Tracking

We are walking in single file as we do in the bush. I am near the back of the line. Four or five people in front of me ascend the ridge.

           I am beginning to plod its slopes when we come to a sudden halt. I hear a crack, but not loud enough to be a bullet. Max’s ‘Gandalf stick’ – his walking stick, repository of his twenty years of sage bush knowledge – lies on the ground. He has thrown it a buffalo, shouldered his rifle and yelled Fuck! in the same instant.

           It is a textbook example of an encounter that could go badly wrong. The animal does not know we are there, we do not know he is there. Surprise ensues. A surprised buffalo is just as likely to run for you as to run away. Your only option may well be to shoot.

           But this buffalo ran away. Ahead of us, Max lowered his rifle.

          When you are fully trained, you find that you have shouldered, chambered and fired before you know what is happening. You won’t even remember having done it later, Max tells us.

          After lunch in the shade cast by the dining platform I do dry practice, loading the rifle with doppies and practicing just this sequence of moves – swing round on the back foot, put your weight on the front, rifle swung up to the shoulder from the left arm to the right shoulder simultaneously working the bolt to chamber a round, finger away from the trigger until I am ready to fire, rifle in the shoulder held tight not too high not too low, the stock tight against my cheek. Finger on the trigger and squeeze. Once this is all committed to muscle memory I will make no further mistakes.

We came around a tree and nearly ran into his backside. The elephant was facing away from us. His ears billowed back and forth slowly as he grazed, using his trunk to tug up clods of grass and sod. These he inserted delicately, almost surgically, in his tent-shaped mouth.

            We sat down, unnoticed still, on the grass. We stayed there a long time. So long I had to adjust my posture twice to save my knees from seizing up – not easy to do when you have a rifle in one hand and you are not allowed to let the butt rest on the grass.

            The elephant came closer and closer until he had consumed everything in our field of vision. I wonder what will happen, I thought, as the elephant’s trunk edged toward us. He hadn’t seen us; it was twilight and their vision is particularly poor in these interstitial times of day.

            As the elephant’s forefoot came within five metres of us, my heat pounded out a single alarmed beat. I felt my hand tighten around the stock of my rifle.

            We will have to do something now, I thought. It’s only seconds before the elephant is upon us. I looked at Adam. His face would tell me what to do. He was framed in twilight. His eyes had deepened from blue to khaki green. His profile was etched, then, dark, certain and uncertain.

            He took off his hat and scratched it in the grass. The elephant stopped, one forefoot off the ground. He turned his head, to angle his vision better. He paused, his ears a slow breeze around his head. Adam continued scratching in the grass with his hat.

            The elephant turned elegantly, swinging on his hindquarters, and slowly walked away. He stopped on the other side of the umbrella thorn that had partly obscured us, and toyed with one of the branches.

            Pretending to feed, Adam whispered to us, his eyebrow raised. It was the first we had spoken in ten minutes.

            The bull carried on, swinging wide around us, and began to feed – this time for real – on a tree nearby.

            We moved in formation across the opening the bull had just vacated, and drew up to our vehicle. Wonder and delight moved through us. We had been so close and so easy with this giant creature, who towered even more convincingly over us as we crouched on the ground. We had held our nerve.

            ‘I let him know there was something there,’ Adam explained. ‘He thought it was a small animal, a warthog maybe. Enough to give him a sense that another animal was feeding, but not enough to frighten him.’

            The elephant growing and growing in front of us, like an exercise in visual perspective, the night shrinking behind him as darkness gathered and his bulk seemed to absorb the night, becoming full and dark and more dense. Adam’s profile, etched against this same night. The look in his eye so strange, an alloy of pleading and command. How I had thought his eyes were blue but saw now they were green, or vice versa. Suddenly he was more than I had taken him to be – braver, crazier, denser with knowledge. He has the mind of an animal or knows enough about the mind of an animal to be one himself, when needed. Through him I might be able to get somewhere. He could be the conduit. 

