Are We There Yet?

by David Smiedt

  Some also come to fulfil their Hemingway-esque big-game-hunter fantasies. Conservation is a costly business and many parks welcome guests willing to shell out wads of cash for items that will later be stuffed. Permits to dispatch populous species are exchanged for funds which become wardens’ salar ies, concrete watering holes, poacher-patrol vehicles and so on. Even the odd Big Five species falls to a bullet, the theory being that the substantial fee – tens of thousands of US dollars – garnered to assassinate an ageing leopard or elephant that was likely to die or be killed within a short time anyway will better serve the next generation. One is sacrificed so that many will endure – the way of the wild.

  A significant number of the guests at these resorts are lacerated and bruised during their stay. From Harley Street to Hollywood, canny South African medicos have established consulting rooms where they flog packages which put the rhino into rhinoplasty. What makes these deals so enticing is that for less than what it would cost the hook-nosed, weak-chinned or amply-buttocked to be operated on at home, they also receive a safari that does not merely sit in luxury’s lap but is clutched to her velvety bosom. One can only imagine the excitement that beats in the chest of a cashed-up A-cup at the prospect of having seen the Big Five and coming home with the Big Two.

  A century before the Botox-for-lunch set began flocking to the park’s western rim, Paul Kruger’s plans for the sanctuary had been put on the backburner in the wake of the Anglo-Boer war. Although little remained of Kruger’s troops or the man for that matter – he died (some say of a broken heart, but don’t they always) in exile in Switzerland in 1904 – his vision for the park was enthusiastically taken up by the powers that defeated him.

  The man chosen to be the park’s first warden was Major James Hamilton-Stevenson, a short-tempered Scot. Despite referring to the park in its early days as a “pathetic and dust-covered little wench”, over the next forty years he acquired an additional 10,000 acres and in so doing ensured the survival of one of the world’s last wild kingdoms.

  In what I like to think was a manner reminiscent of Yul Brynner in the Magnificent Seven, he also acquired a band of rangers who responded to a job ad that must have read something like: “Wanted: single men proficient with firearms to protect vast tract of malarial bush from trigger-happy poachers. Previous experience with ravenous wild felines and bouts of fever-induced delirium essential.”

  One of those who thought this sounded like the cut of his jib was Major AA Fraser, a whiskey-swilling behemoth for whom the most cursory of record-keeping was anathema and who was known to deal with the frosty Kruger nights by dozing off beneath his twenty-five dogs. Another was Harry Wolhuter, who in 1904 literally fell from his horse into a lion’s mouth and vanquished the cat with the combination of three fortuitous strikes from a six-inch blade and primal screaming.

  Characters like Fraser and Wolhuter have of course been replaced by rangers with hospitality training programs under their belts but, as I was soon to discover, the lions ain’t goin’ nowhere.

  As the temperature bounded effortlessly into the low thirties, the animals retreated from the road in search of shade. What made the searing stillness even more exciting – in an odd kind of way – was the unmistakably pungent evidence that I’d just missed a large herd of elephants.

  As is the custom in Kruger, cars frequently stop as they approach one another to share information on recent sightings. It’s a convivial affair that frequently leaps language barriers through clumsy mime. There was no need for such malarky with the occupants of the first vehicle I encountered. The pair of bull-necked Afrikaans lads in the ute were atwitter with excitement and throwing feline plurals in my direction.

  I followed their prescribed route over a bridge marked as a safe spot for passengers to get out of their vehicles and stretch or snap, then turned onto a dirt track 500 metres away. Beneath a gnarled thorn tree lay a blood-flecked lioness gnawing on a giraffe leg the length of her body. The carcass had been dragged beneath a tree to avoid detection from the air and its entrails covered with dirt to mask the scent.

  Standing a metre high and easily tipping the scales at 150 kilograms, the lioness moved with a languid fluidity. Even as she ate, the bulbous muscles in her neck and chest shimmied beneath the skin. From a crouching start she could have covered the five metres between us in less than a second, but ascertaining that I was merely an ardent fan, she went back to her cartilage tartare.

