Mothlo was five-and-a-half years old when she disappeared. After the flood of New Year’s Eve 1999 I knew there were only two possibilities: she’d died, or she’d survived and our re-wilding programme had been successful. Then one day – it must have been more than a year later – I was sitting in just about the same spot as on that gloomy post-snakebite morning, watching the paradise flycatchers at their nest, when someone brought news from Horizon Horse Safaris. A small pod of hippo had appeared, all of a sudden, in a dam in the Melkrivier system. No one knew how they got there, but the horse trailists have consistently reported seeing them, and one very large female – the matriarch they thought – behaved differently from the rest. She seemed to have no fear of people and didn’t flee back to the water like the others. She stood her ground and in fact seemed to be rather inquisitive.
I knew immediately: Mothlo. It had to be. In time those first rumours were borne out by fact. It was indeed Mothlo. Everything I had dreamt of for her on those freezing mornings at the Palala rockpool had come true. She, now with a pod of her own, was living according to nature’s design. She was free, and therefore according to my personal definition of the term, at last truly “wild” again. For that reason I had no intention of seeking her out. A chapter of her life and mine had closed, and had closed most happily.
To my delight Dale Parker had agreed to let her be. A lesser man might have wanted his property returned, but for Dale our re-wilding success was too good a thing to wish to spoil it.
With hindsight now I wonder if some of the emotions I was feeling on that difficult day in late January 2003 weren’t due to something similar, albeit less happy. Certainly the aftermath of the snakebite was no fun, but perhaps there was also a sense of finding myself in an open space between chapters. An insecure space. Dale’s death had closed a chapter. With the Melkrivier Museum doing well, it seemed as if another chapter might be beginning, although as yet without allowing me any clues as to the meaning it might hold for me personally. What was clear though was that our timing had been good. 2002 had been a year for the conservation-minded. The UN had declared it the Year of Sustainable Development, International Year of Ecotourism, International Year of Mountains, and the Year for Cultural Heritage. And there was our museum, set up right from the beginning to promote sustainable development within the biosphere, ecotourism in the entire Waterberg region, and the preservation of the cultural heritage of all its peoples. Everything seemed poised for the next chapter to be a good one for both the Waterberg and for the Walkers.
FOURTEEN
Mokibelo
I WAS LEANING ON THE VERANDAH railing, staring at a white rhino cow. Like some dry-land whale beached in our garden, she’d been lying there all morning. A few pale golden pom-poms of the flowering fever trees had landed on her shoulders and broad rump. Decorative, but with her not moving, too funerary for my liking. I summoned Clive from his studio. “What’s wrong with her? I’ve never seen her so lethargic.”
“She’s fat. If you were that size you’d also be disinclined to move.”
Munyane was certainly substantial, well on her way to her adult weight of 2.5 tonnes. She’d been free to roam as she liked for about two years, but she still chose to spend some of her time around Doornleegte and often returned for the night. I was therefore able to keep a reasonably consistent check on her welfare. She seemed to be doing absolutely fine, although beginning in early 2002, her behaviour had occasionally given me cause for concern.
She’d come back from an excursion into the veld panting, as if she’d taken some unusually vigorous exercise. A couple of days without anything unusual, and then the next day, there she’d be again: out of breath. Then came another change. If she was around during the evening, I’d notice that she became unusually restless, more and more so into the night. One evening she abandoned her old quarters and took to sleeping very close to the verandah stairs. The next sign of something going on was alarming. I noticed a white secretion running from under her tail and down her back legs and immediately feared that she’d developed an infection. I checked the spot where she’d slept and found that the creamy fluid had dried to a chalk-like, flaky substance. Suddenly it dawned on me: Munyane had come into oestrus.
