by Clay Wilson
In 1979 I moved another step closer to my dream and graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science degree, with a major in Zoology. I decided to use my knowledge of Spanish, which I’d learnt to speak fluently as a child in Mexico, to see more of the world while furthering my studies.
I applied for and was accepted into veterinary college in Saragossa, Spain, and left the states for a new chapter and a new country.
I hated it.
The school was chaotic, with up to 600 students crammed into lecture halls. My diet consisted of salami sandwiches and Coke. I had been too ambitious thinking I could settle down to serious study in a foreign language, even though I could speak it. In desperation I decided to pack up and head for southern Africa again.
I didn’t give up on my hopes of becoming a veterinarian, and decided I would make a new application for admission to South Africa’s world-renowned Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute, but I needed to have a break from study for a while, and have some fun.
Checking out a newspaper in Johannesburg, I saw an employment advertisement for Spanish-speaking safari guides. I had only ever been to the bush as a tourist and was by no means a safari guide, but I loved animals and thought this sounded like the job for me.
At the time, sanctions imposed by countries abroad on South Africa because of apartheid were reducing the number of inbound foreign visitors to the country, but Argentinians were still able to visit. As a result, the game lodges had plenty of Spanish-speaking tourists, but not enough Spanish-speaking guides. This was a way to get my foot in the door, and despite my total lack of experience and real knowledge of the bush, I was able to land a job at Sabi Sabi River Lodge in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve, as a game ranger.
The Sabi Sand Game Reserve was 65 000 hectares of privately owned bush land on the western border of the government-run Kruger National Park in what was then known as the Eastern Transvaal. Within the reserve were a number of luxury lodges and tented safari camps catering to wealthy locals and those foreigners who still deigned to visit South Africa. At the time, the reserve was fenced off from Kruger, although the fence later came down, allowing animals to migrate freely between the private and publicly owned lands.
My new job there would be the perfect way for me to combine my love of animals with some serious fun.
“Vere are zee lions? It is five o’clock und zere are no lions. Vy not?”
It was my first game drive as a ranger and I was learning one of the cardinal rules, that if you made the mistake, as I had, of telling clients that they would have a good chance of seeing lions, then they would expect to see lions!
As the newest guide in the camp I had been given the oldest and least reliable Land Rover, and a Shangaan tracker who didn’t speak Afrikaans or English. No one had told me what to do or how to act around animals. Many of the guides were veterans of the bush war, and a couple had been Selous Scouts, elite killers in the Rhodesian Army during the war of independence in what is now Zimbabwe. They were hard men, with little time for a half-American newcomer.
I didn’t even know how a safari guide should dress, let alone what I should do. As a boy, I’d seen pictures of the legendary Harry Wolhuter, the first ranger in Kruger, and he’d worn a big white hat. I thought that was how men of the bush should dress, so when I arrived at Sabi Sabi I’d put on my Stetson hat and my cowboy boots. Needless to say, this gave the other guides a few laughs. Later I played on the cowboy-in-Africa gag and arrived at a party with my chest crisscrossed with bandoliers, like a Mexican bandit, and a pistol on each hip.
My first afternoon at work I drove out with my party of half a dozen Berliners on the back of the open-top Land Rover, hoping against hope that we would somehow stumble upon some animals. My tracker, perched on a seat bolted to the left front fender of the Landy, made small gestures with his hand, left and right, directing me, but what he was looking at or for, I had no idea. When he did mutter the occasional word to me, all I could do was nod, and pretend for the Germans’ benefit that he and I were working together perfectly as a team.
We had seen very little, just a few impalas – the most numerous antelope in the reserve and the neighbouring park – and the Germans were getting restless.
As the sun suffused the bush with the golden light that gives its name to the hour before sunset, the time most prized by photographers, my tracker put up his hand. I stopped the truck and turned off the engine, and scanned the thick thorn bush between the leadwood trees, trying to see what had caught his attention. The Germans ceased their babble as they, too, strained to see what we were looking at, or rather what my tracker was looking at. I still couldn’t see it.
And there they were. I caught the swish of a tail with the tuft of hair on the end of it. “Lion!”
“Vere?”
Where there had been nothing visible – at least to my eye and the tourists’ – there was now a pride of 10 lions coming towards us. There were sleek, muscled females, the hunters of the family, and a pair of pride males with luxurious manes. A sprinkling of cubs trotted along on short legs behind their moms and aunties. They were beautiful, but this was the first time I’d ever encountered these super predators without the armour of a car door.
There were, in fact, no doors on the sides of the Land Rover, and the passengers in the back were similarly exposed. Of course I know now, as most visitors to game parks know, that lions and other predators are accustomed to the shape and silhouette of vehicles and will largely ignore them, unless someone decides to jump up and down or, even more foolishly, jump off. I didn’t know that then, though.
I keyed the radio handset and whispered into it. “Umm, base, this is Clay. I’ve got lions. Coming towards me. What should I do?”
