Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  “Nah, don’t be a nafta,” Uncle John said, dismissing her fears. “What you gonna do one day when you’re by yourself and you see an elephant? Drive on.” John waved one muscled arm toward the path, his sleeve even more torn than usual. Uncle John has a skewed finger, so when he points straight, it looks like he’s aiming off to the left, which can make getting directions challenging. Bron’s large brown eyes squinted briefly in the direction he was pointing, and then her beaded Alice headband started to bob as she shook her head no.

  As if he’d overheard the conversation, the elephant, a large bull, burst out of the bush and set off toward the Land Rover at a brisk lope, his ears flapping with each step and his trunk rocking from side to side. I was crapping myself in the exposed backseat of the Land Rover. You see, I’m also scared of elephants. I just don’t tell people, to keep up macho appearances.

  “Jonno, please come drive. I hate this,” Bron begged again.

  But Uncle John saw this as the perfect opportunity to teach Bronwyn how to reverse a Land Rover, although she’d only just gotten a bead on how to drive one forward. “Now look here, Bonna,” he told her professorially, putting her tiny hand on the gearshift. “Things work in opposites when you reverse, so you’re going to want to—”

  Bron let out a choked sob while I dove under the seat, screaming with frustration. The elephant was quickly closing the gap between us, and here was Uncle John, playing the role of the swashbuckling hero fumbling through a huge ring of keys to find the one that starts the ignition, while the bad guys are breathing down his neck.

  “Bonna, slow down; think clearly,” said Uncle John.

  By now Bronwyn was crying and in complete mental lockdown.

  “Think! What do you have to do first?” offered John.

  “Get out of here!” screamed Bronwyn.

  “Bonna! Calm down; read the situation. The elephant’s not aggressive—watch his body language.” Elephants have very expressive bodies and provide much information about their mood and distress level by the carriage of their head and the position of their trunk, tail, and ears. “See, his trunk is down, he’s throwing sand over himself, his ears are flapping. You can tell he’s relaxed,” said Uncle John. “If he was interested in us, he’d lock his ears forward and be sniffing the air.”

  Bron was in no mood for a lecture on animal behavior. “Please, just drive!”

  Two titanic wills had met and both of them had lost track of the elephant, which had picked up speed and was now a mere fifteen yards from the car. He looked as if he was going to charge after all, his large ears locked forward, his full attention on us. He paused briefly to lift his trunk like a trumpet to drink in our scent.

  The elephant’s moment of assessment was Bronwyn’s call to action. She was no longer scared; she was angry. Ignoring Uncle John’s instructions to reverse, she mashed down the gas pedal and charged the elephant.

  Now it was my uncle’s turn to scream: “Stop, Bonna, for God’s sake, stop!” But once engaged, Bronwyn isn’t big on backing off. She unleashed a snotty, teary snarl that, combined with the roar of the Land Rover, frightened the elephant so much that he turned tail and ran for the bush. John, realizing there was nothing left to do, simply gave himself over to the situation. Sporting his vampire-like grin, his canines sticking out beneath his top lip, he turned back to me and said, “Well, that’s one way to do it!” Bronwyn started to giggle with relief through the tears, and soon we all completely lost it.

  I see those same threads from that day now: Bron’s reticence, her feeling of being underprepared for whatever the elephant of the day is. I see my sister as a vulnerable little girl in a pink tutu among the dust of the African wild. She’s afraid and unsure, and then, as if a channel has opened to the forces of the sky, comes a clarity that vanquishes all fear, the way light dispels dark. And I see someone who can summon courage, who stands so rooted when I get lost, who can charge when she must.

  I always thought I was tough, but it was my sister who put aside her own fear in those blazing night storms to come get me first.

  FIVE

  NEVER PANIC IN THE BUSH

  “FRIENDI, WE GONNA PLAY SHOP SHOP,” Bron announced one day. We planned easily for a week: prices, goods, location, displays, tablecloths. I had to construct everything, from the shelves to the till. Bron was in charge of advertising, which meant that pretty much everybody at Londolozi had been mustered to attend and purchase our wares, mostly fruit and little bags of popcorn.

