by Douglas Hurd
The baboons were now engaged in a skirmish of skips and leaps, posturing and grimacing in what must surely be a parody from their observation of human activity – except, Elvira reflected, that none of the baboons could actually have been to a dance in Sandton or to a Capetown garden party.
One thought niggled her.
‘Luis, can we find a different ranger?’
The senior ranger John had been allocated to them, and they had already made a rendezvous with him for 3.30 p.m. He was the most experienced of the team. Because Luis had paid extra, John would go out with them alone, leaving incomplete the normal team of four guests in each Land Rover.
‘Why? He is clearly competent.’
Luis was reading a text book on antelopes. He was preparing to take the weekend seriously.
‘He is plain and middle aged.’
‘Don’t be silly.’ He spoke without rancour. ‘Game reserve ranger and gigolo are different professions.’
She was not sure. The Land Rovers were returning one by one across the bridge up the sandy slope into the circular courtyard formed by the huts and administration building of Helderspruit. From each vehicle as it arrived a ranger jumped down and helped his clients to disembark with their cameras, binoculars, sweaters discarded as the sun had strengthened through the morning. The clients chattering enthusiastically about their experiences were of all races, shapes and sizes. By contrast the rangers seemed of a type – fair haired, handsome, courteous, wearing khaki shorts.
But after the peace conference Elvira did not talk in such terms to Luis.
‘It might be more fun with someone younger,’ she said lamely.
Luis continued to read about antelopes.
As their own afternoon drive got under way, she had to admit that John was a superb ranger. At the outset there was a test of will as they approached the bridge over the river bed.
‘I would like to see hippopotamus,’ said Elvira. ‘I hear they have been seen a few hundred yards upstream.’ Over the noise of the engine she leaned forward and used that high, very English voice which she half knew acted as an irritant to most who received it.
John was not irritated. ‘Not now. Tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘They graze in the early morning. Now they will be wallowing in the pool. Nothing to see but eyes and snout.’
‘What time in the morning?’
‘We must start out at five-thirty.’
Luis, sitting beside John in the front, glanced back quizzically at his wife, who on good days in Sandton rose at nine.
The first minutes across the river were disappointing. The Land Rover wound a tortuous way up the slope and into a dense wood. On the slope Egyptian geese pottered in the sun. In the wood were baboons, but Elvira had ticked baboons off her list already. She wondered whether the large sum which Luis had spent on this trip would be wasted. Better to sit at home, vodka in hand, and watch a video of the Kruger. There was nothing attractive in the pitted back of ranger John’s squat neck, and if the Land Rover continued to bucket about in this way she would be sick.
Behind her on a raised seat sat the black tracker from the Shangaan tribe, whose skills passed from generation to generation, with his teenage son. The lad wore a brown felt hat considerably too big for him. As they emerged from the wood into open bush, a gentle expanse of long yellow grass dotted with acacia trees, the trackers gave a low whistle on two notes. John immediately stopped the Land Rover and turned off the engine. The tracker pointed to a clump of three acacias halfway up the slope. Elvira could see nothing through the long grass. Slowly John edged the Land Rover off the track and into the bush. It carried a fender in front to prevent saplings and small bushes from whipping back against the passengers. In that way he could make progress without too many deviations. Elvira saw movement under the tree, but could not identify it. The Land Rover was only 20 yards distant when she distinguished two large cats. Something was wrong with the scale of their bodies. Their heads were disproportionately small. One of them extended his body against the tree and began to sharpen his claws.
‘Leopard?’ whispered Elvira.
From the front seat Luis was scornful. He had been consulting another text book from his rucksack. ‘Leopards are the hardest to find. They’d never be out here in the open bush. Smaller, too. Right, John?’
‘That’s right. These are cheetah, male and female, two years old.’
He edged the Land Rover even closer. The male cheetah continued to sharpen his claws completely unmoved, the bark falling away in strips to the ground.
