by Boyd Varty
In an exception to our usual rule of naming leopards by their facial spot configurations, as the local scientists did, we named Uncle John’s leopard cub Jamu, after the indigenous leopard orchid. Jamu had the most wonderful nature. She was playful and, unlike most leopards, seemed to genuinely enjoy the company of humans. All cats within a species have distinct personalities. Just as you might have one house cat who’s a lap sitter and another who seems always to be planning its escape, some leopards are more outgoing than others. Jamu was a lover. We would spend hours out in the middle of Luangwa, walking with her, watching her teach herself about her environment by climbing trees, pouncing on insects, and sniffing mushrooms.
Living in close proximity to a leopard affords you the opportunity to observe fascinating aspects of its nature you don’t get to see even when close up in a Land Rover: the delicate manner with which they step, the intricate calculations they make in the middle of a stalk, the way they learn through countless failures when to pounce. There are, however, downsides.
Raising a leopard is like raising a kitten that’s eaten a three-year supply of horse steroids. Whereas a kitten might scratch the corner of your couch, a leopard will eat half of it, leaving a fluffy wad of upholstered carnage in its wake. A kitten might give you a few scratches; a leopard will make you look like you lost a fencing duel. Play fighting with a young leopard is a good way to get a sense of its raw power. I came to appreciate just how physically inadequate the human body is in the wilds of Africa whenever Jamu lovingly kicked the shit out of me. Bron and I had to guard a toddling Savannah from Jamu’s natural curiosity; she might have been knocked flat by a playful pounce.
Jamu had a passion for toilet-paper rolls. She would steal ours out of the latrine and, in usual leopard fashion, hoist it into the branches of the sausage tree. (Leopards often drag their kill up into a tree, where they’re protected from poaching lions and hyenas.) After a few hours of chewing on the roll and jumping from branch to branch, trailing long white garlands and sodden clumps of masticated paper, Jamu had the tree looking like a frat house after a hideous keg party. She was also passionate about soccer balls, running them down, trapping them between her great paws, and generally mauling and killing them. Jamu bounded around the camp during the day, but at night we put her in a sizable central cage with branches all around it, so she could sleep safely.
Kate, Bron, and I shared a tent in the camp. Upon arrival, Kate instantly took exception to our new digs.
“This tent smells like a kill—does this surprise us?” she noted sarcastically.
In fact, the mattress I was sleeping on had previously belonged to Shingi the lion, and it had indeed been her favorite place to eat her kills. She’d bitten huge hunks of foam out of the mattress, so I was constantly misplacing a foot, hand, or elbow in one of the holes.
Kate surveyed the general chaos of our tent and set about creating whatever order she could impose on it, as was her wont. She cadged a table from the mess tent and set it up at the front of our tent with chairs: an instant schoolroom overlooking the Zebra Plains. She hung up mosquito nets over each cot. She put a mosquito repellent coil in a corner. The box holding the coil featured a graphic of a mosquito with a red circle around it and a line slashed across it. Kate cut that out and taped it to the outside of our tent as a quirky warning to winged invaders.
As the weeks wore on, the smell of carcass became a regular theme.
“If it’s not the mattress, then it’s beastly Riggi,” Kate complained. Riggi was a guinea fowl Uncle John had asked me to shoot in order to teach Jamu how to go about dealing with a bird carcass. Unfortunately, when Jamu was presented with the dead bird, she had no idea what to do with it, so we kept it with us and offered it to her periodically, hoping she might catch on. The dead bird became such a fixture that Kate decided we needed to name it.
“Let’s call him Riggi,” she proposed.
“Riggi? Why Riggi?” I asked.
“As in rigor mortis,” she said. Over the last couple of days, the bird had solidified into a sculpture with one leg sticking out at an odd angle, its claw curled up tight.
“That thing is now disgusting. It’s been dead for a week!” said Bron.
“It’s not dead, it’s just resting,” said Kate.
