Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  Uncle John made the show in his cannonball way. Mom was surprisingly good in the series, pulling from her extensive knowledge of both the bush and child wrangling. Dad, with his almost charmed good luck, managed to sell it to Walt Disney Television. Much to everyone’s astonishment—except Uncle John and Dad’s—the Disney executives absolutely adored the idea and Mom. There was just one catch: they didn’t want twelve parts; they wanted fifty-two. Mom gamely went back and shot forty new fifteen-minute episodes in three weeks. Bush School originally ran in 1993 and was seen by more than fifty million people.

  When Uncle John wasn’t filming, I watched him from the sidelines as he and Dad dominated the epic battles of Gazankulu district league soccer. Gazankulu was an endless tract of dry bush designated as a homeland for the villagers by the apartheid government. In Gazankulu League, you didn’t choose which direction you’d like to play during the coin toss; you chose whether you’d like to play uphill or downhill.

  The crowd, a motley crew of villagers, sat on the hoods of ramshackle cars and Land Rovers or under the branches of acacia trees and screamed and howled at the changing fortunes of the game.

  “Coke, Coke, cross it, you Arab!” screamed Uncle John at Alfred Mathebula, the barman, a.k.a. Coke.

  Uncle John was the center forward by declaration: “Buddy, center forward, that’s the position for us! Gotta be where the action is!” His soccer cleats had seen so much play on the stony fields that the studs were worn flat; they were as slick as ice skates on the gravel pitch.

  Dad had a reputation for shoulder charging and spoiling. He would scream up the right lane in a pair of Adidas sneakers with a hole at the toe. The ultimate wingman, he was supposed to make a great cross to where John waited at the goal mouth. “Pass! Pass! Pass!” John would scream. He was so desperate to score that he wasn’t above using his fist or elbow, squelching the opponents’ appeals to the referee—Dad doing double duty—with a “Bugger off, it’s a goal.” This inevitably provoked a game stoppage as the other team sat down in protest, which only incited another shouting match—and then a staff walkout the next day if John had been particularly obnoxious.

  Occasionally the rangers from the nearby MalaMala Game Reserve would come to play. Once when MalaMala prevailed, Uncle John was so angry that he canceled their transportation home, saying, “You guys can walk.” The guests on the afternoon wildlife-viewing drives that day encountered a fifteen-man squad with socks sagging around their ankles, heading east through the bush. If, God forbid, a guest joined the game and played against John, all bets were off. Even if the guest was a most valued customer, the owner of the Taj Mahal, and had flown halfway across the world, Uncle John would trample or punch him in his quest to get a sack of tanned leather into the goal.

  I loved watching Dad hit his great looping crosses, which Uncle John would pounce on for goals. The brothers had a natural cohesion that produced results. If there was a penalty shot to be taken, Uncle John would sub a player out and put a six- or seven-year-old Boyd Varty on the field.

  “Okay, buddy, just like we practiced,” he’d say, setting the ball on the penalty spot. In the garden, we’d rehearsed a move called “double dummy,” which was him running over and pretending to take the shot and me following and actually hitting the ball in. He trusted me, he put me on the line, and he let me go for it. It worked. When Uncle John called me onto the field from the backseat of the Land Rover, parked askew under a tree, I would see myself as a man, forgetting for a moment that I was so young, the way some small dogs have no sense of their size.

  Around Dad and Uncle John, anything seemed possible. Once, in Johannesburg, our family car, a Mercedes, was stolen. Most people in South Africa in the early nineties would have simply accepted this as a reality of living in a country whose metropolitan areas had a high crime rate. Not Dad and Uncle John. A week later, Dad got a phone call from an unknown woman. “I’m not going to tell you what my name is, but I know you Vartys from the films you make, and I want to let you know that your car is in a house next door to me where some bad people live.” She’d looked at the registration and tracked Dad down.

