A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  In my Doornleegte night I longed for that peace, and was grateful for the soothing sound of the Palala which, on the far side of the floodplain, ran at peak rainy-season levels. But suddenly, deep into the night, there was another sound which instantly put me back on that solitary hilltop above the Majale, looking up at a comet in a field of stars; and even further back still to another Tuli campfire decades earlier, when beyond the crickets and frogs, beyond the sounds of something splashing into the Limpopo, beyond the stories my new husband was telling me, fiery-necked nightjars had been calling. The intervening years disappeared and, beyond Munyane’s ragged breathing and the other sounds of my Waterberg night, there they were again: koo-Weeu, koo-Wiriri, koo-Weeu, koo-Wiriri … I guessed that they were where I’d so often seen them, at the Doornleegte turn-off, their invisibility betrayed by the ruby shine of their eyes in my headlights until, at the very last moment, there was that confident rise and flight into the darkness. I hear them still: Lapalala’s nightjars calling the hours with me.

  I risked a hand on the gate; later, in between the bars of the gate; still later a fleeting touch on Munyane’s head, a micro-second only before she exploded again, but I kept my movements slow and gentle, talking to her and calling her name through hour after hour. I thought of the rangers who had found her and brought her to me: big strong black men who had had to wrestle her away from a stinking carcass, fight to contain her violence and knew very well that they were dealing with a highly dangerous animal. Yet they called her “Little One”, an endearment which in North-Sotho lent itself to that night’s chanting: “Munyane, Munyane.”

  I watched the stars fade and thought of Clive, how his artist’s eye would have delighted in that day’s beginning. I told Munyane about that. I told her many things. There was no one else, just us, and I spoke to her about everything that one sometimes needs to talk about and doesn’t.

  It was morning before she let me touch her forehead. When I stretched to reach as far as possible with slow light strokes along her body, she still flinched and jerked away but I thought her movements were less violent than before.

  I became aware of stealthy sounds nearby. Still murmuring to Munyane and resting my hand on her head, I slowly turned to look. The workers had arrived and were going about their tasks in an uncharacteristic hush. It was touching.

  Titus hovered until I beckoned to him. He approached with the usual respectful greeting, but with a wary eye on the rhino who had an equally wary eye on him. I gestured to him that he could get going with the morning’s jobs. He nodded a couple of times, but remained standing a few metres away, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I pointed to the gate which, battered but still holding, ensured that while Munyane was in her sleeping quarters she couldn’t get to me on the outside. Yes, he said, with a doubtful look at the damage to the gate, that is a good gate. Can he see that there’s an equally strong gate between her sleeping quarters and her feeding enclosure? Yes, he can see that gate too. Can he see that it is securely closed? He squinted at the gate: Yes, it is closed. Does he think he can open the outside gate into her feeding enclosure, knowing that there was that closed gate between him and any danger from her? He beamed at me: Yes, he can do that. I waited. Titus didn’t budge. I tried again, reigning in my impatience so as not to spook Munyane. We did another round of the gates. Yes, he understands everything perfectly. So is he going to do it? Oh yes, certainly! What is it that Magog wants him to do? My sign language, hampered by one hand needing to remain on Munyane’s head, must have been unclear, but suddenly the light dawned: Oh, Magog wanted him to actually go in there? Yes, indeed Magog did.

  Titus, bless his heart, went in and meticulously as he did all tasks emptied out the ploughshares of their unused contents, scrubbed them clean, reburied and refilled them – fresh water in the one, freshly mixed milk formula in the other. I kept up my low-voiced schizophrenic conversation, instructing Titus while reassuring Munyane.

  She didn’t like him being there, but once he was gone she became calmer again. After a while she went down on her knees, then slumped down heavily as if wanting to sleep. With an old, heavy army coat wrapped tightly around myself I crawled into my sleeping bag and lay down right up against the gate. She seemed to be falling into a deep sleep with occasional grunts that I found oddly reassuring. I desperately needed to sleep myself and with my hand on her and still calling her name, I drifted in and out of a doze.

