Close to the Sun

by Stuart Jamieson

  We had a pet giraffe named Tiny, who came to the compound every evening to eat the banana leaves we fed her. She had long eyelashes and beautiful soft lips. We loved Tiny. Philip even forgave her for killing one of his prize bulls with a violent kick from her back legs. Tiny roamed wild during the day, and we became worried when she didn’t turn up for a few months. Probably she’d been eaten by a lion, we thought. But then Tiny returned—with a calf, a perfect miniature of herself. We called the calf Tinier. Tinier never grew as tame as her mother. Some months later Tiny strangled herself in some telephone wires, and Tinier disappeared for good.

  Tiny, the giraffe, with Annie.

  We had two other pets that were an unusual pair—an ostrich and a zebra. The ostrich didn’t have a name, but we called the zebra Waa Waa, after a funny neighing sound it made. They’d been raised together and were inseparable friends. We’d marvel as they walked side by side on the dusty road. One day the ostrich broke its leg trying to get into the vegetable garden through a fence. We did our best to patch up the injury, but the bird died the next morning. Waa Waa, bereft, stopped eating and died within a week.

  My mother with Waa Waa.

  The office buildings and workshops where Philip worked were just over a mile from the house. There was a headstone on the lawn in front of his office, only steps from the entrance, that read, “On this spot in November 1956 the General Manager Mr. Dedman was killed by a buffalo.” It was a reminder that in Africa danger could lurk right outside your front door.

  The head mechanic was a black man named Butterfly. Butterfly could fix anything. He had a short, squat Land Rover built from parts cannibalized from other Land Rovers on the ranch. It was slow and had no brakes, windshield, or horn. Otherwise, it was perfectly serviceable. I appropriated Butterfly’s car whenever I was at Nuanetsi. I learned to stop it by running over larger and larger bushes until it came to a halt.

  Philip’s desk had once belonged to Leander Starr Jameson. Imported from England when Jameson worked for Cecil Rhodes at the British South Africa Company in the late 1800s, it was made of mahogany, had a leather top, and was an altogether remarkable piece of furniture to find in this remote place. There was a walk-in safe behind the desk where an armory of guns of every sort was kept, mainly big-bore rifles for heavy game such as buffalo and elephant. My favorite was a .470 English-made double-barreled rifle. It had a kick that nearly knocked you over, but it could stop a charging elephant in its tracks. Although it afforded only two shots before reloading, in close encounters and dangerous situations, there is rarely time for even two shots anyway. And I figured that, knowing I had only two shots, I’d be more likely to make them count if I had to.

  I had the .470 with me one day when Joni and I went after some lions that had gotten into an African-style thornbush kraal and carried away a calf. We tracked them deep into the bush and found a large male and three lionesses feeding lazily on the kill. As we approached, they lifted their heads and looked at us, nervously twitching their tails. We stopped about fifty feet away, stood still, and discussed the situation in whispers. We didn’t want to kill all four. If we killed the male, we thought the others would leave. I shot the male between the eyes as he stared at me. His head dropped, and he didn’t move again.

  But the lionesses did not leave as expected. One of them took a few steps toward us. I shot her and started to reload. One of the other females then dropped her head and twitched her tail more urgently. This was bad. She grunted, took a couple of trotting steps in my direction, and then rushed forward in a full charge. While my gun was still open, she leaped at me from fifteen feet away. I heard the crack of Joni’s .303. The lion tumbled forward through the air and landed on the ground dead, her head coming to rest by my toes. The remaining lion turned and ran off.

  A cardinal rule in the bush is never to run from an animal. This is true for any predator and also applies to buffalo and elephant. The rule works for humans, too. Fear only encourages a coward and a bully. With animals, it is always best to stop and back away slowly, downwind if possible. Despite its size and ungainly appearance, an elephant can run twice as fast as a man. Elephants will generally stay away from you, but a female with a young calf or a bull elephant with a bad attitude is dangerous. We often came upon elephants while we were in the bush on foot. Most charges I experienced were “false charges.” The elephant would run forward, flapping its ears and trumpeting, usually when taken unawares. After a few steps it would stop and back off, still trumpeting, stamping its feet, and flapping its ears.

