Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  The Vav was a master tracker. He recognized the alarm calls prey animals made when predators went in for a kill. He taught me how to follow up on those calls. The birds’ trills became songs to cheer me, the impressions in the sand a language I could read, an opening to a new world in the same way that a foreign language can initially isolate you and then suddenly make you feel perfectly at home. At first the Vav acted as an interpreter, but then in staccato bursts and finally in fluent harmonies, the voice of the bushveld started to talk directly to me through the tracks and sounds.

  Maybe that’s why all the mystics went to nature. Maybe Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad wanted to hear the Creator speak through his creation.

  During those hours out in the bush, we communicated only with hand signals and subtle sounds. When we were tracking an animal, the Vav would hold his hand flat, palm down, to indicate that tracks were old and cold. His hand palm up, fingers poised to snap, was a sign that we were getting close. If we lost the track and then one of us rediscovered it, he would snap his fingers and point at the discovered spoor. Two snaps meant “freeze”; there was some potential danger. Tapping his ear meant “listen,” and slicing his hand across his throat, in that universal gesture for “cut it,” meant “Let’s leave the track; we’re not making any progress.” We’d make a knocking sound with our mouths like a woodpecker hitting a hollow tree to get each other’s attention. Eventually we had so many snaps and knocks that we were like a walking Tourette’s menagerie.

  During those silent hours of tracking out in the bush, I felt a sense of purpose and power seeping slowly back in. Every day was a balm, and our shared comfort in silence deepened our bond.

  Sometimes in the middle of the day I would do a training routine that involved a run through the bush followed by a series of calisthenics: push-ups, sit-ups, and squats. The Vav was amazed that someone would intentionally burn extra energy. “You’re a byzaan”—a madman—“to be running around like this,” he’d say. Still, he became an eager participant in the midday training. He certainly brought his own style to it. Not wanting to sweat up his clothes, he would strip down to his underpants—a ragged pair of tighty-whities—don his walking boots, and run off like a gazelle. We cut quite a sight for the afternoon game drive, the Vav in jockey shorts and boots and me shirtless and bearded like a wild man.

  On a cold winter morning, we discovered a wildebeest a poacher had trapped in a snare, its tongue engorged and purple. I called it in on my two-way radio; the anti-poaching team was on its way. Much to my surprise, the Vav had us wait in ambush with the anti-poaching team until the poacher returned. Amid the gunfire, which made me dive for cover, Chevavane ran the poacher down. It seems he ran as well for the anti-poaching rangers as he did running away from them. He was whatever he needed to be in the moment. The rangers were impressed; of course they didn’t know it was the notorious Chevavane who’d aided them.

  After a while, I started to move like the Vav, think like him, see the world from behind his eyes. I’d grown up learning to track, but the Vav took me to a far deeper level. Tracking put me in the system the same way hunting did, but without having to kill something. It required the same level of immersion and alertness; it was like stringing together a series of clues, and it had all the thrill of pursuit.

  The Vav and I sat around a small wood fire as the dawn broke into gold and the first sounds of the morning resounded a wild call to prayer. On the other side of the hill, a male lion roared. I felt such a deep mixture of emotions. The Vav was a wonderful, uncomplicated person to spend time with, but it was still lonely out in the wild.

  When my time with Chevavane was over, I moved back in with my family. The ongoing litigation was continuing to take its toll. Mom proposed a new family motto: “Love many, trust few, be discerning, paddle our own canoe.” “From now on, we are gonna call ourselves the Canoe Company,” she told us.

  One day Janet, our maid, approached me shyly. “I can help you,” she murmured. It turned out she was also a village sangoma, or medicine woman. She urged us to gather the whole family, including Uncle John, on the deck. This quiet, reserved woman, who normally wore a powder-blue dress with a frilled white apron and a traditional white cloth doek head covering, suddenly appeared before us in full sangoma regalia: a bright red wig, her neck circled with dozens of plastic beads, her legs wrapped in a traditional shwe-shwe skirt. Rattling her beaded wildebeest tail to chase away bad juju, Janet urged us to slip some money under the mat as an offering to the ancestral spirits. She began to shake and twitch, allowing herself to become possessed by spirits, ranting in such rapid Shangaan that we couldn’t even translate it.

