The Gift
I WAS A trapper before I became a hunter. My tutor was our full-time domestic gardener, Victor – I could never get my tongue around his Xhosa name. As an eight-year-old boy, I regarded Victor as the cleverest chap in the world because he could make ingenious bird traps out of odds and ends. He passed this skill on to me and it wasn’t long before I kept a variety of garden birds in a small aviary.
On my tenth birthday Uncle Phil gave me the wonderful gift of a Daisy Red Ryder BB rifle and taught me how to hold, aim and shoot it
Victor also taught me how to make a catapult. Not just an ordinary catty – this was a custom-built precision hunting instrument. The two strips of motorcar tyre tubing, carefully cut to exact lengths and widths, had to be made from red rubber. The V-shaped catty handle