  After a few minutes she was joined by another female. And another. And another. And another. From every direction they prowled out of the undergrowth until nine converged on the carcass, each met with teeth-baring hisses and the flashing slashes of claws like meat hooks. Most were likely entitled to a share of the spoils as lionesses have mastered the art of hunting in packs.

  With the hard work done, the male strutted into the picture. Incidentally, your average male lion can put away thirty-five kilos of meat – around 15 per cent of their body weight – in a single sitting and mates four times an hour for less than a minute over a two-day period. It’s good to be the king.

  What had been a flicker in the rear-view mirror turned out to be the man of the pride. He made the mistake of loping a little too close to my car’s exhaust pipe and emitted a roar that caught the attention of my sphincter way before my ears. Which is to be expected when a low-frequency rumble that can carry up to eight kilometres through the bush emanates from a metre behind you.

  Sporting extravagant pectorals and crowned with a coarse faux-fro, the lion reminded me of David Hasselhoff in Baywatch. Until he began to eat, at which point the resemblance took a turn for the Orson Welles at a seafood buffet.

  A transfixing hour later I drove back to the main road and within ten minutes was putting away a cheeseburger in the Shingwedzi camp restaurant. Considering the view it afforded, it seemed absurd that I had the tennis-court-sized thatched pavilion to myself.

  The support cast of the spectacle before me was airborne. Midnight-blue birds washed opalescent by the sun were trailed by tangerine African monarch butterflies and a variety in a yellow I’d only seen previously deep in lemon-delicious puddings. The main players were a wallow of hippos (I’m not sure if this is the appropriate collective noun, but it damn well should be), a smattering of waterbuck bearing perhaps the most unfortunate marking in the animal kingdom – a ring of white fur on the rump which looks uncannily like a target – and a thirty-strong troupe of chacma baboons.

  With 109 kilometres between me and the evening’s camp, I reluctantly pulled myself away and continued south. Kruger spoils you for choice, and the grazing zebra, loping giraffe and nyala buck – one speaks of them in the singular apparently – that had me pulling over to gawp in wonder earlier in the day now warranted a mere deceleration as I scanned the grassland for the more spectacular.

  My first elephant appeared at a drinking hole 150 metres from the road. Even from this distance the sheer bulk of the animal had me opting for idling in case a swift getaway was required. A full-grown male stands as high as the guttering on a double-storey house and easily accounts for five tonnes.

  You do not want to piss them off. As I found out after turning onto a concealed dirt loop far faster than I should have. Whereupon my windscreen was filled with a wall of dusty brown elephant vagina. Stomping on the brake, the car fishtailed off the powdery sand track as the tyres vainly battled for traction. The elephant spun through 180, flapped her ears forward to make herself look even bigger and tucked her trunk under her body in the classic preparation for a charge. With a piercing trumpet of aggro, she bolted towards the car, then pulled up abruptly as it became clear that I was not merely beating a swift retreat but disembowelling one.

  By the time I reached the Letaba camp, my heart rate had dropped to mere panic. Arced along the foreshore of the river after which it is named, this is one of the park’s bigger camps and includes dozens of rondavels, a general store, elephant museum, audito rium and restaurant.

  Letaba is an oas
is of shaded lawn and curved stone paths beneath clusters of chocolate-bark mopani trees. It is immaculately neat in the pseudo-military manner that only government-owned enterprises can muster. My double room with private patio and river view – cue gambolling hippo – set me back the grand total of $40 for the night. There was even a resident herd of bush buck, the species that inspired Bambi. I could see paradise by the dashboard light.

  On the way to the general store, I was halted by a notice alerting visitors to the reptilian dangers that routinely slip through the barbed wire of the compound perimeter. The first venomous suspect to watch out for is the puff adder. Responsible for 60 per cent of the fatal bites in the region, this piece of slithering death is thick, yellow-brown with pale-edged black chevrons on its back and produces a cytotoxic venom. Which means swelling, necrosis and eventually the shuffling off one’s mortal coil. It lies in wait and its preferred strike zone is the shin.