“Ya, he’s just sleeping,” I chimed in. Kate and I were both big Monty Python fans, as well as connoisseurs of Gary Larson’s Far Side comics.
“Look, he just moved!” said Kate, pushing the carcass with a stick.
“You guys are so not funny,” huffed Bron.
“Oh dear, I think he’s got a sore foot,” said Kate. This understatement cracked me up because one of Riggi’s feet had, in fact, been chewed off by Jamu.
“Yes, a little tweak in the toe,” I said.
Bron just rolled her eyes in surrender.
The staff of the small camp, all local Zambians, were very dubious about the wisdom of living with a leopard. Bronwyn, on the other hand, was very excited. The only thing that annoyed her slightly was the fact that leopards, which are incredibly soft to pet, have a general disdain for any kind of cuddling that confines them.
Our shower was a bucket with holes poked in the bottom. The bucket dangled from the branch of a tree by a frayed piece of rope. A tug on the rope opened a valve to produce a feeble shower. The sight of the wobbling bucket was far too interesting for a young leopard to resist, and Jamu would scamper up the tree, launch herself from a nearby branch onto the bucket, panic when she realized it was full of water, and bite through the rope, leaving you with a concussion and both a bucket and a leopard on your head. Despite her intelligence, Jamu repeated this maneuver regularly.
John’s life in the bush followed simple routines. He’d take an early morning walk with Jamu to get her used to the wild, then rest through the middle of the day, lying on his camp bed in a faded orange sarong, working on scripts for his documentaries. In the late afternoon, as massive cumulus clouds started to build in the sky, we would all go out and walk Jamu again, kicking a soccer ball for her and rescuing her from trees she got stuck in, my uncle always filming, with Gillian by his side doing still photography.
“Buddy, get down on all fours and see if Jamu will stalk you,” JV commanded.
“Buddy, grab those cameras, batteries, the lenses, the sound mike, the rifle, and a blanket, get my .44, and bring me a banana.”
In the evenings we would eat around the fire or sit in the kitchen tent. Each night we went through the same routine, with Uncle John doing his usual pantomime as he removed lids from the pots with a chef’s flourish. “Tonight for dinner we have … pap and dried fish.” Which was what we had every night.
After our initial crossing on the banana boat, I anticipated a long, happy time on solid ground before we had to set foot in it again. I was wrong. Uncle John saw the canoe as a vessel for adventure, and whenever we weren’t filming Jamu, we trawled the river in search of dead, decaying animals. Most people, when they happen upon a carcass, happily run the other way. Not Uncle John; a good rotting carcass was the perfect bait for crocs, a means to gathering great footage.
Whenever we found a hippo or croc carcass, we would tow it to the bank and then rope it to a root so that we could lie concealed and get good shots of crocs feeding. The photography was easy. Getting the carcass to the bank was the challenging part.
The day we found a rotting young elephant that had drowned was cause for great excitement. “Buddy, it’s like a floating balloon—the crocs are right inside it!” Uncle John exulted. It took us about an hour to chase the crocs off and then rope the carrion to the canoe. Proud of ourselves, we began to power off, but we’d misjudged a few things. For one, we’d stupidly thought that our electric toothbrush–sized motor would be sufficient to pull an elephant upstream. Secondly, when we took full power, the boat hydroplaned, and we nearly flipped. “Climb up and anchor the nose!” my uncle screamed at me, in his excitement forgetting to take his hand off the throttle. After an hour of sc
reaming engines, we’d gone about sixty yards. Then we ran out of petrol. Uncle John reluctantly abandoned the carcass. It took us the better part of three hours to hike home.
Trudging back to camp, I realized that I’d developed a typically African resignation to whatever misadventure Uncle John brought into my life. Setting out with him always prompted nerves, and I could be sure of only one thing: that I couldn’t be sure of anything. I took to hoarding food in my pockets, knowing that a “short walk” could easily become an all-day hike. Not going along was never an option, however, because telling Uncle John that I wasn’t game would have been unacceptable to both of us.
