We had so many poignant and beautiful moments this year, this season. So many perfectly captured professional photographs even, and I’m forever grateful for all of those moments. But this still stands out as one of my favourite moments and images that I will hold onto forever. Hopefully as a really tired, stiff old man one day I’ll look at it and remember everything about it. A photograph is a powerful thing. I’ve always said such. It can transport you right back to an exact moment and time. I personally remember every detail about any capture; the smells, the weather, the exact scene and moment that unfolded, what I was dealing with personally, where I was internally, and how content and happy just that moment in time left me – even amidst the stresses of life. The present moment is all we have. The past and the future both don’t ever exist, they merely exist in our minds. Truly inhabiting the present moment, in surrender is enlightenment enough sometimes I feel. As it allows us to accept everything we are dealing with. And the secret is, it’s all good, no matter how ‘bad’ it seems at the time…
Bulton of Oscar high up in the snowy capped peaks, like a white beacon, my white beacon of hope – amongst the tangerine, rust, apricot and ochre yellow shades of grasses. It was a large covey of Greywing Francolin, 17 birds. We were high up, 2600m up to be exact. I was hunting Bulton and his daughter Bianca as a brace. All three of us were tired. Our legs were weary. There are no roads up here. It’s all negotiated on foot. It had been a long season already. But this was our time. Our time to enjoy one another, without the pressures to deliver and without any time constraints. To find Greywing Francolin who have barely seen man before, especially man and dog. It is an untouched wilderness up here. I’ve always said that, perhaps one of the very few remaining areas like this in South Africa. To find startled Greywing Francolin up here, bright eyed and bushy tailed, hurtling in all directions like mortars making their escape, with only the Black Eagles as your spectators and company, and the odd Vaal Rhebok or Mountain Reedbuck is something truly special. Bulton is the old man of the show now, but he still doesn’t act like it, and I love him for that. I hope to be as he is one day when I’m an old man.
Always chasing the horizon.