  We were doing quite the booming business when Uncle John suddenly burst in, a bandit mask pulled over his face and a toy gun pointing at our gizzards. He promptly held us up, knocking over stalls and cleaning all the money out of the till. Bron was furious. “Uncle Jonno, stop it!” she screamed. Uncle John just laughed and continued kicking the place to pieces. “Guys setting up a business? You gotta think security!” he barked, then fled. Bron and I looked around in despair: overturned tables, stained tablecloths, fruit rolling everywhere—all our hard work ruined. Bron began to sob. We both felt horrifically embarrassed; effectively the entire camp had seen the debacle.

  Uncle John sat us down later for a chat. I think he felt bad; he hadn’t expected us to be so upset by what he’d thought would be a cute joke. Bron was still very cross. “Uncle Jonno, I don’t think it was very nice of you,” she huffed.

  “No, Bonna, but just listen,” Uncle John said. “You’re growing up in Africa. Can’t just be mono-focused. You’ve got to look at the whole situation. When stuff goes wrong, you don’t cry about it; you pull yourself up and keep going.” Uncle John never missed an opportunity to give us a true bush education. His methods could be harsh, and Mom had been very upset with him as Bron had sobbed, “Jonno robbed us!” but to be fair, his training worked.

  Uncle John tried to prepare us for the harsh realities of African life. The Sand River at Londolozi has always been sacred to my family. Long before in-ground pools by manicured gardens made their appearance, the river was where Uncle John would lead me and Bronwyn on hot summer days. Hours could go by seemingly in minutes as we swam and played games of dropping twigs and branches into the current and running downstream to see whose won the race. Sometimes Uncle John would let us “shoot the rapids.” We’d release ourselves into the wild current, and after a tumble downstream, he would capture us in his burly arms. Once my uncle missed me at the collection point at the end of the rapid and I washed downriver, choking and sputtering. When he finally pulled me out, I was shaking with fright. I got a brusque reprimand instead of the hoped-for comfort. Shaking me gently to be sure I was listening, Uncle John warned me, “In the bush you never panic. When you panic, your brain turns to sponge.” This wasn’t meanness; this was a crucial lesson in survival, and I never forgot it.

  Bron and I were bush people; we grew up fast. “You’re the man of the house,” Dad told me when he had to leave on business. I was all of eight or nine. “Look after your mother and sister until I get back.” Dad made sure I knew where the key to the gun safe was, the order of people to call in case of an emergency.

  Whenever I came back from a walk in the bush with Dad, Mom would matter-of-factly strip me down, toss my clothes in the laundry, and put me in a Dettol bath to get rid of the ticks. She groomed me like a monkey, parting my hair and checking my armpits for the stubborn hangers-on. Her doctoring was necessarily pragmatic, given our lack of proximity to anything resembling a pharmacy. She had an unfailing belief in the same two solutions, no matter what the malady.

  “Mom, I have a sore stomach.”

  “Well, rub some arnica oil on it.”

  “I did that.”

  “Okay, I’ll bring the hot water bottle.”

  If her back was against the wall, Mom might bring out the Rescue Remedy. Her variations on this limited repertoire got us through many a cold, scratch, and fever. In fact, I’m fairly convinced that if one of us had lost an arm, she would have calmly administered arnica oil to the stump. Mom prescribed the pills sh
e did have like a resident pharmaceutical artist, handing out random instructions with impressionistic flair: “Okay, it says take two three times a day .… So you know what? Take one twice a day and we will see how you do.”

  We never bothered to treat scratches, and as the family doctor said, “When I got a call from the Vartys, I would immediately book a surgery.”

  Mom and Dad enforced strict rules. We were banned from walking around barefoot because of the snakes and weren’t allowed out unattended lest something try to eat us. When Bron and I played in the sand pit outside the kitchen, we had to be under constant surveillance in case a snake tried to slither into the area.

  When one of us cried, my father would fix us with a withering stare and say, “Stop it—you’ll attract the lions in.” My mother would politely pour tea in the foreground while Simon the gardener calmly murdered a python in the background. Dad would dunk a biscuit as a child pulled an impala leg across the garden. We’re basically an unflappable family, although when a deadly mamba dropped onto my sister’s cot, Mom immediately promoted Simon from gardener to full-time guardian.

