Hunting the “poor man’s desert sheep” during an unusually rainy week in West Texas.

West Texas is not usually known for being cold and rainy. Mostly it’s hot. And dry. Shimmering, heat-induced mirages dance across jagged ridges and rocky arroyos, while roadrunners pant in the shade. That’s what West Texas is usually like. But not today–today it’s cold; we huddle against the chill, collars turned up against the damp wind. Fog rolls in and out, making it difficult to see the distant ridges and cliff faces we’re inspecting though our binoculars. We’re searching West Texas for aoudad, the “poor man’s desert sheep,” but it feels more like we’re hunting in the Pacific Northwest. Chilled and damp, we crowd back into our truck to four-wheel to another glassing spot.

Aoudad, also known as Barbary sheep, are native to North Africa. They possess legendary eyesight and no sense of humor whatsoever, rendering them an elusive and challenging quarry to hunt. A mature ram will stand roughly three and a half feet tall at the shoulder and might weigh 300 pounds or better. They are rusty red-gold in color, sporting tough, abrasion-resistant hair. A long, blondish mane grows down the front of their neck and cascades from the fore part of their front legs, forming spectacular chaps on many mature rams. Aoudad are known for toughness, too, requiring a well-constructed bullet and accurate shot placement to achieve a quick, clean kill. 

Barbary sheep have been transplanted to multiple locations around the globe over the last century or so. Reportedly first brought to the United States around the year 1900, they were introduced into the wild in New Mexico in 1950 and Texas in 1957. Since, they have flourished across the desert ridges and badlands of both states, in many cases becoming so plentiful that they compete with native wildlife. They typically move in herds and feed indiscriminately, often badly overgrazing sensitive plants and posing a very real threat to local vegetation and habitat. Because of these proclivities, landowners, ranchers, and wildlife biologists are commonly unified in their desire to aggressively manage local aoudad populations. In Texas, Barbary sheep are categorized as an exotic species and therefore huntable 24/7/365. Management practices are determined and implemented by the landowner, often in conjunction with an outfitter who leases the land for the purpose of hunting. Aoudad reproduce prolifically and are talented survivalists, and in most cases they stay well ahead of population objectives.

Many hunters, myself included, dream of hunting wild sheep. But for me, and for most blue-collar hunters, a hunt for native wild sheep is financially unattainable. That’s where Barbary sheep enter the scene; a good aoudad hunt will set you back roughly one-tenth or less of the cost of a desert sheep hunt, and in many ways the hunt resembles that of a desert sheep, in similar country and with similar challenges. It’s no wonder hunters have nicknamed aoudad hunting the “poor man’s sheep hunt.”

The Big Bend country of Texas is a long way from anyplace with high rises and traffic lights. Nestled into a northward-curving bend on the Rio Grande River, Big Bend National Park is a place of surreal desert beauty, shimmering heat, and deep, cliff-rimmed canyons. Rattlesnakes continue their age-old quest for packrats, cottontail rabbits, and unwary tourists. Javelinas snuffle about cactus patches, smacking noisily as they chomp down great bites of prickly pear. And sheep live in the cliffs. Desert sheep, but Barbary sheep too, especially north of the park in the vast ranchlands stretching from the badlands across the Permian Basin toward New Mexico. This is where my hunting partner Jake Burns and I are headed, the tires of our rented imitation SUV humming down the lonely West Texas highway as darkness falls. Jake’s flight was delayed and it’s almost midnight when we pull into Alpine, Texas, and stumble into a motel for some much-needed sleep.

Dawn finds our imitation SUV dead alongside a ranch road, having made it all of a quarter mile from the blacktop before blowing a tire. It’s a problem, but nothing unusual in remote ranch country. Jake and one of the guides point the vehicle back toward Alpine for a replacement tire, rolling gingerly along on the rental-company’s donut spare. I climb in with head guide Cross Moody and we continue southward, Cross’s truck grumbling carefully down the rough ranch road. Emptiness stretches for miles, reaching away into the distance to where the desert merges with a lowering, rain-promising sky. It’s a place that makes city folks nervous and anxious with too much freedom. Cowboys, desert rats, and hunters feel like they are coming home, the emptiness promising and hopeful with adventure.

An old, hand-built stone ranch house greets us as we arrive at camp, where pioneer equipment and piles of shed mule deer antlers decorate the surroundings. We unload the truck, stowing gear and a week’s worth of food inside the ranch house. Settled in, we turn our attention to the hills. The sheep await, but first I need to check the zero on my rifle. Airline baggage handlers have a way of making undesirable adjustments to shooting irons, and it’s always wise to conduct a quick test before heading afield.

