Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  I pull Trevor aside and ask him to tell me more about what happened.

  “Gladys was at the small pool in the river in front of Founders Camp, where she was collecting water for the church,” he says. “That’s when the hippo just attacked her.”

  Something doesn’t add up. I know that pool. I’ve never seen a hippo there. In fact, it’s a little small for them. And I’ve never heard of any staff members going there to get water for the church. I decide to take Richard Siwela, our master tracker, down to the site of the accident. If you want to find the truth, first you’ve got to find the tracks, and then you’ve got to follow them.

  Being with Richard is like starring in a scene from CSI. Although the sand is soft, he finds no human tracks there. In fact, he doesn’t find any human tracks at all. When you don’t have the tracks you’re looking for, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got. In this case, it’s a hyena’s tracks along the riverbank. (Richard knows this, but I do not.) He painstakingly follows the hyena’s tracks, which lead to a trail of muddy human footprints and broken vegetation, which, in turn, leads us to the gory scene of the crime; as a scavenger, the hyena must have followed the scent of blood. We find river grass stained with Gladys’s blood and low-lying branches festooned with chunks of the fat from her arm. Look closely enough, and the tracks will always tell the story. By pointing to the tracks, Richard becomes a fluent storyteller without having to say a word.

  No staff member is allowed to venture down into the thick reeds of the river without an armed escort because it’s extremely dangerous in the dense undergrowth. The tracks suggest that Gladys wasn’t telling the whole truth about walking only as far as the pool. Richard begins to imitate how she would have moved through the terrain beyond the pool, showing me where she bent over to recuperate after her attack and how a puddle of blood is congealing there. “Look here!” He finds her fishing tackle and more than one rod. “She was with someone else,” Richard tells me, showing me the second set of footprints. Gladys hadn’t simply been fetching water; she’d unwisely and illegally gone deep into the riverbed and had been fishing in some thick reeds, where she had no visibility. A hippo had been sleeping on the bank behind her and was startled, when he then came ambling down his path toward the water, to discover that she was blocking the way.

  Richard follows the second set of footprints and shows me where Gladys’s companion had thrown a bucket of worms to hide the evidence. We find them lying in the high grasses. Richard’s a true chauvinistic, hard Shangaan man. At one point he suggests, “Gladys’s too fat one; maybe that hippo thinks, ‘Another nice hippo for me.’ ”

  Gladys had been asking for trouble, all for the sake of a few free fish. I’d have to ask around the camp to find out whom she’d been with and give them a stern warning about the dangers. All I can do now is make sure Gladys has the best of care. Everyone in the camp will be updated about her progress. We dissect every incident so that it won’t happen again.

  As we leave the scene, a three-foot-long monitor lizard explodes out of the reeds. With hippo attack on the brain, I leap straight into the air. Richard thinks this is very funny and walks off shaking his head.

  I go back home to shower so I’ll be ready to welcome the guests when they return from their afternoon drive. Afterward, I dress in a crisp new uniform of khaki shirt and pants and walk down in the fading light to the boma, a large circular area hemmed by a tall wooden fence to keep out the animals. A fire is blazing in a large, low-slung brazier. It’s in the same spot where my great-grandfather made his first fire when he arrived on the property, cold and tired, in 1926. I am the fourth generation to sit around this fireplace, and every time I do, I’m with my ancestors.

  All around are brown paper luminarias, the candles inside making them glow like orange butterfly cocoons. The three chefs in crisp white jackets stand behind a buffet of smoldering roasts and a fine cheese platter. The twenty guests take their seats at the tables, which are meticulously set with crisp white linens and sparkling silverware. The whole setting is framed by the stars above. I move from table to table, listening to each guest recount the adventures of the day.

  Sandross’s group is celebrating having survived their marooned morning with a few bottles of wine.

  The ghost of Pioneer Camp has been exorcised. “It was an interesting experience, but we decided to call it quits when he got his knife out,” says the couple who had the reading, their eyes widening slightly.