  While other kids were getting yelled at or lectured by their parents for losing the TV remote or not putting away their video games, what stopped me and Bron in our tracks was my parents’ low but insistent “danger voice,” which meant we had to snap to attention without question.

  Dad’s cardinal law was: Get information before you act. Whenever I saw a dangerous animal, every fiber of me wanted to flee right away. I would feel Dad’s arm come around my shoulders, the palm of his hand onto my chest. He would drop down onto one knee behind me so that his mouth was close to my ear. “Slowly, Boydie, assess,” Dad would tell me. “Look at him. Does he notice you? Is he interested in you? Aggressive? Figure that out first.” I would study the potential predator. “Okay, now that you have information, start to chart your retreat.”

  Because of the way my parents taught us about the world, it didn’t feel dangerous. If you don’t know how to cross the street in New York, it’s hazardous, but once you learn, you manage the risk. It’s the same in the bush. I saw my upbringing as undeniably idyllic. Who else had wildebeests, kudus, and vervet monkeys scampering through the garden, or a river right next to their house for swimming? When I was young I was under the impression that everyone raced the monkeys for chocolate during the Easter egg hunt. When most kids were getting their first bike, I was driving a Land Rover. My father bought my sister and me a short-wheelbase Landi when we were about ten or eleven. We named it “BB Jeep,” for Bronwyn and Boyd’s jeep; driving it, we were masters of our destinies. Getting a bicycle when you’re young is pretty awesome, but I’d choose getting a Land Rover any day.

  Dad taught me to drive with a methodical patience. We were parked on a dusty two-track in the trusty old Series 1 Land Rover. He had always let me steer the car, but on this occasion he simply cut the engine and got out and walked around to the passenger side, where I was seated.

  “Move over” was all he said.

  I slid over to the driver’s seat, feeling dwarfed by the depth of the foot well and the size of the steering wheel.

  “Put this under you,” Dad said, handing his old bush jacket to me. Seated on the jacket, I could reach the pedals and look through the gaps in the center of the wheel to see the road.

  “Okay, now just listen and do what I say. Clutch, brake, accelerator. Left leg drives clutch and nothing else, right leg drives gas and brake. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I repeated.

  “Say it back to me,” he said. I did. “Right, clutch in,” he directed. By pulling against the steering wheel, I had just enough strength to compress the clutch.

  “Okay … give it a little bit of gas.” I jammed my right leg down. “Too much. Less, less … that’s right. Now slowly let the clutch out.” He gripped my left knee to control the speed at which I could release the clutch.

  The car started to splutter forward. Dad pressed his other hand down really lightly on my right leg to hit the gas. The sound of the engine changed, and I felt the car begin to move honestly forward.

  “There you go,” he said. “Now let go of the clutch; if I catch you riding it, I’ll flick your ear. You’re driving.” He smiled. “Clutch in, foot off the gas.… Second gear.” He pulled the stick back, and the old Landi gave a little skip. “Right, you’re in control.”

  Dad made a big show of leaning back in his seat and pretending to go to sleep. We chugged along, the swaths of thick brown grass brushing against the Landi’s underside as impalas darted across the road. I was driving; it was no big deal. Dad had made the transition elegant and simple. And without saying a word, he had told me how much he trusted me. Driving was for adults, and with simple, calm instruction, in less than ten minutes, he had turned me into one. Dad had a way of making you feel more grown-up than you were. He never made the challenge too much of a big deal. He simply acted like it was normal, and you knew he wouldn’t let you fail.

  The front garden, where Bron and I played, was about as close to a literal Eden as I could ever imagine. The green grass—something my mother had struggled to create in the harsh, dry conditions—was an animal haven. Our lawn mower was a small group of warthogs that came in to graze, folding their hooves back so they could walk on their knees as they clipped the short grass into a golf-ready green. Woodland kingfishers nested in the big knobthorn tree, the central feature of the garden. Their arrival in summer was an occasion for celebration. Bron and I spent long hours watching them burst out of the holes in the thorn tree in a turquoise flurry of flapping, use their long, sharp red beaks to collect batches of insects, then return to their nests amid chirps of delight from within.