  Two hours later she woke up, apparently calmer. I weighed up the risks of leaving her for a while and having to recover lost ground when I returned. The lure of a hot drink became irresistible and I also wanted to phone – Clive would want to know how Munyane was doing. But when his first enquiry was about her, not about me, it wasn’t what I needed to hear. Lack of sleep, I thought, and swallowed hard.

  “She hasn’t drunk,” I said.

  “You mustn’t take it personally.”

  “No.”

  “Win some, lose some. One has to be realistic about these things.”

  “Yes.”

  A brief silence. Then, carefully. “Conit, you all right?”

  “Of course. If anything happens I’ll phone Anton.”

  “You do that. He’ll know what to do.”

  I was back in the kitchen busy preparing fresh milk formula before I realised that he’d been commiserating with me about what he regarded as a certainty: the inevitable, imminent loss of Munyane.

  When I returned she stood at the gate and I had to admit to myself she still presented a picture of real physical threat. I approached slowly, calling her name, talking to her as I’d been doing all night. She moved away abruptly and snorted. I got right up to the gate. She stomped around and snorted again, but didn’t charge. She watched as I cleaned and refilled the ploughshares and settled again at the gate for however much longer it might take.

  It took hours. I became hoarse but kept whispering to her, watching for the least sign of progress. I held my breath when she sniffed at the water trough and after a long pause took a first sip. It was a day of small exhausted steps for both of us. By early afternoon I was able to stroke her body without triggering a startled or aggressive reaction. By late afternoon I reached now-or-never. My instinct told me it would be fine; my fear told me it could be suicidal. Misjudging a strategy with Munyane could leave me severely injured, perhaps worse. In all honesty by this time I was a mess, so over-tired that I was unsure if I could trust my own instincts, and after more than a week of witnessing Munyane’s impact on a heavy steel-barred gate there was sufficient reason for some trepidation.

  I unlocked the gate and eased it open. She retreated. While talking to her I tried not to imagine another one of her charges without a barrier between us. I stayed at that two-metre distance for a while. She snorted a few times. I saw signs of stress and nervousness, but not aggression, I thought, and inched forward, still talking. Many minutes later, my heart pounding in my ears, I was running my hand over her head, then along her back. More minutes, more stroking and talking, and I walked her out into her feeding enclosure. We got to the ploughshares. She lowered her head, then pulled away. I sat down next to her, kept up my monologue. From down there she seemed so much bigger – I had to reach up to stroke her. Her head went down again. She sniffed, blowing bubbles on the milky surface, and began to drink.

  At sunset the ploughshares were empty and I was weeping, my forehead pressed against the dusty shoulder of a white rhino calf.

  The next day Clive returned. He was used to being welcomed home: he would usually see me as he drove up. Not this time. I was sitting comfortably, my back against the nearest support: Munyane, slurping noisily from her ploughshares. I heard Clive’s call, Rosina’s answer. He appeared around the corner of the house and stopped dead. Munyane’s head jerked up, splattering milk formula in my face. Prepared as I was, the change in her, in those shoulder muscles under my hand, was unnerving. I kept talking, stroking, and tried to keep my breathing steady. Many long seconds later t
here was a wet muzzle butting my cheek, a small messy snort and then her head lowered to her milk.

  Clive stayed with us for a long time, leaning with his arms crossed on the top pole of the railing.

  EIGHT

  New beginnings

  ON 15 APRIL 1996 I turned on the radio and forced myself to listen. A dispassionate voice reeled off names and statistics, as calmly as if she were reciting prices on a commodities market. But she wasn’t. Other voices, anything but dispassionate, followed. They were telling stories which I, and millions like me, were hearing for the first time.

  It was the beginning of formal hearings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a milestone in South Africa’s stumbling progress towards post-apartheid democracy. The TRC was not a military tribunal, although many, intent on retribution, had been calling for a clone of the Nuremberg Trials. But faced with the challenge of forming a nation out of a wounded and fractured citizenry, the new Government of National Unity determined that the overarching goal had to be reconciliation.