The ballistics lecture is a bit of a joke in camp. Our lectures are held after breakfast/brunch, which follows a 4-5 hour walk in the bush in the early morning. Everyone always falls asleep in ballistics.  

         We surprise our instructors by staying awake. We learn the minimum muzzle velocity required to bring down the animals we must defend ourselves against – elephant and rhino in particular – is 4000 feet per second. Only a few rifles can muster this: the .375 Holland & Holland, the .458 Winchester Magnum – the most common weapons carried in the bush. The .375 has good penetration but lacks the stopping power of the .458, which rips through the animal more slowly, in part due to its blunt-nosed cartridge, but it is the only rifle – apart from the .416 Ruger – that will bring down an elephant with one shot. Magnum means the cartridge is over-loaded; the amount of gunpowder contained within it supercharges its trajectory.

        Ballistics means the science and technical factors of moving objects propelled through air. It has come to mean the science of bullets only, but this is a misnomer, as is the word bullet – this refers only to the brass and copper alloy nose of a cartridge, which is like the rocket that propels a space capsule.

        A bullet’s trajectory to its target is governed by several factors: exit velocity – the speed at which it exits the muzzle of the rifle, the aerodynamics of the cartridge, and weather. ‘Terminal ballistics’ refers to what happens when the bullet reaches its target – how fast it penetrates the hide, the speed and efficacy with which it tears through soft tissue and bone. The amount of resistance it meets. 

The sun is a mitre dropped from the sky. It is early winter and it swings in a shallow ellipsis, pushing into the horizon early and fanning out into russet hours.

         Days are blue-gold. The sky untraced by cloud. These are the scorching days and cold nights of the lowveld. When a warm front wings in, bringing marled grey clouds from the coast of Mozambique, the temperature rises ten degrees in an hour. It comes at night and in our sleep we fling off duvets and sleeping bags damp with sweat.

         The evening is not grey or purple. I don’t know what colour it is. A series of oranges, maybe – tangerine, or watermelon. The solitary baobab which I now treat as a companion or oracle is bathed in silver then lead then mauve light, until it is dissolved in darkness. Of the night, there is no opacity. It is a bitumen night, thin and cold. It has the cold obsidian eyes of the mamba, a gleam around its edges.

         Here there are gullies and culverts to the land, ridges and hillocks and fissures and flat dust-sand vleis  - marshes - where nothing, not even pan dropseed grass, grows. 

Some days embed themselves in your flesh. Acacia days, thorns of hours.

      Our days in the bush are decorated with event. But also the so much the same that time has lost its spatial dimension and no longer feels like time but a river.

        The red and yellow barbet, its military parade jacket colours. The sand grass, hollows of rough-leaved shepherds trees. We roll through these hours, they envelop us. We are not insistent anymore that time be meaningful, that it dispense anything to us. We dissolve into minutes where nothing happens, until it does. 

         A hyena loping through the long grass, we see only its head, surfacing like a buoy on a grass sea. Walking through its paths and corridors, the lion occulted in the long grass, the African fish eagle who watches us, measuring our consumability, as we pass beneath it. The bush bristles with alarm. The gutteral blare of baboons, nervous chatter of vervet monkeys. The threat assailing them can be parsed from their position in the trees – if it is a Verreaux’s eagle they fear they perch close to the trunk; if a snake, they go to the end of the branch, ready to swing to safety.

       Knowledge is a conscious effort, but also it is simply time spent. Every day we are learning, our minds are saturated with understanding. That is why we sleep so soundly at night. 

Are full of discord and slaughter. The baboons live in a nightly cauldron of domestic violence. We hear the rigid shouts, more vocal claps than cries, of the males, the screech of the young baboons as their mothers are clawed into submission.

           The wife-battering of the baboons is joined by the thrashing and chewing of the impala, who are browsers and who strip the leaves of the trees around the tent with an outsize shear. When the elephant’s trumpeting comes the air is electric, anticipatory. They are feeding near the camp. The sound of the branches breaking under the assault from their trunks has the richochet crack of gunshot.