As with Mothlo I had vowed to let nature take its course; I would not interfere with Munyane’s further progress. Observe yes, when I could, but the policy was strictly hands-off. It wasn’t easy. One night, Clive, lured out of the house by loud noises, discovered not only the source of the noise, but also his wife watching from the verandah. A fully grown male white rhino was very interested in Munyane who was fighting back and barking loudly at him. If this was a courtship it was not a gentle one: the next morning she had bleeding scratches on her face from the aggressive horn-on-horn clashes of the previous night. This went on for a few nights and then came the morning I discovered Munyane lying in the front garden, looking decidedly like the morning after the night before. She seemed dejected and reluctant to move. The reason wasn’t hard to find: under her tail bloody pieces of flesh were protruding from her vagina. Not the most tender initiation into adulthood, but nevertheless a significant positive step in Munyane’s re-integration into life as a wild rhino.
There was no way I could know if that first contact with a male had been successful. No amount of careful observation, and I did plenty of that, gave me any indication whether she was pregnant or not. Taking a hopeful view, I marked off the 18-month gestation period of a white rhino on my calendar.
She began to stay away at night and sometimes we wouldn’t see her for days on end. I tried not to worry. Every time she returned to Doornleegte she seemed to be as calm and friendly as ever. By now her size was impressive: at least two metres in length, 1.5 metres high at the shoulder, and very heavy. But in the absence of any confirming evidence I couldn’t with any certainty ascribe her bulk to a pregnancy – as a white rhino she was meant to be huge. In October 2003, when 17 calendar months had been crossed off on my calendar, it was clear to me that for some reason Munyane was needing to rest a great deal. We were approaching the end of the 18th month when I discovered her lying, bedecked with golden blossoms, and called Clive for a second opinion.
He refused to commit to a diagnosis purely on the basis of minor changes in her behaviour, which might or might not be the fruits of his wife’s fond imaginings. But a few days later I called him again and handed him the binoculars: “Have a look at my imagination.”
Even without the aid of binoculars he could see that Munyane’s mammary glands had begun to swell. “Congratulations, Grandma,” he said. “That makes three.”
In February, to our great joy, Anton and René’s daughter, Tristyn, had been born. With her brother Ayden she provided us with the brightest and happiest moments in a year not noted for undiluted good news, neither in Africa nor in the rest of the world.
The end of February saw the beginning of an ethnic war in Western Sudan as rebel forces took up arms against the Sudanese government, an escalating horror that would become known as the Darfur Genocide. In March American and British-led coalition forces invaded Iraq and set the agenda for a renewed global debate on the morality of war. As in Darfur, and in Afghanistan and most other conflict-ridden areas, it was, understandably, a human-centred debate. The cost to the biodiversity of these regions received barely a mention in the corridors of power.
In July another international debate, one which did include biodiversity conservation, ended in defeat for all parties except the all-powerful Chinese government. Waters started pouring into the newly constructed Three Gorges Dam; 1.3 million people were displaced; archaeological and cultural sites lost; and thousands of already endangered plant species (57% of the more than 6000 in the area) doomed to an even more tenuous hold on life. The dam was bad news too for 27% of China’s endangered freshwater fish species and for the remaining critically endangered Siberian cranes which lost their over-wintering wetlands. Most threatened of all: the Chinese river dolphin, which occurred
only in the Yangtze River. Three years later it would be declared functionally extinct.
In August, closer to home, news broke of the wildlife conservation crisis in Zimbabwe. The Parks and Conservation authority was unable to pay its staff; game scouts had to drastically curtail their patrols as vehicles had run out of fuel; and they were told to shoot game to make up for the shortfall in their rations. More than 3000 cheetah had been lost to illegal settlers hunting with packs of dogs. Rhino poaching was on the rise, and in four years almost 4000 poached elephant carcasses had been discovered in the Zambezi Valley alone.
In September, the 5th IUCN World Parks Congress held in Durban, at which Clive was a delegate, heard that there was simply not enough funding available for the management of the earth’s protected areas – an annual shortfall of 20 billion dollars. The Durban Accord acknowledged that “environmental conservation today has to compete with urgent socio-economic priorities for funding and therefore needs to become self-sustaining in order to survive”. The IUCN chairperson, Yolanda Kakabadse, made it sound slightly more noble: “Areas must be protected not against people, but for people.”
