Bush Vet

by Clay Wilson

  Bush Vet

  Bush Vet

  Clay Wilson

  with Tony Park

  Published in 2013 by Umuzi

  an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1966/003153/07

  First Floor, Wembley Square, Solan Road, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

  umuzi@randomstruik.co.za

  www.randomstruik.co.za

  © 2013 Clay Wilson and Tony Park

  The authors have asserted their moral right to be identified as the authors of this book

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  First edition, first printing 2013

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0178-7 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0502-0 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0503-7 (PDF)

  Cover design by publicide

  Cover photograph by Alex Bernasconi Photography

  Text design by Chérie Collins

  Set in 11 on 15 pt Adobe Caslon

  For the wildlife of Botswana,

  especially those elephants lost to poachers

  and man’s thoughtlessness

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Full circle

  Chapter 2: Coming home

  Chapter 3: Finding my way in the bush

  Chapter 4: Prevention is better than cure

  Chapter 5: A stranger in paradise

  Chapter 6: Saving the day

  Chapter 7: Hit and run

  Chapter 8: Honorary game warden

  Chapter 9: Injured giants

  Chapter 10: Cats

  Chapter 11: The most dangerous animal

  Chapter 12: Services no longer required

  Chapter 13: Everything is going to be all right

  Chapter 14: You must sit down to urinate

  Chapter 15: In the shadow of the gallows

  Chapter 16: Coming home

  Acknowledgements

  Many people supported me during my time in Botswana and I’d like to thank my thousands of friends on Facebook and other forums around the world who provided moral and, at times, financial support for my voluntary veterinary work. In particular I’d like to single out my friend Patrick Webb, who called the United States embassy in Botswana on a daily basis while I was in prison to ensure they didn’t forget me. I’d like to thank my co-writer Tony Park for his professionalism and dedication to this project. Tony and I would like to thank our agent, Isobel Dixon, from Blake Friedmann; publisher Fourie Botha from Umuzi, and Frederik de Jager, who preceded Fourie and believed in this book from the start. Thanks also to our excellent editor Bronwyn McLennan. Tony would like to thank Kathy, Nicola and Sheila who read the manuscript and offered suggestions, and Chris Harvie for his initial reading and characteristically forthright feedback.

  Clay Wilson

  Dr Clay Wilson can be contacted via email at exodusclay@yahoo.com. Visit his website at: www.internationalwildliferescue.org or his blog at http://chobewildliferescue.blogspot.com.

  The names of certain individuals were changed to protect them.

  Prologue

  “We’ve got a wounded leopard, let’s go,” Mogau said. “I’ll come to your place.”

  I ended the call and got my veterinarian’s bag and my dart gun and went outside to the Land Cruiser to wait for Mogau.

  It was my first day back on the job, and man, it was good to be back.

  I had just got back the night before from Botswana’s capital, Gaborone, where I’d met with my lawyer and, after much toing and froing, the permanent secretary of the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP). My status as an honorary game warden had been suddenly revoked three months earlier, at the same time as I’d been told my visa and work permit were being cancelled.

  The letters had come like a lightning strike at the beginning of the rainy season – malevolent and without warning – and they had exploded my world. I’d been given no reason as to why the government of Botswana wanted me gone, but the Minister of Environment, Wildlife and Tourism’s office had now told my lawyer that it had all been a mistake.

  Mosweu handed me a letter that gave authority for Chobe National Park to reinstate me as their voluntary veterinary surgeon, and this was all I needed. It didn’t give me my game warden’s position back, but I didn’t care. The guys from Chobe had been asking for me constantly in the three months I’d been in limbo, and now I had the green light to go back to doing what I loved.

  As I was loading my gear, Kabo Mogau pulled up. Mogau was one of the good guys and probably my best friend in Botswana. He was bright, caring and a man of integrity, and he took no nonsense.

  We shook hands.

  “It’s good to see you back, Clay.”

  “It’s good to be back.”

  On nine out of 10 calls, Mogau, who was head of research at Chobe National Park and the guy I reported to, didn’t bother coming out with me, but on this occasion he said he would ride with me, in my vehicle.

  His excitement was infectious and I was pumped. I drove from my house on the plateau above Kasane to the T-junction up the street and turned right on to the main road to Ngoma. We passed through the barrier indicating where the national park began and I signed the book and exchanged smiles and handshakes with the rangers on duty.

  It was October and the air was hot and heavy, expectant with the promise of rain. The grass on the side of the road was long and yellow, almost brittle from the months without moisture. The mopane trees’ butterfly-shaped leaves had turned red gold, but soon the whole park would be rejuvenated and dressed in a lush, green cloak. A fresh start.

  Although the road was wide and tarred smooth, the speed limit was 80 kilometres an hour and I stuck to it. I had treated too many wild animals that had been seriously injured on this main route through to the Namibian border crossing. I took a left, on to the dirt road heading south towards the famous Savuti plains.

  We were heading for a hunting camp, in a concession somewhere on the edge of Chobe. Soon after this incident the government started banning hunting and while some people applauded this, the fact was that if the ethical hunters left, there would be fewer eyes on the ground and fewer people to assist with anti-poaching in the areas adjacent to the national park.