  “Bring me a razor blade!” she suddenly demanded. I jumped up, ran to my room, dug out a safety razor, and smashed the plastic to break out the blade. Janet grabbed it from me and started waving it around wildly as Mom blanched. Our maid’s body jerked with convulsions as she danced around the deck, spitting at us and whacking us with the wildebeest tail. Then she danced up to each of us in turn, using the razor to nick us between the eyes, on our wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and the backs of our necks—everywhere the bad spirits needed to be let out. Into each of the nicks she rubbed black powder, or muti, calling in ancestors from the spirit world to heal us. Bron leaned into me. “We’ve totally lost it. We are off the reservation.”

  Another sangoma, this time a white medicine woman, told us to lay giraffe bones a certain way in front of our house. “This will help you see beyond the trouble. Giraffes give you vision.” We were fully aware of how unhinged it seemed, but there was no reason not to go for it; we were that desperate. We trolled the land until we found the necessary bones and arranged them in a pyramid in the front yard. There was no visible effect from the giraffe bones, but who’s to say it didn’t help?

  An astrologer told Mom, “Look, this is really weird, but I want you to see a specialist. There’s a guy I know who deals with people who have been cursed by black magic.” That seemed utterly ridiculous, but by this time, our attitude was Why not? We’d try anything once.

  A few days later, Harold arrived with his wife. A kinesiologist trained by Edgar Cayce, the “sleeping prophet,” Harold was so far out on the fringe that suddenly the giraffe bones seemed normal. He closed his eyes and sank into deep contemplation. “There’s a tear in your energy,” he pronounced solemnly. “You’ve had a Chinese voodoo put on you. I can clear it.” He did a kind of energy healing on each of us. Then he gathered us into a circle, what he called a “clearing ring,” where he declared he was “working in the energy field.”

  Two days later, Harold died.

  “He’s crossed over to do spiritual work for us on the other side, to right the scales,” his widow told us. Such was our mood that we found this a comforting thought. Meanwhile, each of us privately nursed a different belief: “Shit, our problems are so bad, we just gave Harold a fatal heart attack. What’s going to happen to us?”

  As word of the litigation spread, a slow parade of packages began to appear, unbidden, on our doorstep. Statues of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant deity—lord of success, destroyer of evil, remover of obstacles—began to arrive. We got packet after packet of vibhuti, sacred ash, from a famous guru called Sai Baba, considered by some to be the “highest vibrating” person on earth. A steady flow of universal support was coming to us from all over the world, even if we were too locked in fear to see it.

  Uncle John moved to a much smaller farm and, even with the lawsuit, kept the tiger project going. But I started to see him less and less. He didn’t come to Londolozi as much, and when he did, he tended to stay alone. The only people he liked being around were his children. When Savannah was five, Uncle John and Gillian had had twin boys, Sean and Tao. They were full of energy and curiosity, just like their father, and JV lavished as much love and attention on them as he had on me, Bron, and Savannah. Being a parent—a job he was brilliant at—was the one thing that brought him unalloyed joy, perhaps the only thing that kept him from un
raveling completely at this time.

  The years of litigation piled up like boulders. After five years, it seemed endless. Even at a haven like Londolozi, the pressure crushed us all. Uncle John was hurting so deeply, but he didn’t know how to express it. So he did what men like him do: he stayed away.

  He would show up at court in full JV couture, unhappy that he’d had to leave his .44 Magnum in the car. Often he’d get so mad during the proceedings that he would shout out, “This is bullshit!” and one of our lawyers would ask him to leave the courtroom.

  The pain of a lost dream, the constant attacks, and the endless courtroom appearances and lies drained him and Dad. They started talking to each other only in short, clipped sentences, as if saying too much would lead to feeling too much. A space developed between them.

