A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  At bedtime there’d been no word from Anton. Long after bedtime, still nothing. I nagged Clive to phone. But he, annoyingly, was the voice of reason. The boy knew what he was doing. If there was something he wanted us to know, it would be for him to phone us. I had to wait until breakfast, but the news was worth the wait: Anton was fine, Moêng was in good hands. As soon as she was well, she would return to Lapalala.

  It was only later that it struck me: Return to Lapalala – what did that mean? Several months away from her mother and from her natural environment, and then straight from ARC’s nursing care back into the bush? Not very likely. There would have to be an intermediate stage, a process of re-introduction, possibly a lengthy one. But the new Lapalala regime would no doubt have thought of that. After all, with an eye to the future, they had gone to great lengths to save her. She’s an investment. They would make a plan.

  Two weeks later there was another life to be saved. If I’d thought Moêng’s was a narrow escape, this one was even narrower. And as with her rescue, I missed most of the drama.

  It was 6 January. One of those deliciously drowsy Sunday afternoons. After 28 mm of rain earlier in the day the air was humid and heavy. We’d all taken refuge in the coolest spot, the lounge. Clive, who’d been drawing at the table, muttered something about a pen that needed refilling and wandered off to his office. Mother was dozing in her chair. I was at my desk nodding over my camp admin files, taking the occasional irritable swipe at a fly buzzing around. As flies manage to do so unerringly, it found those spots where it could be most annoying. Back of the neck, sweaty from the heat – I swatted and slapped. Earlobe – I slapped, missed again. It went south, settled on my toes – I wriggled, shifted my feet. Toes again – I stamped a foot.

  It was not the fly.

  That flattened copper head, flared throat – black-banded. Unmistakable: Mozambican spitting cobra. Its first blow struck, it was now rearing back and up and aiming for my eyes. I heard myself screaming. Clive came running along my blood-trail into the kitchen and took charge. I was told to keep still while he efficiently and speedily wound crepe bandages around my leg, from the ankle to well above the knee. Then, over his shoulder as he ran out, he issued commands to remain calm and stay put, to shut-up and get out of the way, to breathe slowly. Mother, Button and I collectively disobeyed as two shots rang out. Clive reappeared, brandishing his revolver: he’d killed the computer cables and wounded the snake.

  I was trying to hang onto what sense I had. The pain was indescribable, radiating out from the bite on my left foot. I knew panic and agitation would only serve to increase Mother’s alarm and speed up the spread of the poison. I had to slow down my breathing. Don’t focus on the pain, focus on the counts: ein, zwei … I wanted to tell Clive to get hold of Anton, but he was in the lounge; I could hear him dialling numbers, dialling again and again. Then his voice: he was speaking to the reserve manager. More dialling, then the phone rang and Clive was talking. The phone calls ceased to matter, because the worst kind of thought had come crashing in, and stayed: Kuki Gallmann’s son, a strong young man who didn’t survive a puff-adder bite. At least this wasn’t a puff-adder. But a cobra… My mind raced through what I knew of snake venom. Neurotoxin, cytotoxin, we were dealing with both. Among Africa’s venomous snakes only the black mamba is considered more dangerous than the Mozambican spitting cobra. This bite was a serious one. I was in trouble.

  Der Herr ist mein hirte – it must have been me, although I was still counting breaths – mir wird nicht mangeln. Der Herr ist mein…

  Suddenly Clive was back and with him an angel in the shape of Madeleen van Schalkwyk, our school officer. That strong, no-nonsense, six-foot-something blonde put her arms around me, ignored my protests and lifted. “Come on then. Hospital.”

  Clive was driving, but he was going the wrong way. It wasn’t the road to Vaalwater and beyond that to Nylstroom with its hospital. Instead we were heading deeper into the reserve, a shudderingly painful vibration of tyres on gravel. Through the rumble I strained to hear Madeleen’s voice: she was explaining that we were heading through the reserve, north and then west to Lephalale. The reserve manager had ascertained that there were two doctors there who were experts on snakebite. “Just relax,” she said, her arms holding me upright in my seat. “You’ll be fine.”

