Running Wild

by Bristow, David;

  It looked significantly larger and darker than the rest. Ruff was already half out of his saddle, looking like he was seeing ghosts. Instinctively his legs clenched around Moyeni’s belly, egging his horse into a short trot and then a canter.

  “Hey, that’s my horse,” he cried as the zebras got spooked and turned to flee the impending danger with Ruff in pursuit. Melodie looked and could hardly believe what she saw. It wasn’t just a black horse. It was an almost-black horse with a white ring around its back right hoof. The one she’d been searching for since she was a child.

  “That’s MY horse!” she shouted after him and kicked Pale Face into a gallop. The zebra herd disappeared into the riverine bush and after that it was, as Melodie’s Pa would say, “one big goat party” as things went berserk. Geronimo had never had great stamina and Frankie was heavy and lazy by nature, so they fell behind.

  Ruff shouted back to Harvey: “Come on, we can lasso him before they get to the mopane thicket.”

  But try as he might, Harvey could not coax Frankie to close the gap. They were now making for the upper reaches of the Matabole where the network of tributaries creates a maze of drainage lines and a tangle of vegetation. The area was densely wooded with mainly thorny acacias and cane-limbed mopanes so the chase became a lacerating affair. Ruff was quick to catch up to the herd and already had his lasso swirling round his hat. But as he let fly Zulu ducked into a clump of terminalia bushes and Ruff caught a nooseful of branches.

  Melodie kept apace a short distance behind him and could hear Ruff swearing at the devil. Beyond the terminalia thicket was a block of young mopanes. The black stallion with one white sock led his herd through safely but the riders following, sitting higher, were lashed by the switch-like upper branches, some drawing thin lines of blood on bare skin. As each rider barged through they cursed like troopers.

  Once through the mopane there was open ground and again Ruff had his lasso swinging round as dust exploded and stones flew.

  “C’mon Harv, call yourself a horse guide! We’ve got to get him from two sides before they reach that dense bush.”

  But Harvey was out of earshot and behind him was Ursa who did not want to play any part in the game. But her bigger fear was that the other three would ride off and she’d be lost and alone in Africa.

  Ruff managed to ride up almost alongside Zulu and was considering leaping off his own horse and onto the feral stallion, but just as he was moving into position Zulu suddenly swerved to his right and Ruff and Moyeni shot straight ahead. Twice more they caught up with the black stallion and twice more Zulu gave them the swerve. First left then right again. Two years in the drought-ravaged wilds had left him sleek and more wily than any safari horse.

  The Cowboy was not the man to give up when he had his quarry in his sights. On they rode, the gap between him and the rest getting ever bigger. Ursa, bringing up the rear, was flapping but she needn’t have, her horse could follow the trail of the zebras and his comrades through the bush as easily as Hansel and Gretel following bread crumbs in a forest. The real problem was that both Geronimo and Frankie were tiring.

  Ruff kept up the gallop and Melodie did her best to follow, every so often losing the trail then picking it up again. That was when, alarmed by the commotion, Floppy Ears stepped out of the mopane and charged.

  Zulu and his herd took off to the right and disappeared. Ruff steered Moyeni to the left and their speed took them instantaneously out of harm’s way. Next came Melodie, who was able to kick some extra speed into her horse and steer Pale Face away from a collision with ten tonnes of rampaging pachyderm. Floppy Ears smashed into the mopane bush behind Melodie just as Ursa burst out on one side and Harvey on the other. The elephant turned on a tickey, as they say in the circus, and was after them in a flash.

  Harvey and Ursa dug in their boot heels and shouted at their horses to move, damn it, using words not normally heard in good company.

  “Oh god, oh god,” wept the elderly woman.

  “Go, go, GOOO! You freakish excuse for a horse,” Harvey shouted.

  The two horses were struggling through heavy gravel and the elephant was gaining on them. Once they got through the mopane screen Harvey was not sure his horse would have any more go left in him and they’d be in serious trouble. Harvey had his reins short and was walloping the back of Geronimo with the knotted end. “Move it you painted load of horse turd!”