Elvira found her camera, but the windscreen of the Land Rover obscured the view from where she sat. She stood up. The male cheetah at once gave a short growl. Both animals disappeared. For a second or two waving grass showed where they had passed. Then it was as if they had never been.
‘You fool,’ snapped Luis.
‘I only stood up.’
‘Didn’t you hear what John said when we started?’ She did remember that John had gone through a routine an hour earlier before they crossed the bridge, but she had been too busy organising herself comfortably on the back seat to listen. It had been like a safety announcement at the start of an air journey.
There was no crack in John’s calm. He explained again what she had failed to grasp. ‘The animals here have no fear of the vehicle. They know it is not good to eat, so they do not approach it. But it has never done them harm, so they do not run from it. Man is different. It is years since a human being killed an animal in this reserve. Except once a lion attacked a foolish client who left camp on foot, and had to be shot. You see, I have a rifle in front of me. You have a powerful cudgel beside you. We are licensed to cull impala when they become too numerous. That is why you will eat venison tonight. Otherwise the animals are safe from us. But they still have a vestigial fear of the human shape and smell. When you stood up, you altered the configuration of the Land Rover. It ceased to be a vehicle only and became involved with their fear of man. So the cheetah ran. They will be a mile away by now. They are the fastest of the cats by far.’
Chastened, Elvira allowed the day to assume a routine which began to attract and absorb her. John constantly exchanged low-voiced radio messages with the other teams out in the reserve. That way they heard of buffalo on the move two miles away.
‘It hasn’t rained for a couple of weeks. After rain the game is dispersed. They have plenty of pools to drink from. Now it is dry, and they begin to converge on the river.’
They found the buffalo easily enough, sloshing their way through reeds down a drying tributary. Every now and then a beast found a patch of mud still wet enough for a wallow. Sometimes they paused to graze for a few minutes, or to lock horns in desultory fight.
The first giraffe was an excitement, then they became commonplace. The tracker saw elephant, first a lone bull, then another, then females with offspring, but the bushes and trees were too thick for the Land Rover to get close. The sun began to sink and the temperature dropped, for the spring had hardly started.
‘Time for a sundowner,’ said John.
He set up a little table and produced Castle lager and strips of cured beef on rough bread rolls. This was obviously a personal routine. Luis retired behind a bush. Elvira took close-ups of acacias blurred with the first green, and of a tiny mongoose which posed obligingly before dashing into a conical mound of earth four foot high.
‘Termite hill?’ she asked, glad that Luis was not there.
‘Exactly,’ said John, and for the first time there was a current of communication between them.
‘Those cheetah, what were they doing under that tree?’
‘You did not see? They were just finishing a kill. He sharpens his claws when the meal is over. A dinka antelope. Beautiful, but very vulnerable.’
‘If we’d come earlier, would we have saved it?’
‘We would not have intervened. We never intervene.’
‘Never?’
‘In no circumstance whatever. The Land Rover is
neutral. It does not interfere with the course of nature. That is why it is respected.’
‘So even if something brutal is going to happen, something beautiful is going to be killed …’
‘We let it happen.’
The chord of communication between them snapped. He was grey haired, too short, stubborn.
‘It seems to me that you are a voyeur, a spectator of cruelty. Does it give you pleasure?’
‘Mrs de Brundt, when the Governor General and the Duchess of Kent and all the great of South Africa came to shoot lion here in the old days they did it for pleasure, of course. In those days when the lion saw vehicles they melted away in to the Kruger, where they were safe. But the rifles had a purpose. The lion was listed as vermin in the game books. The lion killed antelope, and unless lions were shot, the antelope would disappear. That was what they thought. They intervened with the course of nature. They were judges, not spectators, and their verdict was wrong. Now we do not shoot, and both lion and antelope flourish.’
She felt that he was evading the issue, but Luis reappeared and she broke off. They turned for home. The trunks of dead trees glimmered in white contorted shapes against the dusk. Once again the murmuring radio brought news.
