Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  “Cut!” shouted Uncle John. “You’re supposed to say no; otherwise the whole darting scene to remove the arrow dies. Okay, let’s go again.”

  The Masai warrior dutifully jogged back into position, then replayed his grand entrance. “Half Tail has been shot by han harrow!”

  “Can we save her?” asked Uncle John, who had no ability to stick to a script.

  “No.”

  “Cut!” shrieked Uncle John, as Bron, Kate, and I collapsed in hysterics behind the sound mike.

  Uncle John was also keen to capture a time-honored Masai ritual, the circumcision of the adolescent boys. This is typically done without anesthesia; it’s considered dishonorable for the young boy to display any sign of pain. Afterward, he will wear a black cloth for months as the wound heals. The Masai wouldn’t let Uncle John film the actual event, but they permitted a re-creation. They didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when it came to Uncle John’s exacting standards. Tensions were already running high on day four, after Grumu, a young Masai boy, had rebelled against having water thrown over him for the tenth time in the simulated circumcision scene.

  “Buddy, get up on that roof there,” Uncle John ordered, pointing to the cow-dung roof of the nearby manyatta. “We need some high-angle shots down into the village.”

  “JV, it looks quite flimsy,” I said. Uncle John fixed me with the look a lion gives an annoying hyena. Needless to say, I wrestled the weighty old Arriflex camera onto my shoulder, clambered onto the roof, and gingerly started to position my feet as well as the legs of the tripod. Nothing but two inches of cow dung separated me from a giant fall. Then the inevitable happened: the roof collapsed beneath my feet. I was swallowed by the house and landed in a crumpled heap in the section where the young goats sleep. Just as my head was starting to clear, a woman who looked about three hundred years old appeared and in a rage over the state of her roof started to beat me to a pulp with a dried wildebeest tail while screaming something in Masai. It’s amazing how reprimands are understandable in all languages.

  But mostly the Masai didn’t mind being filmed and were proud to showcase their traditions. I don’t think it would have been that way if Uncle John hadn’t built up such a good relationship with them over the years. And for all his madness, Uncle John was an amazing teacher. He taught me about filmmaking and how to think in pictures and, perhaps most important, instilled in me a deep passion to tell stories. I realized that if you really want to make an impact as a conservationist, it’s not enough to do the work. You have to be able to communicate a message.

  Things are changing in the Mara. The traditional scarlet-hued shuka is giving way to Western hand-me-downs; in these clothes the Masai, for the first time, look poor. Money and wheat schemes are disrupting the balance and harmony that has existed for so long between the Masai and their home on the great plains. Bron, Kate, and I may have had a last genuine glimpse of this tribe of warriors who live so close to the earth.

  TWELVE

  A LONDOLOZI OF LEOPARDS

  LEOPARDS ARE ANIMATED BY MYSTERY. Their silhouettes house more than sinew and organs; they are the slippery boundaries between ourselves and everything wild we have ever wondered about. If you get a chance to be around a leopard, you’ll discover that elements of this mystery will seep into your own spirit, making you a person who loves the unknown and is comfortable in your own secret nature. I’m not surprised that Uncle John and I have had a lifetime obsession with leopards.

  In many ancient cultures, it is the secretive, solitary leopard that is the totem animal of the shaman. Uncle John set out to capture images of leopards and see if he could connect with these sacred felines. He declared himself the first emissary representing the people. Maybe it was the fact that my uncle has shamanic energy, too, or maybe it was a coincidence, but an emissary from the other side appeared. She took the form of a smallish female leopard with a broken canine.

  Uncle John and Elmon Mhlongo were walking in an area of thick brush where, as a hunter, Uncle John had shot a male leopard fifteen years before. Suddenly a female leopard appeared. Unlike other leopards, she didn’t immediately run away but allowed the two men to watch her from a distance for a good five or six minutes. Such a viewing is unremarkable by today’s standards at Londolozi, but then it was highly unusual behavior for a wild leopard. Uncle John wrote of this first encounter, “I was transfixed by her beauty, her grace, the suppleness of her body and her haunting eyes. For me it was a defining moment, a life-changing event.”

