On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures

by Wilbur Smith

  I remember the day he told me the story of the sjambok, which is a long, stiff whip originally made of rhinoceros hide. Grandpa Courtney must have been 55 or 60 years old, but to my mind he was ancient, mythological, an icon carved out of stone but still animate. He had been an inspector of roads in what was then Zululand, riding the highways, and then a lieutenant in the Natal Mounted Rifles, one of the finest cavalry units in African history. Our trips to Natal were lit up by tales from him which stunned me; they left me breathless and gave me bad dreams for about a week afterward.

  “My boy, let me tell you the story of the black mamba!” he said one day.

  “It was after the war,” he began, “when I came to the Witwatersrand. Those were the days of the gold rush, when there were fortunes to be made . . .” He spat into the spittoon emphatically. “But the gold fields weren’t for me. For ten years, I was a transport rider along the Delagoa Bay route, all the way from the coast to the Witwatersrand goldfields. It would take three months for the wagons to ride that route, ferrying everything from blankets to champagne and dynamite to ore crushers, a 1200-mile round trip. And I’d be riding out ahead of the ox-wagon train, hunting and bartering with the African native tribes as we went . . .”

  It was just like Jock of the Bushveld, the book by James Percy Fitzpatrick which told the story of an ox-wagon transport rider and his dog in the Transvaal of the 1880s.

  “One time, before we set out from Delagoa Bay, I won a dog in a game of poker. It was the biggest, dumbest boarhound you ever saw. Four-foot-high at the shoulder, a big jowly brute. That dog was the most stupid dog I ever owned in my life. It was totally untrainable . . . I called him Brainless. So Brainless rode the trail with us. Along the way, I tried to train him—but it never did take. All that dog did was hang around the camp, or lope after my horse with this dopey expression on its face. One night, we were camped in the Lowveld; it was dark that night, though the stars were out. I was laid out to sleep in the cot in the back of one of the wagons—but that dog, that dog just kept barking, on and on, keeping us all awake. I groped around beside the cot and I found my sjambok, and I slipped from the wagon, the sjambok in my hand, and strode out of the camp, into the darkness where he was standing. I clobbered that dog until, suddenly, on the fourth or fifth strike, the dog started acting in a different way. It made a new sound, a sound it never made before. I was a bit taken aback. I reached into my pocket, struck one of my matches and held up the light. Right where Brainless the boarhound should have been was a fully grown male lion, its eyes wild with fury, its mane matted with blood. It had eaten my dog! I froze. Because there I was, giving this beast the hiding of its life with the sjambok . . . I turned and ran back to the cabin, jumped inside, closed the curtains and stood there panting with horror and relief. And then I felt the sjambok twitching in my hand! I lit another match . . . It was no sjambok I was holding. It was a snake. I’d been beating that lion with a black mamba!”

  It wasn’t only the story that thrilled me. It was the way Grandpa Courtney hollered with laughter, his guffaws echoing around the room. Man versus beast; he’d survived this close encounter with death.

  The black mamba has a reputation for being the most dangerous snake in the world. Its bite is known as the “kiss of death.” It can exceed two meters in length and it likes to live on the ground, waiting to ambush its prey. When under threat it rears up high with its black mouth open, spreading its neck flap and hissing. It strikes faster than the human eye can see and from long distance, often biting many times very quickly. Its poison is highly toxic and will incapacitate a man in less than twenty minutes with a single bite. Many myths surround the snake, such as its ability to bite its tail and roll down a hill then straighten out like a spear to attack at great speed, or that it can ambush a car by coiling itself around a wheel to spring at the driver when he stops and get out. It is a killer but I always found in it a sinister beauty with its sleek, slender olive-brown or gray body and gun metal eyes. Despite its cold scaliness, it’s not hard to imagine how Grandpa Courtney could have mistaken its long, whippy, dark length for his sjambok.

