Blue found no more food that night, or the next, though she walked eighteen more miles. She lay down often to rest and to scratch her irritated skin. Every day the scabby bald spots spread over more of her body and we feared that she had sarcoptic mange, a debilitating skin disease caused by a microscopic mite. These parasites can be present in a healthy animal without causing harm, but can flare up to provoke hair loss when the animal loses condition, as from malnutrition.
Despite her poor diet and condition, Blue’s slender stomach began to swell slightly and her nipples enlarged. We worried that it would be difficult for her to have young during the drought with no other pride-mates to cooperate in the hunting and with almost no large prey in the area. It was with a feeling of pity that we found her one morning, nursing two kitten-sized male cubs in a thicket of tall grass. At a time when she could barely manage to feed herself, and with no water for thousands of square miles, she could ill afford to lose the moisture and nutrients needed to nurse a demanding family.
We went to see Blue every day to learn how she was raising her young in the drought. One of the first things her cubs, Bimbo and Sandy, focused their eyes on was our battered Toyota. Often the mother and cubs would lie in the shade of the truck, and we would have to be careful not to run over a tail or a leg when we drove away.
In the evening Blue left Bimbo and Sandy alone, tucked away in a thicket of tall grass and bush while she walked for miles in search of food. She would return hours later and stand fifty or a hundred yards away, cooing softly. The grass would stir, and the cubs would scamper out, answering her with rasping, high-pitched meows. As Blue washed them with her rough, pink tongue, they squawled and squirmed. Bimbo managed to struggle to his feet and attempt a getaway, heading for his mother’s teats while she was busy with Sandy. But her huge paw bowled him over, and he found himself wrapped in her great tongue again. When the licking and nibbling was over, they all settled beneath a tree where Blue nursed them.
Food was so scarce that sometimes Blue had to leave her cubs for twenty-four to thirty-six hours in order to find a meal. Both cubs were thin, but Sandy, the smaller one, began to show signs of weakness. More and more often he simply sat in the grass, his eyes listlessly watching his brother bounding through the bush or playing with sticks. Whenever Blue ended a nursing period, it was Sandy who cried loudly for more milk.
One night when the cubs were about two months old, Blue cooed softly to them and started walking away through the grass. Bimbo and Sandy scampered along behind as she walked west down the dune face. But by the time she had gone halfway across the riverbed, the cubs were falling far behind. Bimbo trailed by twenty yards, Sandy by thirty, both meowing loudly. Blue stopped and waited, cooing, but when they caught up with her, she continued west without giving them a chance to rest. She led them to the top of West Dune, a trip of nearly three miles, and there she left them in a patch of tall grass at the base of a tree. Then she walked away to hunt.
Blue’s last drink of water had been during a brief shower ten months before; her diet of springhare, mice, honey badgers, and bat-eared foxes was her only source of moisture. She often had to walk at least ten miles at night to find food, and more and more frequently she encouraged Bimbo and Sandy to follow her for at least part of the way. It was increasingly difficult for Sandy to keep up. He was barely two-thirds the size of Bimbo, his fur was thin, the hard angles of his tiny bones showing through his skin.
One morning we found Blue and Bimbo alone. Sandy had been left behind, or perhaps he had been killed by a leopard, jackal, or hyena. Mother and cub lay together beneath a thornbush. The hot wind swept small waves of sand, soot, and ash between the blackened bristles of grass clumps left from the dry season’s fire. Blue’s ribs and pelvis were outlined under her skin, her gums were white, and her hair had thinned all over her back and belly. She nuzzled Bimbo; he stood on his hind feet and put his padded forepaws on her face. With her broad tongue she turned him onto his back and, while he licked her forehead, she nibbled at his shrunken body. Though she could barely feed herself, Blue gave no indication that she intended to abandon her one remaining cub.
She had been wearing her radio collar for eighteen months; the edges were frayed and the antenna curled like a stretched bed spring. It was more and more difficult to hear her faint signal from the air and several times we had been unable to locate her from the truck. Although we did not want to dart her with Bimbo so near, her old transmitter would have to be replaced. And it would also be a good opportunity to examine her physical condition more closely.
We waited until dusk, when mother and cub had fallen asleep under a large acacia bush; then, with the velocity control knob on the darting rifle set at its minimum and the silencer in place, Mark darted Blue from ten yards away. The dart lobbed slowly, and quietly penetrated her flank. She jumped up, lifting her feet one at a time high in the air, looking around on the ground as if a snake had bitten her. Bimbo watched his mother curiously for a minute, also looking around in the grass, and then both of them went back to sleep.
Fifteen minutes later, Blue had apparently succumbed to the drug; she did not wake up when Mark shuffled his foot in the grass to test her. As we eased out of the truck, Bimbo’s head shot up and he gazed at us with piercing eyes. He had seen us standing in full view many times, but never so close and never walking toward him. While we slowly moved to Blue, he looked back and forth from his mother to us, but she slept more deeply than ever. If we were acceptable to her, we were apparently okay with him; he put his chin down on his paws and, from ten feet away, watched us treat his mother for the next hour and a half.