  The leopard started to show glimpses of herself fleetingly, appearing to Uncle John and Elmon at a great distance. Sometimes they would go for days without seeing her. Then, just as they were becoming heavy-hearted, she would appear again, only to vanish like a great magician, giving them just enough hope that they would eventually connect with her, testing to see if she could trust them.

  Over time, the relationship deepened. The leopard allowed herself to be seen with more and more regularity. The Shangaan called her Manana, or “the Mother.” Uncle John called her “the Mother Leopard.” The Mother Leopard was a talisman for how things were changing at Londolozi. The animals were starting to respond to the restoration of the land, becoming more trusting—and this, in turn, changed the people watching them. In Manana, Uncle John had encountered the animal to whom he would dedicate the rest of his life, through observing, documenting, and conserving.

  My uncle spent hundreds of hours in Manana’s presence. He watched her mate and have cubs. He gave her space when she was moody, her tail whipping in annoyance and a snarl on her lips. She went on to have nine litters of cubs—nineteen in total, all of whom grew up with their mother’s trust of people.

  Most of my memories of being in the bush with my uncle involve tracking or observing Manana. As she got older, the years of hunting, raising cubs, and simply surviving began to take their toll on her small frame. She began to rely more on her cunning as a hunter than on raw speed. Her fur began to loosen and soften over her wiry frame.

  We were with her the night she was savagely attacked by lions, who encircled her, viciously charging from all angles. She was a ball of fury in their midst, but one of the lions bit her badly through her hindquarters as another struck at her from the front. The volume and ferocity of her growling made it sound as if she had a chain saw in her belly. Despite her wounds, she was able to escape, running wildly through the bush on her wounded legs. We gunned the Land Rover in pursuit, hoping that she would be able to make it into a tree. Lighter and smaller than lions, leopards can readily climb up trunks lions would have great trouble scaling. Leopards are also much more agile once in a tree, able to jump from branch to branch, whereas a lion’s weight would prevent it from following. Ahead of us we could hear the savage growls as the lions worked as a pride to tear strips off her. My uncle, hard as he tried, could not remain an impartial observer; he crashed the Landi over rough terrain and saplings, screaming abuse at the lions. Eventually Manana made it into the trees. The entire event lasted only a few minutes, but it was a brutal few minutes.

  The lion attack was the beginning of the end for Manana. Over the weeks that followed, she weakened, unable to hunt. Uncle John took a mattress out into the bush, laid it on the hood of his Landi, and slept day and night with her. He brought her an impala to feed on. One of these lonely days, when it was just the two of them out in the wild, he placed a bowl of water near her and she drank from it; this was an immense act of acceptance from a wild leopard. Over the course of three months, Uncle John spent as much time as he could watching over her, following her when she moved around the bush.

  The Mother Leopard lived to the ripe old age of fourteen, very advanced for a leopard in the wild. Uncle John was devastated when she died. Their relationship lasted more than a decade, and he bestowed the honorific of “Manana” on her granddaughter.

  The Mother Leopard’s passing marked the end of an era, yet it spawned a legacy. So much of the success of Londolozi has been as a res
ult of the amazing leopard viewing. In fact, we’ve decided that the proper collective noun is a “Londolozi of leopards.”

  Uncle John invited me and Bronwyn to be his assistants for a few months. He wanted us to help him raise a young female leopard cub deep in the heart of the Luangwa Valley, in Zambia. Having watched Manana raise several litters of cubs, he now felt up to the task himself. He’d taken custody of the young lady after some game scouts had found her mother killed by a poacher’s snare. She was still very much a kitten, only a few weeks old. Uncle John decided that she would be the perfect subject for his latest documentary. He thought Bron and I would benefit from seeing the cub grow.

  Kate agreed. After our first adventure together during the great migration, she’d understood that being out of school could give me and Bron life experiences we would never get in a classroom. Raising a leopard cub seemed like a great opportunity to push those boundaries. She would come along as our tutor. At age fourteen, I was excited at the thought of living in such a remote part of Africa, and I knew from past experience with Uncle John that our stay would be full of adventure. This also scared me slightly.

