The reason lay at Doornleegte on the day of his relocation.
We had decided that I should wait at Melkrivier to reassure and welcome Bwana. One never takes a rhino relocation lightly, so I was relieved to have my morning fully allocated to preparing the enclosure and interacting with the reception committee. The gap students together with the museum and restaurant staff had gathered round to share in the excitement and, unbeknownst to them, bolster my hopes for the operation. Everything was going to be just perfect, they told me. I smiled and agreed and quietly agonised about what might be happening at Doornleegte.
The projected time for the arrival of the truck came, and passed. The champagne and orange juice went back on ice. We rehearsed, again, our manoeuvres for the crucial moment when Bwana would emerge from the truck. We ran out of things to do. Conversations dried up as more and more of us engaged in the pointless exercise of watching the empty stretch of road that led up to the open farm gate. There were several false alarms. Distant rumbles and billows of dust above the trees delivered a couple of farm bakkies with workers and drums on the back, a truck with a mysterious load bulging under tarpaulin, and a game ranger’s Land Cruiser speeding past on some urgent mission. I was wrestling with the temptation to start phoning when there was yet another promising rumble from the direction of Lapalala. With the road largely obscured we couldn’t see what it was, but it sounded like the right kind of truck moving at the right kind of speed. We heard it taking the left turn to the museum, and then where it could have turned into the museum gates it didn’t but kept coming in our direction. At last it came into view and turned in towards us. While the large truck backed up to the enclosure, the reception committee scattered to take up their positions, out of sight and under oath not to utter a peep until Bwana was secured behind a locked gate.
It couldn’t have gone better. On cue, Bwana appeared and proceeded as if he, too, had been rehearsing for this moment. He calmly strolled into his enclosure and sniffed and snuffled at a few items that caught his interest. Then he took notice of his new drinking trough and signalled his approval by drinking from it. He walked over to the feeding area with its extravagant supply of the most appetising browse I’d been able to find. Approved – he chomped a few branches. He concluded his première performance at Melkrivier by marking his territory in true black rhino fashion, with a few strong squirts of urine.
I felt like applauding. He could not have known of course how critical his first appearance would be, but I did. He was a rhino with a reputation. Even though his near-tragic encounter with David Bradfield three years earlier had been kept under the radar as far as possible, some information had leaked out, just enough to fuel rumour and speculation. The observers of his arrival at Melkrivier were mostly people who lived nearby. They needed to be reassured that having a huge black rhino bull, especially this one, in their neighbourhood would not pose any danger to them. Bwana’s behaviour fitted the bill perfectly.
The celebrations over, I stayed behind with Bwana for a little while and then went home. I found Clive in a subdued mood, and after digging for clues got it out of him. The morning had not gone so smoothly after all. It had started well enough with Bwana calm in his Doornleegte enclosure. He knew something was up – animals always do – but didn’t seem to be unduly alarmed. The game transporter truck with its crate stood ready. The veterinarian prepared the tranquillising dart. Clive helped him to position for the best shot, and then watched as it went wrong. The dart missed the rump muscle and hit the hip bone. It must have been painful and with only about half the correct dose of the drug in him Bwana reacted with extreme agitation. A second shot had to be prepared, in haste and with some guesswork involved, since there was no way of knowing precisely how much more of the drug needed to be administered, and how much more of it would be too much. Bwana was stressed, angry and confused and presented a tricky target. Fortunately the second shot went home. The relocation, though an hour late, proceeded without further hitches. At Melkrivier Bwana emerged from his crate none the worse for the experience. So we thought.
