by Clay Wilson
It took a couple of seconds – I don’t really recall how long – for it to register what was happening here.
I saw flashes, twinkles of light searing bright in the golden glow of the afternoon.
I heard something whizzing, like a bee on speed, just over the top of my head.
I heard gunfire. There had been enough AK47S firing in the night around Kasane for me to recognise the sound of the Kalashnikov assault rifle and now, as my brain slowly shifted into gear, I saw the weapon in the hands of the man standing by the elephant. He was shooting at me.
It felt like I was moving in slow motion, but I did not hesitate. Instinctively, I raised the .416 to my shoulder. I saw more flashes, and felt more whizzes pass me by. I sighted down the barrel, and squeezed the trigger. The rifle kicked in my shoulder. The man who’d been firing dropped out of sight.
Shit, I can’t believe this is happening, I said to myself.
There was a big red termite mound, taller than a man, just next to me. I sidestepped and flattened my back against the mound, out of sight of where the poachers had been. I worked the bolt of the rifle and chambered a second round. Joel had run away, never to be seen again.
What the hell should I do next? For all I knew there were more of them out there in the bush, and the man who had shot at me was not the only one toting a gun. For crying in a bucket, I thought. It was 4.45 pm on a Thursday afternoon and here I was in the bush with people trying to kill me!
In the years I’d been in and around Chobe, dealing with the fallout of poaching and being in the bush on an almost daily basis, I had never seen a poacher in the flesh at work. I’d played a part in setting up the ambush and capture of a member of a bush meat poaching gang, but not a single man had been arrested for elephant poaching during my time. That was not to say there was no problem – there was. Elephants were being shot illegally by farmers angry at them for raiding their crops, and hunted deliberately for their ivory. I reckoned I had dealt with about 200 killed and wounded elephants.
My heart was pumping, my every sense on full alert. I looked down at my hands and they were shaking, though I held my rifle tight. I peeked around the edge of the termite mound. I couldn’t see the guy I had fired at. My instinct was to stay under cover, rather than go out into the firing line again. I don’t know how long I waited there. It could have been seconds or it could have been minutes.
I flinched as I heard more gunshots. It was automatic fire, and it all seemed to be coming from the same direction, away from me, towards where the poachers with the axes had run. This fire wasn’t from AK47S. It was the good guys, hopefully.
The gunfire stopped, and I heard shouting and then men talking to each other in more relaxed tones. It sounded like the frenzy of combat and its attendant adrenalin rush were subsiding. I held my rifle above my head and walked towards the voices.
“This is Doctor Clay! This is Doctor Clay! I’m coming through.”
As I pushed through the bush into the clearing, I saw half a dozen men in the camouflaged uniforms of the BDF – the Botswana Defence Force. The stick, their name for a squad or patrol, all raised their rifles and aimed at me as I emerged.
I knew the stick commander because I’d been involved with him a year before, when an elephant had killed one of his guys. We had become friends. I lowered my rifle.
“Doctor Clay, we heard the gunshots and we came,” the stick commander said. “We saw these guys and we shot them.”
As I moved closer to the soldiers, I saw the crumpled forms at their feet, in the dry grass. One of these men had been shooting at me. A man with an AK47 lying by his side had suffered a horrific gunshot wound to his throat, which had clearly killed him. I guessed the man was in his early thirties, and he was quite well dressed in a khaki safari shirt and shorts. His clothes weren’t raggedy or poor; this man could have passed as a professional hunter or safari guide. He looked up at me with wide, dead eyes. I felt nothing for him; he had tried to kill me and he had probably been responsible for the death of the magnificent animal that lay nearby.
“You should get out of here now, Clay,” the stick commander said to me.
I had my GPS in my pocket and had marked the position of my vehicle when I had set off into the bush. Using the GPS was vital every time I went into unknown areas. I navigated back to the Land Cruiser and drove home. When I got there, the dogs were barking and pawing in joy, as they always did. I went to the drinks cabinet and poured myself a big whiskey.
