Cameroon with Egbert

by Dervla Murphy

  Rachel meanwhile had been collecting firewood. ‘When you’ve quite finished being ecstatic,’ she said, ‘maybe we could have something to eat?’

  While tending our noodles I remarked on the pleasure of being spontaneously with wild animals – just happening to meet them, in the course of an ordinary day, rather than going to a game-park and being driven around in a vehicle by a warden.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ observed Rachel, ‘call this an ordinary day. But I suppose you would.’

  She did however agree with my main argument. In Cameroon’s game-parks one can see lions, elephants, hippos, giraffes; but a warthog or antelope, met as it were socially, is worth ten lions viewed from a Land Rover.

  As we ate by starlight Rachel wondered, ‘Where do we go from here? We’re pretty thoroughly lost – surprise, surprise!’

  That was a nasty crack. At one junction, passed during the early afternoon, she had advised, ‘We should go down that way, to get to Makelele.’ Then she tolerantly gave in to my longing for the alternative, upward route; and now it seemed we were very far from any main path. Our ledge was pathless; the faint trail we had been following ended at the stream and we had found our own way up the rough bare slope.

  ‘Who cares about being lost?’ I said. ‘This site is the perfect end to a perfect day!’

  ‘Except for poor Eggles,’ said Rachel. ‘Must we tether him? Those donkeys are miles away!’

  ‘Hardly two miles,’ I calculated. ‘And donkey mares are permanently in season – the only animals, apart from humans, that are always ready for sex.’

  ‘Don’t be crude!’ said Rachel. And then she reluctantly tethered ‘poor Eggles’ to a stout sapling half-way between our camp and the edge of the ledge.

  9

  Exit Egbert

  THUDDING HOOVES WOKE me at 1.30 a.m. Egbert passed so close that his panic-stricken snorting was audible – and infectious. Simultaneously I heard the alarm bark of baboons and the eerie wailing and grunting of a family of warthogs (parents and four young) whom we had noticed bedding down at sunset in the nearby jungle. Scrambling to my feet, I saw tree-tops moving irregularly against the starry sky; the colobus monkeys were also worried.

  ‘Something’s wrong!’ I said urgently. ‘Egbert’s loose and panicking!’

  When Rachel failed to react I kicked her awake just as Egbert, frightened by the warthogs’ aggressive pandemonium, swung around and again galloped past us, going towards his tethering site. Before following him we had to put on our boots: an unbreakable rule, whatever the crisis. During this brief delay the warthogs maintained their hysterical protest and we could hear no Egbert-noises.

  As quickly as was prudent by starlight, we scouted the edge of the ledge. Again we were virtually torchless; in Tignere a crafty Hausa merchant had sold us two apparently new but in fact dud batteries. Already one had expired and the other was producing only a faint glimmer. As we shone this inadequate light over the steep slopes it picked out two large eyes some fifteen feet away. ‘There he is!’ exclaimed Rachel. But at once the eyes vanished, without any of the noises one would expect if a horse were moving away.

  We conferred. As the nearest dependable hospital was hundreds of miles away, common sense suggested that we should not risk broken bones; to have left the ledge by starlight would have been to invite an even greater disaster than the loss of our horse.

  Returning to camp, we noted that Egbert had bolted with wholly uncharacteristic force, breaking the sapling and taking with him twenty yards of rope. ‘Almost certainly,’ opined Rachel, ‘he was scared by a snake.’

  The monkeys and warthogs had quietened down, apart from an occasional bark or snort, and soon Rachel was asleep again. I lay looking up at the stars and hoping – with the sort of desperate intensity that feels like a physical effort – that the dawn would reveal Egbert placidly grazing nearby. Given the nature of our relationship, this was a not unreasonable hope. We had then been trekking together for six weeks and usually he had been left loose at night unless within reach of tempting crops. Even when I led him some distance away, to the best available grazing, his tendency was to move closer and closer to camp.