  Dad phoned Uncle John. “Hey, John, listen, the car’s been stolen. Can you get to this address?” John clapped a .44 Magnum onto his hip. That .44 Magnum is the central feature of Uncle John’s life and, indeed, a symbol for his maverick character. Next he commandeered a tow truck. “You’re hired,” he told the driver. “Follow me.” John arranged for the head of security at Londolozi to meet him at the address. Meanwhile, Dad phoned a friend who flew a medevac helicopter: “Fly to this place and see if you can locate the Mercedes.” “Ya, I can see it.” “Well, hold in your position.” Dad started feeding directions to John, who arrived on the scene like Dirty Harry with a tow truck. With the helicopter hovering overhead, John hooked our car up to the tow truck and sped away.

  Uncle John made me grow up fast. He would decide that he needed footage of an incredibly dangerous situation—say, a wounded hippo. “Buddy, I’m gonna go in there and try and get the shot,” he’d say, passing me the rifle. “If something happens to me, I’m relying on you.” When I was ten, he handed me a panga as we prepared to barrel through a crowded town with our Landi laden with expensive camera equipment. “Buddy, anyone tries to grab anything, you just bash ’em with this.”

  Bron has the best description of Uncle John: “He’d get you involved in a war, then be the only person who could get you out.” There was no doubt that he absolutely adored me and Bron. He didn’t have kids of his own until he was in his forties, so he happily took us on many of his adventures.

  As should be abundantly clear by now, nothing is impossible if Uncle John sets his mind to it. When he decided he wanted to make a movie about raising two leopard cubs, Little Boy and Little Girl, he ended up starring in it himself, with Brooke Shields. I can’t say that Running Wild was the perfect showcase for Uncle John’s dramatic skills, but it did feature some amazing footage of baby leopards, not to mention a splendid scene of John throwing himself into the Mara River and trying in vain to rescue the male cub from the jaws of a crocodile, all the time wailing, “Come back, my beautiful boy, come back!”

  Uncle John’s showmanship and maverick flair may put him in the limelight, but that’s not where his heart is. His heart is, and will always be, with the animals. In his forties, he met Gillian van Houten, a prominent news broadcaster, who became his life partner. He picked me and Bron up and took us on his first date with her, at a burger joint in Johannesburg. Shortly thereafter, Gillian moved to the bush and they started living together. Not a year later, he found a lion cub whose mother had abandoned it just hours after the cub’s birth. He named her Shingalana, which is Shangaan for “little lion.” John’s love and devotion to Shingalana were instantaneous and total. After only the briefest consultation, he and Gillian decided to raise her, knowing that with this one spontaneous act, they’d made a many-years-long commitment.

  Lions are pride animals and bond very strongly with the people who raise them. Shingi grew deeply fond of Uncle John, Gillian, and all of us who played with her. By the time she was fully grown, it was not uncommon for this four-hundred-pound lioness to doze on you lovingly, just as she’d do in the wild with her pride.

  Shingi was hugely mischievous. One night, I was walking from the kitchen tent to the fireside with a bowl of popcorn. Out of nowhere, Shingi, who I thought was in her sleeping enclosure, hit me like a ton of bricks. She was then about 120 pounds; at ten or eleven, I was only about 90. As I sprayed popcorn in mid-collapse, I remember thinking, “Please, God, let this be Shingi” and not a wild lion that had decided he liked his people seasoned with a fine layer of popcorn salt.

  When Shingi got bigger, Uncle John and Gillian relocated her into the bush in the remote Luangwa Valley, in Zambia, to give her more space. As Shingi started to catch her own game, she presented a serious hygiene issue, as she liked to drag her carcasses into the tent and feed on the comfort of the bedspread. M
aybe your house cat likes to bring chipmunks in for you, which is problem enough, but having a 170-pound puku sprawled across your pillow can be a little challenging. It never seemed to faze Uncle John.

  Uncle John’s relationship with the leopard cubs certainly changed his scientific view of nature into something with softer lines, but feeling himself a part of Shingi’s pride truly solidified the idea of the deep kinship between people and animals. His time with Shingi marked a shift in direction for him and, as well, for the philosophy that would become a huge part of Londolozi.

