by Tony Park
‘No,’ her grandfather said. ‘The problem with dehorning in other parts of Africa was that it didn't stop poachers tracking rhino. It's hard work dehorning every animal on a farm, let alone in a big national park, so you've always got some who have been dehorned and some who haven't.’
Natalie nodded, then stepped back a couple of metres so she could get some pictures of her grandfather while he talked.
‘Morning, sir,’ said a voice behind them. Natalie turned and saw a jowly African man walk out of the trees. He was dressed in the ranch's green uniform and carrying an AK-47.
‘Morning, Doctor,’ Grandpa Paul said. ‘You're out early. You should be at home in bed, still with your wives.’
‘I was just checking on the patrols, sir.’ The man smiled and Paul introduced him as Doctor Nkomo, the acting head of security on the ranch. Braedan and Natalie shook hands with him. ‘I am not a real Doctor,’ he explained, ‘but my mother had high hopes.’
‘I was just talking about our dehorning program,’ Paul said. ‘We've got, what, Doctor, seven rhinos dehorned now?’
‘Six, sir,’ Doctor said.
‘Ah, my bloody memory,’ Paul said. ‘I just can't seem to remember numbers any more … Anyway, what the poachers would do, in the early days of dehorning, was track a rhino and when they caught up with it they would kill it, regardless of whether it had a horn or not.’
Natalie stopped taking pictures. ‘But why would they kill it if it had no horn – out of spite?’
Paul shook his head and he and Elias lowered Chete's foot to the ground. She snuffled and nuzzled his belly, almost pushing the elderly man over. Elias scratched Chete under the chin and tried, in vain, to keep her from the man she clearly adored. ‘There, there, my girl,’ Paul said, feeding the rhino the rest of the apple. ‘The poachers would kill a dehorned rhino simply to save themselves the effort of tracking the same animal again in the future. Also, if even a tiny stump of horn had begun to grow back, they would take that. So, we now carve the notch in the foot to –’
Natalie's eyes widened as she understood. ‘To send a message to the poachers. It's like a code.’
‘Precisely,’ Paul said.
‘How do you get the word out? I mean, it's no good making marks in the hooves if the poachers don't understand what the new tracks mean?’
‘Doctor?’ Paul said, looking to the security man.
‘Mr Bryant, he tells us to go out to the shebeens when we are on leave, and that when we drink we must tell everyone in the bar what we have been doing here. We talk about carving the marks in the bejanes' feet, and we lie about the numbers of guards.’
‘I like it,’ Braedan said. ‘But what's to stop poachers going after your good rhinos, the ones without the marks in their feet.’
Paul spread his open palms wide and looked soulfully at Chete who, having received her treat, had ambled away to snack at an inviting bush. ‘Nothing at all. It's a war of attrition, Braedan, as you'll soon learn. If a poacher spends an extra few hours or a day on my property looking for a horned rhino, if he knows it's not worth following the tracks of a dehorned one, then that might give us the time we need to catch him. If he decides to let the dehorned one go, then that's a minor win for us …’
‘Why don't you dehorn all of them, Grandpa?’
‘I hope to soon, while I'm still here and while all my rhinos are still here. But it takes time and money, and Zimbabwe's running out of both of those commodities.’
‘Aren't you worried about leaving the rhinos alone, while you go off to the game count?’ Braedan asked.
Paul shrugged. ‘What can I do? I can't be here all the time. I have to trust my security people and that's where you come in. Part of your job, Braedan, will be to train Doctor here to take over from you eventually. He was second-in-command to the guy I've just fired.’
Natalie noted the flash of resentment on Doctor's face. She wondered if he felt insulted at having a white stranger put in over his head.
‘When do you want me to start?’
‘As soon as we get back from the count, if that suits you,’ Paul said.
‘Fine.’
22
They left the farm just before eleven and it was already scorching hot. Paul and Pip led the mini convoy out of the gates to the house and down the long access road through the bush to the main gate. Tate followed in the Hilux, apparently very happy to be on his own, while Braedan and Natalie brought up the rear in Braedan's Nissan.
