Cry of the Kalahari

by Mark James Owens

  Chip and Sooty, the cubs’ male cousins, did not help feed them. And though they came to the den to play with Pepper, Cocoa, and Toffee, we suspected they were really looking for morsels of food. In fact, on many occasions Chip and Sooty actually stole the carrion that had been brought to the den for the younger resident cubs.

  But why did Dusty, their female cousin, feed the cubs when their male cousins did not? They were all related to the same degree. The answer is probably that most females remain in their natal clan for their lifetime and benefit from an increased clan size, whereas most males emigrate and do not. Because cousins share only about one-eighth of the same genes, this alone may not be enough genetic incentive to induce a male to feed his cousins. He may benefit more by eating the food himself than by investing it in the survival of the few of his genes that are carried by them. Since he will eventually leave to become a nomad or to join another clan, he would not benefit directly from increasing the number of members in his natal clan. On average, half siblings share twice as many genes as cousins do, so that even though a male half sibling may also eventually leave the clan, by provisioning cubs he would increase his genetic fitness more than cousins would.

  On the other hand, it benefits any female in the clan, no matter how distantly related to the cubs, to feed them, because she is probably going to remain in the clan. If she helps raise cubs, there will be more individuals in the clan to defend the territory and its food resources. Perhaps most important of all, there will be more females around to eventually care for her cubs.

  Thus, brown hyena cubs are raised by all the females in the clan and by the males most closely related to them.3 That the behavior is not purely altruistic should not make it any less special—that a birdsong has a function does not make it less beautiful. By understanding the selective pressures behind the evolution of behavior that at first appears to be altruistic in animals—and also in ourselves—we learn that there is a natural and necessary element of self-interest in these kinds of behavior.

  I thought about these things as I watched Dusty, who did not yet have cubs of her own, bringing food to her younger cousins. Is there any true selflessness in nature—in man? Why had we come to Africa, worked so hard, for so long, under such adverse conditions? Was it only for the animals? Or was it partially for ourselves?

  The cubs were being fed again, though in modest quantities, and once more they began to play. Late one afternoon Pepper roused herself groggily from her sleep. Yawning, she shuffled around the den area a few times and then bit the neck of Cocoa, who was still trying to rest, and chomped at his ears and tail. When he stood up to retaliate, she ran away at full speed, crashing through the dry grass and bush nearby. A few minutes later she dashed back to the mound, jumped high into the air above the den, and dove into one of its openings, a cloud of dust rising from the hole. A few seconds later, her black ears, eyes, and nostrils ringed with white calc dust peeped over the rim of the hole, apparently to see if everyone was watching. Everyone was. She sprang out of the den, ran over Toffee, and disappeared into the scrub again.

  It was usually Pepper who came up with new games. One afternoon she minced over to the truck, slowly extended her muzzle to smell the bumper, and then galloped back to the den, hair standing on end. When she reached the mound, she looked back at the Land Cruiser, her eyes rolling. After that, walking very cautiously, she led her brothers single file to the truck. Standing side by side, they all sniffed the Toyota and dashed away. Each time, they gained more confidence, until finally they walked underneath the truck; I could hear them lapping, snuffling, and chewing every part of the undercarriage.

  One night, after several hours of den observation, I started down the dune face, only to discover that no matter how hard I pumped the brakes, the truck would not stop. Gripping the wheel and swerving to avoid termite mounds, holes, and scrub bushes, I bounced down the sandy slope and shot out onto the flat riverbed. The rest of the drive to camp was uneventful, until it came time to stop. I slowed down, but misjudged my speed. Stamping the brake pedal against the metal flooring, I coasted through our usual parking spot and sailed past the sleeping tent, finally coming to a stop just three feet from the office tent. Mark, who had finished transcribing his notes and gone to bed, was up on his elbow peering out of the tent window with a flashlight. I parted the flaps and said as sweetly as I could, “Don’t be upset, but I think the cubs ate the brakes.” Indeed, they had chewed right through the brake hoses and drained away all the hydraulic fluid.

  Since our study of brown hyena helping behavior would be the subject of my Ph.D. thesis, I observed the den for over 1000 hours, and the cubs became completely accustomed to me. One afternoon, instead of staying in the truck, I sat in the long grass on the edge of the clearing. When Pepper and Cocoa looked out of the den, they ambled up to me, stuck their snouts into my hair, and began sniffing my ears, neck, and face. I remained perfectly still, trying not to laugh when their cold, wet noses blew puffs of air down my neck and spine. Eventually they turned their attention back to the bones that were scattered around the mound at the den.

  Sitting among the cubs, I could observe more details of their behavior and get a fresh photographic perspective. Pepper would even let me take measurements around her skull and neck with a tape while she sniffed around me. But I had to be very careful with all my gear; one time she grabbed my notebook from my lap and ran into the den with it. Fortunately, she dropped it just inside the entrance, so I was able to retrieve it without too much difficulty.

