Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  Cathedral of the Wild is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  As of press time, the URLs displayed in this book link or refer to existing websites on the Internet. Penguin Random House is not responsible for, and should not be deemed to endorse or recommend, any website or content available on the Internet (including without limitation any website, blog page, information page) other than its own.

  Copyright © 2014 by Boyd Varty

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Photos courtesy of Londolozi Library unless otherwise noted.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Varty, Boyd. Cathedral of the wild : an African journey home / Boyd Varty.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6985-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-679-60485-3

  1. Londolozi Game Reserve (South Africa)—History.

  2. Varty, Boyd. 3. Varty, Boyd—Family. 4. Londolozi

  Game Reserve (South Africa)—Biography. 5. Wildlife conservation—South Africa—Londolozi

  Game Reserve—History. 6. Wildlife conservationists—South Africa—Londolozi Game Reserve—Biography. I. Title.

  SK575.S5V37 2014

  639.9096827—dc23 2013022706

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Anna Bauer

  Cover photograph: © Elsa Young

  v3.1_r1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Map

  Introduction

  1. Not for Ants

  2. Hunting and Hacking

  3. The Rock

  4. Friendi in the Storm

  5. Never Panic in the Bush

  6. Uncle John

  7. The Flying Life

  8. Madiba

  9. Elephants All Around

  10. The Crash

  11. The Great Migration

  12. A Londolozi of Leopards

  13. Travels with Kate

  14. Shake, Rattle, and Roll

  15. A Royal Welcome

  16. In Battalions

  17. Gunpoint

  18. Seeking

  19. Dead Silence

  20. The Vav

  21. The Flaming Shaman

  22. Tracking

  23. The Medicine

  24. The Leopards by the Watering Hole

  25. In the Front Garden of Eden

  26. The Om in Motion

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In writing this book, I’ve assimilated my memories as best I can. I’ve also collected stories from various people who were present at the events I describe; each recounting was slightly different, so I’ve had to decide for myself what the truest version is. So many of the stories of the early days of Londolozi, before I was born, have been told so many times that they have made the transition to fireside legend. I have tried my best to capture them. In a few instances, I’ve compressed events that took place over several years into a single scene. Out of politeness, I have also changed some names and other identifying characteristics. South Africa is, in the end, a village, and not every home wants to have its doors flung wide open. I have re-created dialogue as closely as I can remember it, and I have at all times tried to be as accurate as possible. This story is a very personal one and so is told from my own viewpoint. This is the nature of all stories; you can recall them only within the frame of mind you are in during the recollection. I am a particularly messy human. This book is a by-product of mucking around in all that messiness, and it’s as honest and authentic as I know how to make it. I hope you will enjoy going on this safari with me.

  Welcome to my campfire story.

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SNAKE WAS SLIDING over the backs of my legs, in slow motion but with purpose, like an army general inspecting his barracks, knowing that someone has been out of line. “Don’t move, Dad,” I kept whispering. “Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move.” The slightest motion and the snake would rear up and strike.

  I was eleven, on a hunting expedition with my father. It was an overcast morning in September, early spring, and the rains had just arrived after the characteristic dry winters in the South African bushveld. The marula and acacia trees were just starting to flush green, and Dad and I had decided to stalk a herd of impalas grazing on the slope. After a few hours, we found ourselves entrenched on the side of a termite mound nearby. I’d fired a shot but couldn’t tell if the impala had gone down. “Stay in position,” Dad advised. “Keep a lookout through the scope of the rifle. If the impala’s still up, you can finish it off.”

  I loved being out with Dad. I’d been going out with him almost every day of my life. When I was a baby, Mom would hold me in her arms as she sat next to him in the front seat of the Land Rover. As I got older, Dad would take me on short walks into the clearings around the house. Later, we went on longer walks into the bush that turned into hunting expeditions. These were my favorite times of day. As excited as I was, Dad always seemed even more enthusiastic.