Eventually it was time for me, Bron, and Kate to head home to South Africa, leaving Jamu and Uncle John to spend their days stalking zebras on the clearing in front of the camp. I was deeply happy to be getting in that boat for the last time.
As she grew older, Jamu’s hunting excursions beyond our camp stretched from an afternoon to a day to several days. This is typical of how young leopards start to leave their mothers. Eventually she struck out on her own. We were very excited that Jamu was well on the way to reintroduction and going completely wild. At the same time, we knew that she was entering a dangerous period. She was starting to become a mature leopard, which meant that she posed a threat to other female leopards in her territory.
Tragically, we believe Jamu was killed shortly thereafter by one such territorial female who’d tried to warn a potential rival off her land several times, mounting increasingly threatening attacks. Uncle John found Jamu’s chewed-up radio collar, and we mourned her. Bron and I were already back at Londolozi when we heard the news. Though we were terribly upset, we understood that this was the biggest risk of trying to do this job. Working with wildlife is an emotional calling, but it does breed a certain philosophical nature. You have to do the best you can and hope to get lucky. Jamu didn’t get lucky. But we were happy that she had starred in a film that would affect so many people around the world. We gave thanks for the gift of a leopard who had lived both with us and with her natural wildness, who had lain down with us in Eden, like the lion next to the lamb.
THIRTEEN
TRAVELS WITH KATE
THERE WAS NO HOPE for the villagers. Column after column of marauding invaders swarmed the area, herding their victims into a tight circle, relentlessly closing off all avenues of escape. Then the attack began. I couldn’t believe the extraordinary strength of the invading hordes as they bore aloft, seemingly effortlessly, the spoils of war, their helpless enemies. As I watched them from my outpost hour after hour in utter fascination, I couldn’t decide whether these soldiers reminded me more of highly disciplined Roman soldiers or pillaging Vikings.
“Don’t get bitten, Boydie,” Kate warned me. “They’ve got really powerful jaws, and you might not be able to pull them off.” Like me, she was stationed with her bum in the air, eyes and ears down in the dirt, watching the Matabele ants execute their raid on the termite nest. The Matabeles, sometimes called army or driver ants, are named after a particularly vicious tribe of marauders that swept through southern Africa in the early nineteenth century. I watched those ants for five and a half of the most entertaining hours of my life. I was amazed to see the termites carried back to the ants’ nest like slaves, to watch the soldier termites demolished by the attacking force.
Although Kate’s nerdship encompassed everything from inorganic chemistry, the Fibonacci sequence, and Bernoulli’s principle to Carl Sagan, space, and Star Trek, she had a special passion for insects, especially the way they were put together and how clever all their adaptations were. She would effuse, “I love bugs” in tones generally reserved for how most women adore shoes or the latest handbag. “Imagine this creature was as big as you are, Boydie. If a praying mantis were as big as an antelope, it would be a deadly predator. If an ant were the size of me, it could carry this house around.”
Once, as part of Kate’s Global Insect Initiative, she insisted we drive four hours through rugged terrain to a place where we might see glowworms. “It’s an amazing chemical reaction,” Kate enthused. “A reaction between two enzymes, luciferin and luciferase.” When we finally arrived at our destination, it was black as night and the location had murder written all over it. “Here we are! Let’s turn our lights off and enjoy the fireflies,” Kate said. And so we killed the lights and were greeted by complete blackness: not a firefly in sight. There was silence in the car for about ten seconds. Then Bron cracked, “What a sight!” We all fell apart.
That was Kate’s teaching in a nutshell. She encouraged my curiosity. She never made me leave the ants and come do math; she allowed me to pursue whatever caught my interest and then made me responsible for getting the rest of my schoolwork done.
Seeing how we thrived with Kate’s teaching methods, Mom and Dad had persuaded her to stay on with us as our tutor so we could continue to be near them as they helped set up CC Africa lodges all over the continent.