  It made me afraid.

  Dad looked so haggard all the time.

  “What can I do to help you?” I asked.

  “Just keep trading.” Meaning, just keep making Londolozi go. We needed the money. We feared that the cost of litigation would drive us into bankruptcy and we would lose everything.

  I didn’t know if I had it in me.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE FLAMING SHAMAN

  THE ZULU SAY, “Utshani obulele buvuswa wumlilo umame.” The dead grass is awakened by the fire mother.

  The flames hissed through the bush like an adder’s warning. In the darkness they looked like a sunset painted in slashes of orange and red against the earth. Backlit clouds of smoke rose into the black sky, plumes of dancing orange cotton candy spun by the heat and rage of the fire below, a work of anger and artistry.

  Bush fires can start spontaneously, particularly at the end of the winter, when the first rains are threatening. The storm builds, with all its lightning and thunder, but no rain arrives. A single bolt touches down and detonates a raging fire. This one had broken out in a thick patch of brush south of the Londolozi lodges. All around me was a coordinated madness: tractors hauling water and fire-fighting equipment, and men with beaters trying to contain sections of the blaze. The radio crackled nonstop, while francolins by the dozens burst out of the long grass in front of the flames, as if shot from cannons. Caught suddenly on the rising heat, for a brief moment they realized their eagle aspirations, until they got beyond the temporary thermals and their short wings began to flail in the face of their true terrestrial nature.

  My grandfather always said, “Men should be in harm’s way together.” We were designed to work together and face hardship together. We don’t go out and fight wars now in South Africa. Instead, we seek that huge sense of bonding and meaning in booze and women, bar fights and extreme sports. Then a fire touches down, and something in us comes out.

  I was trying my best to coordinate the effort to start back burns all around the racing blaze in an effort to contain it. At times this took me to remote edges of the fire where the crews hadn’t yet arrived. I must have run at least fifteen miles, and it was only one A.M. As I was standing alone on the fringe of flames, downwind so that the smoke led the fire in my direction, I felt the earth shake and jumped aside as a rhino ran past me. And then, in the midst of the fiery furnace, I saw the leopard.

  A strange thing happened. For the first time in years, I felt calm.

  The leopard walked out of the firelight wearing a veil of orange smoke, as if his air of mystery had manifested ectoplasmic dancing spirits around him. There were sparks on his coat, glowing jewels studded among the rosettes. In many ancient cultures, the solitary cat is heralded as the animal that walks between the realms. This was a shaman, a master soul dressed as a beast of the field. A leopard in a fire should have been frantic and alert. But this leopard was as calm as if he were lying in the morning sun. Regal as a king, he looked straight into the depth of my soul. Come with me. I will take you to another place.

  And then, as if approving, he walked past me. Close.

  You are always safe. Amaram hum madhuram hum. I am immortal, I am blissful. Utshani obulele buvuswa wumlilo umame. The dead grass is awakened by the fire mother.

  I just stood in the smoke and chaos, watching the trail of smoke the leopard left behind. My memory flashed to a long-ago moment when my father’s mother, Gogo, described seeing my grandfather’s parents appear in the fire like apparitions the day before he died. She had known then that they had come to carry him away. Fire marked the boundary between worlds, for the first Boyd Varty, and now for me.

  In the clarity of those few seconds with the leopard in the fire, I had a glimpse of peace. To the mystic in me, it felt like the leopard was calling to a place inside me that knew deep stillness. Maybe my subconscious was looking so hard for meaning that I saw it in the leopard, but I truly felt like the message came from nature: There is a place inside you that is as healthy as the day it was born.