  They shot past Ruff and Moyeni going the other way. Moments later they heard three shots, countered by an almighty high-pitched trumpeting like a 100-piece brass band hitting a crescendo.

  Harvey and Ursa slowed, panting nearly as hard as their horses, and turned around. Ruff was sitting on Moyeni, rifle still raised and Floppy Ears facing him, shaking her massive head and ears.

  “Put two at her feet and one just over her head,” he told no one in particular.

  Floppy Ears scooped up a trunkful of dust and flung it over herself as if to say: “Hey, you interrupted my ablutions.” Then she trumpeted again, spun around on her four cushioned feet and, with head held up and trunk flailing in the air, rushed off away from the riders.

  “Been drinking at the dam and raiding crops in Zimbabwe, no doubt,” said Harvey when he’d got his breath back.

  “Probably been shot at,” Ruff added.

  Ursa sat, panting, ashen.

  “Where’s Melodie?” said Ruff.

  They stood up in their stirrups looking around, mopane thicket with tall leadwood trees behind them, an open sandy stretch in front and then the refuge of mopane scrub into which the elephant had vanished. None of them had a clue. Ruff fired a round into the air. He and Harvey called her name. They waited, then called again.

  Ruff had a fresh round in the chamber and was aiming up to send another lump of lead arcing over the African bush when the panting Palamino and its sweating rider came bouncing out of the riverine bush ahead. She trotted up: “I went on a wide loop. I wasn’t going to take any chances.”

  “Thought we’d lost you there for a minute,” said Ruff.

  “Just like you said,” she answered, “a whole barrel-load of fun.” She was red-faced and her cotton shirt and jodhpurs were wet through. All their hearts were racing, their hatbands were dark with sweat, their mouths were coated with blotting paper dust and suddenly they each felt wasted.

  “Where the ff…, where are we?” Harvey asked, regaining his decorum and shucking his dry tongue from a gluey palate.

  “Hmm, stuffed if I know,” said Ruff. “I don’t recognise anything around here. We could be near the Zeederberg crossing on the Tuli Circle. Or we might have ridden inside the circle.”

  The rosy eyelid of the sun was drooping towards the horizon. Harvey looked at the horizon to the west. “Clearly west is over there,” he pointed to where the sky was reddening.

  “Latitude is good,” offered Ruff, “but longitude is unclear.”

  “What the hell does that mean,” demanded Ursa.

  “It means, ladies,” Ruff seemed to delight in it, “we have absolutely no idea where we are. I would estimate we’ve ridden about 10 kilometres from the Jwala. I’m just not exactly sure in what direction.”

  If it had been in a straight line north that would place them well inside the Tuli Circle, in Zimbabwe with its paranoid government and political commissars in every village ever vigilant for spies from the reactionary regimes around.

  “If we were anywhere near a village we’d hear donkey bells and dogs barking at this time of day,” observed Harvey.

  “Or night,” Melodie chipped in.

  “Right,” said Ruff. “Well we are going to have to make camp here for tonight so we’d better get going before it gets any darker.”

  Ursa was about to remonstrate but Ruff saw it coming. He was an old hand at dealing with nervous guests out of their comfort zones.

  “Take a drink from the bottles in your bags now,” he ordered, “but be careful because what you have is all you will have until we get out of here. Save s
ome for your horses and some for later.”

  That was when Frankie started to cough and splutter, then collapsed onto his front knees. Harvey managed a quick leap clear before being thrown. His horse was blowing a bloody froth from its nostrils and Harvey measured his heartbeat at more than 80 beats a minute.

  “He’s completely knackered,” announced Harvey to the now dismounted crowd of three. “I dunno, I’ve never seen him – or any of our horses – in a state like this before.”

  He looked up at Ruff and pulled a grim face.

  “Okay, let’s give it 10 minutes and see how he’s doing. We are going to have to give each of our horses a drink, but do it slowly so they don’t go into shock. Girls, I suggest you water the horses in your hats, they’ll have to have a bottle each and then pray we find water in the morning. Harvey and me will go collect firewood.”

