Tracking

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. 

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 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. 

For hours under a blistering sun we puzzle over smudges, heads bent like penitents. Balloon toes of large cats, the narrow rodent prints of the dassie, cleft palette of the giraffe. We do this because we want the competence and knowledge that goes with tracking, to look at the substrate and read it like a text. We want to be free from regret. From the feeling of ghostliness. We are exhausted by our own insubstantiality, by the endless pattern of how experience gives birth to memory, and memory keeps us company, this lasting diffuse simulacra of the real. But our memories are growing in strength. Like unborn children, they need to come out, or they will rupture us.

            We want to get control over our history. We don’t know why we thought it would help us to learn to read the bush like a text, to read the story of spoor and know what animals had passed by,  what they were doing, whether they were walking or running under these stately skies. Why they wanted to come, why they wanted to leave. But we need to read the bush like a text of – what? Signs. Rumours. The dreams of animals. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.