But the cheetahs had not eaten for more than a day and, with appetites stimulated, went into serious stalking mode. The zebra herd moved on but kept their eyes on the action. Moving through a maze of dongas the young cats flushed a scrub hare and darted after it, but it was a survivor and easily out-manoeuvred them. Then another one – which turned out to be a young steenbuck with its large hare-like ears – broke from a ditch and in less than 50 metres one of the cats had tripped it and grabbed it by the throat to execute the death hold. The four cats fell on it with gusto – no messing around with their food this time.
Owing to its underlying geology, where a series of hard dolerite dykes projects above the softer sandstone, resisting erosion and creating low dam walls, the Majale still held water in places and a trickle flowed from pool to pool. The Limpopo also had some good pools but they had been commandeered by the elephant herds that always took first place at fresh water.
In the weeks and months that followed, while on their daily treks between watering at the Majale or Moddergat and the fast-vanishing grazing beyond, the foals in Zulu’s new herd badgered their new adult playmate. They tried to neck and nuzzle him, some even braving a nip as equids will to strengthen social bonds.
The zebra stallion had fought many a fray and won – not only challenges to his authority as the alpha male, but also from younger males attempting to abduct females. An alpha stallion had to fight off all-comers every time one of his mares came into oestrus.
On his recapture Zulu never showed any major battle scars, so it’s likely he knew best to play second fiddle to the boss zebra and keep clear of fertile females. But Zulu would eventually send the young ones off with a well-placed kick or bite. He rather spent his time focusing on lower-ranked females and attempting to groom them. But he deferred to the alpha female with much submissive head nodding rather than risk an attack by her or her mate.
One day while shepherding his herd through the no-man’s land around the Majale, the old campaigner took them within sight of a hyena den. The hyenas, lying in the gloom under a fallen tree, saw the striped platoon move past, but in turn were not seen. For almost all the animals after the good rains it had been a bumper year for birthing. But all those young needed feeding.
An abandoned aardvark hole under the fallen rain tree served as their den and sheltered half a dozen fuzzy balls of future bone-crunchers, the progeny of two senior clan females. In spotted hyena society, the females are larger than the males and do all the rearing in the den, the males not even bothering to bring back food for their offspring. The females also do most of the serious work when hunting. Most of the big game had moved out of the area and the clan was hungry.
As the zebras moved across the open ground towards a stony ridge, the adult hyenas, having noticed the foals, stirred. Hyenas look superficially like dogs but lie closer to cats on the feliform or cat-like twig that grows off the Carnivora branch on the tree of life. In fact, they are more closely related to mongooses, civets and genets than to any other of the Carnivora.
Their heavily armed heads hang down and give the impression of deceitfulness. Their jaw muscles are more powerful than those of any other land animal alive today and can break open any bones other than the biggest of large elephant carcasses. Although they are generally thought of as being scavengers, they are more successful than lions at hunting and much of their bad press comes from seeing them in daytime, cleaning up carcasses in the company of vultures. Most often it is they who made the kill and lions drove them off, then went to lie up, replete, through the heat of the day, leaving the carcass for the refuse department to clean up.
The muscular neck and powerful front shoulders slope down to a relatively small pelvis and under-developed back legs, causing hyenas to lope rather than run, all of which adds to their menacing appearance. It is one queer fish of a cat-dog, made all the more peculiar by females that display vaginal skin flaps that resemble male genitalia.
In African folklore hyenas are synonymous with death. When the tokoloshe, that evil spirit that does its mischief by darkness, rides on the back of a spotted hyena, their intermingled grunts, groans, yells and yelps, screeches and giggles, whoops, whines and yowls terrify humans and animals alike.
Once they emerged from their siesta-time torpor, this particular clan assumed an added dimension of menace with the appearance of an old female. She had no ears and no feet on her two back legs, creating an even more pronounced slouch in her movements. But there she was joining in with the clan bonding that precedes a hunt, loping around the den sniffing and nuzzling one another, cackling and whipping up team spirit.
The footloose female (named Mohono by researchers) could have been the victim of a clash with lions over a carcass as much as a tussle with other hyenas fighting over clan control. Each hyena group is led by an alpha female who has to fight to secure her status as the one who decides who in the clan is allowed to breed. The lead female usually mates with only one alpha male, but will sometimes mate with others when his back is turned.
Sometimes she will make an ally of another senior female and allow her to breed as well. Once a litter is born, all adult females help raise them and one low-ranking female is always being left behind to tend the den. But sometimes a rogue female will kill the litter and then keep a low profile when the rest of the clan returns with full bellies and milk enough for the pups. Surviving pups will be weaned at about a year old, after which they will be large enough to join the hunt.
As the sun touched the tops of a row of mashatu trees, the clan moved off on a course calculated to intersect just behind the zebras, issuing the long howls that end in a high-pitched yelp and raise the neck hairs of all within earshot. The zebras had been making for the avenue of giant mashatu trees to spend the night. When they heard the hyenas closing in on them, they stopped and faced the direction of danger. However, when they saw the line of several predators coming at them and fanning out to encircle them, there was only one option left – run.
