“Never mind, there’ll be owls up there too,” Clive said. “Up there” was the Lephalale property. He’d been singing its praises. Even though he’d not yet seen it himself, hearsay and photographs had done enough – he was itching to go and investigate.
I tried to join in his enthusiasm but for all its attractions the place had one major drawback: we’d be several hours away from our grandchildren. No more spur-of-the-moment popping in by Anton and René with the little ones; I didn’t relish the thought. Clive didn’t either, but he’d already criss-crossed the greater Vaalwater area and had found nothing even remotely suitable. All our friends knew we were looking, and so did the estate agents - if there had been anything closer that could have worked for us, we’d have heard about it. And how much longer did we want to wait around with our lives suspended? No doubt the Land Claims Commission was overburdened, perhaps understaffed, we didn’t know. Rumours of its financial woes were growing. The whole process had become very trying: meeting after meeting, reams of correspondence, all kinds of assurances that had led nowhere. Time was passing and we weren’t getting any younger.
“We have to be realistic. Maybe it’s not ideal, but I can tell you it’ll be better than this. Over there,” Clive nodded in the direction of the museum grounds, “the only thing that moves is time slipping by.”
That was unarguable. I was weary of trying to rationalise away what I was witnessing. In conversations with people who were critical of what the claimants were doing, or not doing, across the road, I got defensive on their behalf and placed the blame elsewhere: the legacy of apartheid, of course, prior lack of opportunity, education, different cultures and value systems that perhaps we didn’t understand. But by late 2007 the excuses were wearing thin, and I had to concede that they weren’t always applicable.
By the time we left the verandah to the mosquitoes and the dark, and went in to dinner, I’d agreed. “Let’s go look at this place. Let’s go tomorrow.”
I went to bed with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Like Clive I was ready for something new, but did it have to be Lephalale? What did I know of the place, other than that after my 2003 snakebite it was in one of the hospitals there that I nearly died, and in another that my life was saved? I did know that at the D’nyala Nature Reserve, 15 kilometres out of town, history was made. In 1989, South Africa’s President F.W. de Klerk summoned his entire cabinet plus attendant advisers to an indaba (bush summit) there. I like to think that De Klerk must have spent some time out there under the stars, feeling himself humbled by a universe so much greater than our human concerns, because two months later he was able to step into the role that destiny had designed for him. He stood up in Parliament and stated that his government undertook to end apartheid and negotiate a new future for South Africa. He announced the unbanning of black liberation organisations and the release of many hundreds of political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela. De Klerk returned to D’nyala again and again, negotiating with the ANC, resolving disputes and crises, and beginning to design a new constitution for post-apartheid South Africa. Those of us who lived through those years remember how tense and dangerous it felt, the likelihood of civil war never far away. But somehow, with every return from their session in the Waterberg bush, De Klerk and his co-negotiators were able to push ahead with their agenda for a peaceful transition. In April 1994 when I drove away from Doornleegte to go and cast my vote in our first democratic election it was because of a deal that had been wrought right there, in a stunningly beautiful patch of Waterberg bushveld outside Lephalale.
I switched off the light. I would raise no more objections. Es kommt wie es kommt. (What will be, will be.)
Early the next morning we drove past the museum gates, still closed, nothing stirring at any of the buildings. We turned to take the road than runs away from Lapalala, away from Melkrivier, away from Lonetree. Two people, no longer young, searching for a home.
CHAPTER 18
Walker’s Islands
IF THE GRANDCHILDREN HAD been with us we’d have been counting raptors on telephone poles. Etched against the pale early-morning sky, immobile like chess pieces or those iconic soapstone carvings from Zimbabwe – eagles, hawks, buzzards and kites, a representative collection of the Waterberg’s forty-plus raptor species. We were keeping an eye out for kestrels, and just before we took the turn onto the tarred road there was one, lifting off from the grass next to the road, with what I guessed was a lizard dangling from its beak. It was a lesser kestrel, one of three migratory falcons of great interest to us.
