by Simon Barnes
Travelling always fills us with desperate contradictions. Filled with joy, I packed Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa and Norman Estes’s Behaviour Guide to African Mammals; cravenly hoping that the trip would be called off and I would be let off going. Thrilled to be going, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay with family, marsh, horses, yet I couldn’t wait to step once again into the Luangwa Valley in Zambia, where I was co-leading a trip. And I knew I would arrive back deeply regretting that I had left the beloved Valley, and profoundly grateful to be home, treading once again the paths of the marsh, taking a beer and an apple juice to the favourite bench and singing the Not Exciting song.
But would the butterflies still be there?
4
RUNNING AWAY, JOINING UP
Was it the frost that turned the owl’s feathers white?
My body was back on the marsh but my heart and my mind took a later flight back.
Again in my mind I saw that lioness, for she had thoroughly invaded my brain. It was getting dusk. She got up, turning in the course of about five seconds from a hearth rug to the most efficient and thoughtful killer in the Luangwa Valley. Then she went round to each and every member of the pride, which was stretched out across the landscape, occupying an area of about an acre, with each individual lion dozing under a personally chosen bush. She was clearly the alpha female, the pride’s chief decision-maker. Sometimes she gave the lion a nudge, sometimes she just walked past, but her gait was elastic and demanding and was obviously, even to us humans, a call to action. One or two – I guessed that they were her own cubs now full grown – got a long lick between the ears. Each lion got up, and stretched – front paws low, elbows on the ground, bum and tail high, just like a cat in front of the cat flap – and began to walk. Well, most of them. One or two of them flopped straight back down again: a lion flop is a fine, dramatic thing; they look like puppets with all their strings cut at once. The alpha female continued her walk, going past the vehicle within stroking distance, and in some moods when telling the tale, I’ll swear she rolled her eyes to heaven as she passed me, as if to say: bloody hell, it’s like herding bloody cats.
Then they were all up. I counted 12 of them, and then . . . Well, do you remember the opening sequence of West Side Story? The Jets get to their feet, walk across a playground and onto the street. And that’s it. But bit by bit, step by step, they move from aimless walk to purposeful dance and the band seems to change step with them, finally blaring out the musical phrase to which the boys will later sing the words: ‘The Jets are in gear!’ And suddenly they’re all dancing, athletic, exuberant, menacing, full of themselves and their joint identity:
Here comes the Jets like a bat out of hell,
Someone gets in our way someone don’t feel so well!
And it was like that. Over the course of 16 bars or so, the pride of lions, the Jet Pride – we’re the Jets! The greatest! – changed from 12 sleepy individuals into a single unit of power: 12 bodies and 12 brains working as one, the perfect team. It was as if they had just had the greatest team-talk from the greatest-ever manager – and that was the boss, that alpha female. It was that single moment, that moment when the Jet Pride got into gear, that stayed with me above all others on the excellent trip. And the reason it stayed with me was fear. I’ve spent a lot of time with lions and have had the odd close call: when I see a lion preparing to hunt, it feels personal; I don’t feel like a privileged observer, I feel like prey.
Now I was back, looking over another valley, another flood plain, one that had been ironed flat by a quite different river, but one not short of things to love, admire and fear.
Two places united also in their vulnerability. Absurd: a lion vulnerable, an elephant, a herd of buffalo, that hippo that gave us such a fright, all vulnerable. But like the marsh harrier, the barn owl and the deer, they are dependent on the whims of humanity for their survival.
I always get a bit sad and elegiac when I come back from the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. I’ll be all right in a minute.
There’s a piece of magic that you can do with a horse. Well, it looks like magic, but it’s easy enough to pull off. You are on the ground and you put your horse through a series of comparatively simple exercises. When they’re done, you turn your back on the horse and walk away. By this time the horse is not attached to anything. Except you. You slow down, speed up, make rapid changes of direction, stop dead – and all the while you have a big soft nose about a foot from your shoulder. The horse is seeing you as leader of the herd of two, and is looking to you for companionship, herd solidarity and moral support.
