We'd been crawling for the best part of two hours, our destination a clump of brush at the base of a big mopane tree. The gravel was blistering hot in the midday sun, and it was sharp, too; our knees and elbows were raw, and my back hurt. Somehow we made it. The grassy peninsula lay just across a small inlet. A midsize crocodile, the sentinel, was less than 50 yards away. Miraculously, he was still asleep. The big boy, the one we wanted, lay at the end of the peninsula among several lesser crocs.

The crocodile was on the far side of that little peninsula, maybe 70 yards away. On most game animals this would be a very simple shot, but the croc's brain is a walnut-size target, and it must be hit precisely. The author cannot recall a more difficult shot.

PH Andrew Dawson slid a bit to the right, and I crawled up beside him, keeping low and kissing the ground. Slowly, slowly, I eased the old .375 into position, adjusting slightly to avoid a leafy branch just ahead of the muzzle.

The croc was lying at a slight quartering-away angle, his huge head almost in the water. I could clearly see the horns, at least with my eyes. Through the 1.75-5X Leupold, turned up all the way, it was a different story. The crosshairs completely covered the small area I must hit.

Sweat trickled down my nose, and not just from the heat. This was tricky. I shifted up, down, left, right and back to center. Yes, this was the hold. I slipped the safety and put my finger on the trigger, and as I did, the big croc slipped into the water, gone.

I've knocked around Africa more or less annually for about 30 years now. I've been fortunate, and there isn't an awful lot there that I haven't done. One glaring omission was that I'd never shot a crocodile.

Truthfully, I'd never much wanted to. After all, it's just a big, creepy lizard.

A few years ago, in Tanzania, my hunting partner, Art Wheaton, shot a big croc on the banks of the Little Ruaha. He made a brilliant shot, anchoring the croc perfectly from one side of the river to the other, and I idly wondered if I could have made that shot.

Last year, on a buffalo hunt, we were camped right on the banks of the Zambezi. Any time we were in camp at midday we could glass big crocs sunning on islands and across on the Zambian shore. I got interested, looking at each one with questions in mind: How could that croc be approached for a shot? If a shot became possible, how would I do it, and could I pull it off?

My buddy Tim Danklef, partner in our film enterprise, loves crocodile hunting, and he egged me on. "Boddington, you're a shooter as well as a hunter. A big croc is the hardest animal to stalk and offers one of the most difficult shots in the hunting world. You've got to try it."

In 2005 we returned to Andrew Dawson and Paul Smith's Chifuti Safaris camp on the Zambezi, primarily to hunt leopard but also with one of their scarce crocodile licenses in hand. We got the leopard--technically not a difficult shot but done under a great deal of pressure--and now we had some time to look for a big croc. By now I'd done some homework, and I had a better sense of what Tim had been raving about.