Tracking

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.

 

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. 

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. 

‘Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.’ John Berger writes, in an essay titled ‘Animals as Metaphors’. He argues that we share much with them - ‘Animals are born, are sentient, and are mortal. In these things they resemble man.’ The rampart between us is built of language. ‘The animal scrutinises [man] from across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension,’ Berger writes. There is no language. There is a lack of even the possibility of language. Only Orpheus, who could talk to animals in their own language, knew of their lives, their hopes, their fears. Animals are an intercession between man and our origin, they are our charges, our reprieve from the garrison of the human. 

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. 

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. 

Adam drills us on our tracks. He is strict, almost severe. There is a brisk pedantic note in his voice as we stop to consider endless smudges on the ground. These marks effortlessly assume the shape of playing cards - hearts, the Ace of Spaces (most antelope), or club-like balloons (buffalo, eland). The thug-toed, canine (hyena), the three-padded Australia-shaped palms of the cats, ringed by satellite claw-less toes – the only cat that cannot retract its claws entirely is the cheetah. Also the two-pronged inscrutable stabs of bushpig, warthog and the Vs of vervet monkey feet, the tell-tale tail drag of their prehensile tail, like a hairy snake. The porcupine with its complex Lego foot, seven or ten pads in all, and the wire-brush scuff of its quill marks on the sand.

          My brain struggles with shapes, with visual information of any kind. At first the tracks we see imprinted on the sand, in month-old mud, on grassy dustlands, are no more than rivers of inscrutable symbols. Animals moving this way, pursued by their future attackers, animals moving that way, to or from water. The dinner plate spoor of elephant who carve their own avenues in dense bush, landscaped by the stepping stones of their dinner plate feet.

         We circle in the mopane scrub, trying to pick up the trail, a group of amateurs pursuing a professional. With a lion or an elephant the great prize at the end is a glimpse of the animal, live, in the act of walking through the world. But also a ribboning satisfaction: we’d caught up with you.  These sightings take on a transport. They are visitations, hallucinations. They are moments. Once unleashed on the world we live in their wake vortices.

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 war on the rhinoceros has changed our world. The bush has become militarised. The park rangers we meet wear flak jackets. We can’t call in rhino sightings on the concession VHF radio channel, even if we are lucky enough to see them. We are not even sure if the rhino are still here. They cannot be kept safe, with the Mozambican and Zimbabwe border so close; the reserve straddles both.

The rhino know they are under attack, that they might as well have a bulls-eye painted on their battleship flanks. I believe they deliberately evade us and that they sense the death of their companions even if they do not witness it. They sense we are involved. They know we have failed them.