In 1995 Clive’s Endangered Wildlife Trust had noted a decline in lesser kestrel numbers. Further investigation yielded an alarming statistic: the number of the little falcons over-wintering here in South Africa was down by 25%; in their breeding grounds in Europe, Siberia and Kazakhstan it was down by almost 50%. In response, EWT launched their Migratory Kestrel Project (MKP), involving scores of volunteers in the drive to count kestrels all over the country. In 2002 the MKP was expanded to include two other falcons: the red-footed and the Amur. I have a particular fondness for the latter, the greatest migrator of the three with its annual roundtrip of 26 000 kilometres between East Asia and South Africa.
Every year thousands of tourists flock to Tanzania’s Serengeti to marvel at the annual wildebeest migration, and a wonder of the world it is – one of nature’s last remaining grand spectacles. But give me the great bird migrations. Around 4000 species of birds migrate. Most of the migrations have been mapped, but there’s much still to investigate and understand. The fact that we cannot watch, in real time, full migratory flights around the globe just adds to the mystery and wonder.
One autumn morning a Falklands Islander looks out to sea and discovers that the sooty shearwaters are back: they’ve completed an immense journey between feeding and breeding grounds, between the Arctic and the Falklands. Some of them travel on to New Zealand, racking up a total of 74 000 kilometres annually. In Australia someone spots another of the shearwaters, the short-tailed, which flew in from Kamchatka or the Aleutian Islands in the far northern Pacific. And in the Waterberg I wait for our summer migrants: the swallows, the red-chested cuckoos, the plum-coloured starlings, little Amur falcons that had crossed oceans to get here.
One late spring morning I’ll suddenly hear a distinctive call: a sharp grace-note followed by a descending trill, and I’ll know the woodland kingfishers had survived all of the hazards of weather, terrain, trappers and predators in their flight down the length of Africa to come and breed here again. I’ll pull on my boots, take my binoculars and go in search of that radiant flash of aquamarine as they open their wings in display on every call. Where, in which trees, would I find their nesting holes? While we’re still at Magog’s perhaps a big bushwillow at the foot of Lonetree and others along the Melk River. And next year, somewhere in the Lephalale district, I might see and hear them there too. It would still be Waterberg, though not included in the Waterberg Biosphere Reserve – the kind of bush I like, the birds I love, the dramatic seasonal changes I’ve adapted to. It would still be home.
How fortunate we were. Unlike half of humanity, it seemed to me. We weren’t ill, persecuted or hungry. We’d not been cast adrift by some natural disaster as many had been that year: hundreds of Japanese in the aftermath of a massive earthquake in July off the Niigata coast, thousands in Peru after an even bigger one that struck in August, thousands more a few days later when Hurricane Dean made its Category 5 landfall in Mexico. That very day as we were driving to Vaalwater, we were to discover later, there was untold misery in Bangladesh in the aftermath of Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Sidr. Thousands had died, thousands had gone missing, hundreds of thousands had lost their homes and would, for a time at least, swell the numbers of environmental refugees around the world.
In Africa the numbers were worse, always worse – the word refugee invariably accompanied by the word crisis. Millions of displaced persons in the Great Lakes Region and elsewhere, victims of a
n atrocious political environment, a natural disaster or both. Relief and other humanitarian agencies started talking about climate refugees. Drought, floods, deforestation; hunger, thirst, disease; people at the mercy of the elements and each other. Refugee camps became sprawling permanent settlements, for children perhaps the only home they’d ever known, while their elders still dreamt of repatriation, of going back home. A camp offered safety, food and medical care, but it was still exile. Displaced persons, asylum seekers, exiles – in 2007 the UN Refugee Agency estimated that there were over 31 million people in need of their support. Even when exile did not mean a life of danger and poverty, the siren call of home remained.