  Then I heard my own voice. “I want that.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  TRACKING

  DOWN BY THE RIVER on a winter morning, the water ran clear and shallow over the coarse sand, and the mist rose as if heated at some unfathomable depth by the earth’s heart. Lions had congregated. I could see their clear tracks damp with the dew of the reeds; the water had run down their muscular forelegs, wetting the pads of each paw and leaving a drop of moisture in each pawprint. The tracks approached the water and then turned away. The length of the stride told me that the animals were moving fast; the change in direction spoke to a kind of frustration. The lions wanted to cross but, like most cats, were uncomfortable going into the water.

  Then the tracks headed right to the edge of the water. Here they were deeper, as the sand was soggy where the alpha female had stopped. Her weight had created clear impressions in the sand. In my mind’s eye, I saw her lifting her paws high out of the water as she crossed it awkwardly on tiptoe, her ears pinned slightly back and a wincing look on her face.

  On the far bank I could see where water had splattered down onto the powdery sand; this was where the lions had exited the stream. I’ve followed this pride on this crossing many times. Ahead was the winding path to the tamboti grove at the edge of the clearing, where the shade might have tempted the pride to lie down, unless they could muster the will to push through the heat and head for the deeper shade on the banks of the Manyaleti River. I saw all of this in my mind’s eye as I stood amid the pugmarks in the sand. I am connected with every animal as I track it. The warmth of the sun on me is the same warmth on the lion’s skin.

  In my experience, when you’re tracking, the mystical derives from the practical. You get really good at the practical aspects of seeing tracks, listening to birdcalls and the alarm sounds of animals; then a mystical intuition begins to flow into it. With yoga, you get on the mat and do the positions and the breathing, and then something else arrives. It’s the same in life. You’ve got to go and do the work. You have to get good at following the feeling, practice following the rhythm of life. Then it starts to look like magic.

  After I saw the leopard in the fire, when my soul realized, despite all the grief and trauma, that it wanted to heal, it became like an animal that instinctually knew how to find its way out of the wilderness. It began to conjure imagery of better times as tracks to a healed place. It began to pace, looking for a fresh scent on the breeze. There was the slightest glimmer of intentionality; I cared about finding my way home. I did what my animal brethren did in that situation: I began an inner and outer pacing.

  When I’d first started tracking, as a boy, I was hopeless. Elmon would point out a sign—“Look, a leopard slept here”—and I’d see nothing. Eventually, I got so I could detect those faint clues. The other hazard was following the wrong track. Once when I was ten, we were stalking a rhino in long grass, the three-leaf clover of its gigantic, bucket-sized track. But a hippo had followed the rhino and crossed the path, and suddenly I was following the hippo’s pie-plate prints instead, just similar enough to lead me off course. “Go back to where you started,” Elmon told me. “Go back to where the trac
k is freshest.”

  So, where was my track the freshest? What was the last time I’d felt as healthy as the day I was born? The night after the fire, I spent hours sitting on the front lawn daydreaming, my soul pacing. Then I remembered. It was a few years earlier, with Jen and the lions.

  Jen, the daughter of a family friend, sat beside me as I poked at the embers of the previous night’s fire. Although she was tired, her eyes sparkled in the dawn light. With her stick-straight hair, she was beautiful in a sixties folksinger way. We’d been up all night “kicking logs”—that’s where two people are just talking but at least one of them is thinking there could be a vibe. You’re not sure; you’re kind of keen, but you wonder, is she keen or is she just sitting up because you’re interesting to talk to? Every time you become uncertain about what to do or say, you stand up and kick a burning log deeper into the fire. I knew I was keen because I’d been getting her boyfriend’s name wrong the night before on purpose. It felt good to get a jolt of that playful chemistry, particularly in the midst of the family’s legal troubles.

  A lion roared across the river, the sound starting almost lethargically, then beginning to find its groove, the deep rooo-a-a-a-r blasting into the cold winter air. I could see him in my mind’s eye, his stomach a giant set of bellows inflating and then compressing, the condensation of his breath fogging the early morning air like dragon smoke.

  Jen’s starlit blue eyes brightened with a mixture of excitement and concern. We now had something to work with. I gave her a half grin. “That’s how lion tracking starts,” I told her, trying to sound casual.