‘Two male lions, near our eastern border.’
By the time they reached the lions the tracker had turned on the Land Rover’s search light which swept the bush from side to side of the track. Of the four Land Rovers already close to the lions, one backed away as they approached.
‘We have another rule,’ said John. ‘No more than four vehicles at one sighting.’
Elvira felt that even so it was a staged spectacle. They were paparazzi, neutral perhaps but, prying. John edged them to within ten yards of the nearer lion, who sprawled at ease under a tree. Unbelievably he took not the slightest notice of the lights. His magnificent head dwindled away into a body that seemed by comparison mean and shrunken. Elvira looked into the lion’s eyes – large, yellow, expressionless, except, she thought, for a touch of evil. After four minutes, and for no particular reason, the two lions got to their feet and walked eastward: The Land Rovers followed them through the bush until they crossed the boundary of the reserve.
A fax waited for Luis when they got back to camp, and he was at once on the telephone, stretched on the bed in their hut, talking in Afrikaans to his partner Stefan in Johannesburg. Elvira knew by experience what would follow. She could hardly understand the conversation, which was why Luis had chosen that language. But the outcome was as she expected.
‘I have to go. Sasol expects a hostile bid on Monday. Their Chairman has called a meeting noon tomorrow.’
She said nothing. She knew it was no use to plead. She no longer loved him, but since the peace treaty she had learned to accept, even welcome him as her partner for life. He had taken a shower. His brown shoes were a little too smart and polished, and the ornate buckle of his belt gleamed a little too brightly in the light of the bedside lamp.
‘You will stay,’ said Luis, reaching out to touch her shoulder, obviously relieved that there was no fight. ‘I will fly back and pick you up Monday, maybe Tuesday. I will arrange it all.’
After Luis had gone there was one further development. The manager telephoned just as she was settling to sleep with her Joanna Trollope novel. Now that she was alone would she mind changing rangers? He would make no change without her approval, but it would be more convenient for the management if she could join an American couple, very agreeable, and another ranger. His name was Peter. He was younger than John but equally experienced.
It was cold when they gathered in the courtyard at 5.30 a.m. The birds were more insistent in their calls at this hour than later, as if permitted an overture before the animals took centre stage. The humans spoke in hushed voices, sipping hot tea and deciding what sweaters to take. Elvira persuaded herself later that she knew the day would be magic even before Peter introduced himself. His fair hair was bleached by sun, his khaki shirt and shorts were sharply ironed, and unlike the other young rangers he wore stockings which gave him the old fashioned air of a colonial district officer. As the light strengthened she saw the lines on his face which showed that he must be older than she at first thought, thirty-two or so perhaps. When Luis later asked her what they saw that day, she had difficulty. The hippos first of course, two or three already in the big pool of the river upstream of the camp, two others grazing on the bank among the Egyptian geese – huge, looking benevolent but as if they possessed the mix of stupidity and strength that could do great harm: John had told her that they caused more human casualties than any other animal. It was particularly dangerous to find yourself between them and the water.
After that they turned north, then east, following the routines now familiar to her. She sat in the front seat beside Peter, the two Americans in the back. Elephant, giraffe, wildebeest, waterbuck, impala – they saw them all and today she found them full of grace and beauty; even the scuttling warthogs made her laugh. Elvira did not deceive herself, and hardly tried to deceive Luis. Her real study that day was Peter’s nose and chin in profile beside her, the schoolboy floppiness of his hair, contrasting with the grown-up tan of forearm and knee. Peter drove less neatly than John and was less communicative. The elderly American couple too were more silent than Elvira had dared to hope. The husband wore a lumberjack shirt and rough corduroys, but had the air of an academic. His wife lacked an air of any kind. The morning passed for Elvira in a silent happy haze.
It was the custom for each team to lunch together on the terrace overlooking swimming pool and river. Elvira rather dreaded this occasion. The silence of the Land Rover had been entirely welcome to her, but equivalent silence at the lunch table would be more difficult. She need not have worried.