  At times, Pepper would rake her oversized paw down my arm, just as she did to initiate play with Cocoa. And once, at eight months of age, she latched onto my little finger with her incisors and stared into my eyes, as if issuing a challenge. She could easily have bitten off my finger, so I dropped my gaze and quickly pulled my hand from her grasp. It would have been fun to play with her, but this would have interfered with the objectivity of our research. Besides, her powerful jaws could have been quite dangerous. Since I did not respond to their attempts to incite play, the cubs ultimately treated me as little more than an object of curiosity. Pepper would always shuffle to the truck when it arrived and smell me as I stepped out, but then she would usually ignore me for the rest of the observation period. I was always careful to return to the truck before an adult approached, for they were less relaxed when I was sitting in the open only ten yards from their communal den.

  That dry season of 1979 was the toughest we had known because there had been no rainy season at all preceding it. By late September, the temperatures again soared above 120 degrees in the shade, and the daily relative humidity was less than five percent. The adult animals needed more food for their own moisture requirements, and they visited the den less often. Sometimes nothing was brought to the cubs for two or three nights, and for the first time since we had started our study of brown hyenas, both the adults and the cubs looked worn and haggard. Once again, Pepper, Cocoa, and Toffee remained in the cool den most of the time and seldom played.

  Late one afternoon Mark and I were busy in the kitchen when, to our amazement, we saw Pepper walking toward us on the track. She was not quite a year old. Cubs usually don’t leave the den until they are almost eighteen months old, and then they follow adults closely for three or four months before foraging on their own. Yet here was little Pepper out all alone, three and a half miles from the den. It must have been a frightening adventure for her; every hair on her thin body stuck straight out, making her look like a bottle brush. That she had begun foraging on her own so early in life was another sign that the cubs were not getting enough to eat from the adults.

  Pepper came into the kitchen without a moment’s hesitation. She walked to where I was stirring stew over the fire, smelled the wooden spoon, grabbed it, and tried to pull it from my grasp. I held on and won the tug of war, though I would have liked more than anything to have given her the whole pot of stew. For me, one of the most difficult aspects of observing the brown hyenas and the li
ons during the long drought was resisting the urge to help them in some way. But we were there to learn how they survived and whether the game reserve offered enough resources for their conservation, not to offer them comfort. We burned our garbage and buried it in deep pits in the sandveld, away from the riverbed. We kept food out of reach and tried to remember to empty the water basins—I felt guilty every time—so there would be nothing in our tree island for animals to drink. We did everything possible to discourage the hyenas from keying on camp as an oasis in the desert. When they learned that they couldn’t get to the sources of the scrumptious odors, they usually ignored them.

  All except Pepper, that is. After she had smelled all the shelves and boxes in the kitchen boma, she walked down the path toward the dining tent. She stepped inside the door, and before we could stop her, she grabbed the tablecloth and pulled all the dishes onto the floor with a loud clatter. Then, for the next hour, she snooped around every corner of camp, smelling the water drums, poking her head inside the tent doors, and standing on her hind legs beneath the hanging shelf. It was dark when she finally left, and we followed her in the truck to see how well developed her foraging skills were.

  Her hair again on end, she walked north, sniffing here and there on the dry ground and lapping up a few insects. As she rounded Acacia Point, she stopped and stared north along the valley. In the spotlight we could see the large eyes of another predator walking toward us from about 100 yards away. Obviously frightened, Pepper backed slowly toward the truck, ducked under it, and hid behind a front wheel, peering out with widened eyes. Through binoculars we could see Chip, her cousin, approaching; she apparently had not recognized him from a distance. After Chip circled us and moved on, she came out and continued north along the valley floor.

  Nearing the dry water hole on Mid Pan, Pepper was intercepted by two jackals. She stared at them briefly and then scurried toward the den, which was still two miles away. Emboldened by her fear, the jackals closed in, their noses to her tail. She turned back her ears and walked even faster. Apparently realizing that she was a rookie, one darted forward and nipped her on the rump. Pepper tucked her tail between her legs and drew in her hindquarters, but both jackals continued to snipe at her legs as she struggled along, now almost sitting on her backside.

  This continued for several hundred yards, until Pepper abruptly came to a halt. As if she had just realized that she was twice their size, she drew herself to her full height, her neck hackles bristling, and chased the jackals all the way to the edge of the riverbed. We followed her until she returned safely to the den; except for a few ants and termites, she had found no food.

  Several weeks later Mark was in Maun for the night and I was in camp alone. After dark I heard a racket in the kitchen and cautiously crept down the path to see who was there. Pepper rounded the corner and walked straight up to me, smelling my toes and fingers. I followed her as she sniffed around camp, and after she walked out of the island and went to stand on the flat riverbed. I sat down five feet away from her. She turned to look at me and then settled on her haunches, her head up. The moon was only a quarter full in the western sky, but I could see for several miles over the Kalahari. The dark line of the dunes was silhouetted against the lighted sky; the night was quiet. We sat together, two small forms on the desert floor. I had never felt so close to the Kalahari, to the natural world. After about ten minutes, Pepper flicked her tail and walked away without looking back. I wondered where I would go if I had to walk into the desert to find my supper.