Belly down on a gravely rise, I adjust my turret and steady my cross hairs on a three-inch-high by six-inch-wide rock, 500 yards distant. My first shot breaks clean and the bullet strikes a fraction of an inch over the rock. A second bullet impacts next to the first, verifying that my scope, mounts, and rifle withstood the best efforts of the baggage handlers. I’m ready to hunt.

That evening we spot a lone ram feeding through the jumbled outcropping of a broken cliff. He disappears over the top, but Cross doesn’t think he is old enough to be worth pursuing. We drive and glass, fighting the fog, searching the uncommonly sodden Chihuahuan desert for elusive aoudad. Just before dark I spot two rams silhouetted against the dusk a half-mile away on a mesa top. One looks particularly good, with heavy, deep-curling horns. We circle for a favorable wind and move in, but darkness overtakes us and we never see them again.

It’s dawn once more, and Jake has rejoined us. I watch Cross’s little brown-and-white Jack Russell shivering in the bed of the Tacoma. It’s partly from the cold but also part excitement; Spade loves to hunt. I worry about him as we drive into the broken desert; he appears about to turn into a brown-and-white hunk of shivering ice. Cross notices and gives me a hard time for allowing Spade to play upon my sympathies. The morning rolls on and so do we, moving and glassing, glassing and moving. Spade plays his cards well and ends up riding inside the truck next to me, eagerly staring out the front window in search of game. I may be a sucker, but we both enjoy the arrangement. The day passes without excitement, and I can feel Cross getting tense at the lack of game. Perhaps it’s the weather that is keeping the sheep hunkered down and out of sight.

Another day dawns like the ones before it, gloomy and damp. I enjoy the moisture–it’s far too rare in the desert to ever resent. But it does make hunting harder, and this day passes much like the previous ones, with a lot of moving, glassing, and moving. The afternoon grows old, and finally Cross spots three sheep far away and below us on the point of a ridge. We study them through our spotting scopes and they are all ewes. We continue on, moving rapidly from vantage to vantage, trying hard to find some rams before darkness falls. Luck eludes us though, and the silence is loud inside the truck as we head for camp. Cross is feeling the pressure and breaks the silence, telling us that he is trying hard to find sheep. I assure him that I know he is, but he doesn’t seem convinced. We only have one day left. Fortunately, the forecast calls for sunshine and calm. It’s the kind of day we’ve been waiting for.

Blue skies greet us at dawn, and as the sun chases the shadows from the desert, we roll carefully along the gravel ranch road toward a section of tall, broken territory. A great cliff illuminates in the morning sunshine, and just above it, Jake spots a band of sheep. It’s a big band, and Cross doesn’t spend more than a few seconds in his spotting scope before uttering the words we’ve been waiting four days to hear: “There’s a couple big rams in that group. Let’s go!”

We tuck the truck out of sight behind a butte, shed some layers, and check the water bottles in our packs. Jake and I ready our rifles and correlate briefly; if a shot opportunity presents itself, I am to take the first shot. Hopefully a second ram will present an opportunity and he will get a chance too. Shouldering our packs, we head across a big alkali swale that’s rimmed by a small ribbon of slickrock opposite us. The breeze is in our faces now, but air is capricious in terrain like this and that could change once we circle the big butte to access the sheep.

The morning is bright now, a brassy sun glaring cheerfully at the desert she hasn’t seen in almost a week. The sky is blue and I feel great as we stop to shed another layer; after days of damp, overcast chill we are dressed too warmly. Moving on, we climb carefully up through a notch in the slickrock cliff. Cross slips ahead to look for the sheep.

The sheep are there, much closer than expected and moving toward us. We belly down on the desert gravel and deploy our bipods, Jake lying immediately to my right. We’re scarcely set when the wind capers and the sheep bolt, running straight away and up the steep mountainside. Big, curving horns are everywhere, but Cross directs my attention to one sheep in particular and immediately I see why. This ram is heavier and wider than any of the others, and I have no trouble keeping track of him as the band climbs away from us. The distance is roughly 360 yards and I reach up and crank the turret on my scope as the rams slows and then stops, turning his head to look back. He won’t stand for long, so I settle my cross hairs and press the trigger. The impact is obvious and the ram bolts to the right about 40 yards before slowing. He stands for a brief second and then tips over behind a big Sotol plant. My poor man’s desert sheep is down.