It’s called join-up.
It’s about connectivity. So many things in life are about connectivity. Things like managing a few acres for wildlife. It’s OK if you make an island of wildness in a sea of concrete, in the manner of Central Park. But it’s a great deal better if you can join up.
Coming back from every trip, particularly the good ones, tends to be about counting your blessings rather than wishing you were still there. I was riding Miakoda, my nine-year-old American Paint mare – a blessing if ever there was one – and considering the way things join up. The view from the top deck of a horse, with your head nine feet off the ground, is particularly helpful here.
There’s a point on our daily ride where we can look down and across the valley. From here we can see the whole sweep of the landscape, the river snaking its way across the valley floor, and on the far side the wide, shallow waters of the flood: a great wide watery place with stands of trees and herds of grazing cattle.
We then drop down – by this time we have covered more than a mile and a half – to a point a few hundred yards from home. Here again, we can see where it all joins up: all the one flood plain, the ironed-flat grazing marshes that lead to the same river, which lies two or three furlongs away or, if you prefer, 20 or 30 chains.
This tends to be where we roll on into a canter, often startling – and being startled by – Chinese water deer and hares. They hold still until the last moment, just as pheasants do, and break cover right at our feet for maximum startle effect. It’s a popular escape plan in the wild world, and the presence of all these mammals – deer, hare, cow, horse, human – again joins up the landscape and unites us in its purpose. It helps – it helps profoundly – that all this land is managed with wildlife in mind by the Raveningham Estate: a practical demonstration that agriculture need not be the enemy of wildlife or human delight in the countryside. Green woodpeckers and jays often shout out as we pass: there’s a special and perhaps slightly smug pleasure in this high-speed birding.
And then we loop back up the valley’s side, usually at a ground-eating jog-trot, and head towards home, joining up the outward with the inward route.
Back at the yard – untacking, rugging up because it’s that time of year already, too cold for naked horses, a thank-you offering of carrot because that’s one of those acts of courtesy that keeps the horsey life harmonious, turning out and then getting back to my hut to work – I join up the working and the non-working aspects of the morning.
It’s good to know that our few acres are joined up to many surrounding acres in which wildlife is accepted and encouraged. A deer can walk from the estate by way of another stretch of private land onto our patch and then onto the land owned by the parish, the place where our neighbour Jane grazes her sheep: and it can do so in a single unbroken stretch, without any need to cross those dangerous roads, without any need to tell a single human being at all that it’s about. You can pick out its paths, accustomed routes across our land and our neighbours’ land: land that’s joined up by the deer and by everything else. It’s easier for a bird, of course: they can get from one place to another by flying over roads and houses, but even for them, it helps to have trees and hedges and rough ground – sources of food and shelter – along the way.
For the wingless invertebrates, the creepers and the slitherers, the connectivity also matters hugely. If you join places up you doub
le their value: one of the reasons why we were so delighted to acquire those extra acres from Barry: we had joined them up – and by joining stuff up you make it less vulnerable. There is robustness in connectivity. Our marsh is not an island. It’s part of something bigger. It’s part of the stuff that touches and surrounds us. It’s part of something that covers the nation: a vast and spreading web of places where the wild things are. And every strand depends, at least to an extent, on all the others: when you break a single strand you weaken the entire web.
We’re part of it. Our bit of marsh is part of it. It’s part of the web of wild places that unites the local area, the county, the country, the continent, the world. I’d call it the worldwide web, but I think that’s been done. And that’s a shame because this version of the web is bigger and better and more important than the other, and when we break the strands we do harm to more than just the deer and the hares. We also harm ourselves: for we are connected to non-human life whether we like it or not. With every strand we break, we make every other strand – every other place – slightly more vulnerable. And with it ourselves.