I sat down. I was alone; my girlfriend, Laura, was back home in the United States as her son and his partner had just had their first child. I started shaking and sweating as the realisation of what had happened – what had nearly happened to me – sank in.
I wanted to tell Mogau in person, but he wouldn’t be back from his conference for three or four days, and Laura wouldn’t be back until then either. I wondered if I should drive to the police station and tell them what had gone down in the bush. I was in turmoil about what to do. It had been a clear-cut case of self-defence; the poacher had fired first and he had tried to kill me. I should have been able to tell my story, just to set the record straight. I had nothing to hide. But the army seemed to have taken control of the situation and I didn’t want to jeopardise my current situation by going to the police.
After a couple more scotches I went to bed, but couldn’t sleep. Time and again I saw the rifle rising in my hands as I brought it up to my shoulder. I saw the muzzle flashes as the 7.62 mm copper-jacketed rounds left the barrel of the poacher’s AK47. I stared at the ceiling, seeing the eyes of the dead man.
The next morning, tired and red-eyed, I told myself everything would be okay. I had survived the fire fight with the poachers and Kgomotso, my lawyer, had assured me I would be reinstated as a game warden in no time at all and that the government would reverse its decision to cancel my work permit and visa. All my dreams were within my grasp, at last.
Three weeks later I was in prison, locked up with murderers and rapists in the shadow of a gallows tower, awaiting deportation from Botswana.
Chapter 1
Full circle
I was born under the bright Highveld sun amid the mine dumps and mansions of Johannesburg, South Africa, but ended up speaking Spanish before I learnt English or Afrikaans. It’s complicated.
My father, Irwin, a remote man of whom I have very few memories and even fewer good ones, was an American who moved to South Africa after World War II to set up the Aladdin electrical company. He met and married my mother, Vicky, a South African of English background. I was part of the global baby boom, and immigrants from around the world were coming to Africa to escape the horrors of their past, and look forward to a bright, sunny future.
In 1959, when I was just two years old, my father took a job with Pepsi-Cola, running their operations in Mexico. I don’t know if my mother would have been happier staying in her homeland, but I guess she had no say in it, because we moved, as a family. It’s hard to imagine two more different parts of the world, but the way it turned out I probably spent more time in the bush, in the wild, wide-open spaces in Mexico than if I’d been brought up a cosseted, privileged rich white boy in the affluent suburbs of Johannesburg. So something good came of it.
I have two older brothers, Graham and Wayne. They were both much older than me, so I was left to play on my own. We were not a close family; my father was too engrossed in running soft-drinks factories to pay much attention to us. I was a half South African, half American gringo living in a remote area in central Mexico, in the town of Monterey. I grew up an outsider and had to make my own fun. The rugged, dry countryside around me became my playground and preferred classroom.
The hills were filled with wildlife of the two- and four-legged variety. In those days there were still banditos roaming the countryside, although I guess not a lot has changed on that front as Mexico still rivals South Africa these days when it comes to violent crime. I remember Pancho Villa style roughriders on horseback, with droo
py Viva Zapata moustaches, festooned with bandoliers of ammunition and rifles, riding down out of the hills. There were guns in our house – my father had an extensive collection of antique weapons – and like many small boys at the time my games were of cowboys and Indians.
My first interest in animals was not very politically correct or kind. As I roamed the hills I found I liked to hunt things. I would catch frogs and when I got my first pellet gun I would shoot birds. Later I’d devote many years to saving injured birds, but back then I was a little boy running wild in the hills of a foreign country, catching and shooting things, enjoying the freedom and wildness of my solitary childhood. I went to a local school where I had to learn Spanish right from the start in order to get along; there were no international schools or special classes for an English-speaking boy where we lived. As one of the few Americans, I was naturally treated with some curiosity and occasionally bullied. I learnt how to fight from an early age and sometimes it would be just me and one other English-speaking kid (although my Spanish was better than my English) fighting off a posse of Mexican kids. It was like re-fighting the Alamo, sometimes for fun, and sometimes not for fun.