Another band of sheep bolts up the mountainside, weaving and leaping upward though a broken morass of jagged ribbon cliffs. Cross immediately identifies the biggest ram and gets Jake on him, but the sheep won’t stop. Higher and higher they climb, rapidly putting elevation and distance between themselves and us. Finally they stop, and Jake is ready, hitting the ram solidly at 560 yards. It staggers and then tumbles down the slope, coming to rest in some brush. We watch, but it doesn’t move again. We’ve just doubled on big Barbary rams, both accomplishing clean, one-shot kills under challenging conditions. It’s a beautiful, sunny day in West Texas as we photograph our rams and retell the story, marveling at the beauty of the sheep, the terrain, and the freshness of the rain-blessed desert air. It’s a good day to be a hunter.

Ammo for Aoudad

Thanks to tough hide and hair, dense bones, and a never-say-die attitude Barbary sheep are challenging to kill. Always use a premium bullet and place your shot with precision.

In my opinion, Federal’s Terminal Ascent bullet is the best all-around hunting projectile currently on the market. It’s accurate, but what makes it really shine is the architecture of its design and construction. The rearward shank of the bullet is solid copper and will always penetrate aggressively. The front half of the bullet features a bonded lead core and Slipstream polymer tip to initiate rapid, controlled expansion. Ballistic Coefficient is very good, as is wind-bucking ability and retained downrange energy. The entire bullet is designed to give strong terminal performance at a wide range of impact velocities.

For my aoudad hunt, I selected a Kimber Mountain Ascent rifle topped with a Leupold VX-6 HD scope and chambered in .280 Ackley Improved. It’s one of my favorite rifles and is superbly lightweight–just right for sheep hunting. Muzzle velocity with 155-grain factory Terminal Ascent ammo is 2,937 feet per second.

My hunting partner, Jake, used the same caliber and ammunition in his hunting rifle. In the end, the final moments of our hunt proved how critical to success this choice would be for both of us. Both shot opportunities were fleeting and demanded rapid execution of an accurate shot. My ram was quartered away at impact; my bullet entered mid ribcage, ranged forward through heart, lungs, off-side ribs, and shoulder muscle and bone, coming to rest under the hide at the point of the far shoulder. Terminal performance on both sheep was spectacular, the spent bullets showing perfect upset.—A.vB.

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The world’s crocodilians have always been a source of fascination and fear.

Hic Sunt Dracones appeared with frequency on the unexplored places on ancient maps:  Here Be Dragons.  Even with almost every part of the earth now charted, there still be dragons.  We call them alligators and crocodiles.

The crocodilians of today have a variety of other names, too, such as caiman, gharial, and mugger. They all descend from crocodylomorpha, evolving more than two hundred thousand millennia ago in the Triassic.  The earlier members of the group were far more terrestrial and cursorial than the related reptiles of today, and were among the dominant land animals of the time, overshadowing the dinosaur, until dying out in the aftermath of the mega-volcanic eruptions brought on by the fracturing of the supercontinent Pangea into North and South America, Europe, and Africa some two hundred million years ago.  The next iteration of these animals was the Neosuchia, the ancient clade to which modern crocodilians belong.

Our species’ relationship with crocs and gators is more intimate than we may suppose.  If you use the evolution-in-one-twenty-four-hour-day model, then on their evolutionary scale, crocodilians first laid their cold eyes on us around a quarter-hour ago.  By the time we hominins became persistent carnivores some two million years ago, among our genus’s traits was to settle near water, both for security–mammalian predators couldn’t splash across a creek or pond without alerting all those protohumans clustered around the black obelisk–and food.  We had our work cut out in order to feed on terrestrial mammals, but the part vegans omit is that without flesh in our diet, our brains would never have grown as large as they are. (In fact, as we beggared our nutrition by growing and eating crops, our cranial capacity has actually shrunk.)  Meat eating lets us tap into a singular suite of lipids–omega-fatty-acid molecules, some in existence for a half billion years–that work industriously on us on the cellular level, in anti-inflammatory, healing, and nerve- and tissue-growth processes, such as encephalization, or brain building.  If “omega fatty acids” rings a bell, it is because, as we know now, aquatic animals such as fish, turtles, and even crocodiles, are rich in them.  And living beside water, we had them right there at our back door, able to take them without having to compete with lions, leopards, or hyenas.

