Kudu

The greater kudu is called the grey ghost and the name is not marketing. A bull stands nearly five feet at the shoulder, weighs six hundred pounds or more, and carries three full spiraling turns of horn running past fifty inches on a good bull — and he will stand in brush at thirty yards and simply not be there. Kudu are the animal that convinces experienced hunters their eyes have failed them. Bulls here are taken at forty-nine to fifty-four inches, which in African terms is a bull nobody would apologize for.

What makes them disappear is the combination of vertical white flank stripes against vertical brush shadow, a gray coat that matches mesquite bark exactly, and a habit of freezing rather than running. The standard kudu sighting is a horn tip moving where you were certain nothing was standing. South Texas brush country happens to replicate their native cover almost perfectly — thick thorny scrub broken by open lanes — which is why kudu do so well here and why hunting one here feels closer to the real thing than it has any right to.

They feed at the edges early and late and go deep in the heat, so the hunt is a first-light and last-light proposition. When a bull does break cover he usually gives you one look over the shoulder before he goes, and that is the shot. A .300 magnum with a premium bullet is the sensible tool; kudu are large but thin-skinned and not especially hard to kill with a well-placed shot behind the shoulder. A kudu bull is not an animal to hurry, and the number of hunters who have taken one in Texas without leaving the country is still small enough to be worth being part of.