“Where are you?” came the rather bored-sounding reply.
“Umm, I don’t know.”
Each of the lionesses seemed to be catching my eye, summing me up, and mentally filleting me. This was a whole new world to me, to be this close to these magnificent animals, which were making a beeline for me and the Germans. The tracker sat still, probably cleaning his fingernails with a stick, such would have been his level of fear or even interest in the sighting. For him this was a regular occurrence.
“Sit tight,” came the reply, and I swear it was punctuated with a snigger.
My fascination was fast turning to terror. I had a rifle, mounted in a bracket running along the dashboard, behind the folded-forward windscreen, but I had only five bullets, and there were 10 lions. They just kept coming, straight at me. If they kept moving at this pace, pretty soon they would be climbing up into my lap and having the Germans for afternoon tea. I reached for the key and turned on the ignition.
Nothing happened. My vehicle, the worst in the fleet, refused to start. I was surely going to die.
Just as the pride reached the Land Rover, at the moment my heart felt like it was going to come spurting out of my mouth, the males split and the lionesses and cubs followed them around our front and back bumpers. The tourists in the back oohed and aahed, their camera shutters and flashes whirring and popping like crazy.
Adrenalin surged through my body and a German clapped me on the shoulder. I had done nothing, but my life had just changed. I had forced myself to act calm, cool and natural for the tourists’ benefit, when secretly I’d been ready to poop my pants. I’d been up close, albeit from the safety of a vehicle, with Africa’s top predator, and all I wanted was more. But first I had to wait for the ignominy of another vehicle to be sent out to rescue me.
I didn’t have to wait long. Within minutes, three or four other Land Rovers appeared on the scene, the guides smiling. Later, my friend Rod, who had taken me under his wing, told me they had known all along where the lions were. They had told my old tracker to take me there, and they were waiting to see how I reacted. They all had a good laugh, but I didn’t mind: I had stuck it out.
As time went by, I found it took more and more to get that adrenalin high again. Game rangers a
re a bunch of alpha males, and they like nothing better than to outdo each other, whether it be making out with female tourists or risking their lives.
When we weren’t trying to cut each other out of chatting up a pretty guest, we were doing things such as creeping up on sleeping white rhinoceroses, on foot, and grabbing on to their tails. That was a favourite game of ours. We’d grab hold and see who could hang on the longest, kind of like being a rodeo clown with a two-ton animal.
One of my best friends during my time as a game ranger was Rod Genricks. Rod and I would often meet guests at the reserve’s airstrip, and stake our claims on the prettiest ones. We have remained friends and he’s been a great support. Not long ago he and I went back to the Sabi Sand, now called Sabi Sabi, and to our amazement we caught up with a guy named Frank who worked as a tracker there at the same time as us. I envied Frank spending his whole working life in the bush.
I had applied for admission to Onderstepoort veterinary school, but I was unsuccessful. Undeterred, I vowed to try again the following year. I’d spent about 12 months working as a game ranger in the Sabi Sands, and though it had been a hell of a lot of fun, I felt like I needed a change while I waited to see if my next attempt at becoming a vet would work out.
After leaving Sabi Sabi, I worked on a cattle farm in the Magaliesberg mountains, north of Johannesburg, learning to become a dairy manager. The experience taught me a lot about cows, and helped me to brush up on my Afrikaans and Fanagolo. But I found the three months on the farm were three months too long away from the bush.
Around this time I learnt that my second application to study at Onderstepoort had been successful. I was over the moon, and to make the news even sweeter I found out that my first year would be very easy indeed. As I already had a BSC from the University of Florida, I was able to skip most of the subjects for the first year of the veterinary course, which left me plenty of time to explore and to tackle an interesting challenge given to me by a relative.
My uncle, whose well-off family owned the then famous OK Bazaars shopping chain, visited me and, knowing about my time as a safari guide, tasked me with finding him a game lodge to invest in. First, he sent me to Malawi where I found a reserve on the edge of the Shire River, but it was inaccessible by road due to rain and I had to walk in to scout possible locations for a lodge. I was there with officials and they gave me a rifle, as there was dangerous game in the area. In a portent of what was to come later in my life, we spotted some men at the river. Seeing my gun, they ran off. They had left fish traps woven from reeds and sticks. I learnt that there was little control of illegal fishing in the area. My uncle and I were to find our next lead for a lodge from a guy I used to live next door to. When I was growing up in Johannesburg, our next-door neighbour was one of the wealthiest men in South Africa, the multi-millionaire businessman Sol Kerzner.
Sol had built a place in Botswana, the Chobe Game Lodge, in the magnificent Chobe National Park, on the banks of the river of the same name in the far north of the country. Sol invited me to come up and visit the lodge, and I jumped at the chance.