  After the allocated 10 minutes the guides had a pile of logs that were the windfall of elephant foraging. The horses had each been given its small ration of water. Harvey checked Frankie’s pulse but it had not come down anywhere near the usual resting rate of around 20 beats a minute. He checked the other horses. Although Geronimo was still panting and beating at around 30 a minute, Frankie’s pistons were still pounding at more than 60 revs a minute.

  “He’s blown,” Harvey said aside to Ruff.

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  “How bad?

  Harvey made a gesture of slicing across his throat.

  “Okay,” said Ruff, throwing his HF radio into his hat on the ground. “No signal here. Try to get the girls comfortable. See what supplies we have left, how much water. It’s going to be cold tonight so we’ll have to keep close to the fire. We’ll have to use the horse blankets so hang them out to dry. Get the other horses on a line and then start a fire. I’ll take Frank out of earshot.”

  “Your rifle?” asked Harvey.

  Ruff patted the .45 on his hip as he walked off.

  Harvey made a fuss about making a fire Bushman-style, trying to hold the attention of the women, showing them how to make the fire stick with a hard acacia branch and the block out of softer marula, into which he cut a slot. Then he cut a green branch from a combretum bush and, by peeling back the sinuous bark, made a bow.

  “My hands are not as tough as they used be,” Harvey tried to lighten the mood as he began to swirl the fire stick until tiny sparks appeared in the groove he’d cut into the marula block. The sparks dribbled down onto a ball of grass seed “cottonwool” and Harvey blew softly. A wisp of smoke appeared, followed by a flicker of flame and he placed it under the pile of twigs he had prepared.

  “Aha, there’s still a bit of the old Bushman in me,” he said with relief. “Now we just have to feed it and hope they can see the blaze from camp.”

  But all of this could not hush the echo of a gunshot through the still, cool evening.

  The three stood around the roaring fire for a few minutes as if in mourning.

  “Will they come for us?” asked Melodie.

  “Not likely tonight, especially if we’ve wandered into Zim. They won’t want to be driving around with headlights on and getting themselves arrested or shot at. We’ll probably have to sit it out until morning. They should be able to set a course on the smoke. They’ll be as anxious as all hell to find us.”

  When Ruff returned, the others were resting against their saddles with the leftovers from lunch set out in front of them, but no one was touching anything and the sullen silence was amplified by the crackling fire which shot flames and sparks high into the air.

  The weathered cowboy did not shed a tear or even show a sign of sorrow, but the two women did. Never one to prevent a bad situation from getting worse, Ruff trotted out the old platitude: “As we say, Africa is not for sissies,” then leaned forward and began helping himself to the spread.

  He spooned liquefied butter onto a white bun onto which he layered cold meat and crisps.

  Even while chewing his buttie he couldn’t be stopped: “Well, that’s life – and death for you – everything that lives is going to die, Frankie, the ants, me … and you.”

  “Don’t you care about anything?” Ursa shot at him.

  Ruff considered the question for a while, then replied: “Yes. In fact I do, madam. I care very much every time I have to shoot one of my horses.”

  Ursa wiped her nose with her shirt sleeve.

  “What’s the matter?” Melodie put her arm around the older woman.

  Which only caused the shaking to break into convulsions of sobbing.

  The two men looked at one another as if to say, “was it something I said?”

  “Cancer,” blurted Ursa. “That’s why I came here, to feel really alive,” she managed to say between sobs. “And now this.”

  They all gazed into the fire.

  “Lung cancer. And I don’t even smoke! I haven’t had children, or even much of a life if the truth is going come out.”

  It seemed like as good a time as any to be speaking the truth.

  Ruff got up and added more wood to the blaze and it spewed fireworks into the air.

  “But isn’t there something you can do? These days cancer isn’t automatically a death sentence,” said Melodie.

  “I decided not to undergo any treatment. I’d rather spend what little money I have left doing things like this ride while I still can. Rather than shovel it all to the medical industry that uses cancer as a great big money-making scam.”