Late that afternoon, having finished with Moêng, I allocated some more time to spend with him. It wasn’t just for the pleasure of seeing him settle so easily into his new home, it was also to guard against a break in continuity. I wanted the only change to have been one of location, everything else had to continue as before. Bwana was lying in the shade of violet and horn-pod trees deeper into his enclosure. At least it might have been shady when he went to lie down there, but with the sun dipping towards the horizon the light was angling in underneath the foliage. He was dozing or perhaps simply too comfortable to move. It was such a tranquil scene I was almost sorry to have to disturb it. I called, he lumbered up and stretched. He had done some more investigating since the morning: the mudpool appeared to have also met with approval. He walked up to me, hinted for the usual head-rubs and handfuls of game feed pellets. Everything just as usual. But then, a couple of feet away from me, without any warning whatsoever he was suddenly in a mood I’d never seen him in before.
I was jolted into stepping back a few paces. But Bwana’s attention wasn’t on me. I looked around: it was Clive. He was still some 20 metres away, so I thought maybe Bwana didn’t realise who it was. I spoke to him and stretched out to touch him, but it was an angry wild animal in front of me. He wouldn’t be touched. He appeared to not hear my voice.
Clive had stopped: “Careful Conit.” It was that quiet, dead-steady voice I’d got to know in dangerous situations on wilderness trails. The very first time I walked in the wild with him, he had told me as he told every new group of trailists: “Don’t think you know better.” Don’t think you’d be able to predict a wild animal’s behaviour, or read his intention to attack. Only the most experienced bush guides can read a warning, sometimes. There may be no warning at all from elephant, rhino, buffalo, or lion – and they’re all faster than most humans. Even a hippo, that overlarge, heavy, lumbering animal, can be frighteningly swift in water and can attack without warning. In his career as ranger and trails leader Clive had at some point or another faced all of these potentially deadly animals, and so have I. We both knew trouble when we saw it. An elephant, its trunk curled and ears pressed flat back, coming at you at terrific speed; a lion, ears flat, tail lashing, a fierce, hostile look in the amber eyes, every muscle in its body taut, ready for the electrifying charge; a black rhino with the same high head, eyes and stance of Bwana’s right now, that same loud, sharp snort…
Very quietly Clive retreated while I remained at the railing, my pulse hammering in my ears. It was only after Clive had completely disappeared from sight, and I suppose from the reach of Bwana’s acute hearing too, that I again had the familiar calm rhino with me.
At first I hoped that it was just his reaction to the disturbance of relocation – it would wear off. It didn’t. And it was personal. Clive had become associated for him with the stress he’d experienced during the botched darting. He represented danger, and a black rhino has only one way to react to danger, with aggression. So unfortunately Bwana’s enclosure became off-limits to Clive. I knew this saddened him and hoped that their previous good relations would be restored, Bwana would forget. After all, general consensus held that black rhinos were not the smartest animals, unlike elephants with their proverbial long memories. Well, in this instance, general consensus was dead wrong. From that day on, whenever Clive came to fetch me, he had to wait well away from Bwana’s enclosure, at the gate.
So it was at that gate that I gave him the happy news of Moêng’s improved gastrointestinal health. Insignificant as it was as an item of news, at least it was good news. And its inconsequential nature was in itself a blessing. So little of our news was either good or inconsequential enough to simply ignore or forget. Just that week we’d heard of another farm attack in Limpopo Province, in the Polokwane district. The farmer was killed, his wife left wounded by intruders who’d broken into their farmhouse while they were in bed, sleeping. We did
n’t know them personally, nor the other farm attack victims that we’d heard of. But we had many farming friends and we ourselves lived in rural circumstances. Security had become a national obsession. Wherever people gathered, sooner or later, the conversations turned to crime and how to avoid becoming a victim of it. Lately I’d heard too many such conversations.
Not for nothing was our new home situated at an ancient crossroads, it was still the place where people met and exchanged news. Several rural grapevines converged at Walker’s Wayside, and not rural ones only. City visitors brought city news, and like their rural counterparts they also brought rumours, gossip, speculation and their fears.