  I was already patrolling the edge of the ledge when the stars began to fade and the blackness to become grey. As the light strengthened my hope ebbed. Egbert was nowhere to be seen. I felt a ridiculous foreboding – ridiculous because he might be hidden close by in any of a hundred corners. Now the chaotic magnificence of this region filled me with despair – its deep forested ravines, its isolated patches of jungle, its wide expanses of grassland, its long, steep, scrubby ridges, its many twisting narrow valleys, its immense irregular slopes where jackals lived amidst a wilderness of massive boulders. Over supper I had said to Rachel, ‘This must be the very best campsite in Cameroon!’ Now I was saying to myself, ‘This must be the very worst place in the world to lose a horse!’

  When Rachel joined me we surveyed the scene through equine eyes. Mares apart, it seemed unlikely that of his own volition Egbert would have wandered far. Our ledge offered the best grazing for miles around and at the end of an exceptionally tough day’s trekking it was inconceivable that he would have chosen to explore this rugged terrain by starlight: he wasn’t that sort of person. So we began our search by returning to the donkey herd – not even thinking of breakfast.

  If asked to specify my unhappiest experience, in quarter of a century’s travelling, I would have to say ‘Egbert’s loss’. It was a disaster on two levels, practical and emotional. How were we ever to get back to a village and food without an animal to carry our gear? Would we have to abandon much of it? If so, how were we to survive for the remaining six weeks of our trek? Those were disturbing questions, yet secondary. From the moment of our meeting, Egbert had endeared himself to me in a special way and as time passed I came to love him more than any other equine travelling-companion – which is saying a lot, for on three continents I have been lucky with my pack-animals. Thus it was the loss of Egbert as a friend, rather than as a convenience, that truly devastated me. I knew my reaction was absurd; at the end of the trek we would have to part from him. But I was conditioned to that and he would then be left (one hoped) in comfortable circumstances with a kind owner. Losing him was another sort of experience. If only I hadn’t argued with Rachel about that path to Makelele! And I was haunted by the implications of those twenty yards of rope. If we didn’t find him, if the rope had ensnared him … His Irish head-collar was so strong and well fitting that he could neither break it nor slip out of it. All that day the vision of Egbert slowly dying of thirst gave me superhuman energy.

  I needed it during the next twelve hours. From the donkey herd, whose female complement showed no signs of having been wooed by Egbert, we climbed a high grassy mountain in search of a compound where we might be able to enlist helpers – offering a substantial reward and buy eggs and milk. (During the small hours I had heard cocks crowing somewhere in that direction.) Half-way up our hopes soared when a distant herd of eight horses and foals came into view. Eagerly we turned aside to investigate them but that long, exhausting detour ended in disappointment.

  ‘Maybe he tried to get off with one of those mares,’ I said, ‘and was attacked again. Perhaps he’s quite near, still hoping to ingratiate himself.’

  We split up then, to search all the obvious places, but in vain.

  When we found the compound – three ramshackle huts near the windswept brink of the spectacular escarpment – no man was around and the two young women and their many children were much too scared even to attempt to communicate in sign language.

  As we debated where to look next a bay with a white blaze appeared a hundred yards or so below the compound – then disappeared behind a hillock. ‘Egbert!’ whooped Rachel joyously. I thought so too, while not allowing myself to believe it.

  We hastened down – and this time the disappointment felt like a physical blow. In appearance that horse might have been Egbert’s twin, but he was very ill – scarce
ly able to walk – which explained his being alone. Miserably we returned to the high ground, passed the compound and spent the next half-hour searching a patch of nearby jungle.

  On our way back we heard confused shouting and screaming and saw eight children and a dog, followed by a woman with baby on back, racing down the slope from the compound to a group of horses. Rachel at once realised what was happening.

  ‘No!’ she cried, gripping my arm. ‘No – it’s too awful – it can’t be! They’re killing him!’

  I stared – then looked away. The bay was lying on the ground, being trampled and kicked by three stallions. Moments later the family reached the scene and the older children drove off the attackers. The woman knelt by the victim and raised his head; he was still alive.

