I got my third and fourth gun some six months after leaving East Africa. I was at a loose end after my adventure as a diamond prospector and big game hunter in Tanganyika. I had just turned twenty one and was not sure what to do with the next step in my life. Finding an office job held no attraction. I applied to a newspaper advertisement in the Natal Mercury and signed on for a safari to go crocodile hunting on the Pongola River.
The Pongola forms the boundary between Zululand and Swaziland and flows on through Mozambique into the Indian Ocean. It was wild country up there on the borderlands and I wanted to see it. During those days crocodiles were still listed as vermin in Africa and no license was required to hunt them. Crocodile skins were going at a good price and I figured that the cost of a two-week safari would give me enough inside knowledge of how go about it and set myself up in a professional manner.
I outfitted myself with new camping gear and bought a Cogswill and Harrison .375 magnum together with a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. The rifle was for shooting crocodile and the handgun was for night protection in the camp.
Professionals hunt crocodile at night from a boat using a powerful flash light. Hunting them during the day is near impossible. They submerge as soon as they see you and can stay under the murky water for twenty minutes and more and swim away. Catching them basking on the river banks presents an impossible brain shot at their flat skulls from a long distance. A body shot, fatal or not, just sends them scurrying into the water to be lost forever. If the shot has proved fatal the bloated body would eventually surface miles downstream. If not discovered immediately, a few hours of sunlight on the belly skin sets in slippery scale and the pelt is then worthless.
During night hunting the only parts of a croc that are exposed above the waterline are the snout and eyes. The light beam from a quarter mile off picks up the red reflection from their eyes as sharply as the tail-lights of a car. A long shot with a flat trajectory aimed at the bony ridge between the eyes leaves the bullet ricocheting harmlessly away… . The idea is to get within ten yards or so. Cruising up slowly with the outboard does not frighten them. . The light blinds the croc, allowing the boat to get close enough for a steep downward shot. Once brain shot, the job then is to gaff the giant reptile before it sinks and gets carried away by the current. The carcass of big cros have to be lashed to the side of the boat… Large crocs of fifteen feet and more can weight a ton and more. Those giants have been known to grab animals as large as a rhino by the snout and pull them down the mud banks and drown them. A good night hunt can bag either a big giant or several smaller ones. They need to be skinned and salted the next morning and stored in the shade for later transport to the tanners. Only the soft belly skin is valuable. . The bony buttons on the back have no market. The price us calculated by the measurement around the belly. A giant could give fifty inches and more. The going rate those days for the skin of the last surviving monster lizard of the fantastic Age of dinosaurs was three English pounds per running inch.
The long and the short of my croc hunting career, was indeed very short. The big reptiles were scarce along the Pongola. The two week safari taught me just enough to feel confident that I could make a living out of it if I could find a good river. I got myself more fully outfitted with my own boat and camping gear, loaded it all on the top of a small four cylinder Consul and traveled north to the Limpopo. I was short on cash and needed some quick returns.
The Limpopo river forms the boundary between South Africa and Botswana. My timing, at the end of the dry season was bad. There had been a long drought in Northern Transvaal. The river was too low to be navigated by boat for any reasonable length. While portaging the heavy craft between two pools, my hired gaff boy slipped on the wet rocks and stove in the side of the boat. I had to call my croc-hunting career quits before even getting started. Four years later I got my investment back and then some. I producing a wild life hunting film. One of the more exciting episodes in the film featured hunting crocodiles at night in the Okavanga Swamps.
The actual gun story in this piece centers not around the Gogswill, but on the Smith and Wesson handgun. After going bust on the croc hunting expedition, I got a job as an aerial surveyor and moved into to a high-rise apartment in down town Johannesburg. One night while my wife and I were listening to the radio, I heard a body thud heavily down onto the ground outside my balcony. I got up to check and in the light from window saw that they body was in fact a heavy bundle of fur coats. I was on the ground floor. I looked up. About five stories above I could see the shadow of a cat burglar, scaling down the row of balconies that extended above mine. In order to reach the ground, he would have to arrive on mine.
I rushed inside and got the handgun, waved my wife into silence, and crouched in the shadows of my balcony, gun ready, waiting till the burglar straddled the banister.
“Stay right where you are!”
The thief was a young colored man, no older than I. His surprise lasted less then three seconds. Then he leaped out of sight down into the alley between my apartment and the hotel next door. I jumped up on the banister and saw him scaling down to the ground below. At less than twenty feet I had a clear shot at his back and could easily have dropped him. Instead I fired a shot into the air. The report of the police special in the canyon between the two high-rise buildings was deafening. The burglar reached the alley twenty feet below me.
“Put your hands up in the air!”
He complied, took a couple of steps towards me, and then suddenly dashed through a dark doorway.
My immediate thought was that he would rush through the hotel and escape through the front doors. I jumped off my balcony, ran around to the hotel entrance and burst into the foyer brandishing my gun in front of the wide frightened eyes of the receptionist and several customers.
“Anybody seen a young colored guy some through here?”
All heads shook in the negative.
“Call the police. He just robbed the apartment next door.”
I rushed back out of the foyer, back to my apartment building.
My wife was standing on the balcony.
“You missed him. He came back up onto our balcony as soon as you left, then jumped down into the parking lot and ran off in the opposite direction.
With the drop on him, I had been completely out-foxed by a fast-thinking young scamp. The only salve to my pride was the knowledge that I could have dropped him if had wanted to. Also, he had left his loot behind. The fur coats belonged to a young couple on the fifth floor. They had been out dining during the burglary.