What I would have preferred to hear, idealist that I am, is that wilderness in and of itself was worthy of our protection; environmental conservation ought to be a duty incumbent upon us for the privilege of sharing the planet with such a magnificence of other life forms. The realist in me knew that we had to be grateful that there was at least a perception in some quarters, though regrettably not all, that mankind benefitted from conserved and protected natural areas. The idealist had the last word: maybe such benefits would be seen not solely in terms of commercial exploitation.
Despite all the achievements reported by international delegates at the Congress it would have been a very naïve conservationist who couldn’t read the writing on the wall: worldwide, and not least in a country like South Africa that had to prioritise the eradication of poverty, the fight on behalf of nature’s other-than-human creatures could only become harder.
So for us at Doornleegte Munyane’s news could not have been more welcome. Lapalala was a private reserve, every rhino counted. Naturally my delight outstripped everyone else’s. Detective work by the rangers indicated that the father was Hatton, the large bull that Dale had named for Clive’s grandfather. The Walker men agreed that Hatton had done the family name proud.
Munyane’s next move was entirely natural, but intensely frustrating for me. She disappeared. There was no sign of her anywhere. Eventually I had to accept that either the birth had been disastrous for her and she died, or it had been successful and she was living as a fully re-wilded rhino somewhere in the reserve. Either way she’d left Doornleegte, and me, for good.
For a while I still kept hoping for reassuring news, that Clive or a field ranger had spotted her somewhere on their rounds. At least I would have known that she was alive. There was nothing. That was the worst: not knowing the fate of that animal which for me was not only the adult rhino, but also that terrified little calf with whom I had pleaded through a long summer night to accept my help.
November arrived and with it the shift to my hot-weather routine: household and administrative tasks allocated to afternoons when the stifling outdoors made it less of a penance to be indoors. So mid-afternoon on the first Sunday of the month found me at my work table, listening to rain sifting down, the end of the shower that had broken the mugginess of that day. Wonderfully cool air streamed in through open windows and doors. The rain stopped and I set aside the remainder of my work. The rain-washed air was just too inviting. I walked out onto the verandah.
Clive told me later that I’d given him the fright of his life. My urgent call had brought him rushing out onto the verandah where he found me with my hands over my face, weeping inconsolably. I couldn’t tell him why, so he looked around for the cause of my distress. And then there were two of us in tears.
Approaching through the open driveway gate was a massive adult white rhino cow. She wasn’t alone. Dwarfed by Munyane right up close to her, was the tiniest, most perfect little rhino calf.
They walked up to about halfway between the gate and the house and then stopped. Munyane’s attention seemed to be divided equally between us and her calf.
“Go on,” Clive whispered, “she’s waiting for you. But carefully now.”
I crept down the stairs and began calling her name as I’d done a million times over the years. At the foot of the stairs I waited a while, still calling. Munyane’s full attention was on me now. I took a step and was brought up short by the change in her. There was no mistaking it. When a rhino means business you know it and that was as close as she was going to allow me to approach her calf.
I watched Munyane cross the lawn and walk up to the back of the kitchen. There she tucked into lucerne and pellets like someone who’d discovered a feast after a long famine. All the while her calf stayed tucked up close to her, a perfect miniature, still wet from the rain which in that light gave her as yet unmarked, baby-new hide the look of slate-grey smoke.
Suddenly that magical moment was over. As quietly as Munyane had arrived, she left again, taking her baby back to their world, out there somewhere beyond the umbrella thorns silhouetted in the failing light.
The rangers named the little one Mokibelo (Saturday). Her human grandmother, having been told to keep her distance, had to limit her need to spoil and indulge both mother and daughter to efforts at “improving” the veld around Doornleegte. Additional drinking water and a nutritional subsidy of lucerne and game pellets for mother; two newly created mud holes, one large, one small; a large heap of fresh, clean river sand for the little one.