  I’d had my own run-ins with the black mamba. Sometime before Grandpa told me that story, I’d taken to climbing the koppie behind the ranch house to the reservoir that lay on top, a big tank filled with water pumped up from a bore-hole. The water attracted flocks of doves and pigeons every evening, and I used to go up the hill with my pellet gun and bring back some birds for the barbecue. One evening, when I’d reached the water tank, there were no doves or pigeons to be seen at all. The place was deserted. It should have been a warning, but I paid it no mind. Instead, I started walking up to take a closer look in the reservoir—and suddenly, out of the knee-high grass in front of me, appeared this horror: gray-black, glistening in the sunlight, with two beady eyes! It was a black mamba, known by the locals as the “lights-out snake,” because if it taps you, your lights go out pretty quickly. It was an enormous snake, as thick as my wrist around the neck, and its head was a whispering menace, its little black tongue slipping in and out. Its eyes mesmerized me, shiny black, as pitch as coal, as hard as death. It rose, and kept on rising until it was at my eye level, and then beyond. The snake was over the top of me, staring down. Slowly, I raised my pellet gun and took aim at its head. As my finger hovered over the trigger a small voice whispered to me: Don’t be a damn fool, Smith. Get the hell out of there! With meticulous precision, I lowered the gun. I knew better than to run, the black mamba is a fast mover, so I took two short steps backward and the snake dropped down a couple of inches. I backed off two further steps and the snake bobbed down two more inches. It was following my every move, its eyes on me all the time as if it was trying to hypnotize its victim before striking. By now it was all or nothing, I turned tail and ran down the hill like a terrified gazelle, jumping and kicking my heels, panting and squealing as the air burst out of my lungs with sprinting. By the time I reached home I was a trembling mass of giggles and nervous laughter. I had lost my appetite for barbecued doves and pigeons. That was the last time I ever went hunting at the reservoir.

  •••

  Grandpa Courtney had been a hunter on the Delagoa Bay trail, my father had been a hunter in the Witwatersrand, and it was imperative that I turn to hunting of my own. In those days, it was the measure of a man, as well as a way of providing meat for the table. I wanted nothing more than to prove myself capable of surviving the demands of the wilderness.

  I didn’t have normal friends. My childhood was bordered by the bounds of the ranch, and my only real friends were the children of the farm laborers, who shared the same interests as me: getting out from under the feet of our elders and living free, hunting all manner of prey with our slingshots and pack of mangy farm dogs. My first and best friend was a boy named Peter Matoka, whose dad, Peter senior, was my father’s foreman back when he worked on the mine. My friend would go on to become Minister for Information in Kenneth Kaunda’s government when Zambia became independent in 1964.

  The other friend I had was Barry, the son of one of our neighboring ranchers, and it was with Barry that I spent many of my longest, most hair-raising days.

  I did not need an excuse to go after adventure and Barry was the perfect partner in crime, each of us egging the other on to wilder extremes. It was with Barry that I had my second run-in with the dreaded black mamba. There was an abandoned tobacco barn on our ranch with a pair of beautiful Lanner falcons nesting in its eaves. The Lanner falcon is a medium-sized bird of prey, with dark gray-bluish plumage on its back and a lighter brown mottled underside. It has a reddish head and distinctive dark streaks down both cheeks, like a pair of raffish mustaches. It really is a most handsome, dignified bird, and we should have treated this nesting pair with more respect. I knew the mother had laid her eggs, and, after consulting his manual of falconry, Barry and I determined to get ourselves a chick each and train them to hunt. This, we were convinced, would make us real hunters—to go out with a falcon at our comman
d. It was a terrifying climb to reach the nest in the rafters, not just because of the height and precariousness of the ascent, but because I was constantly being dive bombed by the angry parents. The Lanner falcon hunts with its partner, forming a coordinated attack from two angles, so I was being given a proper going over—their talons are very sharp. Yet, with Barry urging me on, somehow I reached the rafters and counted three little fledglings in the nest.