  Cocoa and Toffee also explored away from the den, searching for morsels. One night, just after leaving the den, Toffee, who had always been the most cautious, was grabbed and killed by a leopard. We found his remains stashed high in an acacia tree only 150 yards from the den. Sooty disappeared from the area, probably having emigrated from the clan. We found Shadow’s wizened remains on the parched desert floor. She, like Star, had been killed and eaten by lions. McDuff, the dominant male, was dead of unknown causes. Only Patches, Dusty, Pippin, Chip, Pepper, and Cocoa were left in the clan. The drought was taking its toll.

  Pepper and Cocoa began foraging away from the den with an adult, whenever they could find one to accompany them. Patches, the only adult female; Pippin, their half brother; and Dusty, their cousin, always allowed the cubs to tag along and shared any food they had with them. The young hyenas were entering subadulthood, and they must have learned a great deal about the scavenger’s way of life on these excursions: the clan’s territorial boundaries, the network of pathways through the home range, and how to find and appropriate carrion from other predators.

  If they could not find an adult, the cubs wandered off on their own, usually returning to the den by midnight, when it was most likely that a relative would bring them food. Even through the worst of the drought, Patches, Pippin, and Dusty continued to feed the orphans whenever they could.

  Mark was in our reed bath boma one night, taking a spongebath in the dark. He was bending over the basin, his head covered with soapsuds and his bare feet perched on a narrow board to keep them out of the sand. All of a sudden a tongue slithered across his toes. He let out a loud whoop and jumped back. At the same time Pepper’s head jerked upward, hitting the table and upsetting the water basin. She turned and shot for the entrance, but she missed and rammed the log frame of the door with her head. This frightened her even more. Like a ricocheting seventy-pound cannon ball, she charged around inside the small hut, with Mark tripping and shouting in confusion as he tried to figure out what was in there with him. Finally, Pepper blasted right through the wall of the hut, leaving a gaping hole in the splintered reeds.

  When they had both recovered their composure, Pepper shook off the bits of reeds clinging to her long hair and walked calmly down the path to the kitchen. There she picked up the empty water kettle—its handle still bore her mother’s tooth marks—and walked off into the night.

  22

  Muffin

  Mark

  From his slim Palace in the Dust

  He relegates the Realm,

  More loyal for the exody

  That has befallen him.

  —Emily Dickinson

  BRILLIANT SHAFTS of sunlight stabbed through the leafless trees in camp. The rays of white heat stalked us into every corner of our island. It seemed as if there were no longer any seasons—only heat. Each day was like the last, each week, each month the same. By September 1979, Deception Valley had received only four inches of rain in twenty months. The Kalahari was an expanse of grey earth stretching out to a grey sky, as if reaching for rain that would not come.

  One of our thermometers, nailed to a tree in camp, rose past 122 degrees and stuck; surface temperatures on the open riverbed were near 150. Every day we poured small puddles of water onto our canvas cots and wallowed there, in a stupor, for hours. Or, like roaches seeking the cooler darkness, we pressed ourselves to the floor of the tent or sprawled on a corner of the ground sheet.

  The heat clung to us like a leech, sucking away our strength. When we had to perform some task—anything—we dragged through it in slow motion, exhausted. Often, when we stood up from our cots, dark spots would spread behind our eyes; dizzy, we would lower our heads between our knees until the nausea passed. The hours of torpor scrambled our brains and confused us. Sometimes we had to stop and think, “Why are we still here, trying to survive the fifth—or is it the sixth?—dry season . . . the first—or second—year of drought?”

  Because the relative humidity was so low and the evaporation so intense, we did not sweat; that is, the moisture from our bodies was vaporized before it could dampen our skin. We drank quarts of water, hot and smoky from being boiled on the fire, but it tasted good just the same. When the sun finally sagged behind West Dune, our skin felt chilled beneath a sticky film of dust mixed with dry perspiration salts. We could hardly wait to sponge-bathe. But when we stood naked and wet in the boma, with the wind rushing through the flimsy reed walls, we shivered—angry that we we
re always either too hot or too cold.

  Often apart, sometimes together, Muffin and Moffet roamed for months over miles of wasted desert. At times they were as much as thirty or forty miles from any of their scattered lionesses, and we seldom found them with their females anymore. It was a time of social disintegration, of enforced isolation, for members of the Blue Pride. The most the lions could find to eat was a rat here, a springbok there, a porcupine or steenbok (if they were lucky), but never enough to allow them to stay together as a pride.

  Like us, Muffin and Moffet spent the hot days in torpor, lying on bare sand and fire-blackened stubble beneath any sterile bush that offered a little shade. They constantly worked their mouths, pushing their tacky tongues out through dry lips, slowly rolling their vacant eyes toward us when we collected their scats for analysis. Their bellies were high and tight against their spines, their manes thinned, ragged, and lusterless, like the hair of bed-ridden invalids.

  It had been more than a week since they had fed on anything substantial. With no large antelope left in their former Deception Valley territory, they had moved east, hunting every night through the open woodlands near the border of the game reserve. Now the two lions lay panting next to a bush, the only sign of life in sight.