  The TRC provided a platform for victims of human rights violations under the apartheid regime to tell their stories. Perpetrators of such violations could come to tell their stories, and apply for amnesty. The TRC sessions were harrowing, but it was the surgeon’s knife cutting to where the wounds were deepest. An individual could stand up in front of the world and say: This was done to me; this was done to my people. The time for unwitnessed injustice was past.

  For all its failings, the TRC offered something that had never before been available to the succession of peoples inhabiting the sub-continent.

  Thousands of years ago this part of the world was home to a people who called themselves the First People – the San. In many places in the Waterberg, in rock-shelters, on hidden sandstone canvasses such as those above the Blocklands, they had left their paintings – a record by and of a people which, whichever way you interpret it, says one thing most clearly: We were here once.

  Their cosmology did not include a sense of ownership, but it included a sense of home. They belonged to the landscape more than the landscape belonged to them. Earth, wind, moon and stars, water and wildlife: these were the coordinates that defined not only their geographical but also their spiritual home. We don’t need to ask where they’ve gone and how that happened: archaeologists have unravelled that tragic history. The unbounded horizons of the San narrowed as settlers – black from the north, white from the south – arrived. They were hounded, hunted, assimilated and all but exterminated.

  I doubt if anyone can stand in those painted rock shelters and not feel a deep sadness for the San. If they hadn’t left their own poignant records we wouldn’t even have known they were ever in those places. There were few witnesses to their lives other than those who came to kill them. And at the time no TRC where their own voices could be heard. We who came after express our sorrow, our remorse. We declare “never again”. But our efforts at redress are too little, too late. Attempts at preserving fragments of bushman heritage only succeed in reminding us of how much they’ve lost, and how comprehensively we’ve all lost as a result of it. That world is gone, and what remains of it is also going.

  Stand, as you can do in the Waterberg, in front of a rock painting of a rhino: the artist is gone, the subject very nearly so. Stand there, feel the world changing around you, and accept that we are moving inexorably closer to the point where those paintings could say of the rhino too: They were here once. There has never been and will never be anything like a TRC for the wild; they’re voiceless and expendable. At this point in my life I have to recognise that our protests – those of us who care about such things – may have been too little, too late. Anyone who has worked with rhino as I’d done so intimately, knows how it feels to work within that narrow margin between extant and extinct. It lends a painful edge to your experience.

  Every day I spent with Bwana and Munyane, and indeed with Mothlo too, was a privilege. A responsibility, a worry, a relentless treadmill of tasks, but a privilege nonetheless. In learning about them I learnt a great deal more about myself.

  In the attempt to prove to myself as much as to others that I could be an adequate caretaker of rescued wild animals, I harvested as much as possible of the knowledge and training I didn’t have from experts who were kind enough to help me. I needed to understand, to know, everything. But in the midst of the big crises when all the knowledge in the world seemed to fail us I defaulted to something far more primal. My need for approval was gone. It was motherhood – fierce, aching and uncompromising.

  That surprised me. I had regarded myself as such a rational being. Sensible, practical, sentimental only insofar as it concerned my family and friends. Certainly I cared very deeply about the natural world and about the preservation of wilderness, but I’d always thought of myself as a people person. Love was for the people in my life. In Lapalala I discovered that perhaps that wasn’t the whole truth.

  Bwana had prepared the way, I suppose, being so small and endangered – his appeal went straight to the heart. With Mothlo too one simply had no defence against her pudgy baby vulnerability. Munyane arrived and it was war. An outsider would have observed what he might have thought was a wild animal fighting against me. She was wild, yes, but we were fighting on the same side. If we’d lost she would’ve died. The extent to which that mattered to me was love.

  If I had been asked years earlier if I’d be able to find the time in my day, let alone my heart, to care for a wild orphan I would have been doubtful. Two orphans: No. Three orphans: Impossible. Perhaps it is just as well that our lives don’t seek our permission before they send us such challenges.