I was fascinated with animals. I would carry out autopsies on them and then stitch them back together. At some point this moved from morbid fascination to a desire to heal rather than just capture and kill. My love for hunting did not diminish; in fact, it increased my appreciation and love of wildlife, which grew at the same pace.
It’s hard to explain to people who have never hunted where the love of this sport – or calling, or whatever name you want to put on it – comes from. Perhaps I was working through some childhood frustrations, or maybe I was reverting to something more basic in those dry hills beneath the baking sun. Having been taken from my natural environment – a suburban home in a wealthy city – I was going back to a more primitive me, free of the supervision or nurturing that other kids receive. Whatever. I was enjoying myself, although in later years my time as a bush vet would end my affair with hunting.
I was enjoying the animals I was meeting. From frogs and birds I graduated to dogs. I had a collie that I called Shane, after the character played by Alan Ladd in the 1953 western movie of the same name. I loved Shane – and the scene in the film where the kid calls Shane’s name as he rides out of town – and that dog was the first of maybe six more Shanes that I’ve had during my life. Shane number one was not the sharpest tool in the box, but I loved him all the same, and he intensified my desire to have animals around me all my life.
I enjoyed the company of animals far more than the tense atmosphere at home. I was growing up alone in a house with parents whose marriage, I was learning, was not a happy one. I suppose it wasn’t that unusual for me to look for love and acceptance elsewhere.
By the time I was 13, and starting to think about what I wanted to study and what I wanted to do with my life, I was certain that my calling was as a veterinary surgeon. This was crystallised for me when my father decided we should all move back to the country of my birth, South Africa. He relocated to Johannesburg around 1970 to set up the first factory manufacturing tinned soft drinks in the country.
I was back where I had come from and I was happy. While we were in Johannesburg, a number of game reserves – including the world-famous Kruger National Park, about 400 kilometres to the east – were in reach. And so, too, was my dream of becoming a veterinarian.
Kruger is still a well-run national park, but in those days it was organised like a minor military operation. The camps and accommodation were kept spotlessly clean, the rangers all dressed in uniforms with razor-sharp creases. The park itself boasted Africa’s so-called Big Five – lions, leopards, elephants, buffalos and rhinos – in impressive numbers. There was and is no better place for a family holiday than the Kruger, even if my family wasn’t the jolliest. I would long for my holidays, when I’d get the chance to get almost within touching distance, albeit from the safety of the family sedan, to a lion, or to see my favourite animal, the African elephant, up close and personal.
At home in Johannesburg we were cocooned from the rumblings of black African nationalism and the oppression employed by the white government to try to contain it. We lived in the prestigious suburb of Hyde Park, in a mansion with 10 servants. The only black South Africans I met were those in positions of domestic service. I was ambivalent about politics and content to get my fix of wildlife when I could, and enjoy the trappings of my life, if not my actual family life.
My parents’ relationship was deteriorating. We had been back in South Africa only a year or two when my father sent my mother and me – my brothers had long since left home – back to the United States. The plan, as it was explained to me, was that we would go ahead of him and he would join us when he was transferred back to the us for work. I subsequently learnt the truth: he was having an affair with a woman in South Africa and this was the first step in the break-up of his marriage to my mother.
I didn’t like having to leave South Africa again, but I was a kid, and I did what I was told. We were sent to Houston, Texas, where my mother had to swap her mansion full of servants for a one-bedroom apartment. We were provided for, but our lifestyle changed dramatically in so many ways.
For my part, I found that the best way to fit in as a teenager was to do what my peers were doing. In South Africa kids like me led a sheltered, old-fashioned kind of life, but in America we were coming out of the drug-fuelled sixties, and the early seventies weren’t much less radical. Within 24 hours of being back at school in the States I was exposed to drugs for the first time in my life. All the cool kids were smoking pot, so I joined in and had my first joint. The crowd I ran with were hooligans and it wasn’t long before we were breaking into houses – supposedly for fun – while other kids stole petty change. I was part of it, although never caught by the cops for my illegal doings. I don’t know how I got away with it.
