A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  The saga dragged on for the two years it took for a full ecological survey to be conducted by the University of Cape Town. The people tasked with the survey were accommodated in our bush camps. They held our fate in their hands, which put me on the defensive, but they were my guests. So I welcomed them and helped whenever I could. In any case they were not the villains of the piece, they were just there to do their job. But their presence in Lapalala taught me to be wary of the power wielded by scientists and other consultants. The word of such experts, backed by their degrees and sometimes obscure fields of specialisation which impress us ordinary people perhaps more than it should, can make or break. They can work for truth, if they’re good and worthy of one’s respect as most of them are, but they can also work against truth, if they’re swayed by anything other than their scientific integrity or by something as ordinary and deadly as incompetence, laziness or graft.

  Fortunately the UCT scientists were not of the latter breed and indeed, as it turned out, they were on the side of the angels. The Moerdyk site was not deemed the most suitable. The science backed what common sense had predicted years before: a dam sited in the lowlands beyond the northern edge of the Waterberg where a homeland community was desperately in need of just such an intervention.

  When it was all over Dale had added the Moerdyk farm to the rest of Lapalala. Clive was standing amidst heaps of farming debris on the site that was eventually to become the Lapalala Wilderness School. And, to Dale’s immense satisfaction, the Palala was left to run free.

  So today it is still a living river. On sun-baked rocks you’ll see skinks with green throats and electric blue tails, or striped backs and tails the colour of a Bombay curry. There’ll be delicate flutterings of some of the area’s 128 species of butterfly settling and lifting and settling again on damp sand or muddy patches. In the fine washed gravel of a mid-stream bank you’ll see the water slowly seeping into fresh spoor – rhino or eland or buffalo. You’ll see a reed swaying and dipping under the weight of a tightly packed row of swallow-tailed bee-eaters; in an earthen bank above the waterline, the nesting-holes of southern carmine bee-eaters. When high summer draws its migrants to the Waterberg, there’ll be the iridescent purple flashes of plum-coloured starlings in the reedbed where the Blocklands joins with the Palala. And everywhere, wherever there is access to the water, you’ll see spoor. The hoof prints, paw prints, claw, foot- and handprints of the countless lives that depend on the Palala.

  I wanted that to be Mothlo’s world. She’d be an adult, close to five metres in length and 1.5 metres high at the shoulder; perhaps with offspring of her own, diving and tumbling in the river as she was doing on that first morning of her first September, when at first I struggled to get her in and then struggled a good deal more to get her out.

  “Time to go,” I said brightly. She didn’t agree. I begged, I ordered, I used sign language. She ignored me. I threatened to leave without her – she sank below the surface. I walked away − she called my bluff. Every time I was almost out of her sight and looked back over my shoulder, she was unconcernedly drifting, awaiting my guaranteed return. But when I really did disappear from her view, she hastily scrambled out, crashed through the vegetation to the chattering alarm of vervet monkeys, and trotted after me.

  On the way back over the floodplain I became aware of the light changing, dulling to that eerie, leaden purple which was as much a visceral sense as it was a visual one. I looked up: smoke. It was that time of year. Soon after we came to the Waterberg I learnt to dread it.

  We’re told that the year has four seasons, of more or less equal duration. In Lapalala my year split into more seasons of varying duration, and not according to the Gregorian calendar which puts our annual beginning in January.

  For me it began in October if it was a good year or as late as December if it wasn’t – the rainy season. The Doornleegte floodplain turned green, braided with tracks of slick, sticky red mud. A sky that earlier promised nothing but blinding heat could, with a swiftness which never ceased to amaze me, deliver a terrific thunderstorm that lashed the trees and the animals hunkered down below them with driving, punishing rain. Within hours it would be gone, the valley again sweltering under a hot blue sky. Or there’d be a steady brooding build-up over days until a deafening release, with lightning that knocked out our communications and electricity. En route to check on bush camps I’d stop to watch the sodden grass fields with blue wildebeest or buffalo, hunched and darkly glistening, lowered heads turned to the storm.