‘You're taking this game count thing very seriously, I see,’ said Natalie, nodding at the green bush shirt and matching shorts Braedan was now wearing. The shirt bore the machine-stitched logo of Kiabejane, the name of the Bryants' ranch, on the left breast. The name meant ‘home of the black rhino’.
Braedan smiled. ‘I'm not interested in counting animals in a national park.’
‘What do you mean?’ Natalie asked.
He winked at her. ‘You'll see.’
Doctor was standing at the entry gates, next to the security guard on duty. He smiled and waved at the Bryants, and at Tate, but his face was cold as Braedan and Natalie passed under the boom. Natalie waved and Doctor pointedly ignored her farewell.
You'll keep, Braedan thought.
Once they were off the farm there was another two kilometres of dirt track before they reached the main road back to Bulawayo. This had been the feeder road for three other cattle farms in the district, all of which had been taken over by so-called war veterans.
‘Check the fences,’ Braedan said, pointing out the window.
Natalie nodded as she wrote something in the notebook balanced on her leg and Braedan tried hard not to let his eyes linger on her smooth thigh.
‘Are you taking notes for the book?’
She nodded.
‘They let the fences fall into disrepair,’ he continued, ‘and then the cattle roam wherever they bloody well want. When there's an outbreak of disease, like foot-and-mouth, it spreads to hell and gone before anyone can do anything about it.’
‘Who's they exactly?’
‘Farm invaders, war veterans, wavets, new farmers: call them what you like. They say this land is theirs and that we whites didn't deserve it, but as soon as they get it they strip the farms bare of anything of value then let the land go to ruin. Farms didn't only go to veterans of the liberation war, they went to politicians, party faithful, serving soldiers, public servants. Plenty of them have jobs in town and hardly ever get out to their farms. Sometimes you see them in their brand-new Hiluxes that they get cheap through government grants, coming out to their property for a braai on the weekend, and that's as close as they ever get to working the land.’
Natalie looked out the window. There was a clutch of roughly built mud huts with thatched roofs.
‘A couple of families, living like they did two hundred years ago,’ Braedan said, following her eyeline. ‘That's all there is on this farm.’
‘If they want to live that way, then who are we to say they shouldn't?’
Braedan shook his head. ‘Don't give me that politically correct crap, Natalie. That farm probably supported a hundred, maybe two hundred Africans when it was white owned. These places were like mini communities – mine was, too. We had a little school for the kids and a chapel, and my wife used to run a small dairy herd just to provide milk to the compound where the Africans lived. All those people – dozens of families – were kicked off when we were. Overnight, the men had no jobs and the women had no homes or food for their kids.’
He checked his rear-view mirror as he passed the huts. He saw a couple of kids in baggy hand-me-downs crossing the road, along with a mangy dog. Paul's theory was that the men from this small settlement were prime suspects in the poaching of the last rhino to be killed on his property. The people living there were ZANU–PF supporters who had been bussed in, at the government's expense, four years earlier and told to take over the then white-owned farm. The thugs, none of whom were old enough to have fought in
the bush war, had threatened and beaten the workers on the farm so that when they were ready to make their move on the owner's house the staff fled in fear of their lives rather than rallying to support their employer. Once the whites had been hounded out, the invaders had raided the house, looting furniture, carpets, light fittings, copper wiring and plumbing, and the pipes and pumps that watered the lands. It had all been sold and the money spent long ago. Those ‘war veterans’ who hadn't drifted away eked out a meagre living by growing a few straggly lines of mealies and running some thin, tick-covered cattle on what had once been a thriving ranch. The old herd of fat cattle had been slaughtered years ago.
‘Those people back there,’ Braedan said, glancing again in the mirror, ‘have taken to poaching on your grandfather's farm to survive. Their party and their government have no need of them any more. They set snares to catch buck, to eat and sell, and he thinks they're responsible for killing at least one rhino.’