Like wild dogs, hyenas can run down most antelope but usually stop short of chasing zebras – unless they have foals. This herd had three. The stallion took the head and Zulu kept up the rear. Although Zulu still had no official status in the herd, his protective instinct had him herding the foals onwards, they in turn relieved to have him keeping their backs.
Whenever a hyena came close, Zulu half turned and swung his head with teeth bared to keep the hideous killers with those jaws of death at bay. Or he bucked and lashed out with his back feet. The females sandwiched in the middle but their speed was not enough to outpace the predators. Their only hope was to outlast them, but those odds were long. They were racing along a game trail over a gravel slope, the low sun casting exaggerated shadows across the landscape.
The path was strewn with the usual veld paraphernalia: lizards darting, beetles scurrying, centipedes creeping, animal scat, stones and small rocks as well as elephant dung “boulders”. In the fading light and with growing fatigue the lead stallion miscued a step and one front hoof hit an obstruction in the path. There was a loud clunk! Hitting a rock usually meant no more than a small stumble, whereas miscalculating the hop across a donga could lead to more serious damage.
In life the difference between fortune and misfortune, living and death, can be decided by the throw of dice, a split-second decision or indecision. A machinegun fired from a bunker rips into the soldier lying next to another who lives to deliver the dead GI’s watch to his widow; a bus careens out of control and crashes into a car while the one ahead carries on unaware of the carnage behind.
The same is true of evolution where each and every genetic alteration comes from a flip of the DNA coin: heads leads to better environmental adaptation while tails leads towards the bottleneck of extinction. Everything that has ever existed, as well as every species that has ever gone extinct, has done so only by the most unbelievably slimmest of chances, the flip of the evolutionary coin over and over again for billions of years. One of the evolutionary
adaptations that equids enjoyed out on the open plains was something called a springing foot that gave them the combined advantages of superlative speed and exceptional endurance.
Around five million years ago the legs of paleo-horses (the prototype was about the size of a large dog) began to lengthen as their brains enlarged. What looks like the knee of a modern horse or zebra is actually its ankle and what looks like the foot is really a toe. So equids stand not just on their toes but on their tiptoes, the hoof being the nail. The ankles (hocks) of the back legs bend backwards, but frontwards in the case of the front legs. There is very little muscle between knee (patella) and hock, and virtually none below the hock. This, in conjunction with tendons and ligaments, makes for a very strong but light limb. All the big muscles are in the shoulders and thighs, where massive force can be generated in the swing. It is a limb designed for speed.
This assembly of bones, ligaments and tendons in the back legs allows them on landing to store elastic energy and then release it when stepping off. The arrangement of springs and levers also gives them an almost uncanny capacity to leap great heights from a standing start. The parallelogram-like configuration of the springing foot has one more huge benefit: equids use only a little bit more energy when running than when walking or even standing.
The combined speed and endurance of an equid is a rarity. A cheetah can reach a speed of 75 kilometres an hour over maybe 100 metres. A horse, on the other hand, can sustain a gallop of around 40 kilometres an hour for a kilometre or more. At a slower gallop it can keep going for several kilometres. At a canter it can run for kilometres and kilometres, at a trot or fast walk all day, for days and weeks. There is no other creature alive today that can match this athleticism.
As the stallion’s front right hoof hit the rock it stumbled, which would have been easy to recover from if he had not tripped immediately into a donga, driving one of his backward-bending hock joints forwards with punishing momentum. There was a loud snapping and tearing as bone and sinew ripped apart. The superficial digital flexor, the deep digital flexor, peroneus tertius tendon and the suspensory ligament tore like wrenched springs, the bones of the hock joint, the patella and the tibia shattered like the nuts and bolts in an exploding mechanism.
Bolts of pain shot up his leg and through his body like electric shocks. He went skidding down in a cloud of dust and stones, dragging his splintered limb. The rest of the racing herd had to brake hard and swerve to get around him, bumping into one another in a pile of confusion as the hyenas closed around them.
In other circumstances the loss of the leading male would mean the herd would be at the mercy of the predators. Even though zebras will gather around and protect not only young but also any injured herd member, they would not have the power or the requisite skills to fight off the attackers for very long. With great effort the zebra stallion eventually managed to stand up but his running days were over.
The herd gathered around him while Zulu took the point position, lunging at the slathering carnivores with their bolt-cutting jaws. He had done this before and now with several mares holding his back, kicking furiously at any hyena coming in from the rear of the herd, the herd’s defences held. It had been a long chase and every animal was dog-tired. The hyenas shuffled off into the darkness, but not far off.
In a state of shock and excruciating pain the injured stallion tried to stagger on with one leg dangling uselessly, unable to walk let alone run. Zebras will wait for young or other slow members of the herd and stay with one that has been injured. Normally zebras move very little at night and sleep lying down, except for an individual that keeps sentry.
That night, however, although the foals lay down almost as soon as the sun closed its bloodshot eye, there was very little sleep among the rest of the herd. They could hear the occasional chatter of death in the distance and knew the hyenas would be back, they just did not know when. By first light the adult zebras were still on their feet, dead tired, except for the stallion who lay still on the cold stony ground.