‘Tell me, do you believe in a higher power?’ asked the American professor over the opening fish salad. He had by now introduced himself as Dr Mountfort.
It was not clear whether he was asking Elvira or Peter. Peter said nothing; he was eating a mountain of salad.
‘Yes, I think so,’ said Elvira.
‘This morning must have made you think of the purpose of life,’ said Dr Mountfort.
Yes, indeed, thought Elvira, but what if I conclude that the purpose of life is a young man’s profile? She was on her second glass of Stellenbosch white.
‘These animals beyond the river spending all their time walking, sniffing, running – year after year coping with danger. Their aim is to survive. But in the end they do not survive. Another animal eats them or they die alone in a thicket. What is the purpose of all the strenuous activity which we have glimpsed this morning?’
‘I suppose to reproduce, to prolong the species?’ said Elvira.
‘Yes, indeed, but you must see that only postpones the question. They breed, they protect their offspring. But what is the purpose of those offspring? Do they too exist only to watch, to give warning calls, to fight among themselves, to run from danger, to maul and be mauled?’
They helped themselves to chicken and home-grown vegetables.
‘There is an order in what we have seen, all these relationships between species, the pluses and minuses with which each is equipped, all so sophisticated that it cannot be accidental,’ said Dr Mountfort, who had taken only a small helping of chicken. ‘So there must be a creator, and a plan. The creator must presumably survey the creation he has made. Has he perhaps distinguished man so that we intervene on his behalf?’
‘No,’ said Peter rather loudly. ‘He threw the dice once and let the results follow. When we intervene we make a mess of it. We are not God.’
‘No indeed,’ said Dr Mountfort.
They prepared for ice cream. The conversation petered out. Elvira would have liked to pursue it, but with Peter alone. Was he following John’s doctrine of neutrality in the bush? She hoped he was more warm-blooded. But she could not cope with Dr Mountfort. She could see that he was not booming emptily; he was genuinely looking for an answer. But they all,
even Dr Mountfort at Stanford University, even money-making Luis, even Peter daily confronted with creation, saw through a glass darkly.
The afternoon drive showed less game. Elvira tried to draw Peter out about his past and his private life, asking questions in low tones so that the Mountforts in the back seat were not involved. Peter was the son of a Rhodesian farmer who had, to use the phrase of the day, ‘taken the bridge’ into South Africa as the regime of Ian Smith crumbled in the late seventies. Luckier than most he had managed to smuggle out his money to buy a small sugar farm in Natal, which Peter’s elder brother now ran. Peter preferred the more open life of a ranger. That was as far as she got.
‘You are not married? Do you have a girlfriend?’ As she asked Elvira knew that his physical appeal was clouding her judgement. She was piling on the questions too fast. And so it proved.
‘Even a ranger is entitled to a private life, Mrs de Brundt.’
Peter did not pause for a formal sundowner as John had done. He was scouring the bush for a pack of wild dog which had been reported by a tracker but not yet found by any of the Land Rovers. They paused just as the sun was setting by a line of mounds, the wrong shape for termite hills.
‘Cattle graves,’ said Peter. ‘They tried to farm here in the twenties. It didn’t work. Malaria wrecked the cattlemen. Lions ate the cattle.’ He made it sound like a success. Nature had triumphed. Against the last glimmer from the sun a bird launched from a tree planted by one of the mounds a long trembling appeal. Peter listened carefully, then repeated the song exactly, cupping his mouth with his hands. The bird responded to the call and flew to a closer tree. ‘Look,’ he said, handing Elvira his binoculars. Their hands touched, but this might have been by accident. It was a tiny white owl with staring round face.
‘Can John do that?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
There was no doubt about the next time. They paused because of a report that the dog pack was coming their way. It was cold by now; Elvira and the Mountforts had blankets round their knees. Peter sat still for a few seconds after switching off the engine. His hand felt under the blanket, found and pressed her own.