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To do something right in life, you need a good foundation. For David Hanlin that foundation was his grandfather and his uncle, Joe Semple, who took him out in the woods and guided him to his first deer, a doe, when he was eleven. Hanlin’s hunting life started from this very simple beginning, for he had no rich relatives to take him on deluxe tented East African safaris. In fact, to get through college he worked in a steel plant to pay his bills.
In 1958 he and his friends went to Alaska for an unguided hunt, where they shot a moose, and then the adventure began! That night, no less than four brown bears came into camp, attracted by the smell of moose meat. In the fracas two bears were shot. From then on, Hanlin was hooked on the thrill of big-game hunting. There is very little in Hanlin’s lifetime he did not hunt, and he was fortunate enough to take dozens of trips to Asia and Africa as well as many trips to Canada and the western United States.
As he said “I always had to work hard for my trophies,” and his experiences prove this statement. He was one of the last hunters in Sudan before the country closed to hunting, and he was on his first safari to Mozambique in 1971 when FRELIMO fighters stole the carcasses of the animals he had shot in order to feed their troops. While hunting in the Philippines he had to use a M-1 Garand rifle with solid bullets to shoot buffalo. He was just plain lucky that he had a semiautomatic because the two buffalo were more than a little aggressive, one because of a large ear infection. When he arrived in Moscow with “forbidden” magazines, U.S.S.R. Customs officials found them and promptly sat down to read them in front of all the arriving passengers! It’s experiences like these that make big-game hunting the grand sport it is.
After you have shot a Grand Slam, a Super Slam, the Big Five, all the spiral-horn antelope of Africa, and virtually everything in North America, you have a lot of stories to tell. Hanlin’s book contains the highlights of his hunting career—the funny episodes, the mishaps, and the unusual. And although he has hunted the mighty argali of Asia, he still prefers the deer of Pennsylvania, his home state, to wild sheep. Not Sold in Bookstores
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