A Rhino in my Garden

by Conita Walker

  Then it was our turn to thank everyone. I felt guilty to be going home while others were left with the burden of cleaning up after a big late-night party. But I was tired and at dinner I had thought Clive looked drawn, as if the emotional roller-coaster of farewell had taken a toll on him too. We drove away through the light rain that had held off long enough to dampen but not drench our departure. Just short of the turn from the Kolobe track onto the bigger road that would take us out of the reserve, there was a movement among the syringas to the right. Clive stopped and switched off the headlights. My eyes adjusted and there he was: a large kudu bull, shadowy and indistinct, a phantom in the low light and drizzle. After a watchful pause he took a few steps, arching back his neck, the beautiful horns angling horizontally along his withers to avoid tangling them in the low branches. He straightened up and walked out on to the road. He stood there, facing us, a thousand conservation and tourism emblems come to life. Behind him, his family emerged from the trees and quickly, furtively crossed the road. Then, with a toss of the proud head, he moved off to the left and was gone. We drove on, knowing that all signs of our midnight meeting would be gone too, rained away, by morning.

  SIXTEEN

  Lonetree

  WAS IT SOME ANCIENT MEMORY embedded in my genes that drew me up to Lonetree? A bipedal ancestor hauling herself into a tree or onto a pile of rocks to look out over the savannah? Where’s the danger, where’s the food, where are the members of my family?

  As long as I can remember I’ve sought out the high places, the lookouts, the perches above the rest of the world. On the Lobethal mission station it was the lemon tree behind the house, wickedly thorned as such old wild-grown trees are but eminently climbable even for someone whose ambitions stretched further than her short limbs. Grown-up, I took to flying and saw the African savannah passing far below me. Then the checkerboard patchwork of Europe. The hungry cities sucking in, it seemed to me, countryside, converging roads and rail links, and us, as we descended, landed and got swallowed up. With the next flight we’d escape back up to the clouds and the views. I liked it better there.

  Then followed my wilderness trekking years with Clive and always somewhere along the trail there was a magnet pulling us up higher, to see wider and further and feel safer and freer because of it. After that we found ourselves in Lapalala, an inexhaustible supply of cliff-top view-sites stitched together by gorges and winding valleys. And behind my home there was Bwana’s hill where I could go to see further than Doornleegte and follow the Palala to the horizon.

  We moved to Melkrivier and I found Lonetree. There really was a tree, a mountain syringa – my favourite Tree of Heaven – and it stood alone, shading a rocky outcrop that became my eyrie. Eagles soared alongside me. A sea of Waterberg green flowed all the way to Lapalala and through it to the sky. If I had had the time I could have sat there for hours staring at that shimmering horizon, especially on searing summer days when it drew mysterious undulating escarpments of dull green up into the sky, or lakes of blue onto the land until the angle of the sun or the temperature changed and everything solidified, reduced again to what was real and familiar.

  2 February 2005 was such a day. From Lonetree I looked down onto the narrower confines of my new world. There, on the right was the two-hectare Melkrivier Museum complex, its garden, restaurant, chapel and the parking area with the cars and minibuses of early visitors. Obscured from my view was the small house that was now my home and where Clive was working his way through a mountain of conservation reports. To the left, on the other side of the road that ran past Lonetree, past the museum and on to the junction with the Lapalala-Vaalwater road, was a 10-hectare piece of land and, hidden in indigenous bush, a house (Magog’s, named in my honour) with – set apart and completely hidden from every view – a smaller cottage. These had been built several years earlier to Clive’s design and under his supervision. It had been our guest accommodation for friends and family who’d come to visit us in the Waterberg. At Doornleegte there hadn’t been enough space for everyone, and especially when Dale had been staying with us he needed all the privacy we could provide. Now post-Lapalala, in our revamped headmaster’s house at the museum, we still found ourselves with more friends and visitors than bedrooms, so Magog’s remained handy.

