because the most common way I see people get burned on African hunting is to overestimate how much of the process they can run themselves. The good outfitters earn their fees twice over before you ever land.
The first six days were standard kudu hunting in the Caprivi: walk, glass, walk further, glass again, see nothing, see something, watch it disappear. We took an excellent 54-inch bull on the morning of the sixth day at 180 metres, broadside on a clearing between two thickets. He went thirty metres and dropped.
For the next week we hunted plains game, mostly to fill the cool-room for trophy preparation, and waited for a brown to be reported anywhere within driving distance. Browns are nocturnal almost without exception, they cover huge ranges (a single individual will use a hundred square kilometres or more), and they don't den in clans the way spotted do. You don't sit a bait for brown. You don't call them. You essentially try to be in the right spot at the right time, and that spot is most often a carcass or a known scat-marking tree.
On day thirteen we were driving back to camp at last light from a failed late-afternoon stalk on a sable that didn't materialise. Three kilometres out from camp, on the track, the headlights came across a brown standing broadside at the edge of the road, looking at the truck. He had been on something — there was a spring hare or hyrax on the verge, half-eaten — and he was so confident in the dim light that he didn't run.
W. cut the engine and rolled to a stop. I had perhaps four seconds to decide. The .375 was in the rack between us. The brown was at maybe sixty metres, side-on, and was about to disappear into the long grass on the far side of the track. I shot from the truck — not standing, not over sticks, sitting in the passenger seat with the window down and my elbow on the door frame, which is not how I have ever taken any other animal in my life. He went straight down.
I have written that paragraph three times trying to make it sound less unsporting than it was, and I can't. It was a shot of opportunity, taken from a vehicle, on an animal at last light. The licence allowed it. W. encouraged it. I took it. If you want to argue that I shouldn't have, write me a letter. I think about it more often than I'd like.
He was a mature male, perhaps eight years old, in good condition. The mane was deep, the long guard hairs along the spine still intact and not yet rubbed bare as they do in old age. The skull is at a taxidermist in Outjo and will eventually come home. The skin is staying in Namibia, treated and stored, until the next time I'm in the country to collect it.
That the best brown hyena hunting is, paradoxically, the one you don't plan. The clients who've taken multiple browns over the years (W. has guided four) have all taken them by accident, on roads, on carcasses, late, with the wrong rifle. The clients who've sat traditional bait setups for them have, to a one, not taken anything in three weeks.
That the Caprivi in July is colder than I had bothered to pack for. The mornings were five degrees and I spent half of them shivering through binoculars. Bring more wool than you think.
That a kudu hunt with a brown hyena permit in your back pocket is the right way to structure that trip. If you go for the brown alone and don't get it — which is the likely outcome — you've spent two weeks looking at scat and not much else. Better to have a real hunt running in the foreground.