  Barry’s book had said the chicks would be ready to train in six weeks—so, four weeks later, this time with a pith helmet jammed squarely on my head and the strap cinched under my chin, I made the daunting climb again, finally ready to rob the nest. As I got closer, I became aware of a terrible silence. The mother and father falcon did not shriek nor dive at me from above; the baby birds were not crying out for their mother, neither hungry nor in fear. With a growing sense of unease, I reached the nest and peered into it. The three chicks were stone dead and looking straight at me was a snake! It was a black mamba and it was very angry. Immediately it struck at my face. I ducked and it smashed into my helmet like someone had punched me in the head. I dropped and crash-fell the thirty feet to the floor of the barn, picked myself up, and ran like hell. Barry followed, sprinting behind me, shouting, “What is it? What is it?” He must have feared I’d unlocked the gates of hell. We didn’t stop running until the barn was out of sight. With our hands on our knees, catching our breath, Barry suddenly looked at me in horror. He pointed at my head. I removed my pith helmet and, right at the level where my forehead would have been, were two puncture marks in the cork, the cloth soaked with the snake’s pale yellow venom.

  I almost threw up in relief. Neither Barry nor I ever went back to the barn.

  I had shot my first animal soon after my eighth birthday, with the Remington rifle handed down from my Grandpa. I had stalked that reedbuck by drawing on every lesson and piece of wisdom my father had given me, keeping low and silent in the bush until I got the chance and took aim. When I brought my first meat to the farm, my father shook my hand, and for that moment I felt ten-feet-tall, immutably connected to this vast and beautiful African landscape, its history and the long reach of my family and their ancestors. My small hand almost disappeared in his. He squeezed tightly and I shook his hand vigorously in return, sealing the bond as the adrenaline coursed through my veins.

  After that, Barry and I would roam the trails from one corner of the ranch to another, sometimes crossing the Kafue into his own family lands, sometimes straying even further afield, deep into the untamed bush. The animals we didn’t shoot, we would trap—laying down snares for birds and other small creatures, anything we could roast to eat above an open fire. Then we would return home, long after the sun had gone down, to avoid that most dreaded punishment for all wild boys: the bathtub. My legs would be scratched and scored from the vicious wag ’n bietjie thorns, I would have blood-sucking ticks in places I could not show my mother, I would stink of wood smoke and dried sweat—but none of it mattered. I was as happy as I ever could be.

  For a time, we hunted only small game: reedbuck and impala, bushpig and the puku. But, as in every young hunter’s life, our ambition soon turned to bigger animals such as antelopes or bushbucks. On a bright summer’s day when we were no more than fifteen years old, beneath an unending expanse of stark blue sky, Barry directed my gaze to the mountains that marked the horizon beyond the churning Kafue, and whispered of a rumor he’d heard.

  “There’s a kudu bull, roaming in the lowlands of that hill. Wilbur,” he said, “we’re going to hunt him.”

  Kudus are a tall woodland antelope, with narrow bodies and long legs, their coats marked by vertical white stripes stretching down from their pronounced, curved spines. To my young mind there was no more elegant antelope to hunt; its two large spiral horns were coveted trophies. Bulls, I knew, sometimes moved in small bachelor herds—but more often they lived solitary lives. Barry had heard of this fine specimen from the laborers on his farm: a legend of a bull, with horns bigger than any they’d ever seen.

  Barry and I set out, borrowing my father’s old Willy’s Jeep from the back of the farmhouse, fording the river and journeying into the forested hills. I had driven this way before, but soon the roads petered out and we rolled, instead, through deepening scrub. When the jeep could go no further, we jumped out and went on foot. It took an hour for us to spot the bull’s spoor, finding evidence of his passing in the tracks he’d left behind, the familiar diagonal walk and prints of his cloven hoofs—but it took longer to discover the beast himself. The sun was already sinking by the time we first saw him. Even from five hundred yards away, he was as regal and dominant as I’d imagined. I marveled at his size, he was a big bull, his proud head adorned with two magnificent horns.

