Gary Lewis / For The BulletinA giraffe surprised out in the open on the road to camp.

When I saw the waterbuck, he was diving for cover and much bigger than the others. His horns swept back, then up, carrying his mass past the ridges. We caught him in the sweep of the headlights on the evening of the first day after an unsuccessful bushpig and bushbuck hunt along the Limpopo.

Guide Wighardt van der Gryp and I didn’t need to speak. We’d go after this one.

The trackers in camp told us about him. They’d seen him with a curly-horned male, and the two were never far from cover. At the approach of a vehicle, they drifted like water into the trees and bush.

We set game cameras and tried to establish a pattern, but the bulls never showed themselves on camera.

It was on the morning of the third day. Judas and Phineas, our trackers, rode on the back. Sam Pyke rode in the front left seat, and Mika, Wighardt’s 9-year-old, had the back left. We chanced on the other hunters, and they told us they’d seen the rams in a stand of mopane. The one we wanted walked with a limp, so we knew when they told us that this would be our best chance. We stalked him and found him out in the open. It seemed our luck had changed.

“How far can you shoot?” Wighardt asked. There stood the bull, and it had to be 250 yards, but he was broadside, and I had a NoslerCustom rifle with a 200-grain AccuBond that would reach him.

In the scope now, the crosswire found his shoulder, two-thirds up, half a breath, squeeze.

Wighardt said I missed. But we had the benefit of a camera. Sam replayed it over and over and then gave his verdict. “There was a little puff of something right in front of the animal.” The bullet hit a stick and deflected.

We took up the track with Phineas and Judas in front. The prints were 7 to 8 centimeters long. To Sam they looked like elk. To me they looked like teardrops, and they flowed east into the rising sun. There was no sign the bull was hit.

Where we expected to see the bulls cross a road, we waited and then found their spoor. They’d already crossed. Phineas and Judas pushed another bull out in front of them, though, this one a kudu, bigger than the waterbuck, with a dark gray striped coat and a long mane. Thirty yards away, he walked out in front of me and then barked and whirled to vanish back into the bush.

Three miles on the trail of the waterbuck, we left the track. The image of the great kudu began to seep into my consciousness.

Anyone who has hunted elk is easily captivated by spiral-horned, striped kudu. But our luck was bad. We’d hunted bushbuck along the Limpopo, we’d baited for bushpig in a blind, followed the waterbuck through a wilderness of impala tracks and come up empty.

Back home, if this were an elk hunt, I’d have switched it up by hunting coyote. If there is one thing that will turn around a game, it’s a shot at a predator. But there are no coyotes in the bushveldt, just jackals, which are about half the size and twice as mean.

“Every day,” Wighardt said, “the jackal must eat a fawn. One jackal will kill 350 fawns and calves a year.” If he doesn’t get a fawn, he gets a guineafowl or francolin or warthog piglets. “We must try to keep them down.”

At dusk on the third day, we surprised a jackal. It tensed as the crosshairs found it and started to leap even as the bullet found its mark. Sometimes this is what it takes. Remove the predator that torments the young and earn the right to take the old monarch from the herd.

On the morning of the fourth day, we tried for bushbuck again. Mika climbed out of the cab of the truck and leaned against the horn. It didn’t matter. Our luck had changed in the night of the jackal.

In the breaking light, we spooked a kudu where we didn’t expect one. Usually the young bulls and the cows are the last to go. The older bull stays in the brush and is, most often, unseen. It drifts away like gray smoke, as if it never was. This time, the old bull stood face on. His long, black, spiral, white-tipped horns gleamed.

The horns were backlit by the dawn. His white fringed crest, erect, and his mane was flecked with dried mud. I saw it all in the scope as the crosshair found its mark and the muzzle bloomed orange.

There was little in the spoor to tell the tale till we found the bull where it had come to rest in tall grass in deep shadows.

This was my third kudu in four safaris, and I knew at a glance it was also the biggest. But it is almost profane to whip out a tape measure at such a time, and as I write this, we still haven’t measured it.

— Gary Lewis is the host of “Frontier Unlimited TV” and author of “John Nosler — Going Ballistic,” “A Bear Hunter’s Guide to the Universe,” “Hunting Oregon” and other titles. Contact Lewis at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.