Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/742011
120 • S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S under the barrels of my shotgun. I pulled both triggers, and the next thing I knew I was flat on my back, feeling very silly and extremely frightened. The leopard was standing at my left side, not actually looking at me, but watching the Baron 15 yards away. I am now convinced he did not know quite how to proceed at that moment, but then he looked directly at me, and I knew he had made up his mind. He was going to bloody well bite me. I threw up my arm over my throat and right under my chin, so when he grabbed me by the elbow, we were nose to nose, as it were, and I saw his teeth sink into my flesh. That gets your attention, believe me. In other people's accounts of maulings, some remember feeling severe pain, while others do not; some remember halitosis on the cat's breath, while others do not. What I felt was sheer fright and, oddly enough, anger. Next there was a thudding, scrambling sound as Salim threw himself across both the leopard and me, stabbing at the cat with his knife. The leopard was so startled by this intrusion that it released me and vanished into the grass. The sudden silence was surprising, All of this takes time to read and even longer to write, but from the moment the leopard attacked until it left me, I doubt whether five seconds had passed. It seemed like a lifetime. Salim helped me to my feet, and we looked around. The other actors had frozen in strange positions. The Baron was on his termite hill with his rifle still slung in that curious back-to-front way favored by Continentals. Mutia was on his termite mound with his mouth frozen open in horror and his eyes wide with disbelief—quite a comical sight, actually, if I had been in the mood for comedy. The spell was broken, and the Baron and Mutia joined me. My arm was badly chewed at the elbow, but luckily I wore a very heavy shirt (for some strange reason). Half the leopard's mouth had been caught in the folds of the rolled-up sleeve and left four or five holes in my elbow. The other half of his mouth was above the roll-up and did a good job of lacerating my arm. I had scratches on my back, shoulder, and just in front of my left ear. The most painful of all, the ones that really stung, were some shallow scratches on the back of my hand. Once I realized that all my moving parts seemed to be okay, I was furious. I picked up my .470 (which I should have had all along) and started back into the grass. The Baron and Mutia restrained me, arguing that I would only get chewed up again in my present frame of mind, so we waited for Salim to go and fetch the car. While I was Naturally, everyone has a different viewpoint on leopard behavior, depending on his own observations and experience. In my opinion, leopards are typically very cautious in the open and will run; but after dark or in heavy bush or long grass, they are so confident in their powers of concealment, they can be amazingly brazen and manage to avoid blundering into man with contemptuous ease. My experience has since shown that a leopard, wounded or not, usually attacks only when he feels that he is either cornered or too incapacitated to escape. When they do retaliate, the hunter had better beware, for they are extremely fast. Once they make up their minds, leopards are completely fearless—as evidenced by their attacks on safari cars in the Kalahari. This leopard was not hurt badly, and I figured that as soon as he entered the long grass, he had slunk all around the perimeter and found it burned. I was blocking the entrance, which was also his only exit. My feeling was that he was not worried because he was so well hidden, but since he realized that he was cornered, he was probably crouched under some palmettos to await developments. They were not long in coming. S alim and I were side by side, and after a few steps I decided to take the shotgun and give him the .470. My plan was to advance slowly, fire one barrel into any likely looking spot, and hopefully reload quickly enough if anything happened. In retrospect, it was actually a sort of "non-plan," with no chance of success in the unlikely event the leopard made a run for it. My only chance was an all-out attack, though I didn't care for the shotgun as a stopper. Despite what the pundits say, I have too many friends carrying scars who tried to stop leopards with shotguns. We were following the tracks toward the burned area when, after my third or fourth shot, I heard a low growl coming from a particularly thick clump of palmettos. Reloading the one barrel quickly, I shouted in an attempt to get the leopard to do something. I was immediately answered by a succession of coughing grunts and violently agitated grass and palmettos as the leopard launched his counterattack. We were standing in waist-to-shoulder-high vegetation, so we could not see the leopard which was coming low and, of course, very fast. He covered the 15 feet or so in a flash; all I saw was the moving tops of the leaves and grass. When he finally appeared he was right Professional Hunter David Ommanney in 1957, next to his Willys' Jeep hunting car.