Increasingly the news from the world beyond the Waterberg bore out the rumblings we’d heard within the Waterberg. There was discontent at the rule of President Thabo Mbeki, who, while his country was struggling with its own overwhelming burdens, was often away attempting to sort out the problems of other countries. Admirable, perhaps, and appropriately statesmanlike, but puzzling to a large portion of his electorate. And then, while the entire civilised world committed to fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic, like Nero he picked up the fiddle and started to play. Already in October 2002 he’d declared himself an AIDS denialist. HIV was a fabrication of the West, he propounded, it didn’t cause AIDS, and the origin of the disease was to be found in poverty and, in South Africa, in oppression by the previous regime. His Minister of Health, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, advocated the use of beetroot, garlic and the African potato as a cure-all. Anti-retrovirals were believed to be toxic and would not be made available in the public health sector. While doctors, NGOs and scientists lobbied for greater sense in government, cartoonists had a field day with Dr Beetroot and her African cures, and the statistics of AIDS-related deaths climbed steadily. In rural districts like ours, clinics knew they were dealing with AIDS and that HIV infection rates in South Africa were among the highest in the world.
Something else was also spreading, virus-like, through South African society. In 2004 a report by the Southern African Migration Project confirmed rumours of escalating xenophobia in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. It was most prevalent in South Africa. Foreign citizens were increasingly targets of not only hostility but also violence, the worst of it reserved for refugees from African countries further north. I found this sickening, but not altogether surprising. Floods of refugees from Zimbabwe were finding their way into Limpopo Province and into employment opportunities that local communities felt ought to have been reserved for them. It was the same all over the country, with Burundians, Somalis and others often at the receiving end of intolerance and stigmatisation. Small businesses were looted and destroyed, homes torched, some lives lost. I watched the television reports and listened to the angry voices of attackers and the terrified voices of others. There were children … watching, learning. It was a nationalistic and ethnically based discrimination that found a particularly nasty outlet too in the murders of white farmers, a trend which was on the rise. My heart sank: anything that smacked of the kind of intolerance that marked someone of a different race or religion or nationality for elimination, scared me. How far to Srebrenica, to Dachau, to Rwanda?
The move to Melkrivier, undoubtedly much more of a social hub than Doornleegte had been, made it harder to avoid or escape news I would much rather not have known about. Alas, one doesn’t escape news by refusing to hear of it. Like the Boxing Day tsunami it might have to traverse an entire ocean but it will eventually wash up on your shores. In 1939 Europe had not been far enough from Africa for its war not to up-end the life of a plump, moon-faced little toddler on a mission station in Sekhukhuneland.
As Clive and I walked back home from the bomas, we discussed the evening facing us. Clive, always more resilient than I, was looking forward to it. An opportunity to see many old friends, he said, and relive some of the best times we had shared. A couple of hours later it was dusk and we were driving through the Lapalala Reserve gates into what was no longer my world. Unwilling to delve into the mix of emotions that made that familiar drive now seem remote and unreal, I prattled on about the weather and whether the rain which was certainly on its way would hold off until everything was over, and whether I’d dressed warmly enough. The invitation had suggested smart-casual, and my smartest casual had put me in black. Too sombre, I thought, it didn’t feel right.
Soon it was too dark to see anything but the hunched black shoulders of trees and the pale road threading between them. Occasionally I thought I saw a brief flicker of gleaming eyes, but then it was gone and Clive and I alone again in our noisy vehicle with its intrusive lights stabbing into the deep, uncommunicative night. In my mind I held roll-call of everything that I knew was out there: who was hunting, who was being hunted, Lapalala’s most sensational performers appearing when and where we couldn’t see them. If Bwana and Moêng had made it as free rhinos this would have been their time: black rhinos own the night, as do leopards and hyenas, jackals, owls, hippos and bats. Not us. We are not naturally equipped for the night, except in our capacity for awe. In a wilderness night we are cut down to size: we are blind and at the mercy of those who are not. We are dwarfed and silenced by the only things we can see: the moon, stars, galaxies of wonders we cannot comprehend. That is as it should be. We need our nights.