Natalie turned her head to look back through the dust thrown up by the bakkie, but the houses were out of sight now. ‘So what are you going to do, now that you're going to be working on the ranch?’
‘This.’ Braedan stopped the bakkie and opened the door.
‘What are you up to?’
He liked the sound of her accent, predominantly Australian but with traces of the old Rhodesian still there. Her clothes, unlike his, had become less safari. She wore short denim shorts and a lemon-yellow T-shirt, and slops. He would have liked to spend the next five hours in the car with her, on the drive to Hwange, even if she did insist on psychoanalysing him for her book. But he had a job to do.
Natalie got out as well and her eyes widened as he reached into the back of the Nissan and drew out a rifle from under his pack and a stack of extra camping gear her grandfather had loaded into the little vehicle.
‘I need you to drive the Nissan into town for me, to my mom's place, OK? You can go to the count with Tate.’
‘What's going on?’
Braedan took a daypack from the rear and slipped it on. He worked the bolt of the rifle, walked off the road and started into the long grass on the verge. He waved without looking back at her. ‘Bye, honey, I've got to go to work.’
Natalie fumed all the way to Bulawayo. She followed Tate to the house in Hillside where his mother lived. It was, she thought, the poorest looking house in the best neighbourhood of the once prim and proper colonial town.
Sharon Quilter-Phipps opened the sliding security gate by herself. Either the electricity was off or she couldn't afford an electric motor for her gate.
She was a bony woman wearing a faded cotton sundress. Natalie followed Tate through the gate. Weeds sprouted through the gravel on the driveway and the brittle yellow grass looked as though it hadn't been cut for months. The paint was peeling from the wooden eaves of the sagging shingle roof. A skinny dog barked at Natalie and jumped up so that its paws scratched at the driver's door of Braedan's little truck.
‘Down, Roxy!’ Sharon said.
Tate's mother wrapped her near skeletal arms around her son as soon as he got out of Grandpa Paul's truck. Tate dwarfed her, and while he reached an arm around her shoulders, Natalie could see his body was rigid in her embrace.
‘How are you, my boy?’
‘Fine, Mom,’ he said, extricating himself from her hug.
‘Roxy, DOWN!’
For a small woman, she could yell, Natalie thought. Perhaps it was a necessary quality for bringing up twin boys. Tentatively, Natalie got out of the Nissan, now that the dog was fussing around Tate's legs. It looked like an African dog, one of the whippet-like animals that had been called KDs, or kaffir dogs, when she was a child, in a less politically correct era.
Tate mumbled introductions and Natalie took Sharon's dry, papery-skinned hand. She could see what her grandfather had meant, without even looking inside the house. Sharon was like thousands of other pensioners in the country who had seen their pensions whittled away by rampant inflation and a government that cared nothing for them. It wasn't only whites who had been hard hit by the government's ruinous economic policies, Natalie knew, but at least elderly African people could usually count on the support of their extended families. The children of many retired whites, like Sharon's, had left Zimbabwe to start their lives anew. Tate and Braedan were back, temporarily at least, but up until yesterday Braedan had been unemployed, and, from what Natalie had learned, Tate seemed to drift from one conservation assignment to another.
‘You won't stay for lunch?’ Sharon asked Natalie.
‘We have to get going, Mom,’ Tate said. ‘We're going to Hwange.’
‘Haven't all the animals been killed up there?’
‘No, Mom,’ Tate said, using the tone a condescending adult might use with a child. ‘We've got to go. Bye.’
Natalie would have liked to have stayed and chatted with Sharon. It would have been interesting to get her views on the current situation; Natalie intended to touch on the plight of the poor whites in Zimbabwe in her book. Tate said nothing as he pulled out of the gate and followed the Bryants, who had been waiting out on the road, into central Bulawayo.