  There was a different rain too. A gentle sifting down, a tender green muting of the world. I can hear it now: dripping, dripping under the quiet trees.

  The Palala would run faster and louder and I’d be preparing for as German a family Christmas as I could manage in the heat. We’d warn children and workers to watch out for snakes – at least 30 different kinds in Lapalala, from the harmless yellow-bellied sandsnake to the justifiably feared black mamba.

  In a really good rainy season the rivers would flood like the year Clive, on a tractor tyre’s inner-tube, took our younger son through the raging gorges of the Palala, running the gauntlet of oversized, hungry crocodiles. I made him swear to never ever do that again, not if he wanted the mother of his children to survive to old age, or to allow him to do so.

  Then would come Doornleegte’s main flowering season: the umbrella thorns now pale ivory mounds and the air heavy, sweet and yeasty, vibrating with the sound of bees.

  After the rains: roadworks to repair flood damage to bridges and gravel access roads. The swallows would swarm and gather before leaving us. At the confluence of the Blocklands and the Palala the plum-coloured starlings would be gone from the reedbed, having begun their trek north to Zambia or Angola or even further to Sudan and Ethiopia. Around Doornleegte there’d be loud snorts and grunts and clashing of horns: the rutting season for impala, kudu and blue wildebeest.

  As the days cooled down and trees lost their foliage it would be the time for game counts and game capture. Peak hunting season in the Waterberg. Vaalwater would be abuzz with talk of rifles and scopes and trophies, and I would drive back home wanting to escape not only their voices, but also my own, arguing over and over again the pros and cons of hunting, its role in conservation, its moral position, and arriving as usual at no other conclusion than that it felt like a season for vultures.

  June-July would be dry, the veld crisp, thorny and scratchy. Flaming on rock-shelves and ridges there’d be flowering aloes. Unless a cold spell blew a clammy grey cloud-cover up from the Cape, far south of us, our chilly early mornings would warm up to the kind of mellow day that required coffee and the putting up of feet on a verandah. Rare moments of relaxation given Clive’s temperament and responsibilities, unless Dale Parker was also on the verandah and then they’d be plotting. It was the season for game auctions, for “just going to have a look…”.

  Apart from the prevailing easterly breeze, hardly disturbing us down in the Palala valley, the days would be still. But come August there’d be a restlessness in the air. A dusty, gritty wind grabbing at your shirt and your temper and ushering in my least favourite time of the year, the burning season.

  Whereas in areas like the Orange Free State farmers set fire to their stubbled wheat- or cornfields, or to bleached grasslands in order to encourage a new season’s grazing, in the Waterberg they don’t. Nevertheless, fires do occur. A lightning strike could spark a flame which in no time at all becomes a conflagration. It could be an accident: a barbecue fire which goes out of control. It could be arson: fires deliberately set for no other reason than to cause destruction. They’re hot, fast fires. With a strong wind behind them, especially later in the season when the wind itself becomes hot, they’re extremely dangerous. A fire raging out of control, devastating farmland and bush country, threatening lives, leaving charred carcasses and maimed animals in its wake is a terrible thing to experience. At the first sign of trouble therefore the alert goes out and everyone rallies around. Unless co
ntained, your neighbour’s fire is your problem too.

  On that September morning on the way back from the river, Mothlo trailing at my heels, I was concerned about the dirty-brown stain bleeding into the sky. Fortunately it wasn’t a particularly windy day and the source seemed to be outside of the reserve, but I hoped someone was watching. Such fires do not stop for fences. All over Lapalala there’d be heavily pregnant impala ewes, like the ones watching us, without alarm, as we strolled past. Their peak lambing season would begin soon, in October, just after the first rains which is the real beginning, I always think, of Lapalala’s natural calendar.

  As it happened the next crisis to hit was not a fire and it didn’t come from outside. It began at my home. Perhaps even on the verandah, that pre-eminent place for plans and plotting. I was away, dealing with business and family in Johannesburg. So I don’t know who said what first to whom, but given the pecking order of the reserve’s management, the reserve manager sits where X Marks The Spot. In his defence, though, it appeared that he had had the support of the top brass, Dale Parker and Clive Walker. I can imagine that the decision that it would be best not to tell Conita had been unanimous.

