Cathedral of the Wild

by Boyd Varty

  I drove to see my uncle, who was living out in the wild central part of South Africa called the Karoo. The man who’d been such a huge part of my childhood, always my icon, had become distant. Driven by the depth of his rage over the litigation, he kept more and more to himself. His children were in boarding school; he and Gillian lived amicably apart. He focused on running his tiger project. As he’d always told me, “Nature doesn’t lie, buddy.”

  A barn and an L-shaped house came into view, the back window frosted with a thick layer of red dust. In front of the house were some old Land Rovers with bashed-up hoods and roofs. Off to the side was an area enclosed by an electric fence at least twelve feet high. After driving all day, I’d arrived at Tiger Canyons.

  The barn door burst open and out strode Uncle John, wearing a jacket mauled ragged by the bush, packing more heat on his hip than Dirty Harry. The years of legal battle had taken a toll on his body; he looked older, weathered, but in his eyes was that same fire and that same passion for conservation and, more than anything, for big cats.

  When the litigation had started and everything had fallen in a heap, a lot of people would have packed it all in and given up. Uncle John had downgraded the scale of the tiger project and kept going.

  He showed me around the sanctuary. Julie, the original tigress he’d started the project with, walked up to the fence and chuffed at him. He chuffed back at her. Uncle John had added cages to the backs of his trucks so he could drive them inside the enclosure and visitors could sit inside the cages to watch the tigers safely. Since the terrain of the Karoo is so flat, the tigers would sometimes jump up onto the trucks for a higher vantage point. Occasionally they would mark this higher territory, with the result that Uncle John would sit quietly inside the truck’s cab while his passengers in the back got sprayed.

  “Do you think I could charge people extra for getting peed on?” he asked me.

  That night we sat in his candlelit house and ate a guinea fowl he’d shot for dinner.

  “Buddy, success and failure are brothers,” he told me. “If this stupid litigation hadn’t come, this would be the most innovative tiger conservation project in the world. Instead it’s my one-man crusade.”

  It was dark in the room except for the candlelight, and Uncle John seemed cast in shadow and in light. “Living with tigers, teaching them to hunt, walking with big cats has been the greatest experience of my life after my children,” he said. “I would take ten more court cases if it meant being able to help these cats.” After all these years, he remains a role model. I envy his resilience.

  As I left, he said a strange thing to me out of the blue: “Buddy, remember, if anything ever happens to me, I want you and Bron to help look after my kids.” Was this man with nine lives finally feeling his own mortality? Uncle John had been mostly alone day after day, month after month, and the last few years had been hard. When I visited, perhaps he saw an opportunity to lay down some kind of plan for the future. This was his way of telling me that he saw me now as an equal, that he loved me and trusted me.

  A few weeks later I got an email from him:

  Buddy—

  If I die, please bury me down at Plaque Rock. At my burial, please make sure there is lots of singing and dancing. People must feel free to express themselves. Songs and poetry. Stories.

  Look after your Dad.

  Tread lightly on the earth. JV

  Uncle John’s whole life had been about survival and triumph: malaria, a brush with paralysis from the helicopter crash, the wear and tear of the court case. Perhaps my uncle felt his life of adventure was catching up with him. Part of my growing up was seeing the people I loved, once so vital and invincible, now with more life behind them than ahead of them. The nature of adulthood is realizing that you’re not immortal. At the end of my twenties, I already understood that I didn’t have infinite time. It seemed it had taken Uncle John deep into his sixties to get there.

  “Look after your Dad.” This was how he said he loved his brother. In taking a moment to think about his death, my uncle had expressed a lot about who he is in life.

