Fred Bear Archery Hunting in Africa

Here’s an interesting watch for hunters. It’s almost 50 minutes of a program titled “Mozambique Game Trails,” which features legendary bowhunter Fred Bear using traditional archery equipment to take a passel of African game.

He’s hunting with well-known Professional Hunter Wally Johnson, and at 3:25 they get together to talk about prepping the archery gear as Bear sharpens his “razor heads.”

If you want to get right to the hunting, skip to about 9:00, although there’s some oddly-edited fishing video around the 6:15 mark.

They go hunting around for cape buffalo, but have a hard time finding any. In the meanwhile, there’s plenty of other game to amuse them.

At 15:50, the trackers finally spot some buffalo sign and the party goes tracking. They don’t actually find the buff until 19:05, but no excitement yet. That doesn’t come until the 20-minute mark, when a stalk is begun. And at 20:53, things get really good — we get to see the arrow’s flight and impact on a cape buffalo bull! Placement seems questionable, as the bull was almost facing him when he fired, but it does look like it may have found its way into a lung.

And it clearly worked, because they found him — four feet across the horns! — lying nice and dead at the end of the blood trail.

Having delivered the meat to the nearest village, the episode ends and pretty soon we see Fred Bear and company landing in another area to begin a kudu hunt. At 30:50, hunters practice archery by shooting aerial targets.

Without a bunch of preliminary stuff, Bear is soon stalking a huge kudu bull through tall grass. He soon arrows a 54-inch kudu bull, which only goes about 100 yards. Nice!

Next up is nyala, around the 36-minute mark. Waterbuck follows shortly after, and around 39:00 we see a shot at a large bull, which seems to hit pretty far back when the critter “jumps the string” and moves before the arrow gets there. It’s a killing shot, though.

They don’t even get back to the vehicle before meeting up with a passel of warthogs, so Bear naturally stabs a big one. Nice!

So what comes next? Elephants, of course. Around the 44-minute mark, they end up on the fringes of a herd of about 200 to 300 of them! Always ballsy, Bear arrows a four-ton specimen and 600 yards later, they find the behemoth.

None of the game meat went to waste; whatever the hunt party didn’t eat was consumed by local villagers, who relied on hunters for much of their meat.

At 49:10, the hunters literally ride off into the sunset.

Enjoy.

Russ Chastain

Editor & Contributing Writer Russ Chastain is a lifelong hunter and shooter who has spent his life learning about hunting, shooting, guns, ammunition, gunsmithing, reloading, and bullet casting. He started toting his own gun in the woods at age nine and he's pursued deer with rifles since 1982, so his hunting knowledge has been growing for more than three and a half decades. His desire and ability to share this knowledge with others has also grown, and Russ has been professionally writing and editing original hunting & shooting content since 1998. Russ Chastain has a passion for sharing accurate, honest, interesting hunting & shooting knowledge and stories with people of all skill levels.