  Although Dad and Uncle John had schooled me in the idea of being an outside observer of nature, the concept hadn’t had time to gain any traction before I found myself running down a dry riverbed with a poodle-sized Shingi in pursuit. It was proof of what I’d always known deep down: that some members of my family weren’t human.

  Uncle John was a dreamer, often a reckless one, and in his own wacky way, when you least expected it, he was incredibly generous and big-hearted. I was in his car once when he stopped by the side of the road so he could buy the entire sad load of wilted flowers from a vendor. “Sometimes you just gotta help a guy out,” he told me.

  My fondest memories of my early days with Uncle John are of the two of us singing songs together as we returned from a successful morning of filming. Uncle John would be at the wheel, his hat blowing in the breeze, chucking sections of sour naartjie fruit into his mouth as we belted out Elton John and Tim Rice’s “Circle of Life,” from The Lion King. My job was to join in on the chorus to provide the song with more oomph to combat the rushing wind of the open Land Rover. After years of doing this, I became conditioned to the routine that once the work out in the bush is done, one has a good sing as one heads for camp. This has meant some strange moments when I’ve absentmindedly belted out a tune on the way back from a game drive, only to turn around and see the shocked faces of guests never before treated to the Wheatus version of “A Little Respect.”

  Uncle John can play any song with the four guitar chords he knows. Most of the love songs he’s written have been about the cats he’s worked with. When he got malaria and was forced to leave Zambia for a while, Shingi swam alongside the boat that transported him across the river to where a Land Rover was waiting. She then trotted alongside the Landi just like a dog for as long as she could. Maybe you could say my uncle was the love of her life. Each evening Shingi would walk out onto the sand at the edge of the water and watch the far bank as the sky turned to powdery watercolors. She was waiting for his return.

  One day while he was walking her, Uncle John and Shingi were attacked by four lionesses intent on killing them both. When one of the lionesses made a fierce charge at Uncle John, Shingi ran out in front of him to take the brunt of the attack and ended up in a brutal fight. Uncle John tried to break it up with his whip. Shingi saved Uncle John by meeting the lioness’s charge, and my uncle saved her by going in with the whip. Sadly, later there was a second attack, and Shingi died of her wounds. Shingi was his great love. There is no doubt in my mind that a part of my uncle died with her.

  SEVEN

  THE FLYING LIFE

  THE BEECHCRAFT BARON, a twin-engine plane, is a trusty six-seater, but Mom’s best friend, Anthea, was a nervous flier, so Mom was doing her best to keep up a distracting stream of chatter during the brief flight from Mkuze, in the Natal Province, in eastern South Africa, to Richards Bay, ninety miles away, a typically African puddle jump. Dad was riding up front with the charter pilot. Mom was in one of the backward-facing seats behind him, facing Anthea, who was sitting in the back row, facing forward. In a blink they were on “long finals,” perhaps eight or ten miles away from the final approach to the runway. Suddenly there was a great explosion—BHAA!—and Anthea was covered with guts and feathers and a bit of wing, which clung to her head like an awkward hat, as though someone had lobbed a blenderful of bird over her. Mom, confused—why was her neck wet? what was that howling sound?—turned around. Wind was now roaring through a huge hole in the cockpit window. The pilot was conked out in his seat, his lap full of shattered glass, his temple impaled by the beak of a woolly-necked stork, its severed head and neck plastered limply to the side of his face.

  Woolly-necked storks are huge birds, standing about three feet high, with skinny pipestem legs, huge black bodies, and thickly feathered, long white necks. When they collide with a plane in midflight, there’s a lot of wealth to spread around. It was a bloodbath straight out of Pulp Fiction.

  “We’re gonna die!” Anthea screamed, clutching Mom’s thigh in a death grip. “We’re gonna die!” Mom gave her the patented Mom slap. “Shut up! We’re not gonna die! I won’t let us!”

  Dad, who was also completely strewn with bird parts, seized the controls. Mom calmly reached into her bag and pulled out, of all things, a flying checklist—typical Shan. She twisted around to give it to Dad. When the pilot came to, he pulled the beak out of his temple and groggily retook the controls as Dad meticulously went through the list. “Rate of descent?” Check. “Throttle?” Check. “Fifteen degrees flap.” Check. “Call the tower for a priority emergency landing.” Check.

