Bush Vet

by Clay Wilson

  Finally, Kgomotso called to let me know a meeting had been arranged with the permanent secretary of Wildlife and Tourism, Tshepo Mosweu. He was Segokgo’s underling; apparently the big man was not available. I didn’t care. I would play their games and let them handle their backflip in whatever manner they wished.

  Gaborone is a very clean, orderly city. I didn’t see any beggars or hawkers. No doubt there is skulduggery there, but the facade, like that of the whole country, is one of peace and prosperity. I noticed many government vehicles in the well-mannered traffic, big black Mercedes mostly. On a couple of occasions during my stay I had seen the presidential convoy, with its motorcycle outriders. If I could have just spoken to that man behind the black glass I felt all this trouble could have been avoided.

  Kgomotso and I went to the Ministry of Agriculture building to meet with Mr Mosweu. When I entered his office I was surprised to see some pictures of gyrocopters on his wall. I had asked Thuto permission to use one of these over Chobe, for patrols, and he had refused, and said his superiors had also refused.

  “You like gyrocopters?” I asked. “They look like the same pictures I sent with my application to fly one,” I said, trying to strike up some sort of rapport with Mosweu.

  He said he’d had the pictures a long time. He didn’t seem to want to get into any kind of conversation with me.

  “I’m really keen to get back to work again. I just want to save the animals,” I said.

  He stared at me with a face that looked like it was made of bricks and mortar. He didn’t care how I felt, or about what I’d been put through. I would have loved to have talked to his boss, Segokgo, to find out once and for all why all this had happened.

  My work in the bush was my life’s reason and my passion, and these people had cut that out of me as surely as if they had taken out my beating heart with a scalpel. They – whoever they were – expected me to leave the country quietly, not to hire a tenacious lawyer and fight them all the way.

  Mosweu passed the letter across the table to me. I read it. The gist of it was that while my honorary game wardenship was still revoked, Chobe National Park was free, if they wished, to engage my services as a vet. I knew the local guys would have me back in a heartbeat. I didn’t care about the title of honorary game warden – that was something they had given me, not something I had asked for, and if they wanted to take it off me then that was their right.

  Mosweu was the messenger and he had been pushed into playing a part in a face-saving exercise that would avoid the embarrassment of Segokgo having to meet with me. This was my ticket back to treating wildlife, and I was elated.

  I saw the muzzle flashes from the AK47 winking as the ivory poacher fired at me. I saw my rifle in my hands, coming up, slowly, into my shoulder, and I saw the target down the barrel as I took aim. I felt the recoil in my shoulder as I pulled the trigger.

  I sat up in bed, sweating. It was a nightmare, but it was real – the worst kind. Chobe National Park had reinstated me but within a few days I was in a gunfight with poachers. I didn’t know if the BDF soldiers had told anyone I had fired in self-defence, but for my part no one, not even Laura, who had just returned from the States, knew about that incident and I didn’t want news of it to jeopardise my reinstatement. I got out of bed and went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water as I tried to stay calm.

  Kgomotso was still supremely confident that my immigration status would be the next thing the government would back down on, and that reinstatement as a warden would follow. He based this assumption on the fact that the 45-day period for the government to respond to the judge’s interim order had come and gone. It had been three months, and the government had not presented its case. It looked like we really were home and hosed, and as far as the local National Parks people were concerned it was back to business as usual. I had been very busy since the gunfight with the poachers treating all sorts of wildlife.

  Despite my lingering uncertainty, the call-outs kept me busy. Some were grisly, some uplifting, and some downright funny.

  On 25 October I responded to a call about an elephant that had been shot and wounded by a poacher or an angry farmer. The bull was lying on the side of his wound, so I couldn’t get to it to examine or treat it. In any case, he was in pain and on the way out, so I had to put him down. On patrol I came across another poached elephant with its tusks cut off. The war had not abated in my absence, and in a way it would be like starting all over again. I would have to win over PAC again to call me out before they shot at an animal, and I would have to go back to agitating, perhaps in a more low-key way, for Chobe to get the resources and technology it needed to control poaching.

  I was called to treat two warthogs that had been hit by cars. Both had prolapsed rectums, which meant their insides were basically hanging out, and I had to euthanise both of them. If it wasn’t bush meat or ivory poachers, it was careless drivers. Laura and I would have to get serious about our public education programmes again, now that I was back in business.

  On a lighter note, I treated a goshawk – a beautiful grey-and-white raptor – with a broken wing. I taped up the wing and Laura and I kept it for a couple of weeks and nursed it back to full health. As with the bateleur eagle, the day we released it and watched it fly away reminded me again why I did this.

  There was a baboon at the Chobe Safari Lodge, an old male that had been beaten up and thrown out of the troop. He’d taken to hanging around the hotel and foraging for his food among the tables and leftovers, and the tourists were getting scared of him. I was called to remove him.

  I’d never darted a baboon before, but decided to hit it with a shot of M99 and Valium. He seemed to go down okay, and the National Parks guy who had come with me and I loaded it into the back of my Land Cruiser. It was a short drive up the hill back towards my place, and then off to the right to the park.

