Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  We selected Tatty—short for Taittinger, as in the French Champagne—out of a squirming litter of golden retriever puppies because a swirl of soft fur on her head made her look as if God had laid his finger on her.

  Tatty certainly was a blessing. She was four fluffy, golden legs of love. When she was happy, which was all the time, she wagged her whole body, not just her tail. It took all of us about thirty seconds to fall totally in love with her. Dad, naturally, fell the hardest.

  Tatty was a terrible watchdog. Bron and I joked that we would know there were intruders because her tail wagged even more exuberantly than usual. In fact, we spent far more time watching over her than she did over us. When she went out after dark, we had to constantly protect her from any dangers that might be lurking about, like the leopards that wouldn’t have thought twice about turning her into a late-night snack.

  Tatty’s only great success was guarding a pair of Dad’s old gum boots on the front steps from Gorgy the hyena, who tried to teethe on them nightly. She would lie behind the screen door that led to the front porch all night, panting in the heat like a reliable generator. Then she’d let out her most deadly bark—a dainty “woof”—if Gorgy showed. This would send Dad leaping out of bed to investigate, clad only in his underpants.

  Tatty adored me and Bron, but she reserved her greatest love for two things: my father and buffalo dung. She could find a steaming pile of dung anywhere. And when she did, she would wallow in it passionately, her glee indescribable. But her remorse was clear on her face when she padded back toward the house.

  “Taaaa​attyy​yyyy?” Dad remonstrated, and Tatty’s ears flopped low. “Taaaa​aaaaa​aaaaa​ttyyy​yyy?” Her head dropped to inches above the ground. Then Dad lowered the boom: “Tatty, you’re a naughty dog.” He’d inevitably be the one to hose her down under the acacia tree. Her expression throughout the scrub-down bespoke both remorse and a defiant streak that suggested she’d do it again in a second. After she was cleaned up, she’d bestow her favorite token of apology on one of our laps: a sock she’d stolen from the wash. How could we not forgive her?

  Tatty was a huge pet upgrade from our tortoises and squirrel. She took commands. The most we’d ever been able to hope for from Nuts was that he’d scamper toward a proffered cookie and take it from us. Tatty gave us all a sense that she loved us profoundly, a feeling one never gets from a pet tortoise. Living with Tatty was an experience in our own home that echoed what we were seeing in abundance around us. We didn’t hold dominion over nature; we and the animals were nature. Our ability to survive and flourish depended on that understanding.

  Bron and I grew up magnetized by two polarities: we were rooted to our own piece of earth, yet we knew that in Africa all manner of circumstance could snatch it from us in a moment.

  Dad turned even a casual campout in the bush into an important life lesson about these uncertainties. “Tonight we’re sleeping out,” he’d tell us before heading off to work. Bron and I would spend the entire day collecting firewood, sleeping bags, mattresses. He’d get home at half past four and we’d head out deep into the bush, finding a patch of open ground so we would have a clear view all around. We’d make a huge production out of setting up camp and the beds, then starting a fire to cook our boerewors sausages and cornmeal pap, all slathered with “train wreck”—a tomato-and-onion gravy. Then Dad would make us take turns on watch. Bron and I would alternate sitting up by the fire with a flashlight, keeping an eye out for hyenas or other dangers.

  When I was on watch, I felt I was the only person awake in the world. The darkness amplified each sound, but I needed to keep my wits about me. I didn’t want to be the one to bother Dad for an embarrassing nonevent like a scrub hare bounding toward me. If Bron or I did see a hyena prowling close, we’d wake up Dad to chase it away. Now and again, an elephant would break a branch, which would snap like a pistol shot through the cool night. The scops owls would unleash their “prrrr” every ten seconds, like a perfect nighttime metronome. Just outside the glow of the fire, I would watch the sparks return to their home amid the stars … or that’s the story I would tell myself. I felt an overwhelming sense of place on the earth in what others might call isolation.

