Running Wild

by Bristow, David;

  And that was the day Ruff found himself working for the Boss. With very little left to bargain with, Ratty had tied him up in Gordian contractual knots and ensured he would never walk away with anything much of worth other than the clothes he stood in and his expensive cowboy hat.

  Ruff walked back along in the shade of the giant sycamore figs that lined the riverbank, a group of noisy green wood hoopoes flocking from fruiting tree to fruiting tree. They weren’t interested in the fruit but in the insects that swarmed around the ripening bunches of wild figs. To Nguni speakers these birds are hlekabafazi, cackling old women. They seemed to be cackling at him. He swore and kicked up little explosions of dust as he trod.

  “Blewitt …” Ruff Stevens spat a ball of spit into the dust. “You really did blow it for me this time!”

  It was as though a storm was raging around Ruff’s head, his face was flushed and he would have surely killed his old friend right there and then – he spat again at the thought of him – if he had appeared. But he felt so sick at heart he would rather not see the thieving bastard ever again. He did, more than once, but the next time was on a wanted poster at the border post. Although it did not mention for what crime he was wanted Ruff imagined the worst he could.

  The low-pressure system that enveloped Ruff’s head as he walked along the bank of the Limpopo was like a party balloon drifting off from a birthday picnic party compared to the meteorological storm cell that was at that time developing over the Indian Ocean and heading for Reunion Island.

  9

  Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

  ZULU STOOD ON FULL ALERT, battle stations, in the middle of a semicircle of six adult African wild dogs, as though they were enjoying a game of tag out in the veld. The thing about this game, though, was that the loser would likely die. While the playing field was level enough, the going was extremely heavy underfoot. Conditions on the day would definitely favour the runner with the most stamina.

  On first sighting a wild dog looks about as lethal as a poodle – the large kind, not the yapping miniature variety. But you would be fooled. As hunters they have two great assets, amazing stamina and strength in numbers.

  A pack of wild dogs runs its prey to the ground. They can run for hours at a fast lope. The pack of between about five and 10 dogs works like a cycling peloton: one dog takes the lead and pushes the speed with shorts bursts of up to 40 kilometres an hour. When it tires it peels off to the back of the pack and the next one takes up the chase, pushing their prey to suicidal exhaustion. This strategy favours the pack against the individual and wild dogs enjoy the highest hunting success rate among all large carnivores of Africa.

  As with the story of the Great Flood in ancient Babylon, the great flood of 2000 in the Limpopo Valley finally abated. It took about a week for the Limpopo, the Shashe, the Mojale, Matabole, Motloutse and the other rivers that flow through and around Mashatu to subside. It took another week before the area resembled anything like solid ground and it was still sodden for weeks to come. The low-lying areas of the valley turned slowly from slush to goo. The larger animals still hanging around developed a high-stepping gait that looked as if invisible puppeteers were manipulating them.

  The browsers such as kudu and giraffes mostly did all right. They were long-legged and were able to continue feeding on tree leaves. Just a little soggy underfoot, or hoof. But the grazers generally fared less well. Zebra, wildebeest and other large antelope species that were not strictly territorial simply moved away to higher ground. But many of the others, such as steenbuck with very well-defined territories that had become inundated, did not survive the flood and even those that did, in the days immediately afterwards, had little or no food.

  Creatures of the trees, the birds, tree squirrels, bush babies, bees, some species of lizards – like the vividly coloured red, blue and yellow tree agamas – would have been safe, even snug, excepting those whose tree homes had been uprooted and washed away. Animals such as bushbuck, duiker and bush pigs, which depended on the dense riverine forest for cover as well as for food, did not fare well. Some managed to flee the floodwaters but became easy quarry for predators.

  The zebras, giraffes, wildebeest and other herd species were not tied to physical territories because for them it is the social group that gives them their sense of belonging. Steenbuck and bushbuck, leopards, hyenas and wild dogs have specific marked territories and much of their perambulations are precise lines that are routinely patrolled, stopping regularly to leave fresh scent markings. They will defecate and urinate on the same spots, and also rub scent glands against tree trunks or branches, leaving behind sticky pastes that are olfactory boundary markers as effective as electric fences.