  I returned to Doornleegte to find that Bwana was gone. His enclosure was just the way it was when I left except that the gate was open. No, he hadn’t been taken away because he was sick. He was fine. Where is he then? Out there, in the reserve somewhere. No, he didn’t break out, the gate was left open. He walked out by himself. He is now a black rhino roaming free in the wilderness as he’s supposed to. There we are, see? Re-wilded. Done.

  Gradually, more emerged. On his first exploratory ramble Bwana set off south-east down the Palala valley until many kilometres away he happened upon the airstrip. A light aircraft was parked there. According to the evidence, he made vigorous use of its nose as a rubbing post, and then proceeded to push the now badly scratched and dented plane around in a 360-degree circle. When the fascination of that novel exercise wore off he found an electricity junction box which he demolished, by some miracle avoiding electrocution. His trail of everything that he encountered for the first time and had to investigate eventually led to a bush camp where visitors were staying in tents. By the grace of God they remained calm and after he’d nosed around through the camp as much as he wanted, he ambled off without injuring anyone. Or killing anyone, which, given the fact that this was a well-grown black rhino bull, might have been a very likely outcome.

  I listened to the prepared speech in defence of the Lapalala males’ formula for re-wilding a dangerous animal: Instant, one-step like a new patent bleach or floor-polish, or quick-mix batter for microwaved cakes. Then I heard that word again: “molly-coddling”. With that I understood the Why of what they did. They thought I was on the wrong path with Bwana: too soft, too cautious, too much mothering. It was an animal after all, not a child. A wild animal, not a pet. It was time for a man’s hand.

  They made a good case. No harm seemed to have befallen Bwana or anyone else; most early mornings he’d return to Doornleegte and once lured into a corner of his enclosure with the aid of game-feed pellets and lucerne, he’d allow the gate to be locked again. When the gate was re-opened he’d set off, sniffing and nibbling, and disappear among the trees.

  Perhaps they were right, I thought, we certainly had reason to be hopeful. I admired their ability to take tough decisions. I envied their confidence. All my concerns about re-introducing a black rhino bull into the wild would be answered by that one bold step that they were strong enough to take.

  The first signs of trouble weren’t long in coming. The fenced perimeter of Bwana’s enclosure now marked an ineffectual boundary between him and the freedom he’d tasted. It was an equally ineffectual boundary between him and any free-roaming wild black rhino bulls who might have picked up his scent and tracked him as a rival. They could break in as easily as he could and did break out, again and again.

  One night I was woken up by loud barking noises and the sound of heavy objects clashing. I rushed to the back door. It was a moonlit night and I could see all too clearly as, 20 metres away, my worst nightmare played out. Bwana was on the receiving end of a furious attack by another black rhino bull. I managed to get onto a high post of his enclosure, but there was nothing I could do except watch in horror as heads and horns smashed together. Then they were crashing through bushes, rocks rolling down the slope as they charged up the hill and disappeared from sight. The sounds of the chase grew faint and then it was quiet. I stayed there and waited for a long time. Bwana didn’t return.

  Soon after daybreak I contacted the reserve manager; he sent field rangers to help with the search. Perhaps I was being German again, but I would not accept their giving up. Dead or alive, he had to be somewhere. Eventually they found him, collapsed at the bottom of a ditch. He was alive, but injured. Their calls and prodding elicited no response. There was no way on earth they could get him out of that ditch; exhausted and in pain as he was he’d have to do it himself. They resorted to provoking him, trying to make him angry. It took a long time, but finally they managed to goad him into struggling to his feet and dragging himself out of the ditch.

  It was a slow, dejected little procession that returned to his enclosure: Bwana limping behind his keeper, young Titus, and around them the field rangers who had found him. I stayed with him for the rest of the day, feeding him game pellets and bits of his favourite browse. Pain-killers seemed to give him some relief. There was no remedy for what I was feeling.

  The men got busy with constructing a 20-hectare fenced area behind the house – a protective zone between Bwana and the wild black rhino bulls. As far as I was concerned the labour and expense of driving strong wooden poles into rocky terrain was justified.