Our existence in Africa as hominins, though, overlapped with that of some crocodilians that grew to more than thirty feet in length.  So our food could often make us its food, without shedding a tear.  No one questions the danger of crocodilians today.  Around the tropical world, “Don’t go near the water” is an endemic, if not ubiquitous, caution.  

As an example of the warning, persistent to this day, a teacher being rowed to a mission school on Lake Nyasa (now Malawi) in the 1910s could not resist gliding her hand in the water.

“Ngwena, Dona!” one of the oarsman called out.  “Crocodile, Madame!”  

Among the more than two dozen different species of crocodilians, thirteen are known man-eaters–or killers, the mugger of Iran and India often attacking without eating—with Nile and saltwater crocodiles the two most deadly.  Globally they may be responsible for a thousand human deaths per year.  And another seven species are implicated in non-fatal attacks.  For good reason, then, they have been held in terror and awe not just in recorded history, but throughout time. 

Perhaps most notably, the ancient Egyptians both feared and worshipped the crocodile in the form of the god Sobek, crocodiles being mummified in adoration of him.  Tomb walls depicted herdsmen casting spells to protect them and their livestock when they rafted across the Nile.  Centuries later, Shakespeare was shaky on the origin of crocodiles themselves: in Antony and Cleopatra he had Lepidus, one of the triumvir who governed Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar, say that they are grown by the sun from the mud of the Nile.

In something between adoration and dread, there was a ritual of hanging stuffed crocodiles from the rafters and on the walls of medieval churches and cathedrals throughout Europe.  Most of these seem to have been brought back as skins or live specimens by Crusaders returning from the Holy Land and North Africa.  They were placed as ex voto offerings in thanks for heavenly intercession.  They also might represent evil or Satan, so there was the symbolism of the Devil bound in chains.  Because of the unique durability of their hides, they have been preserved to this day, to startle unwitting tourists looking up into the vaulted ceilings.

Writing in his authoritative Description of Africa, the sixteenth-century Andalusian-Berber merchant, traveler, and diplomat Joannes Leo Africanus told of other displays of dead crocodiles.  From the 1600 translation of his 1550 book:

“Of these beasts I sawe above three hundred heads placed upon the wals of Cana [a formerly major city in what is now Benin], with their jawes wide open, being of so monstrous and incredible a bignes, that they were sufficient to have swallowed up a whole cowe at once, and their teeth were great and sharpe.”

Africanus had no doubt about the crocodile’s being a “cruell and noisome beast.” It “containeth in length twelve cubites and above”–not hyperbole for the outsized length of an exceptional Nile crocodile–“the taile thereof being as long as the whole bodie besides, albeit there are but fewe of so huge a bignes.”  Africanus claimed witnessing a traveling companion swept one night into a river by the swipe of the tail of a crocodile and lost in the darkness.

Africanus’s friend may have lived just long enough to experience the initial stages of the crocodilian’s method of making a kill, seemingly coming down from the Antediluvian:  the death roll.  If crocodilians can swallow a prey animal whole, that’s what they do.  If not, they clasp the body in their jaws and twist over and over to tear out portions of skin, flesh, and bone.  This is also the crocodilian’s signature move when wrestling other crocodilians who are tough enough, generally, to withstand it, though sometimes at the cost of a limb or two.  With prey, crocodilians might also bash them against river banks and bottoms or against rocks, though they are also known to cache their kills to let them ripen.  Even moderately sized crocodilians are big enough to grab, hold, and drown a human.    

In recent history, the cruelty and noisomeness of the crocodile is seen in a tale from World War II.  You remember Quint’s speech on the boat at sea at night in Jaws, about the shark attack on the U. S. S. Indianapolis’s crew after it abandoned ship.  That same year, the British sent troops of the Indian Army to retake Ramree Island off the coast of Burma, now Myanmar.  The attack drove nine hundred Japanese, who had offered fierce resistance, into retreat through mangrove swamps that were the habitat of enormous estuarine, or saltwater, crocodiles.  Stories of random rifle fire in the night, human screams, and sounds of violent feeding, were bruited about.   It was said that five hundred Japanese never came out, eaten alive.  Later investigation casts doubt on this; but even if the toll were only in the dozens, which seems plausible, it remains the single largest fatal crocodile attack in history.

In the 1960s, Nile crocodiles seemed to develop a partiality for idealistic and oblivious Peace Corp volunteers.  In one notorious incident, when a new group arrived on the Baro River in southwestern Ethiopia on a hot day in 1966, they decided a picnic and a cooling dip were in order.  As they splashed about, one young man swam across to the tail of a sandbar.  As his friends watched, he stood, then disappeared.