When we rolled Blue over and examined her closely, we found her in even worse condition than we had expected. She had lost almost all of the hair from her underside, and large patches on her flank and neck were covered with heavy scabs. It was most certainly a case of sarcoptic mange.
Treatment for this disease in the wild is quite complicated, because the animal has to be immersed in a dip of Chemical solution to kill the parasite. We had neither the equipment nor the essential drugs.
“I think I have an idea,” Mark whispered. “We can drain some oil from the truck engine and smear it all over her. If we do it well enough, and she doesn’t lick it off right away, there’s a chance it will smother the mites.”
It sounded crazy to me, but I couldn’t think of anything better. Mark crawled under the truck and drained three quarts of black oil from the engine, leaving just enough to get us back to camp. We poured it all over Blue, rubbing it into every inch of her fur with our hands. Bimbo cocked his head to one side and then the other as we rolled his mother over and coated her chest. When we had finished, Blue was a mess. Sand, oil, and ash had caked to form a sludge that made her look like the victim of an oil spill.
We bolted a new radio collar around her neck, made notes about, and photographs of, her tooth wear, and gave her an injection of antibiotic. From ten feet away we could see no signs of the disease on Bimbo’s skin, so we packed all the equipment and returned to the truck; Blue was just beginning to lift her head and look around.
In two days Blue had licked most of the sand and grit from her coat, but a layer of oil remained, and she didn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects from the treatment. In fact, she began to scratch much less often, and within a week the edges of the large scabbed patches turned pink with healthy skin. Once her hair began to come back, the healing process was remarkable. Within three and a half weeks after her oil bath, her coat had almost completely recovered and all of the wounds had filled in with new hair.
At three months of age, Bimbo was still almost completely dependent on Blue’s milk and had not filled out to the stocky shape normal for his age. When he was nearby, he showed an interest in the few kills his mother made, but he was rarely with her when she hunted. Since most of her prey were small, Blue usually consumed them completely while he was in hiding several miles away.
One night Blue killed a female hon
ey badger and its cub, and after eating the adult, she carried the young badger back to Bimbo. When she laid it on the ground he seized the back of its neck in his jaws and strutted around, holding his head high. Then he lay down, his paws around its back, and quickly ate the three pounds of meat. Clearly the time had come: Blue had to find more meat for her cub.
The next night, after leaving Bimbo at the base of East Dune, she hunted through the dry scrub of the interdunal valley, and then up the dune face. As she neared the crest she saw something she had not seen for a long time. Lowering herself, she stalked forward. Along the dune top, silhouetted against the purple night sky, a bull wildebeest led a long line of black forms through the bush. Shrouded in a cloud of dust, blacker than the night, hundreds of antelope wound their way along the dune.
The tip of her tail twitching slowly, Blue flattened herself in front of the herd. As the third wildebeest passed, she sprang forward, leaped onto its back, and threw her paw over its shoulder, her claws hooking deeply into the tough skin. The antelope groaned and bolted, dragging her along the ground and through sharp thornbushes. But she held on and threw all of her weight under the wildebeest’s neck. When her struggling prey hit the ground, Blue released her grip on its shoulder and grabbed its throat in her jaws, pinching off its windpipe. Lioness and antelope lay together, the wildebeest kicking out at first, trying desperately to breathe, then growing still. Panting heavily, Blue chewed into the flank, licking the blood and eating the tender viscera.
A few minutes later she walked the two miles back to where Bimbo was hidden. She cooed softly and he scampered out, and his nose near the tip of her tail, he followed her back to the kill. Two jackals had found the carcass and were tearing at the meat; Blue loped forward and scattered them. Bimbo joined her and they began feeding, not hurriedly, but with relish.
Eventually, Bimbo slumped down against his mother and slept. For the first time in his life his belly was round and full.
Late the next night Patches, the brown hyena, smelled the pungent odor from the tom belly of the wildebeest. By midnight Blue and Bimbo had finished all but the skin, bones, and attached meat. Patches circled cautiously around the area until she was satisfied that the lions had gone. With hackles bristling and tail raised, she scattered the jackals, already snipping morsels from the carcass, and she began feeding on the large bones, sinew, and skin left by the lions.
Pepper and Cocoa, who had been subsisting on old bones and the occasional springhare, were inside the den. Suddenly an entire wildebeest leg, covered with skin and bits of red meat, dropped through an entrance in a shower of dust. With thumps and squeals, the two cubs pulled the leg into the inner chamber. Patches lay down on one of the mounds and slept; she had carried the heavy leg for nearly three miles.
The following night when we drove to the den, Pepper was lying on her side atop one of the mounds. Usually she would get to her feet and plod to the truck to investigate its interesting odors. But not this night. She merely cocked open one eye, peered at us briefly, pawed some dust carelessly over her stomach, and dropped off to sleep again.
Blue’s wildebeest kill had fed two lions and three hyenas. But it was only one wildebeest, and in this part of the Kalahari they were rare.
25
Black Pearls in the Desert
Mark
An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.