  At eleven, I was a rickety, gangly kid, more like a newborn wildebeest, all legs and arms. Dad, in contrast, had a profound ruggedness, as vital as the landscape around him, as if his body were battling to contain his energy. He was the outdoor cliché of the game ranger: clear blue eyes, lean legs in short shorts, a thin khaki work shirt over his broad shoulders, and slip-on Jesus sandals. I always knew that so long as I was with him, I would be fine.

  When I felt something sliding over my legs, the coffin-shaped head was the first thing I noticed, followed by three yards of black mamba draped over and around me as if someone had thrown a fat black garden hose out of the sky.

  I grabbed my father’s arm. “Oh shit, Dad, there’s a mamba. Don’t move.”

  The black mamba’s sheer size and mobility make it one of the most dangerous snakes. And its venom is exceedingly potent: if a mamba bites you, you will almost certainly be dead within thirty minutes—sooner if it strikes an area rich in blood vessels. A guy I knew who had miraculously survived a bite told me that he could taste the venom in his mouth almost the instant the snake’s fangs sank into his leg.

  I willed my body to stop pumping adrenaline, so that my heart wouldn’t beat right out of my chest. The snake was now between my legs, making its way up the termite mound, toward our torsos. I didn’t know if our nerve would hold if the snake made it to face height. The strain thickened the air, and in my peripheral vision I saw a line of red flowing from Dad’s mouth. He’d bitten through his cheek out of sheer fear.

  At chest height, the mamba turned back in what seemed a taunting way. Again it crossed my legs, heading for my father’s feet, nearly naked in his sandals. As the snake’s scales touched the bare skin on Dad’s instep, it changed course once again, gliding away from us, slowly, slowly.

  The only escape route was up over the tall termite mound, which was crowned with a thick tangle of brushy buffalo thorn. I saw Dad begin to weigh it up in his mind: Was the mamba still too close? Could we get through the razor-sharp spikes of the thorn in time?

  “Go!” he screamed. The mamba’s tail was still on my foot as we exploded up the mound. Dad pulled me in behind him and punched a hole in that thorn bush with his bare hands. It tore him to pieces. I came through without a scratch. He turned to me with blood coming out of his mouth and branches of thorn attached to his head. “S
hit, that was a close one,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Boydie, shit—you all right?” My old man is tough as nails, but he was rattled.

  Dad told Mom the story as soon as we got home. “It was a bad one,” he said.

  Mom pulled out her go-to article from the first aid kit: a bottle of homeopathic Rescue Remedy. She gave me four drops instead of the usual three, in acknowledgment of the magnitude of the trauma. “There you go, Boydie, you’ve been through a shock.” She slung a huge jacket around me. “You’ve got to keep warm when you’ve got shock.”

  Next they told Uncle John, Dad’s brother and a famous documentarian. “Did you film it?” he asked. “It would have been a good action sequence.” He was predictably disappointed in our failure to take advantage of such a rare opportunity.

  That was it. We were bush people. We moved on.

  At the end of a long day, we Africans love to gather by firelight with the flames the only wall between us and the wilderness. Tsama hansie, the Shangaans would tell me during my childhood, when they could see that I was exhausted in body or soul. Put down all you have been carrying. Rub the city’s neon glare from your eyes and let in the soul light of these orange embers. As the night grows darker, we kick the logs bit by bit into the fire, giving the solid wood to the flame, keeping its warmth in our bodies as our gift from the trees. And we tell stories.

  This is the story of my life so far.

  My family was loving. My friends, who came in all shapes, sizes, and colors, had in common the qualities of kindness and idealism. Everywhere around me was the ferocious, dazzling gentleness of nature. Elephants grazed outside my bedroom window. Monkeys chattered on the roof. The beasts of the field and the fowls of the air were mine to name, love, and tend.