Despite the early hour, Vaalwater was already busy, with several vehicles queueing at the fuel station. “Might as well,” Clive said and pulled in behind them. In the bush one learns to keep your tank topped-up. We had to stop in Vaalwater anyway – an errand we remembered late the previous evening. We were in a hurry to head north, so this was a nuisance, and then just when we were pulling off, Clive slammed on the brakes – he’d had another last-minute inspiration. There was a Pam Golding real estate agent in Lephalale, a man whom he knew quite well, and he wanted to phone him. “Might as well,” he said, “He gets to hear of things.”
Assis Pontes had indeed heard of things: that Lephalale property for which we were heading, for instance. He was blunt: it wouldn’t work for us. We’d waste our time driving all the way up north to see something that he could tell us straightaway we’d find disappointing. Did we have our hearts set on the Lephalale district, or could he perhaps interest us in a neat 100-hectare parcel much closer to home? There was only one answer to that.
We drove out of Vaalwater, taking the same road that had brought us there, the same road we’d driven between the town and our homes in Lapalala and Melkrivier for over 25 years. “Now don’t get your hopes up,” Clive said. Too late, my hopes were soaring. A miracle it seemed to me that there should have been a suitable property available virtually on our doorstep, without us having the least knowledge of it.
“Stay on the tar for 25 kilometress,” Assis had said. “You’ll see a farm road going off to the left. I’ll have my local farmer agent meet you there.”
Of course it had always been there, that narrow gap in the screen of acacia thorn trees, and the track leading to it. After more than two decades of driving that road I knew every feature – every bend and what lay beyond it, every stream crossing, every turn-off, every signpost and fence, every view. I had my favourite stretches where I slowed down to see what was flowering, aloes or other succulents on small rocky outcrops by the roadside, or early summer lilies waving above the grass, or to watch the birds that visited, in large numbers sometimes, a seepage or small dam on the other side of a game fence. So I had noticed this track, one of a dozen such farm-tracks indicating that beyond the tree-belt there lay something that someone had thought worth getting to. In this instance, not an occupied homestead, I thought, nor an active farming enterprise, not with such a rutted, little-used access road.
The estate agent farmer was waiting, beckoned to us to follow, and drove across an ancient-looking cattle grid – rusted iron rails that rattled and clanked, tall grasses in between them that swayed in front of the Pajero’s bonnet and then ducked under our passing.
With the bakkie leading the way in front of us, and bushes and trees in their summer foliage bracketing the track on either side, the place we’d come to see with such excitement, such hope, remained hidden – a breathless minute of being suspended between what I had known and what I was about to discover. Behind us lay all of our history; what lay ahead was without any personal connection, without a single memory, without any hurt or disappointment. All new. I realised that it had been a very, very long time since I’d looked at anything new the way my grandchildren did. If only I could enter into this next chapter – if this indeed was to be our next chapter – with their unclouded, uncontaminated enjoyment and appreciation. Perhaps I could manage it here: apprehensions and sadnesses left on the other side of that rickety cattle grid.
“Well, this is it,” our guide threw his arms wide, “Raasmierfontein. Let me tell you what I know, and then I’ll have to be off.”
A young German lady, living in Pretoria, had acquired the land with the intention of opening a riding school there. Her plans hadn’t worked out and she’d put the property up for sale. “The house isn’t much, as you can see, but there are the stables…”
I glanced at Clive’s pretend-serious face and I knew, I just knew what he was thinking: artist’s studio. We’d be businesslike, discuss price and contracts, and probably consult with the children before signing, but the deal was basically done.