Francolins squawked the day stridently awake. Zulu came over to nuzzle his fallen comrade but the body on the ground was stiff and unmoving. One instinct was to stay and protect his herd ally, the other was to get well away for all their sakes. Zulu walked back along the path they had come and cautiously, one by hesitant one, the females turned to follow him, each foal with its mother.
Excepting for the alpha mare who for nearly a decade had been a faithful companion through thick and thin. Zulu stopped on the first rise to look back, imploring the old lady to follow. The remaining herd also turned to her, some whinnying. She gave one long forlorn whinny back but did not move away from her fallen mate. The herd stood for some minutes urging her before Zulu turned away and they each in turn turned away and resumed their march.
As they plodded on the second-ranked mare moved ahead of the stallion to take the lead. And all at once, without any of the usual dynamics of the herd, Zulu was bequeathed his own family fully intact.
13
Melodie Goes Eventing
MORE THAN THREE YEARS had elapsed since Cyclone Leon-Eline hit (or Celine Dion, as they later called it – “screeched like a banshee”). Melodie had been 17 at the time and heard about the storm only from television news footage of massive flooding, helicopter rescues and the dramatic birth of a baby girl in a tree above rising, raging floodwaters in Mozambique.
During this time, Zulu had escaped numerous near-death encounters and was finally established as the boss of his own herd and destiny. But during that time hardly any rain had fallen in the Limpopo Valley. Even the leaves on the croton bushes, which managed to hold their green heads high in the driest winter months, were beginning to droop and turn yellow.
Where there had been mud there was hard-baked clay, where there had been bush there was now bare gravel and where there had been grass mostly there was now just dust. Dust that blew with every hot zephyr, dust that got into your ears and up your nose, grit in your mouth and hair. Dust that seeped through windows and slipped under doors. Grit that coated everything so that every colour faded to light taupe under the withering sun.
All this time Zulu had had to protect his herd from the ravages of thirst, hunger and predation. What little rain did fall plopped heavily onto the hot ground and evaporated almost immediately, not bothering to inform desperate roots beneath the surface. Every day was a battle to find water and grazing and to avoid predators that merely had to hang around watering points, wait for the elephants to vacate the premises and then pick off whatever prey offered the easiest target. Luckily for the equids they ate just about any stubble, but even that was becoming hard to find within a day’s trek of watering points.
Even the renowned rivers and springs of the Waterberg – the mountains of water – had begun drying up and only farms with wells were able to save their stock. Double M Ranch was fortunate to have two major rivers running along its boundaries and so it escaped the worst of times when other farmers in the region were having to watch their cattle die or sell them off for a fraction of their value.
In her matric year Melodie applied for admission to Onderstepoort. It was not that she was not smart enough for university, she just had not cared very much for schoolwork. To get her off a horse to do homework was like trying to prise electrons from atoms and the effort it required usually ended in an explosion. Even with a desperate campaign of swotting for final exams, she just missed the A average she needed to get into veterinary school and so went off to Pretoria Technical College to study animal sciences instead.
Her plan at college was to get top grades and then re-apply to Onderstepoort, but it never did work out that way. Towards the end of her first year at college Melodie won a provincial event and studying for end-of-year exams took back saddle. The reward for her win was an invitation to the Botswanan national championships in the capital city Gaborone.
Typically the senior events were dominated by members of the country’s defence force, the mounted i
nfantry that was highly respected for its anti-poaching work. It was the same event where “the cowboy” Ruff Stevens had taken home the prize money some years previously – which included a delayed prize-giving due to an unseasonal thunderstorm, a late departure from Gaborone, sleeping outside the border post and a little incident involving a paper jet.
Gaborone would be not only her first international event, it would also be her first full three-day event on a senior course. Because only a few young riders were resident in Botswana it attracted some of the best junior riders from Zimbabwe and South Africa. Melodie had met most of them on her horse rounds, her nemesis being a highly opinionated and spoiled rich kid, Justin Wolfe. His family lived on their private game farm near Bulawayo (his parents were suspected of being rogue arms traders for Robert Mugabe’s insufferable regime; all a matter of survival in the African bush if you looked at it that way).
The Wolfes always had the latest model SUV and horse trailers, the most expensive horses, best equipment and a small army of grooms and helpers who travelled in their own minibus to keep things running smoothly for Little Lord Fauntleroy – as he was called behind his back.
Both Justin and Melodie would be riding in the Intermediate class, with a few other riders she had seen before and beaten in South Africa, as well as some unknowns. She recognised Scarlet Robbins who hailed from Selebi-Phikwe, the desert mining town in central Botswana.
Scarlet had once beaten her at a combined jumping and dressage show at the posh Inanda Club in leafy northern Johannesburg, but Melodie knew she was stronger in the cross-country. With no fancy riding school and a horse suited more to the African Bushveld than Badminton’s green lawns, most of the riding Melodie had done was across the broken country of the Waterberg. Justin, on the other hand, believed he could buy his way to the top of any podium.
Running Wild Page 13