  My childhood was largely set in Londolozi Game Reserve, a paradise populated with wild and astonishing creatures, many of whom were related to me by blood. My loved ones lived to tend their part of the garden—land that has been in our family for four generations, and that Uncle John, Dad, and Mom painstakingly reclaimed from its status as a failed cattle farm. Working side by side with the Shangaans, distant cousins of the Zulu, they restored its wetlands, took down fences to encourage the great predators to return, and created a beautiful, sustainable resort.

  This was the playground where I and my sister, Bronwyn, grew up, raising lion and leopard cubs, piloting Land Rovers around at a tender age while simultaneously acting as production assistants for whatever nature documentary crazy Uncle John was making. I apprenticed with master Shangaan trackers, learning to read the land, to see the ghostly trails of lives passing across it. I became a tracker and ranger, sharing my knowledge and joy with guests from all around the world.

  Our upbringing was also filled with the hazards of an unconventional life. Our parents never set out to put us in danger, of course; they would have defended us from anything, died before they let us be harmed. But they would not shelter us. To shelter us where we grew up would have been to fail to prepare us. They walked that line as best they could, and all too often they got it wrong. But in the end we survived all we ever faced, and we came out strong and largely unafraid of life, with the full knowledge of its dangers.

  Confidence that comes from never having been burned is different from confidence that comes from having been in situations where it all went wrong—dodgy aircraft, unguided motorboats, uncharted bush—and we were lucky to survive. The second kind of confidence is all you need for life in Africa, where things pivot from day to day.

  Uncle John took us places on a wave of his own confidence. He knew, even when my faith waned, that he would get us through whatever was put in front of us, whether it was a charging elephant or a wayward wildebeest. Uncle John was made for Africa, certain that all things were uncertain, solid on a foundation as wobbly as the ocean.

  “We treat you like adults,” our parents told me and Bron often when we were growing up, making us privy to things far beyond our youthful understanding. If safari means “journey,” we went on one hell of one. Yet for all the explosive brushes with danger I survived in the bush, the greatest threat came not from any animal, natural disaster, or mechanical mishap, but from other human beings. A devastating encounter precipitated an even greater spiritual crisis for me. Surrounded by everything and everyone I loved, in a life of privilege and adventure, I woke up one day feeling like a stranger. As the weeks went by, I felt more and more alone. The hopelessness that crept into my heart was dense and anesthetic.

  Though I still lived in Eden, I had to cast myself out of it and venture away from the place I loved in order to find myself again. From that self-imposed exile in other lands and countries, I learned that you find family members with whom you share no blood in the most surprising places. And I learned to follow that still, quiet track within, the trail to my true home and the restoration of my inner peace.

  Reading over this manuscript, a sheaf of loose papers anchored by stone in the quiet of the front garden, pulls a blurry lens into the sharp focus of hindsight. I heard Dad muttering quietly to himself as he turned the pages among the sunbirds and robins on the front lawn: “What was I thinking?” His innocent vitality was more veiled now. He looked like a warrior who had become an elder, in whom the folly of youth wanting to go to war has given way to the wisdom that values peace above all else.

  From the time I was a child, I walked on the wild grounds of my family’s home on the western boundary of Kruger National Park, in South Africa. Like a small tree, I dug my roots into that soil of extremes, where the wet season paints the grass and trees green overnight and the dry season scorches the earth to powder-dry bones. It was a joy to hear the sound of an aviating dung beetle after the first rains or witness the emerald green of a cuckoo wasp amid the summer grass. My youth was a giant meditation on the perfection and layers of nature. And once I had put my own demons to rest, the reserve became a place I could retreat to, where I could restore myself whenever life pulled me too far from the landscape. On those nights, I’d lie alone on the ground, feeling not lonely but at home beneath a gift of stars. That very terrain became a part of my soul.

  The gift I want to give the world is that which nature gave me.

  Tsama hansie.

  ONE

  NOT FOR ANTS

  IT’S FIVE-FIFTEEN IN THE MORNING, and my father is waiting outside my door. As I open it, I’m struck by his size. In my late twenties, I’m now bigger than Dad, but I don’t feel it. In my mind, I still come up only to his shoulder. He has the weathered quality of a lifelong outdoorsman, his skin like tanned leather—a bit worn, but hardened by the elements.