  As I drove, I was chatting to the ranger when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I glanced back and found myself staring into the glazed red eyes of a stoned baboon! I screamed and swore, then hit the brakes and swerved to the side of the road where the ranger and I jumped out as fast as we could. The baboon staggered around inside the truck and in his drug-induced stupor decided he also needed to take a dump. He messed all over the back seat of my Cruiser.

  I’d had enough of this so I went to the back of the truck. When I opened the rear hatch window the stench nearly knocked me over. Gagging, I got the dart gun and loaded a projectile with M99. I shot him there, inside the car, putting him down properly. With our hands over our noses and mouths and the windows wide open, we raced the sedated bastard into the national park, dragged him out, gave him the antidote and then watched him get away. That was the good part of the job; the bad part was living with a stinking vehicle. No matter how hard we tried, it was virtually impossible to clean out that smell.

  Elephants and buffalos, as usual, made up much of my work as I threw myself back into the business of fulfilling my life’s passion.

  There was a big old male buffalo, caked in the mud that coats these beasts as a form of natural insulation and protection against parasites. He was stuck in a puddle of the stuff, surrounded by reeds at Mowana Lodge, down by the river. If he died there, the decomposing carcass might bring scavengers, and he would certainly stink to high heaven.

  When I got to the hotel and golf course complex, I found that the buffalo was almost dead. He was buried up to his chest, stuck fast, and totally exhausted. With me on the call was a young National Parks vet, who was visiting from Maun. He was actually a Zimbabwean who had been recruited by Parks. I had to chuckle to myself when he came up to the stuck buffalo with a yellow bandana tied around his face. He looked like a stagecoach robber in an old western, but he was wearing the face-mask to protect him from anthrax.

  As gently as I could, I told him this buff was not suffering from anthrax; he was suffering from being stuck in the mud. I got a rope from the back of my truck, made a noose, and looped it around his big h
orns. The poor old guy was so weak I didn’t even need to dart him. I hitched the other end of the rope to my Cruiser and slowly took up the slack.

  He was stuck good and fast but I engaged differential lock and slowly, slowly, he started to come free. This was no easy task, even for my venerable vehicle, but at last we had the buffalo on what passed for dry ground in the boggy part of the estate.

  Even free of the mud he was too weak to move. I gave him a subcutaneous iv drip as he was clearly dehydrated, and administered antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and a painkiller. I would have liked to have stayed with him, but I had to take a call about another injured animal.

  Later that day I heard from one of the rangers who had stayed with the hapless buffalo to monitor his condition. Unsteady at first, this big, tough granddaddy had hauled himself up on to his four feet and ambled off in search of some much-needed food and water.

  Animals getting stuck in the mud happened regularly, particularly near the end of the dry season as water holes evaporated and animals had to venture further into the boggy surrounds to get to the dwindling water supplies. The next animal I was called to assist was an elephant that had become bogged at the Ihaha campsite, about 30 kilometres deep into Chobe National Park, beyond the Serondella picnic ground.

  When I arrived I found it lying on one side, half its body encased in the thick, black, glutinous goo on the edge of the Chobe River. There was a BDF patrol there and the soldiers who had called it in were keeping vigil over the severely weakened creature.

  The mud stretched a long way back from the water’s edge and I had to connect three tow straps to each other to give me enough length to attempt to extract the elephant while keeping my truck’s rear tyres on relatively solid ground. It was a hell of an effort just to get out there to the stuck animal and the BDF guys were happy to help. Before long we were all plastered in mud, as the soldiers waded through the slime and looped the end of the last strap around the bull’s exposed hind leg.

  With the engine and gearbox straining, we inched him out of the mire. Like the buffalo I’d pulled out, this guy was too weak to move. I hit him with some dexamethasone, a steroid that acts as a shock treatment. Along with that was the usual cocktail of anti-inflammatories and pain medicine. This stuff was not cheap and by the time I was finished I estimated I had gone through about P1 500 worth of drugs.

  The elephant had been on its side for too long. With the help of the soldiers, we hitched more straps to its legs and rolled it over. Because of their weight, elephants can crush their own lungs if they lie on one side for prolonged periods.

  We got hold of some five-litre water containers and the soldiers started a chain, moving down to where the water was clean and passing back full bottles and refilling the empties. The soldiers sang as they tossed the containers from man to man, their deep voices rising up like a prayer, calling to the animal’s spirit. The elephant was slurping like mad as we poured bottle after bottle of water into its trunk. He would squirt the life-giving liquid into his mouth and then we would refill him.

  “Come on, boy,” I urged him. He must have drunk 20 of those bottles, about 100 litres in all. I had to get back to Kasane, but the BDF troopers said they would keep watch over the elephant. The next morning they called me and told me the bull had regained enough strength to stand up and had wandered off during the cool of the night. I was ecstatic at the news. This was what I lived for.

