What Is It About A Pretty Woman With A Gun?

In an age of social-media shaming, a single tweet can launch a crusade. But maybe Ricky Gervais should have picked another woman to mess with.

- Kerry Howley

There is no way around this: At 4:30 a.m., as we embark on the two-hour journey that will take us to some hunting grounds in northwest South Africa, a.k.a. “the Bush,” Rebecca Francis is wearing a full-on smoky eye. Her lids are lined and her lashes plumped, her lips shimmer a glossy pink. She is carrying her weapon, a Mathews Chill SDX dual-cam bow with hot-pink detailing, marketed to women “who may be small in stature, but demand big performance,” and from which she has every intention of plunging an arrow into the chest of a 500-pound sable antelope, where it will, if all goes as planned, pierce the animal’s lungs. Am I underdone? I wonder, a thought I immediately recognize as insane.

Francis is a peppy, ever-smiling 41-year-old mother of three, stepmother of five, and grandmother of nine who looks 31 and speaks with the elongated vowels of a northern Midwesterner, though she hails from Utah and lives ten miles from anything on 11 acres in Wyoming, where she keeps two dogs, three cats and seven kittens, seven horses, and chickens she calls “so stinkin’ cute I cannot