[Guns America] "They have the biggest canine teeth, per pound of body weight, of any species on earth. Just wait till you see them, Mate." We were jolting up steep mountainside two-track on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, talking about baboons. A band of them had been raising Cain in the lambing pens, stealing corn out of the feed troughs and threatening the sheep. We’d been keeping an eye out for the troop while hunting plains game, without luck. Now we hunted the baboons specifically, hoping to reduce the pressure they were putting on the sheep.
The terrain was rough, rocky, and broken, with cliff-rimmed mountainsides soaring toward the skies. I was hunting with Dave Davenport, an eighth-generation stockman on the same land. The Boer war had been fought across his ranch, in part, and he showed me tarnished cartridges and bullets he’d picked up from ancient battlefields. The ranch sits deep in a natural horseshoe-shaped valley on the side of the mountains. Dave started Leopard’s Valley Safari here years ago and offers wonderful adventures hunting free-range plains game across the Eastern Cape.