  I was brought back to Earth soon enough, though. Within the next four days I would come across four elephants that had been poached for their ivory. I was too nervous to say anything about this on my blog or on Facebook, and it was frustrating to know that when international conservation groups decried the increase in elephant poaching they never mentioned Botswana. No bad news was getting out that might put off potential tourists and tarnish the regime’s image – and I was keeping quiet in order to keep my job. It was a balancing act; I could save animals only if I stopped myself from talking about their plight.

  My work was non-stop, and if I could not talk publicly about the problem of poaching at least I could try to work on the problem behind the scenes. When Laura returned from the States she brought back 10 Garmin hand-held GPS units that I had paid for out of my own pocket. On 14 November I presented these to Chobe National Park’s rangers to assist with their anti-poaching work.

  My donation wasn’t totally altruistic as it was going to help me, as well as them. All too often when I was called to treat an animal, or inspect a poached elephant, I was given incorrect location details. The National Parks service did have some GPS units but they operated with differing map reference systems and sometimes the co-ordinates they called in did not correspond to my system when I entered them into my Garmin. By standardising the systems and devices I would be able to respond quicker, saving my time and hopefully the lives of some animals.

  But everything was fine, I kept telling myself. I was back living the dream. I was busy with calls and the permits had come through for a visit to Chobe by the wildlife documentary-maker Jack Hanna, from the us. Jack had a regular spot on the Letterman nightly talk show in America, and I thought that it would be good for him to see the work that I was trying to do around town and in the park.

  I would not overplay the problem of poaching, lest I should offend the government, but I did want to show him the challenges I was facing. As it turned out, Jack and his people were delayed leaving their previous filming location, across the border in Namibia, so our time together was compressed. I had managed to get the permit from National Parks to get a blood sample from a healthy elephant and give Jack something to film, but we never did get to go through with the darting because of the crew’s delay in getting to me. I had also arranged a free vaccination clinic for the town’s domestic animals, and Laura and I and a team of volunteers saw to about 300 dogs. I thought it was good that he saw the prevention part of the work we were doing and the images he shot made it to air, along with a video of me taking Jack up the Chobe River. I criticised no one and Jack stated in the programme that he rated this as one of his best safaris in Africa.

  My new contract with Parks had been drawn up and both Mogau and Seema had told me that they were just waiting for the senior guys to review and approve it, and then we’d be able to sign. By now it had been a month since I had received the letter from Mr Mosweu in Gaborone clearing the way for my return.

  Kgomotso was certain that the government would surrender the case and give me back my work and residence permits. They had no chance of winning the case against me as I had kept meticulous records of all I had done and had proven myself time and again as a warrior in the war to save the country’s precious wildlife.

  Everything is going to be all right, I told myself again.

  Chapter 14

  You must sit down to urinate

  Laura and I were at home relaxing, on a rare break from call-outs, when there was a knock at the door. Three blue-uniformed immigration officers were on my stoep and the guy in charge told me to follow them in my car down to their office.

  “What’s this all about?” Laura asked.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’s getting close to the end of my current 30-day period so they probably just want me to renew it early.” Despite my words, I was a little worried. I had been told repeatedly that everything had been resolved and that it was only a matter of time until my work and residence permits were restored. Maybe that’s what this was about. It didn’t seem from their mood, however, that these officers were the bearers of good news.

  It was Thursday, 24 November 2011. The rains had come and the morning was hot and sticky with the sun cooking the moisture from the ground. Around me the bush was regenerating, with new growth sprouting everywhere.

  We drove down to the river office and I was encouraged to see a sign had been erected telling people not to buy fish from Namibian fishermen. This advice might not have seemed like a big deal, but it was something I had fought for. Poaching wasn’t confined to e
lephants, buffalos and antelopes; poor people from across the border in Namibia were illegally netting the Chobe River in the national park area, which was against the law. As a result, legal catches were becoming fewer and smaller. Part of the problem was that as well as feeding themselves, these illegal fishermen were selling to locals in Kasane. The trade was done at the immigration office, on the riverside border crossing, in full view of the authorities, and I had suggested that this was unacceptable. Locals needed to be told that buying fish from Namibians was harming their environment. The informal market shut down and I counted this as a small victory against poaching, but a major milestone in getting one of my suggestions accepted.

  When I entered the office I saw another five or six uniformed officials. The friendly woman I’d dealt with previously was no longer smiling. She handed me a fax. It had the crest of the government of Botswana as a letterhead and read

  DECLARATION OF A PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT

  IN EXERCISE of the powers vested in me by

  section 41(1)(C) of the Immigration Act,

  I SERETSE KHAMA IAN KHAMA,

  President of the Republic of Botswana, hereby declare,

  DR CLAY WILSON

  to be [an] undesirable inhabitant of,

  or visitor to, Botswana.

  It had been signed by the president himself, two days earlier, and an official date stamp from the president’s private office was affixed. What a way to devastate a person’s life, I thought. I wondered if he even knew what he was signing, and if he hadn’t, I would make sure he did when I had my day in court.

  “I’m sorry, Doctor Clay, but you cannot leave this office,” the immigration woman said.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. I looked at the fax. “Is this a real document?”