  From Magog’s up to where I was sitting and all around me were the 90 hectares of Lonetree. It belonged to Anton and was undisturbed bush except for the house where the gap students’ programme had been based, and right at the bottom, virtually across the road from the museum, where we had our rhino enclosures. We had cleared as little of the bush as possible, lots of small game dwelt there. Bwana and Moêng were living in an all but natural environment, and from my perch I couldn’t see them or their enclosures. They were also invisible from the roads, the one running past the museum and the smaller one running in between Magog’s and Lonetree, from the museum road on to farms further to my left. There was passing traffic, some of it on foot, mostly people going to and from work on the surrounding farms. All remote and incidental to my reality up there on the rocks.

  I had a reason for coming up to Lonetree. The view could have been enough and often was, but February was remembrance month for me. No one gets to my age without every month gathering its own crop of anniversaries. In my case a whole of lot of them pooled in February. My father’s birthday, my elder brother’s, and mine. My granddaughter’s birthday. My youngest brother’s wedding anniversary. My mother’s death. It was the month in 1945 when almost 25 000 people died in the ruinous bombing of Dresden with its resultant firestorm which, for the German people, must have been a vision of hell. Two hundred kilometres away from that deadly conflagration, I was in an underground bunker, hiding with my family from the bombs that punished Berlin.

  But it was also the month that brought hope to my other homeland, South Africa: on 2 February 1990 President F.W. de Klerk announced the end of apartheid; on 11 February Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, a free man in a suddenly freer country.

  Such days send me searching out the heights, so in 2005 it found me on a rock on a hill at the beginning of a whole new chapter of my life. I felt lucky and excited. And down there, at the foot of Lonetree, I had two thriving black rhinos. Bwana was my treasure, but he was having to make room in my heart for little Moêng. She had turned several corners and was now as engaging and playful as I could wish. Her appetite was boundless; she gulped her game pellets and always turned the heavy rubber bowl upside down to search for more. To her delight, and our despair, she’d detected the single weak point in our design for her enclosure. It had been such a scramble to get everything ready in time for her arrival that there had been no time to throw a concrete base for her feeding area, so we got creative and used heavy tractor tyres, halved, for feeding troughs. They might as well have been put there especially for her amusement. She pushed them around, up-ended everything, trampled her browse and made another delightful discovery: the mess she’d created was good to recline on, and since she was now heavier and stronger, she could simply by lying and refusing to budge, hamper our efforts to clean and tidy it all up again. She much preferred the mess.

  She amazed us all with her recovery, but I knew we had only begun. After her traumatic start in life she had a lot of catching up to do. She was growing well, but was unlikely to ever reach what would have been her normal size. There was a lot she still had to learn or relearn about black rhino behaviour. Her internal injuries had been so severe that her chances of reproductive health, I was told, were zero. We’ll see, I thought, plenty of time before we need to worry about that. Now it was still time to play and learn and get stronger.

  I needed to teach her about rhino middens and how to use one. She failed to see what fascinated me so much about a scattering of her old dung in a particular corner of her abode. She was far more interested in returning to her favourite occupation: sharpening the fascinating appendage that had sprouted on her face. With studious concentration she’d rub her small horn up a
nd down, back and forth across the iron bridge railings, uttering sounds that could only be described as satisfied cooing. As I walked down from Lonetree I had no doubt at all that that was how I’d find her, head swinging at her chosen section of railing.

  I was wrong. She was resting on the trampled remainder of her browse, surrounded by the evidence of a vigorous workout session among the tyres. She got up and approached for the usual tickle around the ears. That’s when I noticed the flies. Dozens of flies clustered around the bloody pus oozing from a hairline crack at the base of her horn. As if Moêng hadn’t had enough trouble with her rear-end she’d now gone and caused trouble at the front-end too.