  Shortly after that I had to go to Johannesburg again, partly in order to obtain medication with which to relieve the muscle spasms from which Bwana was suffering. That night Clive phoned from Lapalala and urged me to come home as soon as possible. He’d been watching over Bwana for hours. I listened as he described to me, who already knew it so well, how it felt to sit helplessly by while an animal, too ill or in too much pain to be able to move, just lay there moaning softly. All I could advise was to stay close to Bwana and try to entice him to drink a bottle of his long-forgotten milk formula.

  As I put down the phone I knew and I’m sure so did Clive, keeping his vigil at Doornleegte, that our life with Bwana had arrived at a crossroads.

  SIX

  The hopeful species

  THE NEXT MORNING, less than two hours out of smog-choked Johannesburg, I crossed a river and was immediately surrounded by settler history. Legend has it that in the mid-19th century a group of Voortrekker believers, the Jerusalem Trekkers, on their quest to find the Holy Land, came across this water-course in the wasteland. Perhaps it had been summer and the river swollen with floodwaters, for when they consulted the maps in the back of their Bibles it seemed possible that the river (north-flowing at that point) could be the Nile. The previous few days, en route to this riverbank, they’d watched a striking landmark slowly passing on their right as their ox-wagons pulled north – was it a high cliff-crowned hill, or a ruined pyramid? The trek from the Cape had been so hard and so long, the possibility that they had at long last reached the neighbourhood, as it were, of their destination – the Holy Land – seemed reasonable. They forded their Nile (Nyl) River, found good grazing, outspanned to rest for a while, and stayed. It became a settlement, Nylstroom. From miles around pioneer settlers came to trade, and to worship at the monthly Nachtmaal. Their large silver-roofed church, in gracious Cape Gothic style, is a national monument now, Africa’s earliest Dutch Reformed Church to have been built north of Pretoria.

  Exactly like the first time I saw it from the passenger seat in Clive’s little Volkswagen Beetle, way back in the 1960s, the steeple glinted up ahead as, just after sunrise, I drove into the quiet town. Garages were open for business, but not much else. With my flask of breakfast tea and the worries that ha
d kept me up half the night I sat down to while away the time until the banks opened. The sun lifted above the trees and I watched as it lit, one after the other, the graves of 544 women and children who had died in the Nylstroom concentration camp. I wondered if anyone, apart from Anglo-Boer War historians, still visited this place. How many people came searching down these rows of simple stone-packed rectangles with their numbered markers? There were few headstones. Most just had the small green metal plate with its white number. 23, 47, 284 … Were there still family members who bothered to cross-reference number and name in a file in an office somewhere, and then came here because they remembered the stories that had passed down from generation to generation and now to them?

  There are fewer and fewer people who remember, or want to. It’s the way of much of the modern world. It’s not the way of Africa though. Kranskop, that “ruined pyramid” of the Jerusalem Trekkers, had already been known long before to generations of Tswana speakers as Modimo o lle – “the forefather’s spirit has eaten”. There they offered food to the ancestors, and cast their enemies off the cliffs to plunge to their death at the foot of Kranskop/Modimolle.

  In 2002, by government decree, Nylstroom would officially become Modimolle, in honour of this ancient tradition of remembering and honouring one’s forefathers.

  It was still Nylstroom, though, on the morning when I walked away from the concentration camp cemetery strangely comforted by its atmosphere of … I didn’t quite know what. Other lives, other crises greater than mine, perhaps. Or maybe the stillness was enough, the sounds of the waking town and distant traffic more remote than the sense of repose around me. I’d visited other such graves with Clive – he could never understand why some people thought it a morbid occupation. Together we’d searched out settler graves, both black and white, on farms in the Melkrivier area and those of British pioneers in the grounds of the beautiful sandstone church of St John the Baptist at 24 Rivers. We visited Voortrekker graves at Moorddrift and wartime graves in KwaZulu-Natal. We revisited others I’d first seen as a missionary’s teenage daughter in the tribal lands of Queen Modjadji.