  I tried to talk to Clive, but he ignored me. I shouted to him. What about Mother? How could he have made us leave without arranging for someone to stay with her? Why didn’t he get hold of Anton? His eyes remained fixed straight ahead. Why wasn’t he listening to me? I kept shouting. He was going too fast. Much too fast for that road, for the puddles of rainwater, for everything that loomed up right in front of us, then in the cab with us. Shadows were moving, like water, like snakes. Madeleen’s arms around my chest were too tight. I couldn’t breathe and Clive was going to kill us all and no one was listening to me.

  The next thing I remember was my father’s voice, or it might have been my mother’s, or mine. Auch wenn ich wanderte im Tale des Todesschattens … I was in Madeleen’s arms again. Fürchte ich nichts übles… There were two voices: a crying child, a shouting man. A nightmare duet that wouldn’t stop. I tried to see Clive and Madeleen, but couldn’t. Denn du bist bei mir… I was lying down, sweating in unbearable heat. The nausea took over.

  Then there came a moment of absolute clarity: this was a hospital, it ought to be cleaner. Nurses were lounging around, chatting and laughing. It was all too loud. Unprofessional. Long before I became a teacher I had wanted to be a nurse, and I should have done so: I would have put myself on a proper, cool and comfortable hospital bed, a clean one.

  And then the tears came. All of it was my fault; I got myself bitten and everybody upset and now I was going to die.

  I woke up to the dark. Someone was holding my hand. I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was Clive. Comforted, I returned to my position next to the piano, watching my father’s hands on the keyboard. His voice the deepest one among all of ours: Du bist die ruh, Der Friede mild … You are peace, the gentle peace, You are longing and what stills it.

  A week later I was again in the passenger seat of the Pajero. Clive was driving, slowly. He looked terrible. We left the outskirts of Lephalale. We were still on a tarred road, but bush had taken over from industry and shacklands. Bright blue wings of lilac-breasted rollers swooped in and away again. Too much light for my splitting headache. I closed my eyes.

  It was the same road as the previous Sunday and between that journey and this one, Clive said, we had been through hell. After 100 kilometres at breakneck speed with the air-conditioning going full blast to slow my circulation, he and Madeleen had got me – hallucinating, slurring my words – to the Lephalale provincial hospital. No sign of any doctor. No sign of any interest at all in the patient who had arrived with a life-threatening emergency. Madeleen and Clive, fed up with the lack of cooperation, picked me up out of the Pajero, put me in the wheelchair they’d commandeered and got me into the emergency room. Still no sign of any snake-expert doctor, and the only activity that of an intern and a couple of nurses chattily removing stitches from a screaming child. The rest of the staff seemed to be indifferently hanging around in an indolent stupor. The air conditioning wasn’t working, no one cared. The place was boiling. Clive lost his temper and eventually got some attention, but not much joy. He insisted that I should be given immediate help. They obliged by tipping me out of the wheelchair onto a gurney where I started to vomit. The intern sauntered over, ordered a drip to be put up and proceeded to ignore Clive. Without bothering to first check for adverse reactions he confidently began administering antivenom intravenously. Clive was beside himself, but faced with that most lethal of professional qualifications, Ignorance inflated by Attitude, he had to watch as the ampoules of antivenom went in. The result was anaphylactic shock. An antidote made no difference. At that point, mercifully, as Dr Attitude had run out of plans, Dr Bouwer arrived.

  The receptionist, an Afrikaans g
irl spurred on in all likelihood by Madeleen’s quietly forceful presence, had somehow managed to conjure up this wonderful man on his off-day. He marched in and immediately did two things which probably saved my life: he injected another drug and told Clive to get me out of there.

  The discovery, amidst several sets of shrugged shoulders, that the ambulance seemed to have disappeared was the last straw for Madeleen. The next moment she had nurses running to assist her in rushing me from the emergency room, out through the casualty entrance to where Clive was waiting with the Pajero’s engine running. It was another breakneck race through sluggish Sunday traffic, 20 kilometres to the Marapong Private Hospital, with me delirious on the back seat. At Marapong medical personnel were waiting at the emergency entrance. They rushed me, unconscious, into intensive care.