  Like our ancestors before us, Bron and I subscribe to the belief that you die “when your number’s up” or through some Newtonian physics unique to the bush: “He was pushing it, and you can push it in Africa for only so long.” Our upbringing has given us a lifelong habit of being on the lookout for where things might go wrong. Even now we’ll be at a pool party amid the merry tinkling of ice in glasses and the chatter of guests mingling, laughing, drinking—and we’ll be prepping for the inevitable disaster, thinking, “Right. If this one gets too pissed and falls into the pool, we can do this, then this, then that.” This is the nature of growing up in the safari business. There is such a thing as being too self-sufficient. It’s hard to be lighthearted and in the moment when you’re always making contingency plans.

  Bron and I bathed in that culture of coping and getting on with it. By our standards, we weren’t in danger. We were Africans.

  SIX

  UNCLE JOHN

  “FASTER, FASTER! FUCK, NOT SO FAST! … Left … no, right! Right! … No, left!” I jerked the steering wheel left and right, trying to follow the confused instructions Uncle John barked from his unsteady stance in the rear of the old Land Cruiser. An accomplished wildlife documentarian, he was trying to get some good footage of a hyena feasting on a giraffe, using the heavy camera he’d set up on a tripod in the back of the truck. Once the hyena picked up the giraffe’s leg and began to tear across the clearing, he ordered me to gun it in hot pursuit.

  Branches smashed into the sides of the Cruiser, gouging deep scratches in the paint. With his usual torn clothing and his hat flaps whipping in the wind, Uncle John was part drill sergeant, part captain of a ramshackle pirate ship. “Faster, Boyd, faster! Jesus, right, right, right!” He was clearly enjoying himself; pursuit of animals across the wilderness is his passion.

  Then the inevitable happened. He screamed “right!” and I turned left. His arms flailed as his calves caught the side of the pickup and he toppled backward, pulling the camera and tripod with him. I heard a crunch as he hit the ground. “Bloody Arab!” he shrieked at me, following up with more vicious insults as he chased me around the truck. Eventually he calmed down and wandered off to retrieve his handgun, which had fallen out of his holster in the melee. From that day on I wore a bangle on my right wrist so I would never again confuse left and right.

  In my defense, I was only eight at the time. And even though I’d been fielding Uncle John’s requests to be his filming assistant for years by then and, like many farm boys, I was quite good behind the wheel, it wasn’t always easy to see over the dash, even with a jacket or cushion on the seat.

  Uncle John became a filmmaker because he’d gotten tired of driving guests around—“Have to be too fucking nice to them all the time, buddy.” While the rest of my family enjoyed interacting with the guests, he hated catering to their demands, and even more he hated always getting grass seeds in his eyes as the Landi patrolled the dusty paths. He’d taken to strapping on swimming goggles to protect himself, a bizarre look that failed to endear him to our visitors.

  “I can’t take another game drive,” Uncle John moaned. “Eh, this is bullshit. I’m burnt out. If I see another guest, I’m gonna kill him. How do we get fewer visitors?”

  Dad pondered this. “If you want fewer people, double the price.”

  “Okay, let’s double the price. As of tomorrow, we’re doubling it.” John immediately called the reservationist. “Liz, if you get any more inquiries, tell them it’s going to cost twice as much.” With that single act, Dad and Uncle John doubled their revenues.

  Uncle John still hated catering to guests, although he showed brief interest in a new direction. One Sunday, he strode up to Dad and shook the newspaper in his face. “Dave, I need to talk to you about something.” He displ
ayed a full-page ad for something called “sex safaris.” Somebody had opened a lodge with the enticing tagline “Come on safari to our lodge. All your needs will be taken care of.”

  “You know, Dave,” Uncle John cackled, “we need to know about all the competition in this game. I need to go down there and check out the product. I’ll come back and tell you what it’s like.”

  He never did, but that didn’t stop him from inviting every female guest around the campfire to “Come to Room 13.” The lodge had only twelve rooms. “Room 13, for the complete safari experience. Part of the package—you get me!”

  Uncle John was fine being the occasional campfire troubadour, but he really was fed up with guiding. His heart lay in making nature documentaries, and Dad saw that as a great way to build the Londolozi brand. He and Mom were happy to take over guesting duties while John raced around in his torn clothing, chasing the next shot.

  In this new role, Uncle John leaned heavily on Elmon. Elmon was the ultimate naturalist; he’d been born under a tree next to Londolozi and grew up literally hunting and gathering off the land before any stores opened in the area. Elmon and his brother Phineas had been raised by their uncle, Engen Mhlongo, a man with an ancient knowledge of the land. Elmon knew exactly how to find and film leopards and lions.