  Whatever. I was back to doing all I’d ever wanted to do in life – saving animals.

  It was an hour and a half’s drive on sandy roads to reach the hunting camp and on the way we saw elephants – of course, as Chobe National Park and its surrounds are home to about half of the remaining population of African elephants – and ostriches, which was not all that common.

  The hunting camp was set on a dry riverbed. Its guest accommodation consisted of a line of semi-permanent green canvas safari tents, each covered with a thatch roof supported by poles. The hunting season was over for the year due to the heat and the approaching rains, and the camp was manned by a skeleton staff of security people and cooks. When we got there we were met by a few guys toting rifles, and a policewoman who cradled a shotgun protectively across her chest.

  Mogau confirmed the report that a leopard had got into the kitchen and was trapped there. It had happened four days earlier and the camp staff hadn’t eaten since then, as all their food was stored in the kitchen. They led me to the kitchen-cum-storeroom, which was a timber-framed structure with canvas walls. The top third of the walls was mosquito mesh and chicken wire, to allow air to circulate but to keep out curious critters such as hyenas and honey badgers.
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br />   Leopards, I knew from personal experience, could get in and out of just about anything they wanted. It seemed this one had waited until it saw a door ajar and then snuck in.

  “The leopard is in there,” Mogau said. “They say that someone shot and wounded it, and it wandered into the kitchen.”

  I went to the kitchen and climbed up on some boxes stacked outside to look through the mesh screen. I peered into the shadows, my eyes taking a little time to adjust from the bright sun and glare outside. I could just make out some whiskers and a part of its face.

  “I see it.”

  The guys and the woman behind me were tense, their fingers curling inside the trigger guards of their weapons. The leopard, however, was not moving.

  “Somebody get me a ladder.”

  I went back to my truck, opened the back and got out my vet bag. I loaded a dart with Zoletil, a tranquilliser and general anaesthetic I usually use on cats. Zoletil’s a dissociative drug, which means that the brain is temporarily cut off from the rest of the body. When I darted it, the leopard would be conscious and its eyes would be open – it wouldn’t go to sleep – but it would be unable to use its limbs. It’s kind of like the animal’s paralysed. It can’t be reversed, however, so I would have to sit with the leopard until it came around, which would probably be about an hour to an hour and a half.

  The ladder arrived and I moved to a different vantage point where it was possible to see the cat’s rump poking out from under the table where it was hiding. I saw its long, curled tail twitch. I couldn’t just walk into the kitchen armed only with a dart gun; it would be on me and killing me before the drug could take effect.

  It was going to be a difficult shot: the mesh ventilation panels were narrow and high up on the wall. By forcing an opening where the mesh met the canvas, I was able to push my gun through, but I had to crook my arm over the wall and couldn’t put the butt of the weapon in my shoulder and sight it like I normally would.

  I guesstimated the dart’s trajectory and squeezed the trigger. It was a good shot, or lucky, depending on which way you looked at it. The dart hit the leopard in the rump. It wriggled a bit, but not as much as I would have expected. The Zoletil was fast acting, so I got down off the ladder and went to the door. With the shotgun brigade backing me up, I went in, grabbed the leopard’s tail and started to drag it.

  As I pulled, I saw its blood being smeared on the floor of the kitchen. When I had it clear of the table where it had been hiding, I saw that it was a young female. I rolled her over and saw that her right shoulder was a mess of matted, bloodied fur. There were numerous puncture wounds, which told me she had been hit by a blast from a shotgun.

  I palpated the area around the wound with my hand and I could feel that the bones in there were totally shattered. My good mood from the morning was suffering, but this leopard was suffering more. According to the frightened camp staff she had lain in there, bleeding, for four days, and hadn’t moved. She was probably all but paralysed. If I’d had a rehabilitation facility back at Kasane – it was still my dream to set one up – I might have been able to nurse her through the long process of treating and mending her wounds. She would need x-rays and reconstructive surgery, daily shots of antibiotics and room to slowly recuperate. All I had back in my clinic to keep a leopard in was a cage, and it was, I had learnt, impossible to rehabilitate a predator that way.

  I dragged the leopard out of the kitchen and through the dust into the bush at the edge of the camp. I fetched my rifle and kneeled down beside it. I touched its beautiful coat, running my fingers through the fur patterned with black rosettes.

  “Lord,” I said to myself and the cat, “thank you for this animal’s life and please watch over it.” I stood, aimed, and shot the leopard between the eyes.

  As we drove back to Kasane I tried to be philosophical about the incident. The sad fact was that for every injured wild animal saved, I probably had to euthanise another four. Too often the injury was too severe to treat, or I was called too late.

  Euthanasia is a part of a vet’s life. When we see suffering we do what we can to cure or alleviate it and, sadly, a quick death is often the kindest option. A man had caused this amazing animal days of pain, and it was up to a man to put it out of its misery.