  From an original pair of tigers, JV has overseen the birth of several litters. Those tigers have all learned to hunt and are living wild in the large fenced-off area. To see a tiger strolling across the grassland changes everything. People from all over the world make pilgrimages to the middle of nowhere to visit Uncle John’s tiger project, and they’re always blown away by the sight of these exceptional cats. But what they don’t see when they drive off in the late afternoon light is a man completely solitary for hundreds of miles in every direction, playing Bob Dylan songs on his guitar, alone with his commitment to his cause and the stillness of the Karoo night.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  IN THE FRONT GARDEN OF EDEN

  MOM WAS USING HER SECRET WHISTLE to hail Dad. From my cottage I heard it shrilling over the call of the orange-breasted bush shrikes that were inspecting the flowers in the large weeping Boer-bean tree. Mom and Dad have had this secret whistle for so many years that it has developed into a very complex code, blasts and hoots of such intricacy that only they can understand them. They can whistle things from the simple “Where are you?” to “Meet me down by the lower deck. There’s an elephant that’s just been born and the mother is trying to remove the amniotic sac.”

  All I could decipher from the string of tootles was “teatime.” This is the simplest pleasure of our routines out in the wild.

  “Where?” I shouted from my doorway toward the general direction of the sound. Mom fired back a series of tootles that only R2-D2 and Dad could decode.

  “Front garden under the knobthorn because it’s in bloom,” Dad shouted from his vantage point on the cool of the front steps. Thank goodness, because all I heard was “Wooooo-whooo.”

  I arrived at the top of the stairs that lead to the front garden to find Mom crossing the lawn with a tray of tea fixings. Behind her Phillip, the family’s butler, was bearing a puffy granadilla cake on a footed platter as proudly as if it were King Arthur’s sword.

  The knobthorn was beautiful in full bloom, as if the tree’s fingers had been wrapped in pale yellow cotton wool. A pair of chinspot batises flitted from branch to branch, unleashing their shrill whistling call, which makes them sound as if they’re singing “Three Blind Mice” to each other. These two were a couple—the male with a macho black breastplate, his bride with a warm chestnut streak—and I suspected briefly that my parents were part bird.

  It was warm, but heat is never a deterrent from tea, in my mother’s view. “It actually helps,” says Mom. “You heat up, and then when you go back to normal, it feels cool.” She inevitably delivers this line through a thick glowing sheen of perspiration as she sips from her smoldering cup. As some nyalas fossicked among the lacy blue flowers of the plumbagos, a faint breeze plucked dead leaves from the nearby ebony and sent them spiraling down around us like whispering confetti.

  My parents, strangely, looked younger than they had during my inner exile. They seemed to have drawn vitality from the plants, trees, and animals they nurture and love.

  I could see how Mom has let go of trying to control everything. She’s learned to enjoy her life instead of relentlessly steering it. My father’s not much for travel these days, while she always wants to go voyaging. In the past year, like me, she’s stopped waiting for circumstances to set her free and simply headed around the world, taking herself off to the Arctic and India, joining us for a fund-raising bike ride in Namibia. I’m not sure one ever quite recovers from the sight of one’s mother in spandex biking clothes, but we did raise half a million rand for the white rhino.

  “Bloody Elphas Ntuli!” fumed Bronwyn, arriving as if by magic from the Land Rover car park and flinging her Ray-Bans and straw Panama hat onto the table in disgust. With these elegant words she officially opened the ceremonial meeting we call afternoon tea.

  “Who’s for what?” asked Mom, hovering over the tray.

  “Giraffe piss for m
e,” said Bronwyn briskly. “Giraffe piss” has been our name for milky weak tea ever since the day Dad flung a cup off the porch, saying, “This is weaker than giraffe piss.” “So you know, Elphas had to be bandaged up last night after getting knocked over by a ‘buffalo.’ ” Bron used her fingers to rake savage quotation marks around the final word. “Well, today I find out a whole different story from the trackers.”

  “Here’s your tea,” said Mom, handing Bronwyn a cup of the brew at its weakest.

  “Thank you. Does it have sugar?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh, good. I’ve decided to give up sugar.”

  “I think I’ll give up sugar, too,” said Dad.

  We all give up sugar weekly.

  “Boydie?” Mom asked, looking at me.

  “Ya, giraffe piss first,” I said.

  Bron and I like weak, milky tea, so Mom pours ours first. Dad likes his tea the color of what’s left in a water hole during the hottest days of summer—a murky deep brown. We all have to remind each other daily of our preferences, and occasionally we still get it wrong. It’s part of the ritual.