  They got the plane in, climbed out shakily, and wordlessly made their way to the washrooms to tidy up. All in a day’s flight with the Varty family.

  Flying had entered our lives once Bron turned six and had to go to “big school.” Up to that time, Mom had homeschooled her at the Londolozi nursery school; now Bron would need to begin a more formal education in Johannesburg. Mom and Dad had a grand vision of puddle jumping between Joburg and Londoz. If they learned to fly, an hour and forty minutes in the air and they’d be back in the bush. Besides, Grandpa Boyd, who’d been a member of the South African Air Force, believed that flying was one of those things that defined a life.

  So off Mom and Dad went, to get their own flight training. (Uncle John also took up flying, but he gave up when he forgot the clipboard with the checklist on the dash one day and it flew through the back window as he began to lift off.)

  Mom and Dad’s grand vision of the Vartys in flight went off more or less as planned, with “less” perhaps being the operative word. Their philosophy continued to be “Ready. Fire. Aim!” The fact that my parents were barely competent behind the controls and had chosen to put us at what the posh northern suburbs called “undue risk” seemed to have escaped them. On Friday afternoons they would pick us up from our primary school, where I’d joined Bron. During the week, we’d stay in town in Johannesburg, sometimes with Mom, sometimes with Dad, sometimes with our grandparents. Reunited with both our parents for the half-hour drive out to the airport, we’d be allowed a brief greeting before being banished to the realms of silence—or, as my parents called it, “Flying Mode.” Bron and I were bursting to talk about our school week, but our parents enforced silence, mentally buckling down for the flight, no doubt wrapped in the terror of it all and murmuring the prayer of all pilots without many flight hours under their belts: “Please, God, let it fly.” Any attempt to redirect their attention—“Mom, I’m hungry, could I have a sandwich?”—would earn us a warning glare. “Quiet! We’re in Flying Mode!” It was a crime to speak, and in doing so we were likely to be the sole cause of all danger associated with this situation. In fact, our parents seemed rather happy to lay the likely cause of a calamity squarely at the door of their two young children for a few words from the backseat rather than on their own highly dodgy ability to fly.

  At the airport, we’d board our four-seater Cessna 182, nicknamed Rio for her call sign: Romeo India Oscar. Rio smelled like petrol in the back because Mom or Dad would test the fuel in the gas tank before takeoff, then toss the gauge back between our seats; the pungent odor almost made us vomit. Once we were airborne, Flying Mode was even more strictly enforced as our parents took turns consulting the maps and reading off the flight checklist to each other. The puddle hops went off largely without incident, except for the time a lone impala broke out of the woodlands and bounded across the runway j
ust as we were coming home to Londoz. We narrowly missed hitting it head-on, which could have been disastrous, but we heard a loud thunk as it connected with the wheel skid. By the time Rio stopped, Uncle John, who’d driven out to greet us, was already loading it onto the back of his Land Rover for dinner.

  Rio’s longer exploits weren’t always so fortunate.

  We were coming home from a family vacation at Lake Kariba, in Zimbabwe. The week had seemed promising at the beginning. We’d be taking motorboats out onto the lake and fishing for tigerfish, orange-finned, dark-striped monsters with great long teeth and an outsized reputation for fighting. The reality was a bit disappointing. The five exciting minutes of powering out in the motorboat to the middle of the lake were followed by ten boring hours listening to the grown-ups talk and drink. Bron and I were forced to wear big puffy orange life vests the entire time. The vests reeked of mildew, it was stinking hot, and we couldn’t swim because of the crocs.

  I was relieved when it was time to climb into Rio and head for home. We stopped in Harare to refuel. About a half hour later, somewhere around Masvingo, we heard an ominous sputter, and the engine started to run rough. I didn’t understand it at the time, but this was a seriously bad scene—it meant the engine could cut out at any moment.