by Boyd Varty
Something amazing happened: the animals started to flow back onto the restored land, just as Tinley had promised. They began to lose their fear. Early visitors to Londolozi had been lucky to see a scrub hare. As a result of the hunting, game was extremely skittish, and the land was a brushy, matted mass of thorn trees. But by the time I was a toddler, guests were heading out in open Land Rovers—Dad and Uncle John couldn’t afford ones with roofs—and seeing lions, elephants, rhinos, leopards.
When Dad told me the cheetah story, we were standing in a beautiful clearing where the land falls away for miles down to the river. All across the plain, impalas and wildebeests freckled the land. “This used to be a thick mat of thorn,” Dad said. “If we saw a bird out here, it would be exciting. Now look at it!” I gazed at a land restored, and it made me see my father differently. To me, a little boy obsessed with nature, he was no longer the great hunter; he was a great healer.
Dad taught me to shoot a rifle when I was five. He had precisely three subjects for which rules were absolutely nonnegotiable: guns, vehicles, and women. “Those three things are mostly what get people killed in the bush,” he told me. “It’s not animals out here in the bush that are dangerous; it’s people getting drunk and driving Land Rovers too fast, guys trying to show off to women, and people not concentrating and handling their weapons incorrectly.”
Dad schooled me stringently on proper rifle safety: Never point a rifle at another person. Always personally check that the rifle is safe—no round in the chamber—even if someone checks it in front of you and hands it to you. Never leave your rifle unattended. After any high-adrenaline moment—say, an elephant charge—stop and make sure your rifle is safe before debriefing your guests.
I was taken out hunting from the time I was six. Dad made sure I could successfully shoot five rounds into a target from a thirty-yard range; that was the marker of readiness. I moved on to hunting guinea fowl and francolins. From then on, I was going to be doing game hunting—a man’s job—and I better act accordingly. My father and uncle never said anything about this; I just knew it. The gravitas of the situation was apparent. We were going to go out into the bush. Walking three or four hours was rather a lot for a six-year-old, but there was no whinging or complaining about being tired or asking for food. I’d done it once and received the most withering look from my father. I learned that I didn’t have to have my needs gratified just because they arose. That gave me a sense of toughness; I couldn’t say, “I can’t go on,” because I knew I could.
Dad taught me Winnis’s method for dealing with the heat. You started out in the morning with a full canteen of water, but you never glugged it. You took only the tiniest of sips, enough to moisten your mouth, throughout the day, so that you’d have an almost-full canteen of water by the time the sun went down. You drank most of your water at night, away from the day’s heat. “Only townies need to drink all their water,” Dad told me. We were bush people. Bush people tramped around on sore feet with no water. Some people might say we were thick; we said we were tough.
If I was too tired for a long trek, however, I would sometimes deploy the number one tactic Dad would use to get out of hours of fruitless walking with Winnis: to try to bait him into telling hunting stories in the quiet of a dry riverbed. I felt it was quite foolish of Dad to let me in on this strategy and think that I wouldn’t try to use it. “Didn’t something happen here once?” was the line that could spark Dad into all manner of storytelling.
Like a fine wine, the stories seemed to get better with age and on occasion change completely. If we were around the campfire later, the best was when you could get a few people who were there to add their comments, all throwing in extra threads like a cackling group of village women weaving a mat.
Of course, each person has his own way of attacking a story. In my father’s tellings, he’s always the bumbling observer who got in over his head, then miraculously managed to survive, turning hero in the end. Uncle John, naturally, is always a hero straight off the bat. My grandfather and Winnis are flat out heralded as the greatest, carved from stone and without a single insecurity.
I didn’t question these stories when I was little. Later I began to appreciate the power of the storytelling itself: there’s what happened and then the telling of it, which everyone had a view on. The stories became entities in themselves, and at first I didn’t perceive the real people beneath them. The tales, seen through the lens of hindsight, often failed to convey what people felt in the moment and simply became the markers of the dramatic, the funny, the terrifying. Only later did I begin to realize that the stories could leave as much untold as told.