  Largely because of Elmon and the time they spent together, Uncle John is one of the greatest naturalists you will ever meet. He has a deep understanding of the way nature works, and he has a greater connection to the energy of animals and their habitat than anyone I’ve ever known. He has dedicated his entire life to conservation efforts, especially by documenting animals in the wild, long before Steve Irwin made being close to dangerous animals cool. And when I say “dedicated his entire life,” I mean it literally. When Uncle John—also known as JV—decided to befriend a female leopard at Londolozi, he and Elmon spent more than thirteen years with her and filmed all nineteen of her cubs, some from the day they were born until the day they died. He was with Manana, that leopard matriarch, until her death. When he befriended some Masai in Kenya’s Masai Mara, it grew into a seventeen-year relationship, and the documentaries he shot there—Savage Instinct, Troubled Water, and The Super Predators—have won international attention for the plight of nearly extinct animals. His latest passion is for saving the severely endangered tigers of Asia. His Living with Tigers is bringing new hope to the cause.

  As a boy, I absolutely idolized my uncle, ripping the sleeves off my own shirts in imitation of his ratty wardrobe—what friends took to calling “JV couture”—and begging my parents for a green peaked cap just like his, with a flap that protected his ears and neck from the sun and thrashed about in the wind. Beginning at age five I became his faithful assistant, and so my most defining years were spent tracking leopards and learning to swear—something my uncle did a great deal of when he missed a good shot. The day would begin at about four a.m.: he would wake me and I would stumble around my bedroom, pulling on my torn khaki outfit and hat. Next we would devote fifteen minutes to trying to get his film Landi started, my job being to press the accelerator down when he screamed “Now!” from under the hood. Then we would fetch Elmon and go out to shoot “high-action sequences.” “Buddy, we need a high-action sequence,” he’d tell me as we chased after a crash of rhinos or a herd of zebras. Much more often I’d hear, “Fuck fuck, fuck, we missed that action sequence!”

  My uncle’s temper is renowned in the district; his Shangaan name, Ntilo, means “Thunder.” I learned when I was young that the best way to stay safe during an eruption was to join in with double the vigor he was pushing out. If he threw the beanbag the camera rested on, I stomped the beanbag; if he punched a tree, I ran headfirst into it. My displays of rage seemed to surprise him. In the face of my irrationality, he became philosophical, which is the truest part of his nature.

  As I’ve learned to my peril, there’s almost nothing Uncle John won’t do to get, or at least set up, the perfect shot. Once I came across him far out in the bush. He was clad in only a pair of green shorts and sandals, his trusty .30-06 rifle over his shoulder. “Hey, buddy,” he said, high-fiving me. “Is that a rhino down in that clearing? Okay, let’s go stalk it. What’s the rule?” I chimed the answer: “When we do the stalkie, no talkie.” And off we headed, down into the clearing to stalk a rhino with a rifle that would be about as effective as a pop gun if the beast charged us.

  Another time he decided in the middle of the night that he needed a better location for the documentary he was making, and that he would be better served driving twelve hours through total darkness to a spot in the middle of a different province. He was faced with one problem: his only transportation was a Land Rover with no cab, no front right fender, and virtually no ability to turn any direction but left. He wasn’t deterred in the slightest. I watched him load the truck’s bed with so much crap that it looked like the Beverly Hillbillies were having a garage sale.

  Rain began to fall as he wired a broken side mirror from an old Opel Kadett onto the flip-up windshield and duct-taped an old license plate onto the grid on the front of the vehicle. By this time, the rain was pounding down. He ducked into his house, then emerged thirty minutes later wearing every item of clothing he owned, as well as a welding helmet he planned to use as a combination crash helmet and rain visor. The only problem was that what he gained in facial protection he lost in visual acuity, as the combination of the dark glass goggles and the Land Rover’s faint headlights rendered him blind as a bat. He strapped a hyena-chewed tarp over the entire contents of the pickup but had only enough rope to tie one side down. He then boarded his craft looking like a portly, sodden Darth Vader and proceeded to power off down the muddy drive, engine roaring and tarp slapping and whumping. He got stuck about forty yards from his house. This sent him into a blind rage that ended with the right-hand tire taking the brunt of a savage beating. It also confirmed for me that one should never start a Land Rover journey if the only positive you can think of is “the gearbox heat will keep me warm.”