  A woman spotted Clive in the driveway. He was on his knees next to the Pajero. She brought him a glass of sugar water. She was very kind, he said, and encouraging. Earlier that day she’d brought in her six-year old son with a black mamba bite. Marapong’s emergency team had pulled him through – she was sure they would do the same for me. But she didn’t know that, thanks to my first-stop medical help which had added a time delay as well as an antivenom overdose to the shock of the cobra bite, I’d gone into cardiac arrest. In the end, though, that professional team didn’t disappoint. They managed to resuscitate me and once I was more or less stable, Clive was allowed in. He’d never prayed so hard in his life, he said, nor had he ever had as much cause to be grateful.

  The death of Kuki Gallmann’s son had haunted him, as had the fact that he blamed himself. A few days earlier Button had shown all the signs of having been spat at by, most likely, a Mozambican spitting cobra. But he had neglected to seek out the snake and kill or relocate it before it could harm me.

  Of his drive home that night he didn’t remember much, just his eventual arrival at Doornleegte and his overwhelming relief to find that Clive Ravenhill had finally managed to contact Anton, and that they were both there with Mother. He tried to thank Madeleen properly, but didn’t manage. He’d broken down, he said. She just grinned and crushed him in a hearty embrace.

  The next morning he roped in both Fred and our camp maintenance man, Fransie, and began the search. It took them a week to find that snake. Not a case of catch-and-release – it was dispatched and deposited in formaldehyde.

  That was the second disagreement of my homecoming. I would not have objected if that particular reptile had been buried, never to be seen again. But Clive – out of consideration for my profession as a teacher, he said – thought I’d have wanted it to be preserved. A museum exhibit or a teaching aid. I wasn’t at all sure about that, but he seemed so hurt by my lack of appreciation of his good intentions, I let it go.

  Our first disagreement had been more serious, and I had refused to let it go. I was still in hospital, hooked up to monitors and drips, and wanted to go home. Too early, he said. The doctor, a diplomat, agreed with both of us. More bed-rest and monitoring would be beneficial, but if that meant fretting over the neglect of people and animals that depended on me, it might do more harm than good. I made all kinds of promises about rest and obeying Clive, and was allowed to be discharged.

  It took no more than the first crutch-assisted hobble to Bwana’s enclosure to convince me that Clive might have been right. There was no strength in me. Emotionally too I was a mess. Bwana’s evident pleasure at seeing me again had me sobbing against the railing, then all over the bucket of game pellets and at last into Clive’s shoulder. I was naturally pleased to find that Bwana, like everyone else at Doornleegte, was fine, but also dismayed that my absence had apparently been of so little consequence. Nobody needed me.

  A good sleep took care of that momentary low and the next morning, with immense gratitude, I was able to resume most of my normal activities, albeit for a while on crutches and for a much longer while still in open sandals. The daily chore of dealing with dressings and the unattractive reality of a wound going septic as well as the apparently permanent loss of sensation in part of my foot, were nothing. My life had been spared.

  Why? To what end?

  All those stories about life-reviews in the face of death turned out to be true. The Marapong hospital bed had been a front-row seat: the events, the people, the assignments, the loves of my life. It was a courtroom too, and I both prosecutor and defendant. So much to do, so much still left undone; so much given, so little as yet given in return. So richly blessed.

  I emerged with an invigorated sense of purpose. No challenge too big, no fear I couldn’t face. If a mountain needed moving, I would move it. It got to a stage, one morning, when Clive felt he had to intervene. He reminded me of my hospital promises to rest. That did not go well. It went not-well all the way to the Melkrivier Museum. I’d insisted that he take me there – an inspection was overdue.

  “It can wait,” he said.

  “Katz’ aus dem Haus, rührt sich die Maus,” (When the cat’s away, the mouse will play) I flung at him.

  “Nonsense. We have good people there.”

  “Ver van jou goed, naby jou skade.” (Far from your own, close to your ruin.)