  A message comes through from the night receptionist that Gladys is in the hospital and stable.

  The elephant is back in. I can hear him munching on the bougainvillea my gran planted behind the boma. I better tell security to look out for him when they escort the guests back to their rooms after dinner. The elephant’s stomach is rumbling in the darkness.

  We have a name for days like this: Tuesday.

  TWO

  HUNTING AND HACKING

  I WANT TO TELL YOU how I came to be here.

  The first bath I was ever given was in a turkey roaster. Once again, my family had failed to connect me with even the simplest conventions that go with bathing. I was bathed in the kitchen because at the time our bathroom had no plumbing. It probably would have made no difference if it had; in my family, bathrooms are considered places in which to gossip during parties rather than sites in which to engage in the tedium of ablutions.

  I know this because my mother tells me this story every time she takes out the roasting pan. Ours is a family of storytellers. Virtually every object in our home was handpicked by Mom, and each has its particular origin story. Scrapbooks and photo albums are scattered over every surface. The stories passed down from generation to generation are as treasured as my grandfather’s Rigby .416 rifle, my grandmother’s leather journals, and the Varty recipe for impala stew. Of course, the story with which I was raised, with which my own story is intertwined, is the one told to me around countless campfires when I was growing up: the story of how Londolozi came to be.

  Doing things the right way round has never been our family’s strong point. In 1926, most landowners were absconding from the bankrupt farms adjacent to Kruger National Park, about four hundred miles from Johannesburg, a wasteland affectionately known as the lowveld. Malaria was so rampant there that it was said that a man had died from it for every railroad tie laid down. Cattle had overgrazed the land, leaving behind a dustbowl over which clouds of tsetse flies hovered, waiting to spread sleeping sickness.

  My great-grandfather Charles Boyd Varty, however, was something of a maverick, and he saw the land through different eyes. When most people turned their back on this area, Charles and his good friend Frank Unger were magnetically pulled toward it. Frank, a Dutchman, was fascinated by the wide-open spaces of the bushveld.

  The two were Johannesburg business associates who were also passionate about hunting lions; the lowveld was filled with hundreds of them. One of the reasons why cattle hadn’t thrived there was that prides of marauding lions had picked them off.

  Hunting lions through the bushveld was a pursuit reserved for madmen. Hours spent walking through thick thorny scrub would be followed by a few seconds of absolute blind fear and pandemonium as a wounded lion snarled and attacked. Those fleeting seconds during which you could easily get your throat ripped out were what lion hunters lived for. But if genetics is anything to go by, I put it to you that while Charles Varty might have loved hunting, what really drove him ran far deeper: a longing in the spirit for something wild and with teeth. A longing to be away from the confines of the city.

  Londolozi, the central defining feature of my life, came into being almost on a whim. One night, Charles and Frank got greased up on gin and tonics at a tennis party at a friend’s house in Johannesburg and decided to buy a vast tract of that lowveld land, sight unseen. It was not common in such a major city to purchase a piece of real estate in such hostile wasteland.

  Surprising how life is; one seemingly controversial decision can tip the hand of fa
te against years of hard grind and the desperate human need to have a plan. My great-grandfather Charles, an agricultural and water pump equipment manufacturer, set out for what all perceived to be a dank hellhole on a leap of faith. His friends were astounded that he should want to go there, but to his mind, he was setting off for Eden.

  Charles and Frank made their first visit in June, which was winter in the bush. The dawns and nights would be cool, the days wonderfully warm, and the scarcity of standing water would minimize the chance of getting malaria. They caught a train from Johannesburg Park Station and managed to convince the driver to stop en route to let them off in the middle of nowhere, on the endless stretch between Komatipoort and Pietersburg, on Siding 61, a kilometer marker. There they’d arranged for some donkeys to be left for them by the game warden in the area. From that unpromising spot, they walked into the unknown veld with nothing but a compass to guide them.

