Tracking

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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 life of animals consists of a series of traumatic shocks. Tracking is pursuit of their trauma. We are spies on the trail of the creature who does not know it is hurtling toward a brotherhood of the devoured.

           Tracking allows us to organise the confusions within ourselves. Without this we will never understand what happens in the world; coherence begins within. We must establish a sequence, a timeline along with the truth will unfurl.

           Game trails lead to water. Animals know what they are looking for, but they are also prone to confusion. You can see it in their eyes. They are protected though from knowledge of the black elision waiting for us all. I am making choices which feel half –intuition, half fate. I am not in control.

          Our fear is of experience, which we continually evade just as the animals occult themselves in cobalt shadows. They sense our presence on their tail, even though we are in their future.

          I am too reliant on emotional experience to be a success in this strict world of wilderness. I am just another female trails guide who is not up to the job. After our third try on the rifle range Max gave up on us, we were not going to cut it. But I am frustrated with myself less because my shooting is not yet up to it, but because I can discover or understand nothing other than emotionally. There has to be love. Without it life feels insubstantial, facts refuse to accrue meaning. This over-reliance on an emotional life is a deficiency in me, I can’t help feeling. I have lost the capacity to act. I am no longer an animal.

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.