Strange Tales from the African Bush

Book excerpt: Hannes Wessels is one of the most talented writers that we at Safari Press have read in a long time. This former PH in Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe writes tales of hapless figures and derring-do gone wrong that will make you laugh out loud—a rarity in the cut-and-dry genre of big-game hunting. There is the story about a PH who wanted to impress the beautiful daughter of a client and landed up in the emergency room with a rifle barrel stuck up his posterior, and the story of a game warden who fell into a hollowed-out baobab tree on top of a sleeping leopard. This same unfortunate warden in a further misadventure is deprived of some of his very sensitive private parts during an elephant cull—probably just to prove that a run of bad luck does not necessarily have to end. Wessels also weighs in on his own experience when he tells of being seriously gored by a buffalo. Whether telling the story of rafting down an uncharted river to set up a new safari camp or highlighting the experiences of a PH such as Lew Games, you will find Wessels’s stories so entertaining that you’ll be sorry when the book ends. All of Hannes Wessels’s stories are great reading, as attested by the number of his articles published in Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, and other major magazines.One of our readers wrote: “Thanks for recommending Strange Tales . . . . I chortled and laughed and cried and had to stop reading while on the flight from Reno to Chicago—not because the flights were messed up, which they were—but because the book was so funny.”