  They arrived in early evening, set up a tent under a huge ebony tree, and put into motion the routines that the family would follow from then on. They would normally go for the month of July. The property had not a single outhouse or piece of infrastructure, no phones, no running water, no means to communicate with the outside world. The land was far too harsh for year-round living, so every year the family would come down by oxcart to camp out. They took goats for milk and cupboards full of root vegetables, laying wet cloths over the protective chicken wire so the breeze would keep the produce cool. My great-grandfather, Frank, and their friends dedicated their days to hunting lions, which were considered vermin at the time, a threat to the impalas, wildebeests, and other game—not to mention humans. “Bagging a lion” was a rare occasion, but family legend is stuffed with such stories. First my father and uncle and then I were raised on the tale of the time my grandfather held the lantern high so my great-grandfather could see the lion’s eyes—reflecting silver coins in the darkness—and shoot it as it leapt onto the lead ox of the team of six pulling the family wagon into camp.

  Even today a certain patch of scrub or hill will launch Dad into a tale of a lion hunt gone wrong. Charles and Frank eventually built old mud huts, or rondavels, erected in the Shangaan style of piling sticks in a heap and packing wet earth over them. Today these huts have been converted into a wine cellar, staff rooms, and a place where guests can watch Uncle John’s movies. Their presence at Londolozi naturally draws my father and uncle into stories about their past uses. Every gully or boulder in the river is not just earth or rock but the home of some event, as if the land has absorbed the stories of the men who went before and my father is a radio tuned to their frequency.

  Charles Boyd’s son Boyd, my grandfather, continued the family tradition of spending winters at the hunting camp. Dad and Uncle John toddled around the mud huts. The routines remained the same for each generation: early morning hunting, midday swimming in the Sand River, and evenings around the fire. The camp diet likewise remained unchanged for three generations: impala meat for breakfast, lunch, and supper. The camp was peaceful and intoxicatingly still, and the winter sun perfect for napping.

  My grandfather instilled his love of the bush in Dad and my uncle. He was a gruff man, uninclined to social niceties. A childhood bout of rheumatic fever had weakened his heart; unable to exercise strenuously, he’d had to give up cricket because he couldn’t run between the wickets. He liked hunting because it was mostly slow moving. He wasn’t terribly social. In fact, he refused to repair the dirt roads on his property, to discourage visitors. He loved kids, but he was of the more military, older school, not given to broad displays of affection. Dad always said he showed his love by how he spent his time with his boys: playing catch, rooting for them at their cricket matches, and going into the bush.

  Singing was an old staple around the campfire at night, when the cold, crisp air pulled the ceiling of stars down around the family. My grandfather would ask my gran to sing, her voice, to him, rivaled in beauty only by the roar of the lions.

  My paternal grandfather, Boyd Varty, had met my paternal grandmother, Madeleine, a.k.a. Madie, before World War II, although they didn’t get married until afterward. Madie was a tennis prodigy who would have starred at Wimbledon had it not been for the war. She was the social foil to my taciturn grandfather. Where he was grumpy and reclusive, she was incredibly outgoing, arranging endless tennis and dinner parties.

  My gran would sing the wartime songs he couldn’t, the ones too close to home, slicing too finely near the heart—songs like “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer,” which he’d last sung as he and his crew had flown a lumbering old bomber over enemy territory in Poland. As he told it, the missions were a grueling ten hours and forty minutes long, and the planes carried only enough fuel for eleven. Flying at high altitude over Warsaw, the planes made easy targets for the anti-aircraft guns. So my grandfather’s captain conceived of a plan to fly low over the Vistula River, making them an extremely difficult target that seemed to come out of nowhere. They were dropping supplies for the Polish Resistance. You have to understand the nerve it took to fly a four-engine Liberator low over blacked-out Warsaw, using the light from burning buildings as your only source of navigation. My grandfather was the navigator. I often read his flight journals from that time. Countless names of other crew members have a simple “DNR” written next to them: Did Not Return. It must have taken tremendous courage to fly to Warsaw every single night, knowing before you took off that so many of your mates would be dead before you returned. My grandfather told my father that only two things would make men out of boys: wartime flying and hunting lions.