  Domestic dogs do much the same thing and, like wild animals, have highly developed senses of smell. That’s why taking Spot for walkies in the park can turn into a game of tug-o-war: they’re trying to catch up on the news. Bark bark! When dogs run up and down the fence line they are protecting their territory and you, the alpha dog. People walking their dogs right up against your dog’s territorial border is a direct challenge: “You lookin’ at me?!”

  The African bush has a complex three-dimensional matrix of scent trails. To stray into the territory of another one of your species is a declaration of war. When we ventured from trees to townhouses, humans lost our acute sense of smell. But every now and again the ghostly whiff of a passing odour can ignite the most intense sense of nostalgia, a gut-twisting melancholy of something lost. Like when, some time later, Zulu came across his old friend Tommy.

  When all was tallied it was the wild dogs of Mashatu that fared worst in the wake of the flood. Even in good times their dog claws were making spine-chilling, chalk-on-blackboard screeches as they slipped desperately towards the abyss of extinction. Mashatu had just two packs totalling around 20 adults. They were persecuted by villagers and farmers and succumbed to attacks by lions and leopards. Being highly social animals and in close contact with one another, they were continually dying from diseases contracted from village dogs, mostly canine distemper and occasionally rabies. In the whole of Africa it was estimated there were maybe just 5 000 wild dogs, tops.

  When you see a wild dog for what it is, perfectly adapted for a life of running and predation, it is a beautiful thing. The scientific name Lycaon pictus means painted wolf. The coat is a dappled patchwork of white, tans and browns, each pattern as unique as a human fingerprint. Their bodies are lean and sparse, like Ethiopian long-distance runners. They are all ribs and pelvis. The ears are almost comically large and round, as though they are wearing Mickey Mouse head bands. The head is also large and out of proportion to the skinny body because it is packed with great slicing and dicing teeth and large sets of muscles to operate them.

  A pack of the size that had surrounded Zulu could dispatch an impala in the time it would take you to get your camera bag off the back seat, the camera out of the bag, the settings right and focus … By the time you pressed the shutter release button all that would be left would be horns, some of the larger bones, hooves and bits of skin. A horse would take longer, maybe an hour to clean it down to bare bones.

  Since the invention of the bush telegraph, wild dogs have enjoyed the same bad press as hyenas, vultures and Arab slave traders. Great White Hunters wrote about their “inhumane” killing methods, often starting to feed on the doomed prey animal before it was fully dead, ripping out intestines as the antelope stood motionless in shock, feeling and sensing nothing as its life was being ripped out its belly.

  These would be the same brave adventurers who thought nothing of shooting at an elephant herd – mothers, sub-adults, babies – until either they ran out of elephants or ammunition. Sport they called it. Including Frederick Courteney Selous, most celebrated of African hunters to the point of sanctification, who ventured and hunted in the Tuli region. His famous book A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa is filled, virtually from page one to the last, with boasts of such blood-letting it is hard to believe he left a
nything alive.

  “Wanton killers, terrible brutes, most cruel and relentless of all killers,” the hunters wrote and the world recoiled at the thought of the killer dogs, mass murderers all. Even 100 years ago in game reserves wild dogs were shot on sight by rangers who thought them repulsive. They were declared vermin because they were so successful at hunting “royal game” – the same animals that hunters wanted to hunt for sport and trophies. When wagons and then horse-drawn carriages began to ply the Pandamatenga route (so named by the local Africans who had to “pick up and carry” the white man’s loads) between the gold fields of the Witwatersrand and Bulawayo, they shot royal game for food, and lions, wild dogs, cheetahs and leopards for sport. And shot and shot and shot.