Electricity supply, borehole water, accommodation, fences and roads, neighbours, boundaries … I was only half-listening. Those were not the most important features – they could be put in place, repaired, changed and improved. But that landscape … now there was something you couldn’t negotiate or create. That was the real selling point. Stretching away from us, all the way to a low ridge far away to the north, and another to the south, was almost-pristine savannah grassland. And scattered all over it were patches of rich green – vegetated islands, each 10 to 15 metres across. They were the remains of ancient termite mounds, the termites now gone but the enriched soil supporting at least 25 different tree species. I saw several kinds of acacia, wild figs, Cape beech, African wattle, Savanna sugarbush, weeping boerboon and bergsering (mountain syringa) – that great favourite tree of mine which had so often been beautifully portrayed by the late South African landscape artist Pierneef. So that single property offered grasslands, mixed bushveld leading onto rocky ridges, mini forests on more than a 100 treed islands, a little river (the Crocodile) and two small wetlands. With such a habitat range I knew the birdlife would be extraordinary. I loved it.
When we left, though we still held on to the fiction that no decision would be made until the children had seen the place for themselves and given their blessing, the property had a new name. On the title deed it was marked as Krokodilrivier (Crocodile River). The estate agent had it listed as “Raasmierfontein”, referring to those ancient termites, the original creators of the vegetated islands, whose activities, especially in advance of big rain, resulted in a loud rustling as they hurried through dry grass and fallen leaves. Noisy ants: “Raasmiere”. But for us, as we crossed back over the rusted cattle grid, it had already become “Walker’s Islands”.
At the end of the next winter I drove up to that cattle grid on my own, and stopped. I’d been trying to keep a promise I’d made to myself more than six months earlier: I would shed whatever burdens or bad moods I’d brought from the outside world, and enter Walker’s Islands with as open and light a heart as I could manage. Usually it wasn’t that hard – we were so delighted to have been able to buy the place and so captivated by its charms that it easily eclipsed other, less happy preoccupations. But that day I sat facing the cattle grid for a really long time before I felt peaceful enough to drive on.
My clothes, my hair, the vehicle I was driving, everything smelled, overwhelmingly, of smoke. Despite frequent applications of drops my eyes still smarted. Every so often a relentless irritation in my chest sent me into an exhausting coughing fit, hurting my already raw throat.
It had been the third fire around our home that season, and like the two before it, it had been started by (apparently) negligent activities across the road from us, at the erstwhile Melkrivier Museum complex. Of course, once you have a raging bush fire to contend with you put blame and resentments aside and focus on first saving lives and property. But once the fire is out, or at least contained, and you’re left contemplating the aftermath, it is inevitable that you would calculate the culpability of the fire-starter: the destruction of property, the suffering and death of animals, the cost and danger to everyone called upon to fight the conflagration.
I’d survived many fires in the Waterberg, including a truly
terrifying one in Lapalala in the 1990s when an unstoppable inferno raged for five days and laid waste to a third of the Waterberg. We all knew exactly what to do, who to call, whom we could rely on to help, and I had no doubt as to my own ability to deal with such crises. As foster mother of large wild animals, my biggest concern had always been on their behalf. When I worked with them, sometimes with thick, acrid smoke enveloping the bomas, I had to be confident and calm enough to reassure them that, despite what their senses and instincts were telling them, they were not in danger as long as they stayed with me. A rhino in a panic would have been disastrous, so I could not afford to let my fears get the better of me.
With multi-day fires, while staying in radio contact with the fire-fighting teams, and with Clive who’d usually be helping to coordinate efforts from a command post, I’d make sure that I had routine tasks to do around the bomas, to keep things as reassuringly normal as possible. Throughout the night, at regular intervals I’d take the torch and go out in the smoky dark to check on the animals. And then, like everyone else affected by that fire, I’d resume my vigil in front of a window or on the verandah, watching the jagged golden-red lines as they moved up or down or across a mountainside, or came ever closer – a fiery serpent advancing across the veld, devouring everything in its way. Flames would suddenly shoot up as some patch of vegetation virtually exploded in the extreme heat. A favourite stand of trees gone; a grassy field, a reedbed with birds’ nests… We’d watch for the slightest change in wind direction and wait for first light when the teams would reassemble and the battle resume.
A Rhino in my Garden Page 29