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Please give me the address of your local shooting gallery. That would be an experience I wouldn't want to miss.

I have to admit that I was reluctant to go after a leopard in the first place. Only after my PH convinced me that I would always regret it if I didn't (and he was right) did I agree to give it a try.

My main concern was this: if I screwed up my shot, someone else would likely pay for it. My impression of leopards from all the accounts I had read was that they are very democratic creatures. Unlike lions, who tend to go for the nearest source of their pain and then stick with their tormentor, leopards will attack one person and then go on to the next until everyone in the party has had his share. In addition to the PH, I had two gunbearers and a tracker, all of whom would be involved in following up a wounded animal. The odds were five to one that one or more of them and not me would be the recipient of the leopard's attention. I didn't want that responsibility.

In addition, the only experience I had had with shooting cats was with the feral housecats I used to encounter on varmint hunting expeditions. When shot even with a high speed cartridge like a .220 Swift, which is sudden death on crows and groundhogs, cats have been known to jump five feet in the air, turn somersaults, and depart, yes, like a scalded cat, only to be found stone dead and shot to pieces fifty yards away. If this was the reaction of a ten pound housecat, I had a hard time visualizing that of a 150 pound predator.

As far as a leopard's strength is concerned, once, hunting on private land, we came across a place in the nine foot game fence, which was topped with barbed wire, where a leopard had carried a full grown sheep over it. We later found the sheep lodged 20 feet up in a crotch in a tree where the leopard had stored it for future consumption.

All this was going through my head when I squeezed the trigger on my .375 H&H double rifle from the blind 80 yards away. Imagine my consternation when the leopard didn't move, not even a twitch. It was stretched out on a horizontal limb, reaching for the warthog hung as bait, and it acted as though it had not even heard the shot. So I shot again. Still no reaction.

One of the gunbearers in the blind with me (the PH was off with the hunting car) said "bas", meaning "that's enough" or "it's finished", and we slowly and warily exited the blind, the gunbearers with their "shottiguns" (yes, loaded with buckshot) and I with my .375. As we walked toward the tree, the hindquarters of the leopard fell off the horizontal limb, leaving him draped over the branch from which the bait was secured. A post mortem revealed that both bullets had struck about an inch apart, and the first one had severed the leopard's spine.

I would compare the shot I made to shooting a free throw in a championship basketball game in the final seconds, with the game on the line. A thousand repetitions in practice don't compensate for the tension that builds up when you realize that you are not just letting yourself down, but the whole team and possibly their families and dependants, if you screw up the shot.

Only with a leopard your life and the life and well being of others are hanging on the line, and it is not a game.

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