  The Setswana name for the wild dog is makanyane, which describes an agile hunter. In modern towns of the region it is the name given to petty criminals and pickpockets; someone who darts in barely noticed to do some mischief. For African subsistence farmers living in dusty villages, a pack of marauding “pickpockets” is a fearful prospect. A pack can run amok in a village and kill many of the goats and any pigs, leaving the herders impoverished.

  At Lentswe-le-Moriti village, which languishes beside the public gravel road that runs along the western boundary of Mashatu, just west of the foot-and-mouth veterinary fence, they have devised a cunning plan to counter wild dog threats. They take a domestic dog from a newborn litter, one of the “ribs and teeth” Canis africanus types that hang around villages much as the first wolf-dogs did on their way to domestication. This runt will be given to a ewe goat to suckle. It grows up with the goats and becomes their protector as they go about feeding in the veld during the day.

  During Zulu’s time there, an old woman naka (the local name for a witch doctor or sangoma) in the village used three fly whisks: one, a wildebeest tail such as those used by tribal leaders; one from a horse and one from a painted wolf. She would dip them into a prepared brew, infused with this and that (“tongue of toad and eye of newt”), and flick them around a homestead or a person to cast or break a spell. Unfortunately for the packs of Mashatu she also dispensed powdered bones and teeth of wild dogs in order to improve the hunting prowess of men of the village and that of their dogs.

  As bad as things were for the people and creatures of Mashatu, for those creatures that had survived the storm they had at least one another. The antelope and zebras collected in loose coalitions out on the open, soggy plains. The predators tried to keep safe distances from one another, where scent boundaries had been washed clean. It would take some time for them to be renegotiated and remarked. The power of individuals and groups would be retested with much snarling and sneering, lashing and biting, tooth and claw, fur and blood, as new hierarchies emerged.

  But Zulu, who originally had taken flight with Tommy and a few others of the Limpopo Valley herd, was now on his own, with no family or friend to commune with or provide protection – a horse alone in the wilderness. The dogs were starving, literally. Unlike the big cats that binge eat, wild dogs need to hunt and eat every day, twice a day if the animal taken down is not large enough to feed all the hunters, more so if there is a den of pups to feed.

  When lions bring down prey the size of a buffalo or giraffe they will continue feeding for days, then spend the next few days sleeping off the orgy in the shade nearby the putrefying carcass while it is being torn apart by hyenas, vultures, jackals and maggots. Game drives to see an old kill is an olfactory adventure like no other.

  A fully grown horse would more than satisfy this pack for a whole day and so the energy investment in trying to run it down was worth the try. Although this one was a curious beast, not the striped pitse-ya-naga the dogs knew. From long experience they knew the strong and weak points of each prey species: how fast they could run and how far; how deft they were at using their rapier horns or scythe-like hooves. They would have thought they had this one’s measure and it was simply a waiting and baiting game.

  Meanwhile, Zulu was trying to read his opponents as any horse would of another herd of horses – mainly who was in charge. While the dogs were underestimating their wily prey, Zulu was wondering why the female dogs seemed to be not only in charge but larger than the males. With the dogs darting in and out it was hard to fathom their strategy and how to counteract it. But a pitse was not a pitse-ya-naga, as the dogs soon found out.

  The chase had taken the predators and Zulu, the prey, past the ridge known as Agate Koppies. Where the larger Mashatu property surrounds the smaller Naledi private reserve, the ground underfoot was gently undulating and gravelly with low mopane bush. Zulu found himself, in the straight line that a martial eagle might fly, about 20 kilometres north of the Limpopo River, way beyond where the horse safaris operated.

  The pitse was dead tired but not yet spent. The wild dogs, on the other foot, having kept up the chase for something like two hours, already weakened by hunger, had little energy left. A normal pitse-ya-naga would have thrown in its stripes way back. But try and try as they might the dogs could not get the better of this one bad pitse. That tipping point of indecision lost them their advantage.