  It was to be her last safari, her last just about everything and by the end of that year she would be, as they say in Africa, late. When West and the rest of the search party found them the next morning it was agreed they would finish the safari. Ruff lightened the mood by handing Moyeni to Harvey and riding one of the supply mules.

  Back at Fort Jameson Melodie caught up with Harvey putting bags into the Cruiser. She held him firmly by the arm and stared intently into his eyes.

  “You call me if you ever see him again, okay?” Harvey knew what she meant. “He is very special to me. Let me know if anything happens.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  Melodie handed him a note she had written: Melodie Theron. Call about Zulu, and her number.

  Then she hugged him, climbed into the vehicle next to Ursa and West drove them to the border post.

  15

  Muti

  ALL ALONG THE BANKS OF THE Limpopo grow considerable, centuries-old sycamore fig trees. In spring each year, huge clusters of wild fruits hang from the branches and are greedily gobbled up by baboons and monkeys, birds of many kinds and other arboreal animals. The copious groundfall is quickly set upon by antelope, zebras, mongooses, jackals and elephants which hoover them up with relish. If the fig trees disappeared from Africa many wild creatures would not survive.

  Southern Africa enjoys a fruitful confection of slang enriched by many African, Afrikaans, English, Portuguese, Yiddish and even Indonesian words. Voetsek tells off a belligerent dog, and tsotsi is a petty crook. A mamba is anyone or anything that is deadly, in a good way, and muti can mean medicine or poison. The word muti actually means tree, because in old Africa almost every tree is a pharmacopeia of potions.

  Your mother might give you muti for a sore throat or put some muti on a cut. An African person will visit a nyanga (a traditional healer or shaman) to get good muti to cure an ailment. For magic, takati (pronounced “tagati”), you would consult a sangoma, what in English we would call a witch or witch doctor.

  To fight takati you would need to get strong muti, maybe taken from a vulture or a lion (although human parts make the strongest kind). You will not survive long in the African wilderness without a passing knowledge of muti and takati because the dangers are manifest at every footfall.

  A black mamba does not visit anyone by chance but always has been sent to bring harm. Only the most powerful of sangomas can catch or counter it. The embodiment of takati is the tokoloshe who does much mischief by night. But he is a little fellow
and if you put your bed on top of bricks, or old paint tins, he cannot get to you. Many a teenager with child has claimed to have been impregnated by the tokoloshe. Not enough bricks, clearly.

  Humans have used the plants of the wild since time immemorial for muti as well as for takati, whether witch doctor or druid. But so have animals. When a dog or cat starts eating grass or some other garden herb you know something is upsetting their stomachs. Plant emetics are by far the most common type of human muti; there is even a tree with the scientific name Trichilia emetica, the Natal mahogany.

  Chimpanzees, which have neither doctors nor nyangas, will eat a poisonous plant, Vernonia amygdalina, to void intestinal parasites. Parrots in the wild eat mainly fruits and nuts, some of which contain small concentrations of arsenic that helps to kill stomach parasites. Their favourite drugstore hangouts are along exposed riverbanks where they scratch for clays to neutralise alkaloid toxins found in some fruits. Some fruit flies lay their eggs in rotting fruit where the alcohol deters parasitic wasps.

  Many animals, as well as humans, living on the hot African plains look to the arboreal giants, the baobabs, as a pharmaceutical supermarket. The bark contains a mild antibiotic, which is one reason you will often see the lower trunks extensively gnawed. Elephants use their tusks to open up the skin and in times of drought chomp on the water-retentive fibres inside. Humans use the bark to make paper and fabrics.

  The fruits of the baobab look like velvety maracas dangling from the bare branches, ready to rattle a mambo whenever the wind blows. Break one open and inside you’ll find lozenge-size seeds that are extremely rich in oils, protein, calcium and vitamin C. They have a tangy citrusy taste and are much loved by animals and rural children alike. Their parents make a cool drink with them like ours used to make ginger beer.

  The simple but astonishing fact is that just about all animals have their veld pharmacies well worked out or they could not have survived, zebras included.