  There wasn’t much I could do except prevent infection. So I cleaned the area and applied a disinfectant and healing spray. We were back to wash and spray, wash and spray, day after day. I expected that, with its base cracked, the horn would eventually come off. It took several months of discomfort, and I suspected considerable pain, for Moêng. In the end the horn was literally dangling by a strip of strong hide from her purple-sprayed nose, a truly pathetic sight until we could pull the dried-out piece of hide away and the small horn with it. She stayed purple for a while longer but her main horn had begun to grow out again, matching the growth rate I’d measured on Bwana, about half a centimetre per month.

  In the meantime, like the grown-up he was, Bwana did his part in our educational programme without fuss or bother. Every day except Mondays we had groups of visitors from game reserves and lodges in the area, from the Limpopo Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, people passing through on holiday, neighbours who had stopped to visit the museum or relax at the restaurant, busloads of school children. Because of the more accessible location at Melkrivier we drew many more visitors than we had had at Doornleegte. So from 3 to 4 in the afternoons I was a teacher again and loving it.

  My previous experience of introducing visitors, especially children, to something as exciting as Bwana had taught me to not rank my attractions above his. As soon as they caught sight of him my carefully prepared lecture went for nothing. So I always began a short distance away in some attractive spot, within earshot of the rhino resting perfectly camouflaged in the deep bush of his enclosure without the visitors being any the wiser. Once the conservation message I’d wanted to get across had been heard, I’d lead on for the climax. His emergence from the bush never failed to elicit gasps of surprise and excitement and I daresay sometimes fear. His sheer size (almost two metres at the shoulder, and just under four metres from hook-lip to tail) always caused a few of the visitors to back away from the railing, and rather touchingly attempt to hide behind me. From that point on it was a practical showing off of Bwana’s charms: how he ate, what he ate, information about his biology, his behaviour, his impressive condition and good nature. He obligingly took his pellets from a variety of confident or nervous or clumsy hands, large ones or tiny ones barely able to hold a couple of pellets, and deftly, gently dealt with them all. I couldn’t have been more proud of him.

  One afternoon I finished a session and found that Clive, waiting for me at the gate, had news. Stirring events had been taking place in Lapalala and Anton had been right in the middle of it. In fact, exactly like Boxing Day three years earlier, he had been in charge of it. Another black rhino rescue.

  In 2002, when they’d found Moêng, I was still anxious on his behalf: would he know what to do, did he have enough experience to be able to make the snap decisions required during difficult rescue operations? Did he have the right team to support him? By 2005 I’d stopped worrying, except about his safety.

  As Lapalala’s wildlife manager he’d put together an impressive team of field rangers. They were specialist rhino monitors who could identify Lapalala’s rhinos by their tracks. Each rhino was an individual personality, known by the name which they, all locally trained Pedi with their innate gift for appropriate naming, had chosen. They watched over their rhinos with a commitment which was far more than professional, it was personal.

  That morning they radioed Anton in some concern. A young black rhino calf, an 18-month-old male, who’d been driven off by his unusually aggressive mother, seemed to have fallen foul of other rhino bulls. He was lying next to a waterhole and looked hurt. Anton told them to keep watching, he was coming in on foot. When he got to the waterhole, the calf hadn’t moved. Its injuries seemed serious. But, along with a love of the bush and of flying, Anton had inherited his father’s inability to give up, and a stubborn dose of optimism. Besides, having seen Moêng’s even worse injuries and her recovery, he knew what might be possible. So the debate next to the waterhole was a brief one: a helicopter and vet were summoned. Anton flew with them to the site. From the air they could plan the operation: the terrain, the estimated weight of the calf, who’d be doing what on whose signal. Then Anton was dropped off to lead the ground crew in a text-book operation. In under 30 minutes Dr Pierre Bester had darted the calf, completed emergency treatment and seen it safely loaded up. The helicopter lifted off, the field rangers cheered and then piled in with Anton and their dozy, patched-up young rhino for the drive to Lapalala’s holding pens to begin their programme of bringing Meetsi (“Water”) back to health.