Morning ride. A monstrous bull swan blocks our way. Take me to your Leda!
Only connect.
A good starting point, no matter what you’re doing.
If you get into the corner of our tiny outdoor training arena – surface covered in woodchip, surrounded by post-and-rail fencing – you can hoist yourself up and sit in comparative comfort with your feet on the bottom rail. It was a cool, bright day in late autumn and I was doing just that. And watching Eddie lunging his pony.
Eddie was standing in the middle of the school, holding on to one end of a rope while Molly, on the other end, was circling round him at a trot. Eddie was doing all this by himself, with quiet concentration. Connectivity, you see.
Molly trusted Eddie almost at once. Why was that? Did she sense that Eddie was not like everyone else? Horses will often moderate their behaviour for a child. Perhaps she accepted that Eddie was, like herself, a little vulnerable. Either way, her response to him was generous and trusting. First she trusted Eddie, then she got more trusting of me. These days when I went to her box she would keep her head out, and when I raised a hand, she would move her head towards it rather than away. She was a much-patted pony.
Trust is a two-way street. Eddie grew to trust Molly and to feel increasingly confident with her. For some years now, we had been doing exercises on the ground, many of them based on the Parelli techniques of what’s called natural horsemanship. So there was Eddie, doing a difficult, complex and – mildly – dangerous job, with calmness and confidence, and he was getting it right.
I taught him how to do it. How very pleasing that is.
I jumped down to help Eddie reverse the direction of Molly’s circling, and then pointedly went back to my perch so that Eddie could do the rest himself. Raise the stick, I told him. Don’t do anything more, she’s already watching you. At the same time, hold the rope away from you and she’ll start circling again, in the right direction. And Eddie listened, and Eddie raised the stick the tiniest bit and held the rope away from him and Molly circled, and then he encouraged her into a trot, with his voice and a small gesture of the stick, and she trotted comfortably on, and Eddie stood there, calm and in control.
It was then I remembered a particularly irritating line on one of Eddie’s school reports. Mustn’t grumble too much – most of Eddie’s teachers at the special school he was attending back then were kind and generous and Eddie liked them very much – but, well, one teacher told us: ‘Eddie must learn to take instruction.’ Or to put that another way, Eddie must learn not to have Down’s syndrome. Or to put that yet another way, teacher must learn how to teach. Repetition and encouragement, got that? Well done! Brilliant! Now we’ll try it again . . .
Instructions need to be simple. If you give Eddie two instructions at the same time, you’ll create confusion: no idea what he’s supposed to do, he crashes like a computer, goes into a state of lockdown, won’t move forward, won’t move back, won’t talk. It looks like the most colossal sulk but it isn’t: you just have to find a way to reboot. This can be truly annoying, particularly when you know that it’s your fault he’s gone into lockdown. You’ve got to switch him off and on again.
But get it right, and you’ll find that Eddie’s capacity is much greater than you thought.
‘OK, Eddie, bring her in.’
And Eddie dropped his stick to the floor, turned away from Molly and went into a semi-crouch. Molly at once went from trot into walk, went up to Eddie and stopped, her nose at his shoulder. Eddie stood and gave her much praise and many pats. A little piece of horsey magic. Join-up. Only connect.
At this point a chunky old 4x4 drove into the yard and from it emerged a tall, big-boned man with large features and the demeanour of a Shakespearean clown. It was Mr Wright from the Internal Drainage Board, and he wanted to know what we wanted to do about the ditches and dykes. So Eddie held Molly while we had a nice chat about access and dates and so forth. The IDB are all about water management: they operate according to water catchments areas rather than local government boundaries. You find them in the Broads, the Fens, the Somerset Levels and one or two other areas. They’ll come onto your land and clear the dykes, if you give permission, and charge a very modest fee. The open dykes are good for drainage, but they’re also good for all kinds of wildlife including some of our most prized residents – otters, kingfishers, grass snakes. So yes, indeed, go ahead. Water management is also about connectivity.