  “Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer,” a rousing World War II ditty, described the joyous sighting of a missing bomber limping through the air “with our one motor gone” yet still managing to hit its target. In my grandfather’s experience, the song rang all too true as his plane’s fuel gauges read almost empty and the drone of the engines complemented its lilting tune.

  But once he was safely home, finally grounded after the war, those lusty songs lost their appeal for my grandfather. He preferred the wistful tunes Gran warbled instead; “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” became a later favorite.

  Boyd’s head tracker was Winnis Mathebula, a Shangaan man who possessed immense character and a prodigious knowledge of bushcraft. Winnis was the survivor of countless encounters with animals. He’d been gored by a Cape buffalo in the reeds and survived. He used to pat his ribs and say, “Ya, the buffalo got me in my choppies.” After my own encounter with Africa’s largest, most aggressive, and deadliest snake, Dad told me the story of how Winnis and Simeon, my grandfather’s chef, were out in the bush when they were attacked by a black mamba. The mamba reared up and bit Simeon four or five times in his mid-section, staining his pants dark with venom. Then it turned and bit Winnis. Simeon lifted his shirt and realized that the snake had bitten his belt, leaving the skin unbroken. Everyone sat around waiting for Winnis to die, but Winnis hadn’t gotten the memo and just kept on living. The snake must have spent all its venom on Simeon’s belt.

  My father considered Winnis a second father to him. Winnis, along with my grandfather, taught my father and uncle the ways in which the bush speaks to you if you can learn the language. How to listen for the harsh, rasping call of oxpeckers, the birds that pick ticks off large animals, so they wouldn’t bump into one in the bush. How to read the fresh tracks of animals. How to listen for various animal alarm calls, like the squirrel’s chatter that tells you there’s a snake in his tree. Or the baboons’ barking calls warning of a leopard passing by. Or a guinea fowl’s high-pitched shriek when a martial eagle is looking for its next meal. The boys were taught to honor the land and the animals they hunted. One night my father threw an entire log into the fire only to be scolded harshly by Winnis: “Ya, you put just the tip of the log into the fire. Use only what you need for cooking and heat.”

  Winnis had such an intimate knowledge of the land that if a lion roared, he could cut off the track and take you onto its game
path to wait in ambush. On cold mornings my dad and uncle would always try to get Winnis to tell stories so they could spend more time in the warm camp. If he took out his snuffbox, they knew they had him. Most of the stories featured Winnis as the hero, and he’d never hesitate to call out others who didn’t meet his high standards of bushcraft. For instance, Steven Roach, a friend of my grandfather’s, shot a lioness at sixty paces through the heart. She turned and charged straight at him and his party. As she got close, another tracker and backup rifle, Tie, stepped forward with his side-by-side Webley & Scott shotgun. The spray from the shotgun was meant to drive the lioness back, allowing the hunter to reload and get a second shot in. However, in the excitement of the moment, Tie had left the safety catch on, so the shotgun didn’t go off. The lioness powered forward, smashing into the two men, knocking them sprawling. She then died in a heap almost on top of them before she could do any damage. Winnis thought this was hysterical, but an utter disgrace. “Winnis Mathebula would never have made the same mistake,” he sniffed. Winnis was so attuned to the elements that his house was almost a skeletal stick structure; the wind howled through its walls. When one of Sputnik’s cousins appeared overhead in the late seventies, Winnis got into his cups and asked to borrow the old .404 so that he could shoot the offense against nature out of the sky.

  Grandpa Boyd likewise believed that hunting lions was the ultimate pastime. He thought nothing of sending his two young sons deep into the bush with Winnis to hunt lions. Dad went out for the first time when he was only five years old—a sign of my grandfather’s incredible respect for and trust in the man. Dad and Uncle John shared that respect. Hunting with Winnis and the other Shangaans showed them how accomplished these men were at bushcraft.