  The difficulty is that it’s not always possible to distinguish a false charge from a real one. When an elephant tucks its trunk under its chest after lifting it up to sniff the air, and flattens its ears instead of flapping them in irritation, then it’s the real thing and you are in trouble. If there is no escape and you have to shoot, the place to hit is just above the top wrinkle on the trunk to get to the brain. You will likely only have one shot.

  I never had to shoot an elephant, and never wanted to. But I had another memorable close call not long after the day that Joni saved my life with the lions. We had a visitor from South Africa, a VIP with government connections. He’d come to the Nuanetsi to shoot a Cape buffalo, a formidable beast that can weigh more than two tons. It is the most dangerous of the big five game species—along with the rhino, elephant, lion, and leopard. In those days, more people in Africa were killed by hippos than any other animal—but more hunters were killed by buffalo. Joni and I were to guide the hunt. I wasn’t impressed by the hunter—he was a young guy, about thirty-five—and I was even less happy with his gun, a .375 magnum that was fine for lions and leopards but which didn’t have the stopping power for a buffalo you’d need in an emergency. But off we went, me with the big .470 and Joni, as always, with his .303.

  We soon enough found a lone male buffalo. He was old and battered. Older males usually leave the herd and sometimes find the company of other retired males. This one seemed to be by himself. We tracked him downwind. When he was about seventy-five yards away, standing broadside to us, Joni tapped our guest on the shoulder, signaling him to take the shot. Everything looked good. The .375 would be more than enough for a heart-lung shot on a standing animal. I told our guest to aim a third of the way back from the front of the chest and a third of the way down from the top. If he was off in front, he’d break a shoulder. Too high and he’d break the spine. Either would put the buffalo down and make a second shot, if one were needed, easy.

  The shot was low. I knew right away it was not a killing shot. The hollow thud of a low bullet striking is unmistakable. The buffalo galloped into a patch of brush and small trees. Joni and I glanced at each other in dismay. Nothing is more dangerous than a wounded buffalo in close cover. A Cape buffalo is the only animal that will stalk you when it’s wounded, leaving a false trail or doubling back and lying in wait.

  There was no thought of leaving the animal to die slowly. But rather than following up right away, I decided we should take the visitor back to the house. I wanted to tell Philip what was going on and to leave the man behind for his safety. The wounded buffalo would weaken from blood loss and begin to stiffen up, making him easier to deal with. Despite his protestations, we dropped off the visitor at the house and left a message for Philip. We were back where we’d last seen the buffalo about an hour later.

  Joni, saying nothing, pointed to a few blades of bent-over grass and some frothy specks of blood. A lung shot. We looked at each other and started moving forward. The buffalo could be anywhere, including behind us. We tracked it for two hours. It was brutally hot. Sweat was running into my eyes. Around noon we came to a small rise with a thicket off to the right. The tracks continued straight ahead, but Joni stopped suddenly and caught his breath with a sharp hiss. In the same instant, a black shape broke from the bushes on our right. Joni fired. I knew he would not have missed, but his .303 did not even slow the buffalo. What came next seemed unfold in slow motion.

  The horns of a
Cape buffalo meet in a massive, impenetrable boss across the top of its head. When a charging buffalo lowers its head to gore you, this armor-like knot of horn makes a killing shot from straight on almost impossible. Not even the .470 could penetrate the boss. With Joni’s shot ringing in my ears, I saw the buffalo coming at me at full gallop, his head up to see where he was going. Although the buffalo closed the distance between us in only seconds, it seemed a long time to me. I felt like I was watching this unfold, as if I weren’t part of what was happening, and yet everything depended on me. There would be no second chance. It was a feeling I’ve since experienced in an operating room. I was calm. I raised my rifle and aimed at the buffalo’s nose. He was close now, looming bigger by the instant. I fired, steadied the gun and found the second trigger, and fired again. I saw Joni step to his left. I moved right. The buffalo passed between us like a locomotive even as his legs began to fold under him. He skidded to a stop, dead, with two bullets in his brain.