  Poor man. He had learnt not to argue with a wife speaking in tongues. Besides, the truth of that old Afrikaans Boere proverb was indisputable, and in this case most apt. The Melkrivier complex was our personal investment, in finances, furnishings and, not least, faith in the future of the Waterberg. It was doing well, but I believed that it would only continue to do so with a committed hand on the reins. Clive and I had always tackled everything as a partnership, and in this enterprise too I was keen to do my fair share. His schedule of responsibilities was full to overflowing. On top of all the rest he had by now been appointed to the South African National Parks Board, the Green Trust, and the Limpopo Tourism Board. He had also co-founded the Clive Walker Foundation to support the museum.

  And now, I silently admitted to myself, he had to make time for a wife’s convalescence and ill-humour. As the Pajero climbed out of the valley I couldn’t think of a single positive thing to say; cheeriness was beyond my resources for that day. An unfamiliar gloom had claimed me for its own. We emerged onto the Palala plateau to find it lying under a sullen horizon-to-horizon cloud-cover. I stared out at the passing bushveld, which in the dull light appeared dreary and unaccountably empty. A number of the metres-high mountain aloes we passed looked desperate and dying, their crowns blackened, their characteristic broad fleshy leaves thinned, drooping and broken. Even a majestic mature aloe can be decimated by a tiny invader, the aloe snout beetle that burrows into the plant’s succulent heart to lay its eggs. By the time the damage shows on the outside there will be a swollen grub in the hollowed-out stem, voraciously consuming the plant’s life to feed its own.

  Leaving the scenery to Button who, as was her habit, had her head out of the window, I closed my eyes.

  I woke up when the Pajero switched off. Clive smiled at me. “Fancy a cup of tea?” He nodded in the direction of the restaurant’s patio which, in dappled shade, was looking quite charming. “They tell me this place is not too shabby; the boss has very high standards. Bit of a battle-axe. German I believe.”

  Walker’s Wayside was buzzing. Many familiar faces. I matched greeting for greeting, smile for smile, and lied to everyone that I was perfectly fine again. We had our tea and around me conversations ebbed and flowed, while overhead a pair of paradise flycatchers ferried food to their nest. This was the third year I watched them in the massive Schotia (huilboerboon) which spread its generous, deep shade over the outdoor restaurant seating. The male, flamboyant in his breeding plumage, his bright chestnut tail streaming almost 20 centimetres behind his compact boldly dressed body. The pair’s clear calls, loud enough to be heard all over the museum grounds, had become so familiar that hardly anyone bothered anymore to glance up at that free and wild life so busily, so magically, being lived right in their midst.

  If my life had taken a different course I myself m
ight have been oblivious to such things. But two decades of living in the Waterberg bush, and especially my experience with wild orphans, had taught me to marvel at what we call “wild” life. Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of “free” rather than “wild” life. I’d spent hours pondering this while working with my animals. Is a rhino in a boma, or a lion in a zoo, still “wild”? It certainly isn’t free to follow its natural, instinctual life. Bwana was by no means a tame animal, but he wasn’t free. Many, many times we were up on his hill and I’d hear the cry of the Palala’s fish eagles. I’d watch them soar, dive, rise again in their unbounded sky. Free. Truer to their wild nature than my rhino in his 20-hectare allocation.

  Anyone who has taken care of orphaned wild animals, for years as I’ve done, will tell you that it is a singular, incredible experience. However calm the animal may appear to be with you, however much it trusts you, you always know that it is a trust that the animal grants you. You cannot force it; you can earn it but you are not entitled to it. It is an agreement between the two of you, and in my opinion it is quite different from the relationship you might form with a domesticated animal. When I looked into the eyes of my rhinos, I always found something unfathomable there, something beyond my reach, something not own-able by man. In that sense, its freedom – freedom from subjugation by man – is what defines it, and what defines it as “wild”. We might keep it in captivity, but there remains some deep untameable essence that it holds in reserve, something which will never be “owned”.

  Even with the easiest of my charges, Mothlo, I had felt it. I cared for her, but it was with her consent. There was intelligence there, and not only the ability to choose but also the right to do so. Grow to love such an animal and more than anything you will want to see it go free. A lesson in letting go.