  What I didn’t know was that the thrill of being in a remote part of Africa meant that Uncle John would operate full throttle in what he called “Africa mode.” Africa mode involved an odd mixture of John Rambo–like ruggedness, derring-do, and the occasional diplomatic feint. This could be simultaneously terrifying and reckless, as Uncle John has been known to throw the unexpected punch one moment and then become the great philosopher the next. Sometimes Africa mode was simply downright baffling, as when John negotiated for some three-month-old dried fish “to support the local economy”—that is, if you really believed the local market was supported by the barter of a pair of strops. Uncle John had of course invited Elmon Mhlongo along as well, but Elmon had demurred. “I’m never going back to Zambia,” he told Uncle John. “Because the Coke is warm, and when you buy crisps, there are only five or six in the whole packet.” This was a very typical nonconfrontational Shangaan way of expressing his concerns; a more straightforward statement might have been “The last time we went to Zambia, we nearly got killed in a helicopter crash!”

  And so it was that Mom and Dad ferried me, Bron, and Kate out to Lanseria Airport, a relatively small airstrip on the outskirts of Johannesburg, where a single-engine Cessna Caravan aircraft was being loaded. No Varty has ever been realistic about what can fit into a car or plane. This tradition harkens back to when my grandfather, prior to a hunting trip to the bush, would load up the family Plymouth with more firepower than the Allied forces at Normandy and then ask the rest of the family to squeeze in around the edges. My gran would then try to fit a few cake tins containing food into the car. A fight over the proper priorities would ensue, usually resulting in a cake being flung out the window in the predawn departure light.

  Uncle John fully subscribes to the “more is more” school of cargo loading. Thanks to him, we now know that small aircraft can’t fly with fridges strapped to the wings.

  The latest cargo battle was playing out on the tarmac, much to the pilot’s consternation. The plane was already sitting at a grotesque angle, bulging like a pregnant guppy as my uncle tried to force what looked like either a diesel generator or a Land Rover gearbox into the aisle, flicking boxes of papayas over his shoulder and out the cargo door over the wailing protests of Gillian, who believed in the value of fresh produce. Meanwhile, I was unnerved by the six-foot fiberglass crocodile that was sunning itself on the tarmac, waiting to be loaded in. (Uncle John was always commissioning lifelike props he could use to get himself closer to the wildlife he was filming. He’s spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours plunked among herds of wildebeests and zebras, crammed sausagelike into fiberglass crocs, or inside the torso of a model ostrich with just his legs sticking out, the camera whirring.)

  Eventually I was able to wedge myself into the plane between the crocodile and a box of Ensure nutrition shakes, as long as I kept my head cocked at a thirty-degree angle. As Bron, Kate, Uncle John, Gillian, and my cousin Savannah, then four or five, loaded themselves into the plane, Mom began to protest; she knew we couldn’t get safely airborne. My father’s reply was typical of what had aged her: “It’s still cool; she should hop.” Kate’s eyes immediately widened. “I’m sorry, what did you just say?” Dad, realizing that Kate wasn’t the calmest flier, pretended not to hear her. And so we went porpoising down the runway, my mother and father waving from the terminal lawn. As the pilot lifted the plane’s nose for a shaky takeoff, I realized that our Zambia expedition with Uncle John was airborne … just.

  The trip took us from Joburg to Londolozi to load some eight-man tents, then 200 miles to Polokwane to clear South African customs, then 500 miles to Harare, Zimbabwe, for fuel, then 460 more miles to Lilongwe, Malawi, for more fuel, then a final 150 miles to Mfuwe, in the heart of Zambia. By the time we arrived, it was evening and the border official had treated himself to a few warm quarts of the local brew; seeing the guppy touch down with more impedimenta than a gypsy caravan must have been like watching Christmas roll in early. I could tell by the glint in his eye that he intended to take us for big ammo; bribery is a time-honored art and blood sport in Africa. Uncle John had briefed us on landing to claim that everything was a “sample” and to expound how we filmmakers had come to produce a documentary on the amazing country that is Zambia.

  From the very first exchange, it was clear that the border official wasn’t buying. We’d already tried the most popular gambit, in which you place fifteen hundred rand in your passport and ask if you can simply pay a “spot fine” rather than import duties. No sale. It was time to unleash my secret weapon. I produced a bottle of Rémy Martin VSOP brandy. The official’s eyes locked onto it the way a lion’s eyes snap onto a lost baby wildebeest. Suddenly I was in the power seat. “You’re right,” I said. “We should rather sit here till your superior arrives, and then we’ll agree on the import duties.” In a moment, we were through: cameras, fiberglass croc, and all.

