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. 

Dark begins to solidify at five. This is the hour I stop running, the hour the lions are resurrected from floppy outsize dozing cats to nightmare hunters, the hour that fixed depthless look floods back into their amber eyes. Across from my verandah, beyond the outer firebreak, is a single baobab. It is like most of these trees, leafless, its truck bloated with cellulose. At five the colours of the day sink into the baobab, turning it steel, then mauve, then a dead-fish grey-silver, then a silhouette of itself. There is no swerve to the night at this latitude, at this time of year. The winter tilt of the planet forges a bone cold that can only be dispelled by fire. The nights we have no fire or braai are forlorn. We eat in silence and then go to bed  immediately – the sleeping bag is the only other refuge. To have no fire in Africa is a dark impoverishment. 

We walk for seven or eight hours a day carrying backpacks and rifles. Walking - there is a blank automaton quality to this everyday habit. But somehow it gives us a pattern, in its simple two-step, to solve a self-alienation. 

           The Latin proverb means, it is solved by walking. What is it we seek to fathom? The ancient treaty between the self and the land. An antidote to longing, the exact terms of the covenant between desire and grief that seems to structure much of our lives. To feel whole, the separate elves we have lobbed off reconciled. To leave behind cold constraints of the self and to replace those with the constraints of the natural world.

           In walking we might reconnect with our principles. Also our errors, the greater unities beyond the people we love or the things we have experienced. A search for synthesis. We are together here moving through this land and we have no memory of this place and its gauzy horizons. We are rearranging furniture inside ourselves, this is how it feels. Who will we be when we leave here? We may struggle to remember ourselves – who we loved, what we wanted – before we came here.

            There must be a force behind geography, we think. These abrupt rains, heavy humid sky of a winter warm front. This place where we are least and most at home.

 

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. 

We are enlivened by the idea of creatures devouring each other. We want to witness their erasure. This is the basic instinct governing people’s (mainly citified tourists, it has to be said) fascination with the bush. They want to see kills, destruction, carnage. This is spectacle to them, the frisson of the real. We are other protected by this by being apex predators at the top of the foodchain. We only prey upon ourselves.

       I shy away from death. I have seen plenty of it and its aftermath in the bush. The skeleton of the kudu buck we saw our first morning walk at Mabwati. He had been killed by a coalition of male lions on the outer fire break, a few weeks before our arrival. ‘He went down without a sound,’ Max said. ‘He never knew what happened to him.’

       Apex predators fascinate and repel, in part because of the simplicity of their tastes. You can see it in their amber eyes. They say: meat. Fear. Dawn and dusk.

        Leopard kill in a manner similar to tigers – from behind. Whether their quarry is animal or human it is the same. They scalp their prey first by clamping their claws over the cranium, then, once the animal is on its back, disembowel them. Cheetah and lions kill more efficiently, most of the time. A bite to the spinal cord at the back of the neck, a severing of the windpipe. But not so fast that you do not see the blare of panic in the antelope’s eyes.

        Imagine you are a lion. This is your world view: hunks of meat, sometimes larger than yourself, suspended on graceful stilts called legs. Yours is a tawny world of violence and the spoils of cunning. Life as a predator is hard. They don’t get much sympathy, but you only have to see a starving lion to feel a stab of remorse. To fail to kill is not the same as to fail to be killed. For the delicate cheetah nine attempts at hunting out of ten fail. It is hard to make a living on the savannah.

        In Kenya, where I did my first qualification, we walked only forty or fifty metres from a pride of lions. One day I ran around the camp in the full knowledge that three subadult males lolled on the branch of a fallen fever tree only 300 metres away. We kept an eye on each other, and I tucked my hair into my baseball cap so that I would not do quite such a convincing impression of a female impala with her bushy tail.

       Lions can also attack from the rear. They would be on me before I knew it. I would only feel myself being knocked to the ground. Then a pool of ink blood darkness. But I keep running. It’s not going to happen. Somehow I know this, and so do the young lions who yawn and entwine themselves with the white-gold fever tree, fat tawny snakes wrapping themselves around its dead arm. 

Mint. Branches furling into a vein-like canopy. We walk in green-gold afternoons through slow explosions of butterflies called brown-veined whites and rest in pools of shade. Fever trees are not strong. They careen over in thunderstorms or under the pressure of a single wind. They grown quickly and die quickly. They are acacias, but lack the thorn-studded bushy aspect of most acacia trees. Their flimsy plasticity is part of their appeal. Unlike other trees, the fever tree has chlorophyll in its bark as well as its leaves. Fever of the body, fever of the mind. A clammy sweat coats my life. He says, ‘I am an African, I have lived here all my life, but I still feel a thrill when I hear the word ‘Africa’.’ The harsh thorn trees, the red earth. I feel it too, I have the sense I am only really alive here, and so I keep coming back, a continuous attempt at resurrection. 

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. 

Tracking is pursuit. We are stalkers, although disinterested. We are not hunting the animal. We seek only a glimpse of it, in all its lonely integrity, pinioned between thorn trees and the jaws of the eventual predator that will consume it. Even the apex predators have no gentle exit from this life; lions consume lions, wild dog will rip an injured pack member to shreds. We follow these animals to know only this: that they exist, and we, their shadows, also do, by association. For once the animal is more extant than us; we pursue it in order to confirm our unreality.