Eden is huge--in the neighborhood of 100 square miles. The goal was to get good kudu and gemsbok, but this dry area is a smorgasbord for a hunter, and we were hungry. Eden lies in the Kalahari Basin, at the northern edge of the Kalahari Desert, which means there is sand everywhere. Our September hunt put us there late in the season, with more leaves on the trees than Dwight had seen on his previous hunts there. Visibility from the ground was limited to about seventy-five yards.

Most shooting in Africa is done from shooting sticks. You'll do yourself a favor by practicing from them before you cross the Atlantic.

From the top seat on the Toyota, we could see over the tops of the short, scrubby brush, but that didn't make it easy to spot game. Animals there learn to hide or they get eaten. Often, the only clue would be a couple of inches of a horn blended in with limbs. Jamy and his lead tracker, Kumati, were incredible, seeing at a glance animals that took me twenty seconds or more to find--after they pointed them out to me.

The plan is simple. Slowly drive the two-tracks looking for animals. Once you spot one that looks interesting, you hit the sand and start walking. It may be a few hundred yards, or--more likely--more than a mile. Jamy and Kumati often picked up the track of a single animal in a herd and followed it through the sand and brush, ignoring the others, to bring us to within crawling distance; and crawl on our bellies we did.

Several times we walked through the brush just off the edge of huge open areas, stopping and glassing. That's how I got my zebra, but it wasn't according to script. Jamy and I had covered a couple of miles on foot, stopping and glassing. We saw red hartebeest, gemsbok, blue wildebeest, kudu, ostrich and giraffe.

We decided to sit twenty yards back of the edge of the huge clearing (a mile across and two miles long) to watch a water hole. While we looked through our binoculars, I heard a slight ticking sound from behind and to the left. Slowly, I turned to look past Jamy, and saw a line of zebra coming toward us only twenty yards away.

I nudged Jamy with my left elbow, and mouthed "Don't move." He thought I was kidding, but my eyes told him the story. I shoot left-handed, so my rifle was on my lap, pointing to the right. Jamy slowly turned and eyed the big stallion standing fifteen yards away and, ever so slowly, leaned back until he was flat on his back.

"Shoot him in the brisket," he whispered. Able to slowly get to my knees, I moved the rifle around to aim. Then the zebra bolted. He hadn't gotten a good look at us through the brush, though, and went only thirty yards, leaving me with the same shot--straight into the chest. One shot with the .338 did the trick. Nothing says Africa hunting like a zebra, and this one was a beauty.

Later that day, hunting with Dwight, it became clear why we brought a backup rifle. We had been crawling through the sand on a couple of stalks that did not work out, when we decided to do a little "standup" for the TV camera, to talk about what we were doing. In the process, I was to shoot my rifle.