I asked him whether, as he looks back over 50 years of adventures with his .416, any one shot stands out as particularly memorable. “Well, I remember on one occasion a lady hit a leopard and it took off toward a gully. A lot of professional hunters carried a shotgun in a leopard blind but I didn’t because you never knew, sometimes a lion, rhino or elephant would come wandering past. So on this occasion I had my .416 and when the leopard took off it went into this little patch of bush in the gully. As we came walking up, the leopard did a remarkable thing. Instead of holding, it broke from the gully and ran up a steep rocky incline at about 100 yards, going like a streak. I let fly with the .416 and rolled him just like that. A very lucky shot. My trackers eventually, I think, had more faith in that .416 than they did in me. ‘Skitini’ they called it—they couldn’t pronounce ‘416.’ I just had to point it, they thought, and Skitini would do the rest.”

That leopard, and virtually every other animal Harry killed with his .416, was shot with a solid bullet. While Harry used soft-nosed bullets in his light rifles, he much preferred solids for heavy game, like buffalo, rhino and elephant, and used them as well when backing up clients on lion and leopard. In part, Harry’s distrust of softs was due to early experiences with Kynoch soft points, which he found had an unfortunate habit of breaking apart. Much of his preference for solids, however, was simply the need for penetration above all else on dangerous game. The one exception to Harry’s rule on solids in the .416 came after Jack Carter’s development of the Trophy Bonded Bear Claw.

Harry recalls one particularly durable 500-grain, .458 solid, an early Hornady that had a nickel rather than bronze coating over the steel jacket. After dispatching a buffalo with the bullet from a .458 Win. Mag. he was using while his .416 was being rebarreled, Harry recovered the bullet in such good condition that he decided to load it again. He shot a second buffalo and once again found the bullet intact, so he reloaded it and used it to take a third buffalo, at which point he retired the bullet with full ballistic honors. “I would not like to give the impression that I made a habit of this,” Harry emphasized. “It was done as an experiment, but it did happen!”

I was curious about Harry’s recommendations to clients. “A lot would depend on what they’re after,” he says. “If they wanted everything from impala to elephant, I’d say start off with something like a .270 Win. or 7 mm Rem. Mag., then a .338 Win. Mag. or a .375 H&H Mag., and then if you were a magazine man I’d say a .416, and if you were a double man the .450s and .470s are all so similar, really, there’s not much difference between them. For a one-rifle safari, the .375 H&H Mag. is the only choice. No finer cartridge has ever been developed.”

Harry grins as he says this, a boy’s grin. Given Africa to roam and another 50 years, there is little doubt how he would choose to pass the time.