Huge portions of my youth were dedicated to the endless walking and endurance that come with the pursuit of impalas with Dad. I was really out there because there are few better ways to get the undivided attention of your father than hunting: the ultimate form of male bonding, with a bloody full stop. We are a heartless species.
Hunting impalas gives you such insight into predation. Thinking like a predator teaches you what it takes to survive in the bush. “That’s the good thing about hunting,” Dad told me. “It makes you more alert. It attunes all your senses.” The minute you decide to hunt, you have to accept that you are no longer an observer. The rule of “If you leave it alone, it will leave you alone” no longer applies. You’re in the system and had better behave accordingly. When Dad and I were out together, everything was information. If we heard an impala alarm—a rasping bleat—Dad would help me work out the best way to stalk in close. “Don’t look around a bush, Boydie; look through its branches. Something could be standing behind it.” He also taught me how to use high, rising ground or deep ravines for cover. Predators have a natural sense of the land’s topography. They know how to read the land. Dad taught me how to do that as well.
Sharing his philosophy was as important to Dad as the finer points of tracking. He needed me to learn how to make decisions under pressure in the bush. For example, in every hunt, there comes a moment when you have to decide whether to shoot an impala or not. Dad never intruded. By handing me the responsibility, Dad told me he knew I could handle it. We never killed senselessly. If we shot an impala, we were going to eat it. Every part of the animal would be used.
In line with family traditions, I was six or seven when I shot my first impala. I was with Dad and Elmon Mhlongo, a legendary Shangaan tracker who was Uncle John’s best friend and partner in filmmaking. We’d crept down into a gully. When an impala peered over the lip, I shot him in the neck. We ate him for dinner that night. Uncle John was a huge believer in the medicinal benefits of impala liver. I choked it down.
Sometimes on our impala hunts we’d cross paths with a buffalo or a lioness with her cubs. Dad would quickly grab me by the back of my khaki shirt, so that I was connected to him. He was thinking for two, and I could feel that. When I was with him, I always knew he would keep us safe. He knew how to operate under pressure in a dangerous situation and how to create the space for us to get out of harm’s way.
He was always so calm; this was the foundation of the hunter. Once I went for a walk with him and a friend. It was late evening, and the three of us strolled casually through the clearings. A single elephant stepped into view, followed by the rest of the herd. Dad noticed something off in the way the lead cow threw her head and curled her tail. She swung sideways and locked onto us in a threatening way.
As calm as ever, my father turned around. “Run this way” was all he said. He sprinted; we followed. We made it into the thicket with the entire herd in angry pursuit. My father spoke quietly on his two-way radio while simultaneously charting a route for us. Mindful of the elephants flanking us, he would stop for a few seconds to listen, then reroute, basing his course on the sound of the elephants crashing through the bush. It was an awesome display of his strong hunting instincts.
My father and I have been to the wire together. Nature gave us that. So many fathers consider their duty to be clapping from the sideli
nes. In this domestication, fathers and sons miss out on that male bond that can be formed only in real adversity. You can enforce mutual respect, but there’s no place to genuinely forge it without those pressurized situations. I worry that fathers and sons today are facing a new danger: a danger of no danger. There’s an element of the male bond that is formed where things are unpredictable. Being in the wilderness is a wonderful environment in which to find connections that a lot of modern life doesn’t allow for.
While city kids were at the mall, I was out hunting with Dad or Elmon. Elmon’s bushcraft tutorials had a Shangaan flair. He used his tracking skills to find and rob carcasses from leopards and lions; he fished with the poisonous bulbs of the xiranzana as bait. He showed me how to snare francolins with bent-branch noose traps.
My parents happily allowed me to go anywhere with Elmon. A tall, handsome man with thick forearms, he was incredibly strong and resilient, unbelievably resourceful. I learned by watching his reactions on our walks how to check the wind, spot game paths, predict which way animals were heading.