In the silence Natalie wondered what on earth she was doing here. Things were moving too fast for her liking, although she guessed that was part of life in this mixed-up country. She'd planned to spend a few days at least on her grandparents' farm, and maybe to line up some sit-down interviews with Braedan. Instead, she and Braedan had been thrown together on the long journey from Harare and she'd barely had five minutes with her grandfather. It seemed pointless trying to make plans in this place. Now she was on another long road trip, this time with a man for whom talking was as comfortable as a trip to the dentist.
Tate stared straight ahead, through the windscreen, as he slowed at a busy intersection where the traffic lights were out. There was probably no power at all in this part of town. It could have been a recipe for disaster in other parts of Africa, but somehow, through some unseen signals, Tate was able to coast across the intersection without any horns blaring or tyres screeching. Even in the face of chaos, there was a kind of natural order in Zimbabwe.
She had a few childhood memories of Zimbabwe's second largest city, but what struck her as they drove through the town was the absence of white people. Blocks of flats which had once housed single whites and urban professionals were now rundown, unpainted, with torn curtains or sheets tacked in the windows. The whole country seemed down on its luck. In many ways, other parts of Bulawayo reminded her of an Australian country town, with its wide streets, parking down the centre of the road and shady covered verandahs in front of the shops and pubs. Zimbabwe was like a parallel universe, where growth and prosperity had not only stopped but had done a U-turn. It was like so many other places, only sadder.
Once out of town they headed north on the Victoria Falls Road, which would take them to Hwange National Park. The grass on either side looked parched, like straw, and the trees were a dull khaki. Tate was driving with the windows open.
‘Perhaps we could have a little aircon?’ Natalie asked.
Tate sighed and worked the electric window switch. He stabbed the airconditioning's ‘on’ button.
‘Sorry. If you don't like it …’
He shook his head. ‘No, it's fine. One gets used to economising in a country like this. Airconditioning is terrible for fuel consumption, but fuel's not the problem it once was.’
Natalie felt like reminding him that it wasn't his vehicle and his fuel they were using, it was her grandfather's, and that she didn't think he would mind. She sensed, though, that if she tried to argue something with Tate he might not utter another word for the rest of the long journey. That might be OK, but she did also have a story to cobble together about the rhino program in Tanzania, to pay off the contra deal she'd received from Maasai Wanderings.
Her editor wanted a break-out box biography of Tate Quilter-Phipps so she had to persist with him. ‘You were the last white warden of Hwange, weren't y
ou?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ This was going to be even harder than she'd thought. She now wished her grandparents had more than two seats in their Land Cruiser pickup.
After a long minute Tate said, ‘I was one of the last white wardens in the parks and wildlife service. There were a few of us who hung on until not long ago. I was never warden of the whole of Hwange, just of a couple of the camps, Robins and Sinamatella, at different times.’
‘I read a quote from an overseas wildlife fundraising organiser who said that without you there would be no black rhino left alive in Zimbabwe today.’
‘Rubbish.’
Natalie laid her pen down on her notebook. She thought of herself as a capable journalist and normally she could get blood from a stone. A usable quote of more than one syllable from Tate, however, might be the greatest challenge of her career. She stared out the window, trying to think of a way to get him talking. Flattery clearly wasn't the answer. She saw more mud-walled huts and waved back at a little girl in a hand-me-down T-shirt. She wondered if these were more farm invaders, or just desperately poor people.
When she glanced at him she saw Tate staring through the windscreen, his hands gripping the wheel, his shoulders slightly hunched. She hoped he was just socially inept and not a psychopath. She closed her notebook.
‘Write this down.’
She looked at him, but he didn't acknowledge her. She opened her notebook again.
‘Charles Moyo.’ He paused until he heard her pen on the paper. He didn't so much as glance at her. ‘Matthew Sibanda. Patrick Mangwana. Augustine Nkomo. Sylvester Gono. John Little.’
Natalie wrote in shorthand, and Tate spoke the names slowly and deliberately. She would check spelling and write them in full later. For now, she wanted him to keep talking. She waited.
‘There are still rhino in this country today because of those men,’ Tate said at last.
The dry countryside flashed by. Tate drove in silence. She grew tired of waiting.