  Not that you want to remain vigilant only for what’s lurking in the grass. Curled around mopani limbs, the boomslang is the acme of disguise. Comprised of a mahogany-brown body, yellow throat and algae-green eyes, it is rarely discernible in the tree in which it lives. However, when it wants to get your attention, 1 mg of its poison acts as high-octane haemotoxin which prevents the victim’s blood from clotting, resulting in a haemorrhage of epic proportions.

  The final member of the trio of local agony is the black mamba. Easily sliding into the five deadliest snakes on the planet list, it can grow four metres in length and raise up to one-third of its body length when getting ready to rumble. Two drops of its venom will kill a man but it usually doubles the dose as a matter of course. By the time even the speediest medic has sliced a chunk from your recently punctured flesh to suck out the poison, your throat would be throbbing, your bowels would be prompting the nausea of a thousand congealed kormas and your muscles would be in the grip of seizures that would make you feel as though you were being ripped into bite-size chunks.

  Mindful of these lunging venomous dangers, I hotfooted it to the airconditioned sanctuary of the general store, a large portion of which was given over to souvenirs that made Disneyland look like Orrefors. Should one come over peckish, the very animals that had filled you with awe in the bush could do likewise in the stomach department via kudu, impala and springbok pates. And if you were searching for a gift for that person with everything bar taste, look no further than the vacuum-packed canisters of genuine elephant dung.

  Outside, dusk was falling in pastel smudges and a mauve cumulonimbus levitated above green hills in the distance. Cormorants waded amid buck by the water’s edge; tree squirrels darted across the grass at my feet, and a lone elephant lumbered over to the meandering Letaba for a drink.

  With another 4am rise scheduled for the next day, I turned in early and elated.

  For those to whom dawn is a rare experience, it feels pristine to the power of ten when you’re in the wild. The air was as crisp as starched linen and alive with birdsong. The neon bar of orange that hovered just below the horizon gradually flushed the sky peach. The dark bush began to yield forms and movement. My third and final day in the park would be spent travelling to the Phalaborwa gate, located roughly halfway along its north-south axis. The first animals that clip-clopped across the road were a herd a gnus, named after the high-pitched sound they emit.

  A couple of kilometres down the track, half-a-dozen giraffe loped across the road. Improbably long-legged with tapering necks and lithe torsos, their gait has an effortless elegance made all the more beguiling by their mottled complexion. In Afrikaans they are called kameelperd, which literally and rather succinctly translates to camel horse.

  These seemingly passive giants can make life hell for a hunting cat. Because of their height, the usual feline tactic of leaping onto a prey’s hindquarters to knock it to the ground is foolhardy. One well-directed kick can shatter a lion’s jaw, thus condemning it to starvation. Instead, the highest degree of pride work is called for. Using stealth and surprise, their tactic is to give the giraffe such a fright that it loses its footing and life in quick succession.

  A roadside sign informed me that the exit gate was twenty kilometres away and I was promptly suffused with the same sort of feeling that schoolkids are burdened by on Sunday evenings. I didn’t want the experience to end. So rather impulsively I swung the car in the direction from which I had come and made it back to Letaba in time to join a guided bushwalk.

  A dozen participants piled into a Land Rover truck and in twenty minutes we were standing by a ramshackle building in the bush which was once used by soldiers running insurgency raids into Mozambique. At ground level Kruger offers a world beyond that which can be viewed from a car. The baked soil seeped heat through my soles as our twentysomething rifle-toting guide Edgar, bearing the understandable smile of a man with the world’s best office, lead us across a flood plain. The air buzzed with cicadas; the sharp blades of knee-high grass sliced at my shins, and the ground tremored as a dozen zebra took off in a dust storm after spotting us. They were the only animals we saw before stopping for a lunch of fruit juice and cheese sandwiches – with a side serve of mopani worms. A staple for local tribesfolk, these plump buggers are harvested off the tree that gives them their name, piled into hessian sacks, then dried before being fried with onions and tomatoes. For all intents and purposes, they taste and look like gnocchi.