I did try to set myself back on the straight and narrow, and even got myself a job as a salesman at Wal-Mart, the huge American chain of discount stores. But now and then I’d regress, and at night I would sometimes take my mother’s car without her knowing, to go out cruising and drinking with my buddies. Funnily enough, I actually taught my mom to drive, even though I was underage. Because of the high-society life she had led up until then, she had never needed to drive herself; there was always Dad or a driver to chauffeur her around.
Once my folks officially split up, my mom decided she and I would move back to South Africa, which was calling us both. With all this bouncing back and forth between South Africa and America it was hard for me to decide who I was or what I was. I had dual citizenship, but in my heart I considered myself South African. Perhaps in my head I was becoming more American, though, thanks to exposure to the great capitalist economy and the freer, easier lifestyle of American teenagers.
Both of my homelands were at war. America was coming to the end of 10 years of war in Vietnam and South Africa’s border war against the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) guerrillas in the former South West Africa (now Namibia) and Angola was beginning to heat up. I found myself in the unusual position of being conscripted for military service by two different countries.
In the States, where conscription was not universal, but rather decided by a ballot, my name went into the draw for service in Vietnam. Luckily, however, America’s involvement in the war ended in 1973 and a halt was called to conscription before I could be drafted into the army. However, the military machine did catch up with me in my birth country. Service was compulsory for all young white men and I was called up for duty in the South African army.
I did basic training at Pretoria but luckily for me my bi-continental lifestyle got me out of the South African Army. My mom was able to get me admitted to college in the United States, so after two years back in South Africa I was once more on an aeroplane, heading back to my adopted homeland. I was admitted to Whittier College in Los Angeles, California. This university’s
claim to fame was that Richard Nixon, arguably America’s most famous criminal, had studied there. After that I transferred to the University of Florida, in Gainesville.
It was a time of momentous political change and agitation, but as in my privileged younger years, I was isolated from the events going on around me. Because of the places I’d lived in I probably saw more evidence of racial tensions and violence in the years I was in America than when I was in South Africa. I’m not denying bad things happened in South Africa, but when I was there I was cocooned in the leafy, wealthy white suburbs, away from the turmoil of Soweto and other black townships, while my life in America was more grassroots, and the struggles of black people to break down segregation and years of discrimination were closer to home for me. For instance, when I was younger the government had begun the process of “bussing” black kids from their neighbourhoods to white schools, and there had been plenty of white people in America who were vehemently opposed to this.
What I did learn of war and hate and racial inequality simply convinced me that I would be happier dedicating my life to animals rather than a species that continually turned on itself.
Just as when I’d moved from South Africa to America during my younger years, this return as a college student brought with it some radical changes from the privileged life I’d been leading. For one thing, I had never had to cook for myself. For the first year I was studying in the States, my diet consisted of TV dinners, until even I grew sick of these and had to learn some basic culinary skills.
If I was out of my depth in the kitchen, I was drowning in the laundry – I’d always had a domestic worker to do my washing and ironing. The first time I went to a laundromat, I had absolutely no idea what to do. My father had paid for me to buy a whole pile of clothes and once all of these were truly filthy I braved my first washing machine. I piled everything into the machine, pushing it down to make it fit, and then poured in a gallon of bleach – a chemical I had seen our domestic worker using on various occasions. Clearly, though, she had never used bleach for washing clothes, and when I opened the lid to retrieve mine I found, of course, that they were ruined. Asking around, I learnt that as well as using washing powder it would be a good idea to separate the colours so they didn’t run. On my next trip, with a whole wardrobe full of new dirty clothes, I split my various garments into related colours and spread them between three washing machines. I even added the correct washing powder. When the wash was done, I transferred everything to the drier. Knowing I still had an hour of this riveting business to sit through, I decided to go next door to the store and get myself a Doctor Pepper. When I returned, I found the door of the drier open and all of my clothes gone. Welcome to America, I thought.