Kate had been quick to set the tone for the relationship. “I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m here to help you learn as much as you want,” she told me and Bron. Her attitude toward education was hugely defining for me. In formal schooling, we’d been taught to obey. On more than one occasion I’d been forced to learn the hard way, at the end of a thick stick. I’d been stifled by the bells and drills and had lost touch with learning for the love of it; I’d simply fallen in step with the school’s rhythm. Bron and I saw that life outside the school system often required more personal discipline. Kate challenged us to invest in our own learning.
Kate’s methods took the best of the bush education I’d gotten from my old friend Jerry Hambana and crossed it with the finest tenets of traditional education. She set the syllabus, to a large degree, according to wherever we were. If there were interesting mountains, we’d go hike them before learning the theory of their formation. First we would feel them, then think them. “Look here, Boydie, see how the plates are compressed, and it’s causing the mountain to rise.” Kate would point out the changes in contour as we hiked more and more breathlessly up a slope. When we got back to the bottom, she’d spread out a contour map and we could see why the concentric circles got tighter and tighter as the mountain’s elevation increased. She taught us how to read the life of a river: “What stage do you think it’s in? Why do you think it’s meandering? What made this oxbow form?”
Kate always encouraged this kind of wonder. She drew up a syllabus but never wholly relied on it. We once lost the bags with all our schoolwork en route to Tanzania, so for the three weeks we traveled around, Kate just created a new lesson plan. That wasn’t a big deal for her. Presented with a challenge, the inveterate lover of Winnie-the-Pooh simply plied her trademark phrases: “I must ponder” and “I’ll have a ponder on it.” No prescribed curriculum would ever win out with her over teaching us how to teach ourselves. “You can learn more from life than you can in the four walls of a classroom,” she told me. “Just get the piece of paper to keep everyone happy, but don’t let it be the answer.… You find your own answers.”
It’s hard to remember how rough so much of Africa was back in the mid-1990s. The war in Mozambique was over, but we could see its effects on the faces of people; we could read in their eyes all that they’d been through. There weren’t a lot of South Africans traveling around Africa back then, and some who’d gone to Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia had done so for the express purpose of destabilizing those countries. So when Kate, Bron, and I first started traveling with my parents, we were mostly welcome, but it was still a very wild Africa. The economy hadn’t woken up. When Dad and Mom first tried to build a lodge in Tanzania, they couldn’t even get wooden roofing poles, supplies, or food to the site.
We saw the positive effect of education in Zimbabwe and Zambia, even though the places were falling apart. The postcolonial governments might have allowed the infrastructures to crumble, but the people nevertheless were well educated and able to speak English. We sle
pt in tents in the Serengeti, waking at dawn to find a wildebeest giving birth in the morning light. We camped on the banks of the Zambezi, made friends all over Africa, and learned to live and interact with all kinds of people.
By the end of our first year out of school with Kate, Bron and I had done and seen more than some people will in a lifetime. We’d been educated in the mind but also in the spirit. Mom and Dad then decided that we’d been through so much of Africa, they’d throw in their remaining savings to give us some international exposure as well. We’d have stints where they’d be nearby, and times when only Kate would travel with us.
Anyone else would have said it was madness to put a twenty-four-year-old in charge of two teenagers and tramp them all over the world. But my parents recognized that they could trust Kate. Her age had nothing to do with it. What made two teenage boys ready to build Londolozi? How on earth did my father find the love of his life in fifteen-year-old Shan Watson? How did Uncle John know he could trust me at age eight to pilot his Landi or cover him while he stalked a hippo?
Besides, Kate had proved herself as much mama lioness as teacher. She saw her duty as protecting us, her cubs, whenever we were in her care. This was never more evident than when she noticed young men prowling Bron’s perimeter.
Once a group of students from London’s prestigious Eton College came to stay at Londolozi with their parents. The boys were all members of the Etonian Shooting Club, a terribly proper extracurricular activity for a terribly proper bunch of boys.