The first time I saw the Chobe River, I was smitten. This long, wide perennial stretch of sparkling blue marks a line where three African countries – Botswana, Namibia and Zambia – meet. Stepping off the flight from Johannesburg at Kasane Airport, the nearest to the national park, I was hit by a wall of heat, heavy with the promise of rain.
The land on either side of the river is floodplain, and the golden grasses and cool clean waters are a magnet for wildlife. The year I arrived, however, man was turning this Garden of Eden into a dangerous place. The Bush War in what was then Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) was in full swing, and occasionally spilling over the nearby border into Botswana. African nationalist guerrillas from Rhodesia were undergoing training in Zambia, and then being covertly infiltrated back into their homeland. Part of white Rhodesia’s strategy to fight their enemy was to disrupt communications and infrastructure in Zambia. The country’s main road route to and from South Africa passed through Botswana and across the Zambezi River on a car ferry at the town of Kazungula, just up the road from Kasane. This was a hotspot, and while boating down the Chobe River and into the Zambezi (which the Chobe feeds into), I would often hear gunfire and occasionally had a few shots come my way. The Rhodesian security forces actually ended up planting explosives on the Kazungula Ferry and sinking it. It was a wild old time.
On dry land I encountered a wide array of game in spectacular numbers. The floodplains were home to herds of Cape buffalo in their thousands, and healthy groupings of the sable and roan antelope species, which were comparatively rare in the places I’d worked at in South Africa.
But if Chobe had one signature animal, it was the elephant. They came in their hundreds of thousands, migrating to and from the neighbouring countries of Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, ignoring man’s silly map lines – often at their peril – feeding in the dry bush lands and quenching their thirst, with insatiable pleasure in the waters of the Chobe and Zambezi Rivers.
Chobe Game Lodge, located not far inside the park’s boundaries, had been closed due to the hostilities in the region, but with the eventual advent of peace and the declaration of an independent Zimbabwe, in 1980, it was judged time to re-open the premier lodge. My uncle and some of his friends decided to invest, and when they asked me to help out during my veterinary school breaks I was only too willing to do so.
I worked as a guide for the hardy tourists who ventured into this frontier paradise, and in between looking after clients I, like everyone else, was involved in renovating and restoring the lodge to its former glory. This had once been a luxury haven for the international jet set – Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had one of their honeymoons here – but it was now a fixer-upper of note.
As well as getting the buildings fixed, we had to replant the lodge’s once extensive gardens. Elephants had long since denuded all the exotic vegetation around the lodge, and we set to work planting mature native species to bring the gardens back to their previous lustre. To the local elephants, however, this looked like we were putting on a buffet lunch for them, and I was given the job of babysitting the trees and plants. Elephants spend up to 16 hours a day feeding, and in that time can consume as much as 270 kilograms of vegetation, so even one hungry elephant could lay waste to our laboriously replanted garden.
Armed with just a wrist rocket – a catapult firing steel ball bearings – I would patrol the grounds of the lodge day and night, firing projectiles at the great grey shadows that lurked in search of a tender green morsel. Mostly the slingshot worked and the animals veered off, but there was one cheeky elephant that was determined to prune our new garden.
One night, I saw him. I fired a ball bearing at him and hit him with a thud. Reluctantly, he shied away from his path towards the garden, but it wasn’t long before he circled back. “Go!” I took another shot at him.
He continued on a few steps closer to me, then turned and began to walk away. I thought he had got the message, but then he tried it again. Yelling and firing on the run, I gave the massive creature a fright and he started to run away from me. Foolishly, I let the adrenalin rush of seeing off a seven-ton beast get to my head and as he ran, so I chased after him. I was determined to chase him away once and for all.
The elephant kicked up clouds of powdery white dust as he charged through the bush, away from the river’s greenery. It was like running through fog, and I couldn’t really see where I was heading, but one thing I did know was that it was usually not a good idea to sprint through the bush, especially at night. Lions and leopards are attracted to runners; it’s why the first rule of walking in the bush is to do exactly that, walk not run. And predators are more active at night than during the day.
As I returned to my senses and stopped, I coughed away the dust I’d been dragging into my lungs. I heard a deep rumbling noise and looked around me. Some of the tree trunks in the forest I’d run into were moving. I gulped. I was looking at t
he legs of elephants – plenty of them.
I heard the slap of sail-like ears beating skin as one shook its head in annoyance. My heart started pounding, with fear this time. Predators be damned; I started to run back in the direction I’d come from. Pounding the earth right behind me, though, was another elephant.
Perhaps it was the herd’s matriarch – elephant families are led by a dominant older female – or perhaps an angry bull; either way, I knew that I had strayed too far into enemy territory and someone had decided I was due for an ass whipping in return for chasing off the plant thief.
Thorny bushes scratched my bare arms and my legs below my shorts. Every now and then I looked back to see the great grey giant bearing down on me. I knew it would catch me, so I decided to make a last stand. It might have been the last decision I made in life. I pulled up next to a tree and turned and took aim. I was down to my last ball bearing.