Ferlach – By Brooke Chilvers
First published in Gray’s Sporting Journal
So I met this really cute guy, tall, well-built and movie-star handsome, the way I like them, dark hair and hazel eyes. Whereas my mother married my father for his dimples and soft curls, Rudy was granite, like his homeland of Brittany.
Just weeks after meeting, my French professional-hunter darling departed for the Central African Republic, to guide one of the country’s last elephant safaris. He was gone for 81 days; I counted down every one of them. But it also gave me the time to break off my “prior engagements.”
My boss in the Paris advertising agency where I worked knew, almost before I did, that I already had one foot half out the door. Forever. But he gave me a week off anyway to seal my fate when Rudy returned in September. He’d gallantly suggested a camping trip to a “charming little Austrian town named Ferlach,” in Carinthia, the southernmost province of Austria. On the other side of Karawanks mountain range lies Slovenia.
I’m a kinda “follow my guy anywhere” sort of gal, so we somehow collected in my tiny Porte Saint-Denis apartment, a tent, bedrolls, camping stove – the works – and set-out on the 1200-km trip, stopping in Metz for the night to see safari clients who’d become friends. We drove the last 850 km, passing Saarbrucken, Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, even Klagenfurt, without stopping, except for gas where the toilets required 10-pfennig coins, and none of the German ladies left a stall door ajar, like I did.
I hadn’t learned yet that the PH in Rudy made him approach life with determination and directness. It is about the destination, not the journey. We drove with no lunch or coffee breaks; no offered pee-breaks (this man is a camel), and I was still too shy then to ask.
Finally, we arrived at the unsophisticated campgrounds. Like a cavalier who feeds and grooms his horse before himself or kin, Rudy immediately set out to set up camp. This included hooking up, safari style, neon lights to the car battery, which made us different from everyone else. Then he started fiddling and fussing, and would have fussed forever, with a stuck tent zipper. Starved (I’ve never missed a meal in my life on purpose), thirsty as the devil, with a girly bladder, I exploded into tears. My heaving and slobbering thoroughly confounded him, and he has since learned a lot about women.
Fed, watered and relieved, by our second boiled coffee, I realized I’d failed to investigate Ferlach as a holiday destination when I read in the green Michelin that already in 1518, Maximilian I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire had promoted iron ore-rich Ferlach as the center of a gunsmithing industry that still exists today. Its armorers were the armorers to Empress Maria Theresa and the Habsburg monarchy, and also supplied the armies of Spain, France, and Turkey.
Sitting in our folding chairs, I quickly understood we were here for a reason: the acquisition of what Rudy explained, with sincerity, was his “last hunting rifle.”
When we met, in 1984, in Africa Rudy carried a Brno .375 H&H Magnum – the only rifle he could afford as a young PH – and a second-hand Mauser bolt-action Dumoulin in .460 Weatherby Magnum, handed over to him by his mentor, PH Robert Rouelle, for hunting elephant in the forest. With no muzzle break, which Rudy hates anyway, it kicked like a mule and firing it was punishment.
While we sipped Grüner Veltliner and nibbled smokey Carinthian farmer’s sausage and mountain cheeses, he recounted to me the entire history and range of hunting weaponry and calibers, from side-by-side shotguns through drillings.
“I’ve always dreamed of someday owning a double rifle,” he concluded earnestly. “Obviously, I can’t afford an English, and not even a Belgian double.” But he’d read about Austrian gunmaker Franz Sodia, and had seen one in action in the field on buffalo with a client. In time for his 1985 safari season, he’d acquired a sweetie and a boxlock side-by-side .458 Win. Mag., with a Turkish walnut stock, along with plenty of its modern and easily available ammunition.
But when he got to Africa, after a few shots, only a single barrel would fire. Although he had it reliably repaired, he’d fallen out of love with the double, and sold it, only for it to reappear years later in the hands of a client who still owns it.
By now we’d set up household together, our belongings then still fitting into a few suitcases. As we strolled past Kettner, his favorite armurerie in Paris, talk of Rudy’s “very last hunting rifle” resurfaced as he studied the Heym “Express” magnum bolt-action .416 Rigby on display. It was expensive; but less so than a “real” Rigby. Needless to say, although he still owns it, and too many boxes of its 400-grain Federal Trophy Bonded ammunition, the Heym was not his last hunting rifle.
As business called him increasingly to the forest, also in Cameroon, with its invisible testy elephants and ornery buffalo, I found myself begging him to get “the biggest bang for the buck!” It is not a coincidence that he’d already done his research. Our home became home to an ugly but affordable .500 Jeffery, made by French gunsmith Jean-Paul Ridon. This, Rudy promised, “the rifle of John ‘Pondoro’ Taylor and Fletcher Jamieson,” was his very, very last “African” rifle.
Except he craved the look and feel of beautiful wood, and soon sold his scorned mistress to buy a better-looking .500 Jeffery, from young gunsmith Olivier Chevasson. “Done!” he swore. “I have what I always dreamed of having,” he declared, without crossing his heart, I noted.
But he soon learned that it was hard to acquire really good, reliable ammunition for that caliber in those years, and said he’d had enough close calls in Africa due to lousy ammunition.
By now, we were married and living in the house we’d spend the next 24 years renovating. By then, I’d been editor of African Hunting Gazette for years, and could finally really discuss firearms with my avid and informed husband. In fact, I could almost predict the outcome when he read that Swedish ammunition manufacturer Norma was offering 600-grain Norma African PH ammo for a .505 Gibbs.
“That’s what I need! I need one!” he told himself, yet managed to ask, “Really? Do I really need one?” Probably not, he deduced. Still, he told me: “This is the Holy Grail of rifles, the ultimate rifle in the world! John Hunter and Bror Blixen used the .505 Gibbs with great success!” Then he pledged, this time crossing his heart, “I am sure I will never need another rifle for Africa the rest of my life.”
Out went Jeffery #2. In came the newly beloved .505 Gibbs, and yet another lifetime supply of ammunition, just as Paris’s gun stores were shutting their doors forever. Gastine Renette, Fauré Le Page, Callens et Modé, and even Kettner no longer figured in our forays into the city.
Rudy’s hunting career came to an end for various reasons. Most import, the December, 2012 outbreak of the ongoing Central African Republic Civil War, when Muslim Séléka rebels ravaged, then destroyed, our safari camp; and reimbursing safari clients ate up our savings. Then, in Cameroon, there was the open fracture of his ankle in the equatorial forest while hunting elephant with Pygmies; and Boko Haram felt increasingly too close for comfort in the savanna areas in the north. In 2014, my PH turned 65. And after three decades in the safari business in a far-flung perilous country, my nerves were weary. I begged him to pull the plug.
I am not exaggerating to say that these last years together, free from coup d’états and competing for clients, have been the happiest of my life.
We stand in Rudy’s home office that’s really more a museum, with all its memories and reminders of (never) last scopes and binoculars, (never) last hunting hats and roe deer trophies. At age 73, his .505 Gibbs is still there. “Well, I guess that really is my very last big-game rifle,” he nearly lamented. “Well,” I say, “at least I’m still your first – and very last wife!”
Writer Brooke Chilvers and retired French PH Rudy Lubin divide their time between the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and a cottage in Brittany not far from the sea.