  Now the vervet monkeys, having seen the granadilla cake, a confection made of the sweetest passion fruits, were edging closer, the whole time pretending not to be interested. Every time I glanced at one of the troop, they looked away and began to conspicuously play with a nearby twig or leaf, in an “I don’t care about the cake; I just walked over here to inspect the hose pipe” kind of way.

  “So the trackers go to where he was ‘gored,’ ” said Bronwyn (again with the finger quotation marks), “and what they found in the soft river sand of the boma was an empty bottle of whiskey, an Elphas Ntuli–shaped sand angel with a pool of blood where the head imprint was, and a sharp corner to the barbecue.” Bron’s voice crescendoed. “Now, you don’t need to be Horatio Caine to work that one out! The buffalo story is a complete fabrication that he made up when he realized in his drunken state that he was bleeding out the head.”

  In these parts, “A buffalo gored me” is an excuse on par with that old high school classic “The dog ate my homework.” The habitat team once told me that the reason a tractor had crashed into a fence was “because a ghost tried to drive it out of the shed.”

  Bron’s sneakers were spattered with dried blood, and she was smiling as she mock-raged. “I know that Elphas drinks, and I have tried to help him and I will keep trying, but he’ll lose his life if he bleeds on my voetsek takkies and then lies to me!” Bronwyn looked down fiercely at her voetsek—pronounced “foot sac,” the word basically means “bugger off”—takkies. (Voetsek is also a favorite curse word of Uncle John’s; he uses Afrikaans words to frighten off all manner of game. “Voetsek! Voetsek!” he once screamed at a charging elephant.) Bron’s always dressed immaculately and fashionably. The besmirched takkies were an affront to the rest of her pure white attire.

  “Take it easy, Bron,” I said. “If you put mielie meal on your takkies, I’m sure they’ll go white again.” Bleaching was just one of the endless properties of the cornmeal staple we enjoyed as breakfast porridge, polenta, and in a thousand other dishes. “Now calm down and tell me if anything interesting is happening at the camp.”

  “All is well. Mike and his guests went out after dark last night to follow the lions hunting, and they got back at three A.M. after watching the pride kill a big buffalo bull. So they were all blown away. Exhausted, but you should have seen them—ecstatic!” She smiled. “And Duncan did a Champagne stop for the honeymoon couple. He said it looked amazing: lanterns everywhere, a Bedouin bed, snacks and Champagne set out in the clearing at sundown, with some giraffes feeding nearby. When the guests arrived, a hyena was circling the table. They loved it.”

  “Don’t forget we’ve got to go over the new video for the website,” I told Bron.

  “Right,” said Bron. Was that a blush I saw? Londolozi had a new videographer-photographer, a rather dashing sort. Bron certainly seemed to have had a resurgence in her interest in wildlife filmmaking since his arrival. I’d noticed that she went out after work in the afternoons to make sure we were capturing the best imagery possible for our next marketing campaign. Her newfound diligence was truly commendable.

  My dad watched Bron as she moved around the tea party. He had a distinct glow as he studied his little girl all grown up. When she sat down next to my mother, they looked like pictures of the same person taken twenty years apart.

  Our friend Alex used to call Bronwyn “Tugwana” after a very unpredictable leopard that roamed near our house. My beloved Tugwana charged everything she faced like she’d charged that elephant with the Land Rover as a child. Somehow, Bron had taken all that had come at her these last years and used it as fuel. Like me, Bron had felt too much responsibility for the world. She’s as hard charging as ever, but now she feels that the world also has a responsibility to her. She’s much more relaxed, more able to enjoy things. She’s the one who gins up silly drinks parties or dresses the staff in funny masks or brings a photo booth to a New Year’s party in the bush. For Bron, peace has meant becoming a powerhouse in the business, while remaining that girl in the pink tutu twirling in the front garden.

  “The pookies are back,” said Dad, as wings rustled overhead. When we were kids, Dad used to read a book to Bron and me called Pookie and the Swallows. He’d read to us on his bed while we watched the swallows building their nests under the roof of the front veranda. Those swallows were summerhouse guests to be honored and welcomed.