“We saw the tip of the nose of the crocodile,” wrote one of the fellow volunteers, “[and] it looked like Bill said something, and then he was gone.  There was no struggle; he never knew what hit him.”  

The crocodile was found and killed, and the human body parts collected–in particular the precisely severed bare lower legs–placed in  a cardboard box, and flown out.

“I have never heard of a crocodile hunter,” wrote the professional African hide hunter Paul Potous in the mid-1950s, in his book, No Tears for the Crocodile, “having been taken by a crocodile.  But,” he added, “there is always a first time to everything.”

Though crocodilians would seem to pose no direct threat to armed hunters, unless they were to go into the water after them, they present no small challenge as big game.  On the whole, crocodilians take up residence in the deepest, darkest, thickest, muddiest, most-hard-to-reach places.  On top of that, as Potous writes:

“Their sense of smell, hearing, and eyesight are all exceptionally keen, and there is yet another inexplicable instinct with which they are endowed–awareness of danger.  Also to their advantage and protection are the movements and warning noises of the numerous birds, a wonderful variety of which are found along the African rivers [and in the habitats of other crocodilians].”

We have probably no adequate idea of how astronomically high the global population of crocodilians may once have been, even in recorded times.  Exploring Florida and other parts of the Southeast just before the War of Independence, the Philadelphia botanist William Bartram wrote in his Travels:

“How shall I express myself so as to convey an adequate idea of it to the reader, and at the same time avoid raising suspicions of my veracity? Should I say, that the river (in this place) from shore to shore, and perhaps near half a mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish, of various kinds  [largely black bass], pushing through this narrow pass of the St. Juan’s [St. Johns River] into the little lake, on their return down the river, and that the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close together from shore to shore, that it would have been easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless?”

With vast numbers came great size.  From the Louisiana family that to this day owns the salt-dome Avery Island in Iberia Parish, seventeen-year-old “Ned” McIlhenny set out on the day after New Year’s, 1890, in a lugger–a small sailing ship–with two helpers, to wind through the bayou to Vermillion Bay to hunt geese.  Across the bay at dusk, Ned crossed the silted mouth of Lake Cock on foot, and followed the bank of an old stream to hunt ducks for supper.  Wading into the marsh to retrieve two mallards he had dropped, he saw what he thought to be a submerged log, which showed itself to be an enormous alligator, stupefied by the cold.  With only a shotgun and shot shells, Ned killed the animal.  He left it for the night, suspecting this was the largest gator he had ever seen.  When the three men returned in the morning, and were unable to drag the alligator out, Ned used the thirty-inch barrel of his gun and arrived at 7⅔ lengths, or 19 feet, 2 inches.  Ned went on to become the country’s foremost authority on alligators, with remarkably few questioning his report of the near-miraculous size of the monstrous gator (a certified 15-foot, 9-inch one was killed in Alabama in 2014). The McIlhenny’s famed product, Tabasco, remains an essential ingredient in that indispensable Cajun dish, alligator sauce piquante.

The largest crocodilians on earth today are the estuarine crocodiles, or “salties,” of Australia, and ranging across the Indo-Pacific from Sri Lanka and Kanyakumari at the tip of India, to the Solomon Islands.  The largest ever reliably measured in captivity was one captured in the Philippines in 2011 (it was given a name, but there is something patronizing and infantilizing about calling any wild animal Shamu or Elsa, so I won’t repeat it here).  It was 20 feet, 3 inches long and weighed more than 2,000 pounds.  It died two years later of a heart ailment at age fifty. Crocodiles can live to seventy-five, and up to a hundred in zoos, and they grow throughout their lives, so the question is:  how much bigger might it have become?

The biggest crocodilian ever killed?  It would have been, again, a saltie.  The only evidence, though, is a grainy black-and-white photo taken in 1914 on the bank of the Roper River that flows out of northern Australia into the Gulf of Carpentaria.  The hunter was the missionary Rev. R. D. Joynt, photographed with a well-dressed “Miss Cross”–no further identification–crouched behind a crocodile said unblushingly to be 28 feet long.  Though it is likely not nearly that big, and even allowing for the carcass being swollen in the hot sun and the benefit of forced perspective, it is nonetheless one hell of a croc.