It was Elmon who taught me how to hunt warthogs. Spears in hand, we’d approach the hog mound just before dawn and look for fresh tracks. If we spotted them, one of us would stand on top of the mound and stamp his feet, then stick the warthog as it came out of the mound to investigate the intruder. This was a very high-stress operation for a small boy; a disturbed warthog was a 160-pound beast burning for a fight. If the hog didn’t come out, Elmon would disappear into the bush with his sharp panga, a sort of fierce machete. In a matter of minutes he’d be back with a stick braided with dried grass, which would be smoking from a fire he’d started with a hand drill. He’d thrust the burning end down into the hog hole to smoke the beast out. As soon as the hog appeared, he’d stab it with the spear, whereupon the hog would commence its horrible high-pitched squealing, alerting any predator for miles. Elmon would dispatch the hog quickly—hyena, lions, and heaven knows what else would be on the run for us—then cut out a bit of stomach and spread it all around the area. Then he’d hoist the carcass onto his back and we’d hightail it out of there. Whatever predator arrived would be distracted long enough by the bits of meat Elmon had scattered for us to make our getaway.
Hunting was an opportunity to be with my icons. I worshipped Dad, Uncle John, and Elmon. They were rugged. They were heroes always having adventures. I wanted to be like them. But by the time Dad took me out hunting, he was already seeing nature more clearly, more deeply as kin. Looking back, I recognize the impasse; I was largely hunting to impress him and be with him; he was doing the only thing he knew. Both of us were walking the steps of our ancestors, but both of us wanted a new path. Uncle John did, too.
Hunting had its place, and we learned that. And then one day it no longer did. As the two brothers worked the land in the early days of building Londolozi, they started to feel it responding. Dad and Uncle John saw more game, and their mind-set shifted toward conservation rather than hunting. They would occasionally see leopards, which would flee immediately. Then, at the end of a day spent clearing a thick snaggle of bush that encroached on the land, Dad saw a leopard calmly walking in the road. It looked at him but didn’t bolt. “It felt like that leopard was almost carrying a message to me that I was on the right track,” Dad told me. “My reward for all that work that day was the chance to see her for a few minutes.” Uncle John, meanwhile, met a different female leopard and slowly began developing a relationship with her while filming her. He, too, lost his desire to hunt.
Once Dad and Uncle John started to see the benefits of partnering with nature, they could no longer separate the well-being of the animals from their own well-being; they were bound together. They felt what everyone would feel given the time and the chance: that we are ultimately no different from the other creatures. Our survival and welfare depend on theirs, economically as well as spiritually.
My great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and uncle at some point all tested themselves in the pursuit of a lion. I am the first in the line not to hunt one, something of which I’m personally proud. I don’t think I would be able to bear the horror of killing something so magnificent. It’s hard enough knowing that I have killed as many antelopes as I have. But at least with antelopes, we were hunting for food; hunting lions was only about collecting a trophy. Even so, I wouldn’t have traded my hunting experiences for anything.
If I could go back in time, I would spend a night in the original hunting camp, the four mud huts my great-grandfather built in the 1930s. I would wake at dawn to walk with my grandfather and Winnis. As the heat of the sun built, I would spend midmorning down in the river swimming and lolling, the excitement of mornings in the wild now replaced by the calming effects of cool water and hot sun. In the evening, as the nightjar began to call, we would light the fire and gather together, bathed in silence and firelight. I still love the simplicity and wildness of where hunting led us.
Londolozi was running well by the time I came along. I often wonder how my father must have felt staring down the barrel of so much responsibility at age fifteen. There must have been days when he would sit out in the bush by himself, Londolozi’s reservation ledger glaring up at him, its pages as empty as the hollow in his stomach. During the moments when he felt at his lowest, through the silence of that blue African sky would come the bateleur eagle, its stumpy tail pivoting unsteadily behind its squat body and black-and-white wings, its red beak jutting beneath a ruffled black hood, totally at ease with its own instability, elegant in it. In that bird, my father felt his father’s guiding presence watching over him.