  I felt my heart begin to race then. Joni was completely composed. For him it was just another day in the bush. We returned home to find Philip waiting anxiously. The visitor on the veranda was having a beer. We went back to the buffalo so that photographs could be taken of the guest proudly posing behind it with his trusty .375.

  One of my stepfather’s ongoing projects was finding water for the cattle. The crocodile-infested Nuanetsi River ran through the ranch, and there was always water where the river was. But there were thousands of acres that were bone-dry. Water could be pumped from wells called boreholes, but it often had to be pumped long distances to where the cattle were. The pipes were buried, but no matter how deep they were put underground, elephants could always hear or smell the water and dug them up. Unlike lions or leopards, which killed the cattle and had to be hunted, elephants were more of a nuisance we put up with.

  Philip and my mother had another house at the northern headquarters. It was closer to civilization. Local farmers sometimes came to hunt at Nuanetsi, but there were poachers, too, and we pursued them whenever we could. It was hard, because they usually hunted by flashlight at night. One time a woman phoned Philip wanting to get an urgent message to her husband. When Philip said he didn’t know the man, the wife said, “Well, he is hunting on Nuanetsi.” We found his car by the road, tracked him down, and took him to the police station. I expect he had a better time there than his wife did when he got home.

  Much of Joni’s time was devoted to tracking poachers. He taught me a lot about tracking. This was useful later on when poachers gave way to terrorists. Animals do not attempt to conceal their tracks—though buffalo may make false trails, especially if wounded. Humans breaking the law, however, often try to hide their tracks. Poachers would make false trails or try to confuse their tracks so you could not be sure how many of them there were. White poachers sometimes went barefoot instead of wearing shoes, hoping to be taken for natives. Other times they’d walk on the sides of their feet to avoid heel or toe marks or wore their shoes or sandals backward to make you think they were traveling in the opposite direction. Joni taught me how to tell if the track was from a man or a woman—or someone carrying a heavy load like a dead animal or a big weapon. He showed me the telltale signs that someone had been walking backward—the heel mark tended to be deeper than the mark made by the ball of the foot, the pace was shorter, and the feet were placed farther apart. Another trick poachers tried was to walk in a line and step in each other’s tracks to make it appear as if there was only one of them. Sometimes a trail ended where the tracks had been swept away. We even came across tracks that had been partially obscured by the use of feet cut from hippos or elephants.

  Tracking with Joni.

  Joni saw everything: a patch of trampled grass, a few turned or broken leaves, stones or sticks that had been moved. He’d point to a track until I saw it and could tell him who or what had made it, and where it went. Every living thing that moved through the bush left marks on the land. Learning to read them was like learning a new language, one that had existed since long before there were words.

  I had finished at Falcon and was living at Nuanetsi before going to England, where I was to attend medical school, when we received a troubling message from Falcon. David, Philip’s son and my stepbrother, had disappeared. He was sixteen. He had told some friends he wasn’t feeling well and was going to the sanitarium. He never arrived there. Apparently this hadn’t worried anyone at first, as they waited two days before phoning Philip. I believe they thought David had run away and would just turn up again. But he hadn’t.

  I went to Falcon with Philip, Joni, and another tracker from the ranch, but the trail had gone cold. It was impossible to see where David had left the school grounds. His clothes and possessions in his school locker seemed undisturbed. We spent several days searching the bush around Falcon, looking for signs. We checked some of the mine shafts. But David had vanished. We agonized over whether he’d met with some kind of accident or had run off, a confused adolescent desperate to start life over somewhere else.

  Philip never really got over the disappearance and presumed death of his only son. I missed him, too. It would have been much easier to accept had we only known what had happened to him. I think that Philip held out hope that one day David would just walk through the door. He never did.