  Not long after that more news came from Lapalala.

  Our first autumn at Melkrivier had been busier than I could have imagined, and we were delighted to have been able to lure our old friend and colleague from Lapalala days, Glynis Brown, to join us. Button discovered that Glynis’s feet stayed in one place longer than did either Clive’s or mine, so we’d frequently find her there under the desk, dozing and gently snoring while Glynis dealt with the day’s administration. With the arrival of winter, traffic to and through the museum gained even more momentum. Schools closed for their winter break and families streamed out of the cities to holiday destinations. In South Africa the coasts, by and large, got the summer shift; in winter it was the bushveld. Since becoming a biosphere the Waterberg had been attracting more attention, and as I told Clive, his efforts at promoting it as a tourism destination had resulted in more work for his wife while he escaped into the bush to paint. I might have exaggerated a bit. As a board member of several governmental as well as non-governmental conservation organisations he was fully involved in the design and implementation of provincial and national conservation policies. It wasn’t easy work, it was often discouraging, and always time-consuming. Even so, he made a point of still being available to the Lapalala Wilderness School. It had been his baby and his continued involvement as patron was important. Even more than the official business of board meetings, his occasional presentations to children there gave him, as ever, enormous pleasure.

  Shortly after his birthday, mid-June, he returned from Lapalala one afternoon and came to collect me at Moêng’s enclosure. “Fancy a walk?” he said. It was our usual leisurely stroll up the footpath to Lonetree, and ahead of us Button nosing her way through the intoxicating bouquet of wildlife smells. It was only once we had got to the top and Clive remained standing, staring out north, that I realised that on our way up he hadn’t said a word. I’d been chattering on about my rhinos and doings of the day, but from him, not a word.

  We sat down and with his walking stick he hooked Button closer. After a playful tussle she scrambled up onto the rocks and settled next to him expecting, and receiving, her ration of affection. With his hand still on her head Clive finally spoke. He’d been trying to work out, he said, just how many hundreds of kilometres of wire fencing had had to be removed to create the Lapalala Wilderness Reserve. How many kilometres of snagged and rusted wire he had personally hauled out of the bush, how many thousands of wire snares that had been set to maim and kill in the random, cruel way that resulted from such things. Twenty-three years for 18 farms to be cleaned up and consolidated and restored to ecological health, for that corner of the Waterberg to be brought back to wilderness.

  “What did we do it for?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. He continued. “W
hat was in it for Dale? Of all the things he could have done with his money,” the walking stick stabbed to the northern horizon, “why that?”

  There was a long silence, the only sound that of the breeze moving through the syringa’s bare branches. In the distance a raptor was being harried by two small dark specks that dived and circled back and dived again. Tawny eagle and kestrels? It didn’t seem to be the time to ask Clive for an identification. He was also watching the birds, but then he turned to me. “Remember Dale’s snake?”

  Dinner at Doornleegte, a cobra as startled at Dale’s presence as Dale was at the cobra’s – noise and profanity followed by much hilarity and Dale’s admission that he was, after all, a city boy. He had loved the bushveld, but was not by nature a rugged outdoorsman. Lapalala was not his playground, it was his passion. It did not have to amuse or entertain him; he didn’t expect it to turn a profit. All he expected of it was to become healthy, intact wilderness again. Wilderness for the sake of wilderness.

  “Now he’s gone,” Clive said, “and I’m sitting out here. Lapalala has to go on without us.”

  I didn’t understand. “I thought that was the whole point, that it would go on after you.”

  “But will it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a land claim, Conit. Lapalala is under claim.”

  We stayed up at Lonetree longer than was wise. We had to find our way down in uncertain light although the moon, one night before the full, did see us home without twisted ankles. It had got cold, it was our winter solstice after all. But in front of the fire-place, as around many millions of African hearth-fires that night, the day’s news became less alarming once there was a small, contained world of leaping flames to stare into.