  Uncle John met us outside in a Land Cruiser he’d somehow manifested from behind a terminal building. I don’t want to say he stole it, but he may have borrowed it without the owner knowing. What I can tell you is that it was hot-wired and we weren’t allowed to turn it off in case we couldn’t get it to start again. “Load up,” Uncle John shouted to our assembled crew. All the luggage that had made the plane look like a dying whale now had to be piled in and on top of the Cruiser. We were joined by a Zambian chap called Ben, who had a scar that arched from his hand up to the point of his shoulder. In between the slamming and crashing of loading the cruiser, he described to me how an elephant had “victimized” and “taken advantage” of him.

  After we got to our lodge, we had to take turns getting up in the middle of the night to go tip diesel into the Landi as it idled in the car park, lest it stop cold. We also met Savannah’s pet baby warthog, Hela, which had been waiting for her at the lodge. Hela was a stout, hairy beast with little tusks just starting to bloom from her prodigious proboscis. Her acquisition was something of a mystery; she was just part of the scene.

  The next morning we awoke early to drive into the heart of the park. Our journey was supposed to take six hours, but it was the rainy season in Zambia and the road looked like a mixture of the Nile River and gorilla snot. Uncle John was deeply excited by the challenge, wrestling the steering wheel back and forth, elbows flailing. He punctuated his revving of the engine with the requisite “fuck,” “Jesus,” “bloody Arab,” and “shit.” The clunking and revving sent us lurching all over the luggage, breathing life into the fiberglass croc as we careened toward its gaping jaws, and provoking Savannah’s warthog into a snorting fit, during which she began to gore Ben. As the wheels spun, Bronwyn received a blast of mud to the face, transforming her into a Kikuyu warrior. Kate looked on, shocked speechless. Suddenly the Landi lurched into a gutter and would go no farther. We were stuck.

  For a long time we didn�
�t see so much as a single car. I began to prepare for a night of fitful sleep in the rain, cuddled up next to Hela the warthog, drinking Ensure mixed with mud for nutrition.

  My uncle, however, was thrilled by the level to which we had become stuck and took it as a chance to muscle about in the mud, trying to single-handedly push the truck out. At one point he slid in under the truck’s chassis. “If it rolls on top of me and traps me underwater, buddy,” he instructed, “just put a piece of PVC pipe into my mouth, like a snorkel.” We were there for about three hours. Hela ran away into the bush, much to Savannah’s distress.

  We were at last rescued by an armada of fishermen, who, with the freakish strength of people who grow up in Africa, were able to pick the Landi up and carry it to a drier spot, where we set off again, Uncle John doing his flailing turkey dance and my cousin crying over Hela’s disappearance.

  We eventually arrived at the access point to my uncle’s base camp in a section of South Luangwa National Park known as Zebra Plains. From here all we had to do was take a small banana boat across the river and then hike about two miles with all the equipment to the camp. Attached to the back of this motorized canoe was an engine powerful enough for the average kitchen blender. Naturally, Uncle John overloaded the vessel. Water threatened to cascade over the gunnels with the slightest movement. Need I add that along the banks of the river were literally hundreds of crocodiles? Most of them slipped into the water as we motored past. Occasionally we would hit a sandbank and I would be ordered out to push us off. I was not happy about getting out of the boat, and this annoyed my uncle, who reminded me, “Africa’s not for sissies.” One time as I clambered out, I set foot on a catfish. Terrified that I’d stepped on a croc, I let out a girlish scream. The disdainful look on my uncle’s face made me wilt inside.

  The camp was nicely set out, with three large tents under a sausage tree (named for its bologna-sized pods). Its thick foliage provided great shade, though we faced the ever-present danger of being brained by a faux bratwurst. The camp also had a kitchen tent and a pit toilet. Herds of elegant pukus and zebras grazed nearby. We dug a well in the riverbed for fresh water. I loved Zambia for the same reasons my uncle loved it; it is one of the last true wildernesses left, saved by its inhospitableness and remoteness.