The road dipped and we slowed down for the left turn to Kolobe Lodge. The headlights swept through silver terminalia trees now in flower, but invisibly so. Like so many of our indigenous trees they are not showy flowerers. Only to the tree lover, to the birds and butterflies and bees who stop to peer into their hearts do they reveal their bounty. Or to moths, if they spread their fragrant lures at night. To flies perhaps, if they cast abroad the ripe smell of a well-matured balsamic vinegar or, like the terminalia, of rotting flesh. Did they do so at night? There was a time when I would have made Clive stop and we would have gone to investigate. There was a time when interrupting a journey to sniff flowers by moonlight didn’t feel silly. Did that man, so silent by my side, also miss those days? I didn’t ask.
The narrower Kolobe track wound, like a meandering stream, this way and that through a stand of wild syringa trees, and then straightened out and I saw the lights. Instantly I was back in 1986 and the lights were twinkling at the Lapalala Wilderness School. More than 50 guests were laughing and cheering and raising their glasses around a blazing bonfire, and then trooping in to a feast in the massive dining hall, lanterns and candles casting wavering shadows against thatch. Clive’s mother was there, still strong and beaming with pride. His aunt Peggy. His brother Barry. Our sons, Renning and Anton. It was a gathering of the clan, which included the oldest staff member of Walker and Sons, Tom Locke, Clive’s oldest friend, Leo van Vuuren, and friend and fellow elephant-lover, Dr Anthony Hall-Martin. At the end of a weekend of celebrations, of wilderness walking and game spotting and relaxing at bush camps, each guest left with a commemorative, specially commissioned ceramic candle-holder. Fifty candle-holders for Clive’s 50th. A few months short of 20 years ago. It was winter then and the party mine to organise, the candles mine to light. Now it was summer, other people had gone to the trouble of organising and catering and brightening the night, and they had done so for Clive and me.
There were more than 100 people there and I knew every one of them, from the oldest (our old friends from EWE, and Charles Baber, elder-statesman of the Waterberg) to the youngest, the Nel’s fearless little Twana and our own Tristyn who arrived on her father’s arm, charmed everyone and made me want to weep at the joy she lit in her grandfather’s face. Clive was born to be a grandfather: endlessly patient, endlessly creative, with a youthful capacity for play and wonder that matched theirs. Ayden and Tristyn simply adored him.
Someone was calling to everyone to gather and as we thronged in to the lantern-lit boma I caught sight of two women a little apart from everyone else. One, a guest, was listening; the other one, beautiful, slim and elegant, was Elizabeth Parker. She was talking. It looke
d as if she was rehearsing something, running through a prepared order of items. A few minutes later she was standing alone, facing all of us, and I realised she’d been steeling herself for this moment. Her speech was all of gratitude and appreciation. It was a tribute to Clive and to her late husband, Dale. The charming woman laughing with all of us on the Doornleegte verandah was gone. The charm was still there, but that had been Libby; this was Elizabeth keeping her composure in a way I couldn’t have.
There was applause and then Clive spoke, more applause, more speeches. Every story was a story I knew, they were stories I had lived, and so had many of the people around me. Clive and I were sitting together surrounded by our own history. The affection coming our way was tangible.
The dinner was splendid and drawn-out with the lodge dining room spilling chatter and laughter into the night. I knew, none better, just how much trouble it must have taken to give us such a generous farewell celebration. I was so appreciative of the effort that it embarrassed me to be feeling so tearful in the midst of such loving attention. But I hadn’t wanted anyone to go to so much trouble, I hadn’t wanted to be thanked and applauded and made a fuss of. I didn’t need a farewell, I wasn’t giving up any of our friends, I would see them all again. Clive, though, deserved it all. At least that much acknowledgement was due to him for his part in creating, with Dale, the Lapalala Wilderness Reserve. And to let him go without in some way ceremonialising the handover would have been wrong. It would in fact have been wrong for all of us. A party on the face of it, it was a rite of passage. Clive and I, the Parkers and Lapalala were freed now to move on from our joint and joined history.
A Rhino in my Garden Page 24