  Perhaps the greatest testament to Mom’s unflappability was her trial by fire during Uncle John’s most outlandish brainstorm, Bush School. He figured that the best way to educate kids about nature would be to create a TV series built around kids living the experience. At the time, Mom was running the small nursery school at Londolozi, which Bron and I attended with some older village kids. Her curriculum was the usual arts and crafts, storytime, and snacks appropriate for six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds, and because she was the local teacher, Uncle John naturally asked her to be the star of the show. What he failed to mention was that by extension she would have to anchor and present a twelve-part series with no previous TV experience.

  The sketchily conceived show was typical of Uncle John’s scattershot approach. With his trademark optimism, he figured he’d just gin it up, then get Dad to sell it to Disney. Just as they’d done with Londolozi, John would act as what Dad called “the tip of the spear”—he would throw himself at anything with überconfidence. Then Dad would put in the strategic business structure and, in many ways, make John’s mad ideas possible. Mom, just as typically, would add structure and depth to a Varty brother’s radical, off-the-cuff idea.

  Mom rose to the challenge. Uncle John gave her only the most general guidelines. “Okay, today we’re gonna do a show about camouflage. Say that, then say how a lot of animals camouflage themselves.” He handed her a torn sheet of paper duct-taped to an old clipboard on which he’d scribbled a few suggestions: Talk about how leopards’ spots break up their outlines. Mention how insects use cryptic coloring. “Okay, got it? Good. Now let’s go.” Then, right on the spot, with no script whatsoever, Mom had to fill up fifteen minutes.

  Mom smiled broadly into the camera. “Now, children, today we’re going to talk about camouflage. Who knows what camouflage is?”

  My friend Simon Bannister raised his hand. “Well, sometimes it means, like, when an elephant walks past some eggs and it can’t see them and stands o
n them.”

  Mom shot a worried glance off camera. It had just occurred to her that the kids were unscripted, too. “That’s right, Simon. Camouflage is when something is in disguise and you can’t see it.”

  Another kid piped up: “One time I saw, I saw an elephant, but then it went into the bush and I couldn’t see it anymore.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Mom said smoothly. “Did you know that an elephant’s gray skin gives it ideal camouflage in the bush?” She glanced at the notes Uncle John had handed her. “Does anybody know what the word ‘cryptic’ means?”

  A brief puzzled silence; then a girl offered, “One time we were watching TV with my gran and it was a show about a detective and the detective had to go all around and he had to solve a lot of clues and some of the clues were cryptic.”

  Mom took a deep breath, no doubt screaming inside her head. “Well, yes, Size, that’s right. Some clues can be cryptic, but the cryptic I want to talk about is cryptic coloring, which is not really a clue, but clues can be cryptic, especially to detectives, who have to decrypt them”—Mom was in the weeds now—“but I’m not talking about detectives. I’m talking about cryptic coloring, which is when an animal blends in with the bushes and the leaves around it because its colors are similar.”

  Just at that moment one of the kids had a coughing fit, then nudged his buddy. “When we get home, should we play He-Man?”

  “Cut!” Uncle John yelled, and we had to restart the tape so the sound would sync up.

  Uncle John didn’t trouble himself by explaining the how-tos of filmmaking to us kids, so we were baffled most of the time. We’d be told to “look as though you’ve seen an elephant”—the shot would be edited in later—but we never quite caught on. For one scene I had to flap around in a spider monkey outfit while Bron, having donned a hot, cumbersome gray crocodile costume, clambered along on her stomach—a tough assignment for someone with visions of Barbie and the Rockers. The days were long; we’d wake up at five a.m. and get hungry and tired as the shooting dragged on. I hated being told what to do. It made no sense to me that we’d be in the bush, the ultimate free-form paradise, and have to follow some kind of direction. I managed to screw up the whole of Bush School by falling down the stairs and scraping my nose. Uncle John wasn’t shooting the episodes in any particular order, figuring it could all be edited later for continuity, but I foiled the plan, my face alternately clear and clotted by enormous scabs in the same scene.