            At first we sleep badly, woken by any and all of these sounds. But by the end of the second week we sleep through them. Some of us hear sounds that others miss and vice versa. The two Shangaan women who work in the kitchen cannot bear the sound of the lion. Lion he keep me awake all night, Elisa tells me, grimacing. 

            Most creatures that are killed by other animals die in the night. The nights are long, twelve hours, and that is a long time to stay alive, I think, especially when the lion and leopard are also crepuscular hunters. So in total there are around 14 hours a day, perhaps 15, when prey animals cannot relax. When we cross paths in the early morning light I say to Steve, our camp's resident impala ram, glad you made it through another night.

On game drives we look through them as if they were grass, keen to spot one of the more dramatic and violent animals. Impala are sprinter-lissome, a gaggle of fifteen year-old girls putting on makeup in front of the mirror in a highschool locker room. They are all legs, flinty abdomen, eyes, sleek and demure. They never live long enough to become crusted and bitted by age.

           They protect themselves by dissolving into a blur when threatened by a predator. Everything wants to eat them. At times I think they have been input into our simulation only to satisfy the appetites of their pursuers. The impala are the most successful antelope, numerically, in Africa. They have a mysterious metatarsal gland on the bottom of their fetlocks, a black spot which functions either to secrete hormones or as a visual ‘follow me’ signal when they explode in deliberate confusion to avoid a predator.

            One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in the bush: looking out my tent at four in the morning, hearing the roar of a large pride of lions. I couldn’t see the lions but I did see their quarry, a huge harem herd, hundreds of green eyes (this is how impala appear in the beam of a torch) vaulting logs and brush, floating in an organised detonation through the night. 

Hills sunken purple coated with russets, yellow, pallid gold of late autumn. A sinking is happening in the land, but where. We intuit the presence of the deep gorge, the sluggish river serpentining through it, the impassability to the north, south, to the east, that cordons us off from the known world. We are in the wilderness and he is our guide. We trust him with the abandon generated by necessity. He is on his own with us, we are his charges. He is leading us toward knowledge, self-discovery, toward the green garrison of mopane that ensnares us.

          This land is enigmatic. It does not have a single version of itself to offer us, to project. It is not the desert or the savannah, a monochrome immensity which instantly commands our attention. It is furtive, sly, forgotten. Several life zones collide here an the vegetation and animals and birds are all in a confusion.

          We are tantalised by the rare sighting of a Palm-nut vulture. We tear off in search of him, binoculars balanced on the dash board. The Palm-nut vulture belongs in tropical coastal forests and we are 70 kilometres away from that. He is off-course in the off-season. He is lost. 

This is what we call our meetings with dangerous game: encounters. We tot up our encounters in our Dangerous Game Logbooks – elephant 10, buffalo 8. A more evasive term than meet, with its slippery noncommital quality. Encounter means two creatures who recognise each other’s power but shy away from testing it out. It is often employed next to the word sexual, and in this sense it is the right term. There is a savage intimacy in it, a recognition that we share the same moment, are stranded even, have been driven by the same hungry current to a reckoning.

        An encounter is more than the meeting of ourselves in a radically unrecogniseable but mirrored form in which we finally understand our serene dislocation from each other. It has in its sound a refusal, even a reprisal. We are not willing to understand each other. We are not willing to do the hard work, to continue. We fear each other. We are animals, agents of our separate nights. 

Lala palm, Transvaal saffron, Baobab, Weeping boer-bean, Sandpaper raisin, Large fever berry, Flame Thorn, Sjambok Pod, Black bitterberry, False marula. Heartbreak names. The Leadwood which takes a thousand years to die, skeletal against the dawn and its cargo of white-backed vultures who perch there like Christmas baubles. Wild teak. The way Adam said it: wild teak. An automatic note in his voice, a teacher’s tone. Magic guarri, Common bride’s bush, White seringa.