—Aldo Leopold
THE MORNING after Blue had made her wildebeest kill, Echo Whisky Golf and I beat the sun into the sky, trying to find the lions and hyenas before the turbulent desert winds came to life. With Blue’s signal sounding in my earphones, I dropped over the trees into a dune valley, where I was surprised to find her and Bimbo feeding on a wildebeest. Where had it come from and why was it in our area? In all the time we had lived in Deception, we had seldom seen wildebeest, and there had been almost none in the last three years. It must have been an errant old bull who had left his herds 100 miles or more to the south. But since wildebeest are quite gregarious, I couldn’t understand why he would have come all the way to Deception on his own.
I tuned Moffet’s frequency and climbed higher, listening closely to the crackle of static in my earphones. It was hopeless, and so I changed channels to look for Geronimo of the Ginger Pride.
When Deception Valley lay curling away to the south behind me, I noticed plumes of dust, or possibly smoke, rising all across the savanna ahead and below. I had never before seen anything quite like this from the air. Flying nearer, I could see hundreds, thousands of black dots moving along in single file through the bushveld. Stunned, I shouted over the radio to our base camp, “Wildebeest! Delia, I’ve found tens of thousands of wildebeest! They’re moving north!”
I pulled back the throttle and began to descend. Below, the files of antelope were winding through the bush savanna, like long strings of black pearls against the tan monotony of the Kalahari in drought. Although we did not realize it at the time, we had just stumbled upon the second largest wildebeest migration on earth.
In Maun we had heard the hunters reminisce about times when they had waited for hours on the main road to Francistown while hundreds of thousands of wildebeest crossed. But no one knew where they had come from or where they were going. Many people just assumed that the populations exploded in the years of good rainfall, and then died off in years of drought. Only a few months before the present migration, a countrywide aerial survey conducted by a foreign consulting firm had counted 262,000 wildebeest in their southern Kalahari range, a population second only to the Serengeti herds. But the research team had concluded that in Botswana these antelope never migrate.
Delia and I took off at first light the morning after I had spotted the migration from the air. Banking and turning 100 feet above the savanna, we followed the wandering trails south, away from the herds and deeper into the Kalahari, making notes on where the migration had begun, what range conditions were like there, what routes the population was following, how fast it was moving, where it was headed, and other details that we would need to describe this event.
In the five previous years, the Kalahari rains had been generous. The wildebeest herds had led a vagabond’s existence, chasing scattered rain clouds and patches of green grass deeper into the southern part of the desert, far from the only lakes and rivers, 300 miles to the north. Even though they had nothing to drink for several months each dry season, they found moisture as well as nutrients in the fodder they consumed. The grasses on and around the hundreds of calc pans never completely dried out from one rainy season to the next. Each rainy season the wildebeest population had swollen with the birth of many new calves, and these grew sturdy and strong from the protein and minerals in the pan vegetation.
This year, 1979, when the rains had failed, the grasses had turned from green to tan, and now, in mid-May, they were little more than bleached straw, crisp and brittle under the sun.
The wildebeest stood on a low sand ridge, their manes and beards and stringy tails flowing in the dry wind. It may have been instinct, or a behavior passed down for generations, but something told them to trek northward, to the only place they could get water to survive the drought. Probably for centuries, Lake Xau and Lake Ngami, the Nghabe and Boteti rivers, and the southern fringes of the Okavango River delta had provided refuge for Kalahari antelope in times of drought. The dust blowing from their tracks, the bulls and cows and their calves lowered their heads and began plodding north.
This was unlike the Serengeti migration, where herds of wildebeest often mass together in great numbers. Because they live in a marginal, semidesert habitat, the Kalahari population is more mobile and less concentrated to begin with; now it was moving in herds of from 40 to 400 antelope, scattered along a vast front measuring more than 100 miles from east to west.
Not
all the herds headed in the same direction. One portion, probably more than 90,000 strong, had taken the route to the north; tens of thousands of others began walking toward the Limpopo River 300 miles to the east. Whether migrating north or east, once under way they spent little time feeding, for without moisture they could not digest what they ate. Their aim was to get to water, and perhaps to better forage, as quickly as possible. Without water they would starve to death in a savanna filled with grasses. And even when there is an abundance of fodder, it may lack sufficient protein and essential nutrients that antelope need for survival in drought. Trekking in the early evening, at night, and in the early morning in order to avoid heat and dehydration, for days the great long lines of wildebeest plodded onward.
The herds covered about twenty-five or thirty miles each night. From the air the dusty migratory trails looked like gnarled fingers reaching for the lakes and rivers. Some of the wildebeest had already come more than 300 miles, from southern and southwestern Botswana—even from across the border with South Africa. The desert was taking its toll of the very young and the old; they were left behind for the scavengers. The physical condition of each animal was pitted against the great distances that had to be traveled, with little to eat and nothing to drink, but evolution had prepared them for the trek, and the strong should survive.
Suddenly, the wildebeest stopped short. Confronted by something many of them had never seen before, they bunched together and milled about nervously. Stretched across their path were strands of high-tensile steel wire—the Kuki foot-and-mouth-disease control fence, extending for more than 100 miles across the northern border of the Central Kalahari Reserve. At its east and west ends it joins other segments of fence that hem in the desert with more than 500 miles of wire.
Cry of the Kalahari Page 36