I saw the circle completed: a rescued hand-reared rhino, re-wilded, teaching her offspring the ways of a wild rhino. From Munyane’s precisely dictated safe distance I was able to observe Mokibelo learning to use a rhino midden, a mud-bath and, among the choicest of Clive’s specially planted indigenous trees in our extensive garden, acquiring her own adept manoeuvres for getting the most out of a rubbing post.
Mokibelo didn’t always want to be taught – she had inherited some of her mother’s stubbornness. With the aid of binoculars I watched as Munyane dealt with her headstrong daughter. Given her diminutive size at the time, Mokibelo was putting up a spirited resistance against overwhelming odds. Her ear-splitting squeals seemed to be, like the tantrum of any human toddler, a blend of indignation, complaint and frustration. Munyane had her head down, pushing her calf in front of her. Mokibelo kept protesting; Munyane kept pushing. I began to feel anxious: Munyane was getting rather forceful. Suddenly the squealing stopped. Mokibelo was jauntily trotting off through the grass ahead of her mother who, head still lowered, was following closely to ensure that the lesson was well learnt: small white rhino calves always run ahead of their mothers.
It was a happy picture which, alas, was becoming extremely rare in a significant conservation area far to the north of us. Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of Africa’s oldest national parks and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was the very last refuge of the northern white rhino. In June 2004 we read the grim news: rebels from the Sudanese war zones had scaled up from wholesale poaching for bushmeat (devastating as that was for the wildlife of Garamba) to wholesale poaching for rhino horn and ivory. Michael Fay, Conservation Fellow at the National Geographic Society, warned that for the northern white rhino extinction was not far off. Little more than a year later he was proven right. None remained in the wild. Only three survived in captivity.
In my memory now that picture of Mokibelo, gambolling through the tall summer grass, seems all the more precious, a tiny hedge against extinction of the single remaining subspecies of white rhino.
Some time later there was another picture that was to engrave itself on my mind. It remains there to this day, ready to unleash an avalanche of memories against which I have very little defence.
It was high summer. A good year. The rains had arrived late, but then c
ontinued to hammer and inundate us as if the season was intent on a lavish, unsparing outpouring of its riches, as if there was a deadline to its generosity. When I got out of the Pajero to open the gate into the oldest section of the reserve, the gluey mud stuck to my boots. There were deep tracks and a few skid-marks: zebra and blue wildebeest which had crossed a short while earlier. All the way up the steep incline the road showed fresh scars from the previous afternoon’s thunderstorm, but Clive had no trouble getting the vehicle to the top. In any case he could probably have driven that road blindfolded. More than 23 years earlier he’d taken me up there for the first time, for my first look at Lapalala. Then, with Malora lowering over us, we had had a celebratory picnic on the cliffs above the Palala, at the bend of it where Lepotedi would one day be constructed.
Twenty-three years, I thought, between that trip and this one, how could it have been so long? Almost a quarter of a century between that picnic and the one we were heading for now. We drove past the turn-off we took then, and past the other ill-defined almost secretive ones to the left and right to other hideaway bush camps. Without hurrying we followed the twisting route, a well-mannered little road that submitted to the land, and gave way to clumps of trees and rocky outcrops. Nowhere did it force its way in or through or across. With the consent of all the natural features of that landscape it took us deeper into the heart of the reserve. There were no vehicle tracks; if anyone had passed that way recently the rain would have erased the evidence anyway. There were no signposts, but like Clive I didn’t need any.
It was midday – we hadn’t managed to get going as early as we’d wanted – but even so there was plenty of game around. Most of them with youngsters. It was the season for it. We didn’t stop anywhere. Neither of us felt like talking. Clive frequently had his head out of the window, reading the tracks as was his habit. Unusually, though, he didn’t tell me what he’d seen or what his interpretation was of what he’d seen. When at last the road – no more than a jeep-track now, rutted and rather overgrown – dipped down towards the river there were impala everywhere. The beautiful heads turned to look at us. None of them ran away. All the way down that rock-strewn slope I spotted more of them in the sparse shade of wild syringa and cabbage trees. Then we wound in among bigger trees, the deeper shade of tambuti, knobthorn and river bushwillows.
A Rhino in my Garden Page 21