  Before the railway from the Rand pushed north – all the way to Cairo was the dream of ruthless empire builder Cecil John Rhodes – coaches of the Zeederberg company ferried men (sometimes women) and gold between the Matabeleland gold fields and Pretoria. The coaches crossed the Limpopo at Rhodes’ Drift, traversed the Tuli Block, then crossed the Shashe and onwards to Bulawayo. The coaches were frequently the victims of heavy rainstorms, attacks by lions and spear-wielding Matabele warriors. Even a local highwayman named Dick Turpend: either he was dyslexic or he had a roguish sense of humour.

  The stagecoach business relied on horses and mules. But the attrition rate was so high. African horse sickness took its toll on the horse teams so the company experimented with zebras. In their capture and training, wagons were overturned and axles – as well as the occasional arm or leg – frequently broken. Health-wise the zebras did well enough but were proved not to have the stamina required, nor the unquestioning subordination of horses.

  Back at the game ranch, Zulu, lungs and legs burning with lactic acid, was pumped up with adrenalin. The dogs were employing the usual kill strategy of taking turns to dart in and take sniping bites at the back legs and soft parts, trying to hamstring the horse by slicing tendons and ripping out bits around the genitals and belly to induce bleeding and shock. But Zulu was holding his own. The dogs had made some headway and the horse was bleeding freely, but he was by no means down.

  As each dog darted in Zulu rushed it, teeth bared. He reared and stomped the ground, sending the dogs scattering. Each time a dog rushed at his back Zulu lashed out backwards, then another painted wolf would target his other flank, so the horse seemed to be doing a frenzied fandango, his rump swinging one way and the other, hooves lashing out backwards. The matter was at a stalemate until one dog, visibly tiring, was a fraction slow evading the backward kick and was sliced open as though a surgeon’s scalpel had been drawn along its side. It went off whimpering and lay in the fractured shade of a willowy combretum bush.

  The other dogs retreated and lay down on their haunches, heads resting on their front legs, in a holding pattern. Zulu stood stock still, legs burning and lungs pumping. The dogs were assessing the seriousness of the damage to their comrade. It was bad. The wounded dog rolled over on its side and was not moving. One by one the rest of the pack got up and made their way over to their fallen companion. The battle was over and the uninjured dogs trotted off back to find their den and pups hidden down an old aardvark burrow.

  The dogs learned a valuable lesson: a pack could run down just about any wild creature but there was one that would give them more than a fair chase. They had no energy left for another hunt that day. The pups would go to bed hungry. And so that day ended: dogs zero, Zulu one.

  The horse would not encounter the dogs again, which was lucky for him but not so good for the dogs. From that time onwards t
heir presence in Mashatu waned, either they drifted off to who knew where, or they died one by one, driven below the threshold number needed to sustain a viable population.

  Zulu had been given his first serious lesson in bush survival and had come out with a first class pass. But he was still highly vulnerable. He might not get away a second time. The next time it might be hyenas, the dreaded phiri, or a lethal spotted inkwe. What he needed was allies.

  Zulu had seen zebras often enough on outrides – herds of between six and 12 animals, each with a leading stallion which, every once in a while, he’d had fun baiting, until his rider pulled the reins on his little game. If he did not find some of those pitse-ya-nagas pretty soon, the next time he might be dog’s meat.

  10

  Land of Giants

  EVERYTHING WAS GREEN. No one could remember it ever having been so luxuriant as late summer tucked up into autumn. The high-water mark was etched by a line of lush buffalo grass. Wildebeest, eland, zebra and the other grazers had never had it so good. But in nature green is to brown as love is to hate in affairs of the heart: opposites in one direction but back to back in the other. Hard and brittle was the normal kind of love you’d find in the Limpopo Valley, the main food of affection being Eragrostis curvula, otherwise known as weeping love grass.

  Zulu, however, was not as happy as he might have been as he crunched on the succulent tufts of grass. That was partly because horses don’t really like leafy grass, preferring rough grass stalks like those on the Mongolian steppes where they evolved. But it wasn’t even the lush green buffalo grass, the crunchy shoots of love grass or the cotton-topped stems of succulent wild oat grass that perturbed him. It was because he was a herd animal and he was alone.