The twentieth century was a close shave for numerous species of crocodilians.  In many parts of the world, bureaucracies tended to consider crocodilians no more than a nuisance.  In colonial Africa there were C. D. O.s–Crocodile Destruction Officers–usually some old retiree who’d putter around on a lake with a fishing resource, chunking out chicken-egg-size doses of potassium cyanide sewn inside rotten pieces of baboons, monkeys, fish, hippos, even the meat from poisoned crocs. Crocodile eats. Crocodile disappears. Crocodile dies. Crocodile putrefies. Crocodile floats up. Crocodile is of no use to anyone, not even as a hide, although other crocs might consume it, thus possibly resuming the cycle.

Generally considered inferior leather at the time, tanned crocodile skins went back and forth in popularity throughout the 1800s. It was in the early 1900s when tanners learned to make a durable, pliable, commercial product and fashion houses turned it into a luxury item, and the wholesale slaughter was underway.

Among the most famous crocodile market hunters in Australia was an emigre from World War II Poland, Krystyna Pawłowska.  She and her fellow Polish-emigre husband entered the saltie business when one tried to eat their toddler daughter in 1955 when they were gold prospecting in Queensland.  The three-year-old was taking a bath on the bank of a river when a croc came out of the water and began stalking her.  Seeing the croc, her brother yelled to his sister, and her father came out with a rifle and killed it.  They decided to sell the skin and were surprised when it brought them £A10, over $360 USD today.  At the time, the average weekly wage in Australia was $470.

When her husband’s partner quit, Krys began hunting with him.  She proved to be an excellent shot, never wading into the muddy rivers to hunt without lipstick and nail polish, and over the next decade is said to have taken at least 5,000 crocodiles, missing only three.  Just as impressive was her reputation of being able to skin, flesh, salt, and roll a hide faster than anyone else.  In the mid-1960s, the Pawłowskas figured they’d killed their fair share of salties and opened Australia’s first crocodile farm.  Oh, and in 1957, Krys killed a croc in the Norman River that was said to equal the one from the Roper forty-three years before.  With as much hard evidence.  

Maybe not the greatest crocodile hunter of all time, but certainly the most colorful, was the famed photographer and Afrophile Peter Beard.  Because of concerns in the mid-1960s about the population, Alistair Graham, a zoologist, was contracted by the Kenyan government to spend a year on the fly-blown shore of isolated Lake Turkana, surveying Africa’s largest remaining Nile crocodile population.  Beard came along with his camera and rifle.

Caking themselves in mud, the two floated out on inner tubes to the crocs. When hunting at night, they targeted the eyeshine they detected in their flashlight beams.  Overall, they shot, skinned, and necropsied just shy of 500 in the year, living off Nile perch, some weighing nearly two hundred pounds, that were either speared or killed with a .357 Magnum pistol in the shallows. Beard’s teeth turned brown from drinking the lake’s alkaline water.  His collaboration with Graham resulted in the classic Eyelids of Morning. 

The American alligator was listed as endangered in 1967–controversy remains about whether the classification was ever really biologically justified–and delisted at the end of the 1970s, and it now numbers in the millions across its range.  Australia outlawed saltwater-crocodile hunting in 1971.  Today there are well over a hundred thousand, with a flourishing population of feral pigs to feed on, and all the ranchers’ cattle they can eat, until they get shot as “problem” animals. Salties are today probably back at the carrying capacity of the habitat, but there are no opportunities for international hunters to take them.  Locals and Aboriginal people would love to take you hunting, and there some limited permits to be had, but only the Aussie permit holder can take the croc.  Despite their numbers and the problems they can cause for locals, saltwater crocs in Australia are not currently huntable by foreign hunters.

Without resorting to shark hooks and seine lines, which moves the pursuit into the realm of angling, crocodilians are among the most challenging big game to hunt.  Then there is the fact you can eat, wear, and mount them on the wall.  There are also few more magnificent animals in creation. 

Paul Potous made a statement that, while rather stupid, gives his book its title.  He tells us that “no one can be cruel to a crocodile.  Repulsive and loathsome, it is held in abject fear by the natives . . . Men, women or children–they are all a meal to the saurian.  In hunting it, I should still have the excitement of the chase, but at its death there would be no tears for the crocodile.”

Peter Beard’s Eyelids photographs were gleefully erotic, outrageous, and grotesque, yet with something quaking about them.  One is now riding on a golden record across interstellar space aboard the N. A. S. A. Voyager probe, so the only end to the journey of the image of a crocodile is the span of the universe.

The late Tom McIntyre’s book, Thunder Without Rain, will be published this year by Skyhorse Publishing. 

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