  We tracked him down the valley, along forest trail and empty scrub, but by the time the sunlight was paling to dusk we still hadn’t come close enough to take our shot. We turned to the skies. The last glimpses of sunlight were hovering over the mountaintops; soon they would be gone, plunging the land into impenetrable night. Neither Barry nor I wanted to be the first to admit defeat, but we would have to head back to the jeep, and get home, soon.

  We had found the bull and we’d find him again; I shouldered my rifle and began to tramp away.

  It was some time before I realized Barry hadn’t followed. When I turned back, he was walking in the opposite direction.

  “This way, Smith,” he said.

  “This way,” I said, trying to draw him to me.

  The realization hit us both at the same time: we didn’t know where we had left the jeep.

  Too obsessed by our prey, we’d made the same mistake that has signaled the end for reckless outdoorsmen since time immemorial: we’d allowed the wilderness to turn us around. We’d stopped paying attention to the shape of the koppies, the types of tree, the ground beneath our feet, all the markers an experienced bushman would note. Worse still, we hadn’t plotted our route back. Intent on taking the kudu before nightfall, we’d pushed on without a thought to the trail we were leaving behind.

  We set off in one direction, but soon the bush grew entangled and we knew this was not the way. We took off in another, only to find ourselves climbing unfamiliar gullies that we had not come down. Up above, the last rays of the sun disappeared from the horizon, and the stars appeared in the inky canvas—and, as the chill of night descended, we stared at each other and silently acknowledged that the day had gone badly wrong. We were lost. We were not going home that night. Before long, our families would know we were missing, and chaos would break out across our respective ranches.

  “We’re screwed,” said Barry.

  “It will look different in the morning,” I said, only half-believing it. First, there was enduring a night in the bush, without fire, food, or water.

  The sounds of the bush at night are magical when you are safely under canvas, or warmed by the touch of a flickering campfire. But the distant growl of a leopard, the shriek and whoop of hyena—these sounds have a different effect on two boys cloaked only by the dark. Sleep did not come that night. We clung to our rifles, backs braced against an outcrop of cold stone, and waited for the black sky to pale.

  When morning came, two hungry, bedraggled boys tried to follow their own spoor, hoping they could backtrack and find the place they had left their jeep. But it was hopeless. By the time the sun was at its zenith, we had turned ourselves in yet more circles. Desperation had long ago set in. I did not speak to Barry and Barry did not speak to me. The hunger in the pit of my stomach had turned into a fist of hard rock, and the scabrous sensation at the back of my throat was only the first of many signs that we were dangerously dehydrated.

  When I heard a noise overhead, I couldn’t be certain it wasn’t the roar of anxiety in my febrile mind. I squinted into the cruel afternoon sun and saw a shape that lifted my heart. It was my father’s little Tiger Moth biplane, sailing out of the blue.

  Adrenaline pumped through us. With energy I had
not known we still had, we leapt up to grab his attention, screamed crazily and waved. I would have recognized the sputter and whirr of that airplane anywhere; it was in the cockpit, alongside my father, that I had first taken to the skies, wrapped up in hat and goggles as we glided over the contours of the ranch.

  The plane banked overhead. There was a moment when I thought he had seen us. Then, he flew on.

  I yelled until I was hoarse, my throat raw. It was as if an invisible tow rope had snapped and we were left drifting, buffeted by thermals, abandoned. I had never felt so alone and helpless.

  Barry shrugged his shoulders. There was a fixed expression on his face, a thousand-yard stare.

  We collapsed onto the naked red earth and, for the longest time, sat there, being baked by the unrelenting sun.

  We had given up finding our own way back to the jeep. The thought of the kudu bull was so distant it was another lifetime. Now, our only focus was the tormenting hunger in our stomachs, the way our bodies were screaming out for something to drink. Thirst can be all-consuming. It drives men to the brink of madness and beyond. We stumbled on, and only when we came across a lot of spoor heading in the same direction did we begin to hope. There was a waterhole somewhere. With our last reserves of strength, we started to follow.