  The second half of the walk delivered more zebra, a smattering of kudu and an up-close view of an animal that has not changed in twenty million years. The white rhino Edgar spotted thirty metres to our left had no clue we were there. Despite assurances that this breed is far more chilled out than its darker, smaller counterpart, it is still a creature of rare menace. It’s built like a Humvee complete with armour plating and sports a spike that looks far larger and deadlier in the flesh than it ever could on a TV screen. It is also not white at all – the name stems from a mistranslation of the German word for “wide” which was used to distinguish the shape of its mouth from that of the black rhino. When sufficiently motivated, these animals can hit forty kilometres an hour. No mean feat when you tip the scales at 2300 kilograms.

  Shifting his rifle from shoulder to hand, Edgar instructed us to follow as he inched towards the rhino. We had travelled about fifteen metres, roughly one-third the distance between our original viewing point and the animal, when the dweeby Belgian in front of me trod on a twig that snapped with a crack. The rhino swivelled in our direction; his mouthful of grass might have bestowed an almost comical moustache effect were it not for the fact he was wondering whether he should amble away or puree us camera-toting interlopers. The stand-off was as brief as it was thrilling and he lumbered off in the direction of a dry riverbed.

  My Kruger experience was now complete. I had seen four of the Big Five (one at ground level), watched the sun rise over multitudinous herds of leaping springbok. My work here was done. Besides, I had a conjurer of storms to track down.

  Chapter 7

  Long May She Rain

  The road northwest to Tzaneen was a grey ribbon that rose and fell gently as if being flicked by the skilled wrist of a rhythmic gymnast. On either side lay dense mopani forest, randomly interrupted by hills comprised of bus-sized boulders that appeared precariously stacked and resembled the Jenga set of the gods.

  Troupes of chacma baboons congregated by the side of the road; vervet monkeys leapt between tree limbs, and the low olive hillocks that rose from the savanna grasslands ceded to lusher gradients as I climbed towards the ancestral realm of Modjadji VI, Rain Queen of the Lobedu. Securing an audience with the only female tribal ruler in modern-day South Africa is fraught with challenges. Tribal lore mandates that she dwell deep in a mist-swirled forest on a mountain, ensconced behind foreboding barriers of powerful juju.

  The tale of the Modjadji is one of bloodshed, magic and a double dose of incest. The line is descended from the powerful royal house of Monomotapa, which ruled over the Kalanga people in Zimbabwe in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Back on a lazy 1589 afternoon when the Internet was down and the cricket had been rained out leaving nothing to watch on TV, one of the tribe’s princesses got jiggy with her brother, eventually delivering a child whose father was her uncle. The new dad’s half-brothers wanted to kill the baby to stop him from becoming king one day. Wary of having a civil war on his hands, old man Monomotapa gave the child’s mother, Dzugundini, a magic horn for making rain and advised her to take the child plus some loyal followers further south to establish a kingdom.

  Over the next 200 years the Dzugundini became a substantial tribe. In around 1800 their chief, Mugodo, was warned by the ancestral spirits that his sons were plotting to overthrow him. He killed them all and promptly impregnated his daughter, saying it had been supernaturally decreed that a dynasty of women would be founded as a result.

  When she gave birth to a son, the baby was quickly strangled. Her second child, however, was a girl who signalled the inception of the female line. When Mugodo popped his incestuous clogs, the grand-daughter Modjadji became queen.

  Modjadji’s life was spent in seclusion in the forest where she performed precipitation rituals which were famous throughout Southern Africa. She was called the Rain Queen and supplicants came from far and wide to beg for her moist blessing.

  For traditional African societies that based their wealth on cattle, rain was the most precious of commodities, so in a land where storms were sporadic, unpredictable and varied wildly in terms of duration, anyone who could make the sky cry at will wasn’t worth getting offside. Even if she was merely a meteorological prodigy who could predict rainfall with sopping accuracy, you wanted her on your team.