  And now the swallows had returned. I loved seeing them arrive back at their summer breeding grounds. Overnight there were suddenly flocks of them dogfighting through the sky like mini Spitfires. They skimmed the earth, snatching up any insect that leapt into their path. When they found mates, they began to build their nests, mud igloos glued upside down to the roof of the front porch, dive-bombing in under the eaves and plastering in more mud as carefully as stone masons.

  Some other swallows had built their nests in the apex of the A-frame roof that covers the public area of the Granite Camp. They were very welcome to make this their summer home; the only problem was that during construction of the nest, flecks of mud fell down onto the beautiful cream sofa guests liked to loll on as they watched the baboons play and forage on the thick slabs of granite in front that had given the camp its name.

  Mom had devised a cunning plan. She’d gotten the maintenance team to cut her a piece of plywood, stained it black, and had it installed in the roof beams under the swallows’ nest, with the words “Swallows’ Loft” stenciled in graceful italic at the base. The guests could still watch the breeding pair flit in like jet fighters and disappear into the nest, but the plywood protected their heads from any mud or discarded insects that fell out of the nest. Word got out via the bush telegraph that we had added a special room at the private Granite Suites, and we soon had folks calling to ask if they could reserve the “Swallows’ Loft Suite.”

  “Come, come, come, my fat friends,” sang Mom, who had spotted a family of francolins clucking in from the wild bushy fringe of the lawn.

  The phone rang inside. Recently, I’d heard Dad hanging up on the lawyers after saying, “I know my truth. Same shit, different day—it doesn’t even bother me anymore.” I got to my feet. “Shall I get that?” I asked him.

  “Nah, Boydie,” Dad said. “They are just gonna have to wait. It’s only got the power I give it.” He leaned back against the ebony tree and closed his eyes for a little nap.

  After tea, Mom drifted off toward her garden, Bron down to her room, and I headed over to take up Dad’s previous position on the cool cement of the front steps. Suddenly a shrill blast from down near the vegetable patch sliced the air. A monkey that had stuck its hand into the sugar bowl had panicked, knocking the bowl over, and the nyalas had given flight.

  At the sound of Mom’s whistle blast, Dad immediately popped awake, shooed the monkey off the table, and headed for the veggie garden, an organic wonder that represents Mom’s
triumph over marauding baboons and hyenas and the source of much fresh produce in the Londolozi kitchen. As he walked past, he glanced at me and muttered, “I swear she waits till I’m asleep to give me an errand. She wants a rake.”

  I walked around to the back of the house and stood on the porch overlooking the Sand River. I watched the great fronds of the palm trees flap and shake. Down below, the elephants were feeding on reeds and palm leaves, but I couldn’t see them. Elephants have a way of being around but unseen. Many times on game drives, we’ll pause in the Land Rover to survey the landscape. Suddenly the shadows will shift and we’ll realize that a six-ton elephant is mere yards away; incredibly enough, it had been there all along, massive yet invisible.

  Now I could hear the grumbling of the elephants’ stomachs and that deep vibration they use to talk with one another. I knew that those sounds were in fact a sliver of the full extent of their low-frequency communication, which occurs at a level that my ears can’t hear. Even so, I could feel the invisible net of frequency the elephants cast around themselves as a tingling in my own body. The unseen awareness of a giant presence. The om of the ambassadors of peace. You are always safe.

  I remembered that same feeling the night the gun was put to my head. Horrible things give us the opportunity to feel and sense the bigger powers in our life. Now I realize that “Know your truth, stick to the process, and be free of the outcome” are the only operating instructions we will ever need for a right life. These are the pegs I have put into the ground, and at age twenty-nine, I feel clear and peaceful.

  Sometimes, just as a bonus confirmation, the elephants will walk out from beneath the palms, into the clearing, and I’ll be aware that my sense of them was true. I’ll watch the young ones running under their mother’s feet, flailing tiny trunks that don’t quite work yet, and I’ll know that my sense of God is also true.