  “Bushveld morning. Best thing in the world,” he says with a smile. Dad passes me a shotgun and a handful of shells, and we casually begin our morning stroll upriver, toward the safari lodge. At this time of year, it’s best to be at it early, as by midmorning the heat will make further work impossible.

  The dawn is just beginning to break into the pale blue that is precursor to the gold of the rising sun. Already the urgent cackle of the partridge-like francolin—what the bushveld locals dub “government chicken,” as they’re a ready source of dinner—can be heard from the riverbed. The air is fresh and cool, and the grass has been dampened by heavy dew that wants to crawl up my pants. The sun peeks over the horizon, catching the dew as it sparkles in the light.

  The game path runs along the bank of the river and has been well worn by heavy animal traffic. Lions, leopards, elephants, and hippos use it for easy access to the river. A large, steaming, splattery pile of Cape buffalo dung is dead center.

  “Whoops, look sharp here,” my father says. Also known as “Black Death,” Cape buffaloes are one of the Big Five—the most prized and deadly prey of big game hunters—all of whom reside at Londolozi Game Reserve. (The other four are lions, leopards, rhinos, and elephants.) It’s been said that buffaloes look at you like you owe them money. Armed with prodigious swooping horns, they’ve been known not just to attack but to track and a
mbush hunters and gore them to pieces. They can even run lions up trees. I notice a buffalo track pointing toward us; the buff has already moved past. If we were going to bump into him, it would have happened already.

  “You’re losing your touch a bit,” I tell my father. “Too much time in the city, not enough time in the bush.”

  “Tell me about it.” He’s smiling.

  Dad looks up ahead. “The guests always say, ‘I’m going back to the real world’ when they leave. But as far as I’m concerned, this is the real world, and back where they’re going is the fake one.”

  Far off, a lion starts to roar. We can hear the distant baritone boom as he winds up, the sound carrying miles in the cold winter air. The glorious rumble, however, is quickly drowned out by the cough and growl of a nearby Land Rover as someone revs the engine. Really, Land Rovers are useless first thing in the morning, until they warm up.

  For a rare moment, the lodge is calm and relatively quiet. The guides, who will man the Land Rovers, are on the main deck drinking coffee, preparing to take guests out on safari. Early mornings are the best time to find animals, as they like to move in the cool of the day. Tracks from the night before are still relatively fresh, providing critical clues to their whereabouts. Soon the guests will join the rangers on the deck. This takes some time, as each guest must be escorted from their room by an armed guard, lest they bump into a lion or leopard strolling down the path. It’s quite common for animals to come right into the confines of the camp. We once found a muddy set of leopard tracks on the bar counter. The guests will arrive on the deck dressed like they’re ready for an alpine experience and be stripping down within an hour, as the sun rises. That’s August in the bush for you.

  The trackers are chatting quietly in the car park, listening for that lion’s roar, a bushbuck alarm, or the sharp snap of elephants breaking branches. These signs will help them situate the day’s main viewing attractions.

  I’m feeling a little sleepy, as I’ve been up most of the night repairing a two-strand electric fence that runs around the lodge to keep elephants out. Yesterday morning a young bull elephant discovered that he could use his tusks to snap the wire and gain access to the lush gardens inside, the ones the generations of women in my family have so painstakingly planted. This is a new occurrence, and as far as we can tell, only the one elephant, whom we have dubbed “Night Shift,” has worked out how to do it. Once inside, he was a gleeful vegetarian at a giant salad bar, pulling out the flowers, snacking on trees, helping himself to long drinks from the pool, and passing wind so loudly outside some guests’ room that they phoned the night receptionist and claimed a lion was growling outside their window. He also managed to terrorize some kitchen workers by charging at them as they returned from serving dinner at Tree Camp in the beat-up old Land Rover that only turns left.