  Afterwards, with Mogau translating, I learnt the full story of what had happened. The leopard had not, in fact, wandered into the camp wounded after being shot by some stranger. The camp cook admitted that he’d seen it sneaking into his storeroom and that he had fetched a shotgun and shot it.

  They all knew it was wounded, but none of the camp staff would go in and finish it off. Their story was that they were scared they might accidentally shoot one of the propane gas bottles stored in the kitchen and cause an explosion. The truth was that they were probably just chicken.

  They had wasted four days, until they got too hungry to wait for the leopard to die. Perhaps, if I’d been called as soon as the cat had been shot, something could have been done for it then. But that was academic, too, because I’d been in Gaborone fighting for the right to get back to the bush.

  If I’d been able to set up a proper wildlife rehabilitation centre, my dream, maybe I could have done something for the leopard. But to do that I would have needed funding, staff and permission to use volunteers.

  I had none of that, but I was back, and happy to pay for the drugs used on the animals out of my own pocket. In the four-plus years I had worked in and around Chobe National Park treating wildlife, I had never received a cent from the government of Botswana in wages or in compensation for my expenses. But I didn’t care. This was what I had come to Botswana to do.

  When we got back to Kasane, we stopped in at park headquarters, and nearly all of the rangers in the office came out and shook my hand.

  One guy hugged me. “It’s good to have you back, Doctor Clay.”

  It felt like a fresh start, as if I had turned a corner. Mogau and his boss, Thuto Seema, were reviewing a new contract for me. The local National Parks rangers had accepted me and I was even beginning to think I had finally broken down some of the resistance in the insular white community, which, as is the case in many small towns, had been suspicious of a newcomer from the start.

  Four days later, at 3.30 pm, I received a call from a ranger at the main Sedudu Gate entrance to Chobe National Park, just a few kilometres from my home.

  “One of the safari guides in the park says that an elephant has been shot, near Serondella,” said the ranger. This was unusual – not that an elephant had been shot, as that happened all too often, but rather that I was being called out by a junior ranger. My tasking usually came from Mogau or Seema, or someone else senior. However, I knew Mogau had left town to attend a conference the day after the incident with the leopard, and that Seema was also away at a meeting. Perhaps this guy on the gate was just acting on his own initiative, and that was a good thing.

  I loaded my guns and my gear and went to the gate to meet the guy who had called. I’d never seen him before; he had just been rotated in, and his name was Joel. There was a regular staff turnover, so it wasn’t that odd that I hadn’t met him yet. Joel said that he would come with me, even though he was unarmed. Many times calls about elephants being down were false alarms; some tourist would see an elephant sleeping and would report it as dead.

  We drove on Chobe’s sandy roads, along the edge of the river from which the park takes its name. Serondella is a lovely spot, an old camping ground about 15 kilometres from the gate. It is now used as a picnic site for day visitors to the park. It has sturdy elephant-proof ablution blocks, picnic tables and benches, and a nice view over the river and the floodplains across to Namibia.

  Joel told me that the safari guide had spotted an elephant down, with blood on its side. He said the animal was about a kilometre up a side road. We drove around a bit and I came to a spot where there were vehicle tracks leading off the dirt road. I stopped and got out of my Land Cruiser and immediately saw a blood trail, as well a
s tyre tracks.

  It is illegal for non-official vehicles to drive off road in the bush in Chobe, so I had a feeling we would find something here. Either the safari guide had seen the blood trail too and had gone off road unauthorised and tracked the wounded elephant, or, if it was poachers, this could be their tracks.

  I got out my .416 working rifle and loaded it with solid bullets, one in the chamber and three in the magazine. I dropped another four rounds into my pocket, just in case. With Joel walking behind me, we followed the blood. It was very fresh and very clear in the dust. Often, as with the leopard, I was called out too late to do anything, but this elephant must have been only just wounded when the guide contacted National Parks. My pulse quickened a little at the thought of what might lie ahead through the thorny bush.

  We followed the trail for about a kilometre and a half. The shadows were lengthening – it was now after four-thirty– but it was still damn hot. I wiped sweat from my eyes as I followed the tracks. The blood was bright red – lung blood – a gruesome highway that couldn’t have been easier to follow had it been signposted.

  The trail took us back towards the main road again and I had a feeling we were approaching a new water hole that I knew had been constructed in the area, but hadn’t personally visited yet.

  Joel and I walked up a slight rise. My rifle was up and at the ready, as I knew only too well how unpredictable and aggressive a wounded elephant could be. We were in a routine now, of walking about 30 metres, then stopping, looking and listening.

  We paused. Chop, chop, chop, I heard from ahead.

  I moved a little further forward, cresting the rise. I couldn’t believe it. There in front of me was an elephant lying on its side, and four men. One was standing off to one side of the animal and the other three were on it, hacking away at its tusks with axes. I’d recovered tusks from downed elephants and I knew what hard work it was. A chainsaw didn’t work much better, and the best thing was to let the carcass rot a while and pull them out. Some poachers had taken to lugging portable angle grinders, powered by a car battery, and they would use the power tool to chop through the skull and remove the whole front of the elephant’s face in minutes.