  With Munyane, even more than with Bwana and Mothlo, I could forget about clinging to such shreds as had remained of my dignity. There are women who can somehow manage to appear chic and delicately feminine even under the most trying of circumstances. I’m not one of them. My wild charges taught me to value practicality above all, even when it meant sweat, mud and letting visitors discover me in unflattering poses with my nails broken and hair in disarray.

  After that first breakthrough, Munyane allowed us a brief honeymoon period. She became calmer and progressed from accepting me to also accepting Titus. She was growing rapidly in size, strength and appetite. She still flatly rejected the notion of bottle-feeding, but adored her very large quantities of milk formula and didn’t take kindly to having that reduced even slightly as a start to the weaning process.

  But she was a white rhino, a grazer – she needed to learn that grass was food, so our regular walks had a specific focus. She was content to trot along to and through grassy areas, but showed absolutely no inclination to graze. We played in the grass a little – at least that’s what she seemed to think. I wasn’t playing. I was on my hands and knees, my head right down to the grass, “grazing” as a white rhino would do. She looked puzzled and lowered her head closer to mine. I manoeuvred a clump of tall succulent grass right up to her mouth. Her lips clamped shut the way they always did at the first sight of a feeding bottle. Munyane was not one to take a hint. It took patience and muddy knees, but mercifully she got the message before I had to resort to actually biting off and chewing the grass myself.

  Then came the day when the honeymoon was well and truly over. I would not have been surprised if she’d presented with an upset stomach at the change in her feeding pattern, but Munyane was not going to do anything by half-measures. She got acutely ill. It seemed to be the same situation as we’d had with both Bwana and Mothlo: severe diarrhoea, difficult to arrest, without an identifiable cause or source of infection. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for it to be worse than we had with Bwana, but it was. It seemed as if we were fighting for her life all over again.

  We removed all the topsoil in her enclosure and replaced it with fresh clean soil and sand. As a grazer a white rhino carries its head low to the ground – we needed to be sure that she couldn’t pick up any pathogens that way. After every excretion we cleaned up m
eticulously. Our walks got shorter, then ceased. Her weight dropped alarmingly. We tried lucerne, but although she chewed willingly enough it caused her condition to worsen. She was only ten months old and I had to watch her collapse from weakness and exhaustion. I gave her smaller quantities of milk formula, increased quantities of sugar water every half an hour, and all the care and constant attention possible.

  Almost as a last resort we tried the game-feed pellets, which we gave to Bwana and Mothlo but had not yet offered to Munyane. Game pellets are highly nutritious, consisting of maize, natural browse from trees, lucerne and several other good things unfamiliar to her. She sniffed at it, without much interest, and then, with a sort of dull obedience, took a small mouthful and began to crunch. Perhaps her illness had worn down her resistance and she just didn’t have enough spirit left to refuse my pleading. Relieved not to have had to demonstrate the pleasures of the pellets by sampling it for myself, I sat with her and coaxed her through one small cautious meal after another. Within days even the most skeptical among us had to agree that she was better. Whether we could credit the turnaround to the pellets, or even partly to the pellets, I didn’t know. But though it was much sooner than I’d have liked to have started her on such solid foods, with her health improving I wasn’t about to argue. As long as she wanted her pellets, she got them.

  As she got stronger she enjoyed her meals more, and I perhaps a little bit less. Bwana’s pointed mouth and prehensile upper lip were very suited to his delicate way of scooping the pellets from your hand. Not so Munyane. She’d be just as eager for the pellets and like him wait with open mouth, but then she’d clamp those wide muscular lips like a vice over the pellets and the hand offering them, and pull. It was clear that for her these sessions became less about food than about her willingness to be entertained. Fortunately, since rhino don’t have front teeth she didn’t draw blood, but I wasn’t sorry when she outgrew her mischievous insistence on tugs-of-war several times a day.