  PART TWO

  THE CUTTING EDGE

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LONDON

  As British sanctions against Rhodesia grew harsher in my final years at Falcon, the civil war that had begun in 1964 deepened. After the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, Rhodesia was not recognized as a sovereign country, and factions within the revolt were being separately sponsored by the Soviet Union and China. It was a conflict with many faces. To many in the black majority, it was a war of liberation—though a significant number of blacks believed the war would destabilize the country and bring an end to a way of life that was preferable to what lay ahead. Competing rebel groups fought Rhodesian security forces and also each other. To whites shocked by atrocities committed in the name of freedom, the rebels appeared to be foreign-backed communists—or worse, a homicidal mob. And in time many events that could only be called acts of terrorism would unfold. This all played out against the backdrop of a country that was no longer functional. Money was in short supply under the sanctions, since it was all but impossible to get money in or out of the country. Rhodesia was coming apart.

  And I was applying to medical school.

  I was keen on going to London, which was the best place to train. I’d written to several medical schools requesting application materials and had been accepted by several programs. I decided on St. Mary’s Hospital, which had been the first teaching hospital in London but was still smaller that most of the other schools. Many of the older hospitals, like St. Bartholomew’s or St. Thomas’s, where my brother had gone a year earlier, were opened as hospitals and only later took on medical students. I thought a smaller school would be an easier adjustment for me after a boarding school in the African bush. My acceptance letter arrived with a handsome color brochure showing scenes of student life at St. Mary’s. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Classes began in October 1966. I took the train from Bulawayo to Cape Town, saying goodbye to Philip and my mother on the long platform and then waving as the train chuffed and we began to roll beneath a coil of black smoke. The trip to Cape Town took three days. The carriages were grand—paneled in mahogany with green leather seats, the Rhodesian Railway “RR” emblem emblazoned everywhere. The train stopped often to take on water and coal. At each stop it was surrounded by vendors hawking trinkets and peanuts—which we called “monkey nuts.” This was from an old game: You filled a jar with peanuts and then tied a string around its mouth and the other end to a tree where there was a monkey. Soon enough the monkey would come down, stick its hand in the jar, grab a fistful of nuts, and then be unable to extricate itself because it wouldn’t let go. You then approached and the monkey ran around
the tree as the string got shorter and shorter until the animal had pinned itself. You needed heavy gloves to catch the monkey and then let it go. Taming a wild monkey was out of the question. It was an odd amusement. Watching the peanut vendors on the train platform, the thought came to me that London would surely be different from everything I’d known until then.

  The voyage from Cape Town to Southampton by boat took fourteen days. As we departed from Table Bay, many of the passengers threw streamers to people on the dock seeing them off. I wasn’t saying goodbye to anyone, so I just watched. But as we steamed toward open water, I threw a coin in the bay, which was said to ensure that you would one day return. I made my way to steerage, deep in the bowels of the ship near the engine room, which throbbed day and night.

  On the train from Southampton to London, I got my first look at England. It was shockingly green and, as it was autumn, much cooler than I was used to. In London I found my way to Wilson House, where new students stayed, on Sussex Gardens a few blocks from St. Mary’s. My room was in the basement, but it had a small window and was warm and comfortable. I remember not long after my arrival walking to Hyde Park, which was nearby, wearing a coat for the first time in my life.

  London felt like a different world. The brightly lit streets never got dark, which I found disorienting. Everywhere there were crowds of people and a cascade of noise that never ceased, even in the middle of the night. I wasn’t accustomed to streets whizzing with traffic. I’d only glimpsed television and had never ridden an escalator. I’d come to London just weeks before a singing group called the Beatles would enter a studio to begin recording an album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but I knew nothing about any of that. I was oblivious to “Swinging London” and the mod scene on Carnaby Street, and was content to stay that way. I had come there to become a doctor and had no thoughts of anything else.