  The nyalas, with their comical dashes of white war paint, and the sweet-faced bushbucks also liked to spend time with us in the garden; they enjoyed snacking on the trees Mom had so painstakingly planted. They became so friendly with us that we were able to walk closely by them with no more reaction than a brief pause from their chewing on some leafy shrub. To look into the eyes of the antelope is to truly see the gentle nature of the animals.

  A blue-headed agama lizard lived in the nearby acacia tree. Every time anyone approached, he scrabbled up the trunk in a flash of beaded cerulean. Once up the tree, he bobbed his head slightly, as if waiting for our approval of his climbing skills.

  The francolins strutted around like they owned the place. Mom called them her “fat friends,” but Bronwyn complained that they woke her each morning with their raucous calls outside her window. The jewel-toned sunbirds locked onto the shibodi aloes, looking like green-and-red tracers of light as they darted from one nectar-laden bloom to the next.

  Tortoises periodically made the epic crossing of the garden in search of a new flower bed to feast on. The vervet monkeys who lived in the nearby ebony trees occasionally jumped onto their backs for a shell ride.

  We had plenty of other regular visitors, of course. The lions mated outside the room where we played poker. A certain hyena began making periodic appearances at the dinner buffet, hauling off great wedges of Gorgonzola in her massive jaws. We dubbed her Gorgy. “Bloody Gorgy!” huffed the head chef. “She’s killing my budget!”

  As I got older, my perspective shifted. Humans were supposedly here to watch the animals, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were watching us.

  Growing up amid this extraordinary open-air menagerie, Bron and I nevertheless longed for the touch of normalcy we read about in books and saw on television: a pet. Our parents refused, doubtless convinced that any such animal would be eaten instantly. So Bron and I treated every tortoise we came across in the bush as our pet. At one stage we turned the empty plastic pool in the garden into our secret terrarium and stashed every tortoise we found in there, only to discover that tortoises, despite their cumbersome appearance, are incredible escape artists. We once spotted one of our prisoners scaling a chicken-wire fence, placing each oval, horned foot into a circular segment of wire and th
en heaving himself up like an agile rock climber. We soon got bored to tears with our shelled companions; a tortoise as a pet is about as riveting as a salmon on ice.

  Bron was forever trying to nurture the birds that flew into the glass windowpanes of our home and injured themselves. We tended to them with the intensity of world-class neurosurgeons, Bron’s concerned, focused little face peering down at the patient between the curtains of her chocolate hair. All the birds died, despite our efforts to funnel gallons of sugar water down their throats. This mystified us, since our mother had inculcated in us a rabid belief in the placebo effect of sugar water to cure anything.

  Eventually, after years of hectoring our parents, Bronwyn was finally allowed to keep an orphaned squirrel. Naturally enough, she called him Nuts. She fed him biscuits and fruit. She rubbed his stomach with a warm facecloth, the way his mother would have licked his tummy out in the wild to help his digestion. She made him a cozy bed in a laundry basket filled with soft rags. Ecstatic after all that time of not being able to have a pet, Bron channeled years of pent-up girlish love into that little squirrel, cuddling him like the bush’s own version of Tiny Toons’ Elmyra Duff: “I’m gonna hug you and kiss you and love you forever!” She followed him fretfully as he scampered around the living room, stopping only to investigate someone’s ear as if it were a hole in a tree that he might like to sleep in. Nuts eventually met his final reward when he leapt out of his laundry basket and was mistaken for a rat by a Shangaan housekeeper, who thought she was being helpful when she malleted him with the back of her feather duster.

  The depression that descended on the Varty household was thick and bleak. Dad attempted a lecture on the nature of life and death, but he stopped when Bron howled in a bloodcurdling voice, “He was so innocent … innno​ooooc​eeee​eent!”

  Finally my parents could deny Bron no more, and they agreed to break all the rules and get her a dog. “Dogs can be useful as an early warning system in the bush,” Dad conceded. “But don’t expect me to do any of the work; a pet is a big responsibility.”