  ‘It’s a sound instinct,’ I said, trying to be rational. ‘He’s very sick, so Nature suggests euthanasia.’

  ‘I hope they don’t blame us,’ muttered Rachel. ‘Bad ju-ju!’

  Again we hurried down that slope. The family seemed in a state of shock; they looked at us apprehensively but had recovered from the panic induced by our first appearance. To show sympathy for what we assumed to be a family misfortune, I knelt by the wretched horse’s head and tried to give him a glucose tablet. When he spat it out the woman expertly re-administered it; this was not the first time she had doctored a horse. But my futile gesture of solidarity greatly complicated the situation. Gradually we realised that the sick horse was a stray, that his attackers belonged to the family, that they saw us as his owners (hence our running to him earlier and now giving ‘medicine’) and so they felt guilty.

  ‘What a muddle!’ lamented Rachel.

  ‘What a ghastly coincidence!’ said I.

  Everyone looked bewildered when we left, apparently abandoning our sick horse. It had been quite impossible to convey that we did not own this bay but were desperately searching for an almost identical animal.

  We returned to camp by a different route, probing every corner on the way – every horse-accessible thicket, every scattering of large boulders behind one of which our Eggles might be dozing.

  ‘If we’re not careful,’ said Rachel gloomily, ‘we’ll accidentally corner a daddy warthog and that’ll be the end of a Murphy.’

  At noon we rested briefly on our ledge, eating nuts and planning the afternoon’s strategy. Then we again split up, to quarter the grassy plain.

  Eventually I found the hoof-prints of, unmistakably, a galloping horse. When Rachel had rejoined me we followed them down a steep red cliff on a dusty cow-path – one not used at this season, for the prints of a solitary horse remained clear. I had no doubt that these were Egbert’s; having walked behind a horse for six weeks, one becomes very familiar with every nuance of his hoof-marks. Around each bend I expected to find him dead with a broken neck – or, still worse, alive with a broken leg. At the foot of the cliff we lost the prints on rock-hard ground, then briefly found them again, then lost them near the brink of a hitherto unseen and unsuspected chasm.

  It is a measure of the unpredictability of this terrain that such a chasm – half a mile wide and some 600 feet deep – could suddenly appear at one’s feet. In normal circumstances this mighty fissure, its floor covered with virgin forest, would have seemed a thrilling sight. But now, staring over the edge, I shuddered – picturing a terrified Egbert (unnerved by a python?) galloping through the darkness to his doom.

  ‘Let’s be sensible,’ said Rachel briskly. ‘If he’d fallen over here we’d see a mark on the trees, they’re so close together. A horse wouldn’t fall through neatly, leaving the branches to close over again. And if he didn’t fall through, breaking branches, he’d be supported by them and visible, even from here.’

  This blast of scientific logic partially reassured me and we climbed back up the red cliff, to reach a saddle linking the stony northern ridge and the higher grassy mountains to the south-west.

  An hour later Rachel was leading around the edge of a jungle-filled cleft. Abruptly she stopped, staring at the dusty path. ‘Some puss!’ she noted laconically.

  Apart from their size, the leopard pug-marks were identical to those muddy prints left by our own cats on clean sheets and important typescripts. We followed them for some twenty yards, then they disappeared. To stiffen my upper lip I recalled that leopards don’t attack horses where Fast Food is abundant – monkeys, antelopes, warthog piglets.

  ‘But a horse wouldn’t know that,’ Rachel pointed out. ‘So naturally he’d bolt. I’m pretty sure those eyes we saw weren’t Egbert’s – he couldn’t have disappeared so silently.’

  We agreed then that a prowling leopard would adequately explain both Egbert’s bolting and the alarm registered by our fellow-sleepers on the ledge.

  By 6 p.m. we were physically and emotionally exhausted but not yet despairing; at least we hadn’t found a corpse in any of the area’s obvious death-traps. Then, as we collected firewood, a solitary horse appeared against the sky on the eastern ridge where we planned to start the morrow’s search. All day I had been cursing myself for having lost the binoculars and now my self-reproach reached a crescendo.