The bateleur eagle became the first emblem of Londolozi. With a name derived from the French word for “acrobat,” these birds pump their short wings like walkers steadying themselves on a tightrope. Dad taught my sister, Bron, and me to treat the bateleur eagle as sacred, to honor it and to let it guide us. This is the magic of my father: he’s practical to his core, yet with a deeper vision and wisdom. He imparted to me and Bron at a young age an almost mystical sense of the animals as our ancestors and family. What I learned from my father and uncle is that you don’t always have a clear road to your goal; in fact, you hardly ever do. But that’s no reason not to start. Have the confidence that you’ll hack it out along the way. That confidence allowed their mission to evolve from hunting to creating and helping others build a spiritual connection to the land.
Nowadays, as we drive along and the bateleurs fly overhead, my father will look up and say, “Boss man,” in simple acknowledgment of that connection to the animals and the land we call our home.
THREE
THE ROCK
THE YEAR MY SISTER WAS BORN, a drought swept Londolozi. The earth was red with dry resolve; the dust hung in the still air as if magnetized by a great dynamo in the sky.
My mother incubated Bronwyn through the hottest part of the year, working all day helping Dad get the safari business off the ground and spending the nights in a veil of heat on her sweat-soaked bed. The newly built house had no electricity at that stage—it was gas lamps until I was one or two—so my mom would rise by candlelight when the heat became too much and wallow whalelike in the water from her evening bath, now cool, moths floating on its surface like sailing vessels at sea. I can only imagine how she felt about the monumental task ahead—becoming a new mother, raising an infant—even as she and Dad floundered about, trying to make Londolozi work.
Shan Watson, who would become my mother, was fifteen and Dave Varty seventeen when they met at a seaside resort on a family holiday. Sparks didn’t fly then, although Dave was doubtless attracted to Shan’s long, slender “Wednesday legs” (as in “When’s dey gonna break?”), hazel eyes, and long brownish-black hair. She was drawn to his intensely blue eyes, tousled mop of brown hair, and beautiful singing voice when the families gathered around the campfire at night. Mom says she loved his enthusiasm in all manner of games, but I’m told he was rather solitary on that holiday, taking himself out every night to sit in th
e dunes alone and stare out at the sea. When she learned that he was mourning the recent death of his father, she tactfully gave him space. A few months later, though, he invited her to a movie in Johannesburg and the courtship began.
After a protracted and ultimately successful negotiation with Brian, Mom’s father, Dave managed to get permission for Shan to come to Londolozi. Dad told me about that long, fateful evening. Brian kept trying to get a very young and callow Dave to join him for a few beers; Dad wanted to keep his wits about him, so he stuck to Fanta. After hours of sparring, Brian finally agreed to allow Shan to join Dave at Londolozi, but only if Mom’s sister Diane came along as chaperone.
Mom fell in love with the place, the man, and the vision; she was in. Upon returning home, she promptly set up Londolozi’s first reservations office in the attic of her parents’ house in Johannesburg. Her home phone number was the reservations line for a weekend in the bush.
For a time she commuted between Johannesburg and Londoz—then a ten-hour drive on rough roads—catching lifts down to the lowveld, squashed into various delivery trucks with all manner of motley crew heading that way. Often she would arrive with guests coming down for the weekend, which might have undercut just a tad the professional veneer Dave and John were working hard to establish.
“Hi, this is Dave from Londolozi. Just checking that you’ll still be coming down this weekend.… Great, great.… We look forward to it. Quick question: Could you take my girlfriend in your car?”
At first, Dad, Uncle John, my mother, Howard Mackie, who was the mechanic, and a revolving door of one of John’s girlfriends lived in a one-room prefab trailer home that squatted in the middle of the bush, just behind the four mud huts that served as guest accommodations. Nothing worked. The water pump was always broken (a problem that exists to this day at the lodge). Their only Land Rover’s gearbox had fallen out one day when they went over a bump in the road. The roofs of the guests’ huts, which were made from river reeds, leaked like a sieve with the slightest precipitation.