I usually arrive at the Safari Club International Convention with a perfectly sensible hunting plan. Then I encounter a mounted animal that looks as though it stepped out of an explorer’s fever dream, and fiscal discipline quietly slips out the nearest exit. Who knew I needed a yellow-backed duiker?
This is why I never miss the Super Bowl of hunting shows. The next gathering takes place January 20–23, 2027, at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee. After a career of globetrotting with rifle and shotgun, those four days have become a homecoming and family reunion. People I think about throughout the year, but often see only at SCI, arrive from places where the nearest traffic jam involves something with horns.
I have been a hunter of stories most of my life. Pursuing animals has supplied the excuse to collect them, along with friendships forged in places where you learn rather quickly who somebody really is. Spend enough time together in the bush and the formalities disappear. Years later, a familiar face across a convention aisle brings the whole country back: the smell of camp, the dust, the anticipation of another morning.
Recognizing that face can require a moment. An African professional hunter in something other than khaki looks slightly misplaced, like a buffalo standing in a hotel lobby. I know this fellow in his native habitat, where he reads tracks that are invisible to me. Here he is wearing respectable shoes and discussing dinner reservations. My brain needs a second to catch up.
“If these walls could talk” takes on fresh meaning at SCI, although the walls would have trouble getting a word in. Extraordinary people from some of the wildest places on earth converge in a spicy salsa of accents and improbable adventures. You might overhear a professional hunter discussing recovery from his leopard “scratches” while admiring a rifle that belongs in the Hermitage. The engraving warrants a curator. The scratches probably warranted a surgeon.
Daylight hours become a kind of speed dating with outfitters. I move from booth to booth, considering who might be the right fit for a family hunt in Tanzania. You can learn something from a website, but I want to look a man in the eye before entrusting him with people I love. How does he listen? What does he ask? Can he explain the experience beyond the animals on his brochure? Choosing an outfitter is choosing the person who will help write a chapter of your family’s life.
Of course, the show offers plenty of ways to furnish the chapters already written. Buy the trip. Redesign the house to accommodate the trip. Find a painting that returns you to the greatest place you have ever been, on one of the best days you have ever lived. Get warm in a new fur. When you and your wife approach the jewelry booths, study something urgently in the opposite direction. This tactic has a poor success rate, but hope remains important.
Then the show floor closes and Nashville takes over. A city built on music knows what to do with people who have spent the day getting reacquainted. There are smiles, laughter, dancing and perhaps a dram of Tennessee whiskey, with the sequence subject to revision. An old hunting friend can turn dinner into another expedition without anybody leaving the table. Someone remembers a detail you had forgotten, and suddenly you are both back in camp.
The auctions give all this enjoyment a purpose beyond our own calendars. Convention fundraising supports SCI and its foundation’s advocacy and conservation work. Bid up a storm and you can buy something you love while helping defend the freedom to enjoy it. Hunters need people doing that work while the rest of us dream about the next departure.
I go because these are my people, and because time has made the reunion more precious. We compare plans, revisit adventures and make promises to share another camp. The years between those camps pass faster than they once did. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Nashville is already on my calendar. The hunting plan remains provisional.
Somewhere on that show floor, a duiker is waiting to explain why.
– Chris Dorsey
Chris Dorsey is a Coloradan, 30-year media veteran, biologist, outdoor television producer and natural history filmmaker whose writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Forbes and dozens more national titles.