  ‘Could it be?’ I wondered, straining my eyes. ‘It’s a dark horse, it just might be!’

  Action was indicated so we rolled up our flea-bags. The remaining daylight would see us to the ridge, if we pushed ourselves, but we would have to spend the night there. Yet again we scrambled down and down, then up and up – adrenalin stimulated by hope. The sun set as we reached the crest of the ridge. No horse was visible and we crossed eagerly to the other side. This time the disappointment, though desolating, was more bearable.

  ‘We’re getting used to being emotionally tortured,’ observed Rachel.

  Again it was a sick horse, with the same symptoms as the other: an oddly arched back, stiff movements, starey coat, runny eyes, laboured breathing. We deduced a local epidemic of some dire equine disease and at once I envisaged Egbert picking it up and languishing in misery. ‘Pull yourself together!’ said Rachel. ‘You’re worrying more today about Egbert than you ever worried about me!’

  ‘But I’ve never lost you,’ I pointed out. ‘And now let’s look for somewhere level to sleep – in minutes it’ll be dark.’

  Then a flicker of white at the base of the ridge caught our eye; a young man was praying outside a hitherto unobserved herd’s hut. As we moved towards him he noticed us and stopped praying. We waved and shouted cheerfully. He grabbed his stick, screamed at us and gesticulated wildly, pointing towards the high eastern mountains.

  ‘Does he know we’ve lost a horse?’ wondered Rachel. ‘Is he trying to say Egbert went that way?’

  When we quickened our pace – hope spurting again – the herd began to saunter away from us, his stick behind his shoulders. Then suddenly his nerve broke. Drawing his long gown above his knees he fled at Olympic speed: rarely have I seen a human move so fast. Within moments he had disappeared into a scrub-filled hollow.

  ‘Poor fellow!’ exclaimed Rachel. ‘He thinks we’re devils.’

  Outside the well-made straw hut we sat in the dusk, sharing a packet of glucose tablets for supper, while a small herd – bulls, cows, calves – efficiently put themselves to bed in an adjacent thorn-fenced corral.

  ‘Poor fellow!’ repeated Rachel. ‘Where is he now? Maybe he’ll never recover from this trauma! And what about the calves? They should be separated from their mothers – now there’ll be no morning milk – we’re wrecking the whole system!’

  ‘He may return with a companion,’ I said.

  Rachel shook her head. ‘Not a hope! Who’d face two white devils after dark?’

  By 8 p.m. I was aware of having been awake since 1.30 a.m. ‘Let’s move into the hut,’ suggested Rachel. ‘This ground is all bumps and stones and there’s nowhere grassy that isn’t on a slope.’

  Conditioning is an odd thing; one doesn’t normally sleep uninvited in other people’s dwellings and guilt consumed me as we bent low to enter that hut. Our feeb
le torch, conserved until then, showed that it was neat and clean with a narrow ‘bed’ of goat-skins on grass to one side. Our involuntary host had been about to cook his supper; a few sticks smouldered near the entrance, beside a bowl of maize-flour. It seemed he came of an affluent family. On his bed lay a Nigerian mat-roll containing two soft blankets, a smart sweater, a torch that didn’t work, a box of matches, a few kolanuts and a box of sugar-lumps – the last a luxury bought only by the wealthiest in the Mbabo area. A few enamel plates were slotted into the wall, between straw and poles, and a sack of maize-flour stood by the bed. A row of clean enamel bowls, ready for the morning’s milk, reactivated Rachel’s angst.

  ‘Never mind,’ I soothed, ‘we can leave 1,000 CFA in the sugar.’

  ‘We mustn’t use his clean blankets,’ decided Rachel, ‘we’re too filthy and smelly.’

  So we laid our flea-bags (scarcely less filthy and smelly) on the goatskins. But despite my exhaustion and a comfortable bed I woke often. Gazing out at the stars – pulsating and brilliant – I wondered what exactly had happened … Was Egbert still alive? On returning to camp might we find him there? Or was there a possibility that he had been stolen?