Old Bulls

WHEN it comes to hunting Australia’s awesome wild buffalo in the swamps and savannahs of the Top End, the talk and emphasis is often, understandably, centred on the horns of those bulls with the most immense, impressive spreads, the magic hundred-inch-plus bulls.

The score is constructed by measuring the girth and length-along-the-outside of each horn, and combining the four together. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with measuring such a bull of my own, although I hope to someday. I have only witnessed two such bulls shot. My good friends Tony and Paddy each got such a bull near Mataranka – unlikely country, due to lots of hunting pressure there. They truly were incredible bulls, and the guys did some hard running and hot-barrel-shooting with their .416 Rigby rifles to get the job done on the haunted old fellows.

So this article is not actually about the holy grail of buffalo hunting in the traditional sense. Rather, it is about some old bulls that I hunted myself, that didn’t hit the hundred mark. Nevertheless, they are grand old bulls who wouldn’t have grown any larger, and were