We humans get plenty of time to study escape ploys. I rather wish we didn’t. We are so intrusive in a landscape, so big, usually on the move, and usually noisy. This gives us unrivalled opportunity for the study of different creatures’ bums.
It’s all right! Relax! Calm down! I come in peace! But off they go, blackbirds flying away with a loud rattle, sparrows scattering in a whirr of wings, rabbits vanishing into burrows and flashing the danger signal of the white bobtail, squirrels skedaddling up trees as if the ground was suddenly red-hot.
Flight-distance is an essential concept. Walking in the bush – as I’d been doing in Zambia – is all about keeping just the right side of a mammal’s line of safety. Cross it and the creature’s gone. But this line is made of elastic: its degree of stretch depends on the sort of habitat you’re in and whether or not the mammal is accustomed to a benign human presence. Get it right and you can walk alarmingly close to many flighty animals. Get it wrong and they’re bounding off in all directions, the contradictory mass of leaping bodies designed to confuse your predatory instincts.
You can reduce the flight-distance, at least to an extent, by getting on a horse. You become an honorary quadruped, and you are granted special privileges as a result. I’ve done that once or twice in Zambia and walked my horse through herds of antelope as if I was just one more of the same kind; I do it most days in England, and ride with Chinese water deer. They have a fondness for the land either side of my favourite path along the flood plain, but they’re not herd animals so they’re careful about remaining hidden. They can’t find safety in numbers so they seek it by lying doggo. Quite often I don’t see them at all . . . till they break cover at our feet: the pheasant’s startle strategy again, but without the terrible din. I’ve seen these deer take on a fleet-footed collie at that game: the initial advantage gained by the startle-manoeuvre was never quite overcome. It works. That’s the way of things that have been tested by time across the millennia.
Sometimes I’ve cantered just behind a fleeing deer, and seen it drop its pace, maintaining the same comfortable distance in front of me. Sometimes they’ll do this for a mile or so, loping along as we cruise behind. They know there’s no need to panic: they have great faith in their own strategy, in the concept of flight-distance.
This time a deer broke cover at our feet. My horse jinked extravagantly and the deer was vanishing at full speed across the sugar beet – no knowing canter this time. As I watched, the
deer performed two or three spectacular leaps, its back forming a shallow U. I’d last seen that manoeuvre with an impala in the Luangwa Valley a few days earlier: not a go-faster stratagem but an attempt to show how gloriously fit this particular animal is. Don’t bother chasing me.
Thus the landscape of home joined up with the landscape of the savannah.
Under a shallow sun a fieldfare quacks welcome to winter.
Quack-ack-ack! A small bunch of them flying overhead, settling in the tops of the low trees, glowing orange-red in the low-angled sun. Here come the fieldfares: crossing and recrossing the marsh, haunting the hedges, restless birds taking to the air and flying off again: thrushes with black tails forever conversing in that triple-quack.
I have never heard a fieldfare sing. They don’t sing here, only in their distant nesting lands. For us they are birds of winter: they come flooding in with the cold weather, preferring our balmy climate to the brutal continental winters, arriving from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.
Perhaps we should hate and fear them. After all, we love the birds that bring in the spring: swallows are birds of good omen and when they appear we rejoice. The breaking of winter’s grip, the establishing of high spring: these things are unequivocal goods. Shouldn’t we then hate the coming of the winter with the same fervour with which we love the spring? Shouldn’t we despise the birds that seem to usher in winter with such blatant quacking enthusiasm?
But we don’t. We traditionally fear the creatures of the night: owls and bats have a deeply sinister reputation. Our atavistic fear of darkness goes back to our hunter-gatherer days, when every night brought possibilities of violent death. But winter, as much a killer as any creeping carnivore, doesn’t have the same resonance of fear. We humans often fear the dark, but we don’t fear the cold. We only hate it.