Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedications

  Map of Deception Valley

  Map of Botswana

  Prologue

  The Jumblies

  Water

  Fire

  The Cry of the Kalahari

  Star

  Camp

  Maun: The African Frontier

  Bones

  Photos

  The Carnivore Rivalry

  Lions in the Rain

  The van der Westhuizen Story

  Return to Deception

  Gone from the Valley

  The Trophy Shed

  Echo Whisky Golf

  Kalahari Gypsies

  Photos

  Gypsy Cub

  Lions with No Pride

  The Dust of My Friend

  A School for Scavengers

  Pepper

  Muffin

  Uranium

  Blue

  Black Pearls in the Desert

  Kalahari High

  Epilogue

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Appendix C

  Appendix D

  Notes

  References

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Maps on [>] drawn by Lorraine Sneed.

  Maps on [>], [>] and [>] prepared by Larry A. Peters

  Copyright © 1984 by Mark and Delia Owens

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Owens, Mark.

  Cry of the Kalahari.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Zoology—Kalahari Desert. 2. Zoology—Botswana. 3. Kalahari Desert. I. Owens, Delia. II. Title.

  QL337.K3095 1984 591.9681'1 84-10771

  ISBN-13: 978-0-395-64780-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 0-395-64780-0 (pbk.)

  eISBN 978-0-544-34164-7

  v1.0414

  We dedicate this book to

  Dr. Richard Faust

  and to

  Ingrid Koberstein

  of the Frankfurt Zoological Society

  for all they have done for the animals

  of this earth.

  And to Christopher, who could not be with us.

  Prologue

  Mark

  MY LEFT SHOULDER and hip ached from the hard ground. I rolled to my right side, squirming around on grass clumps and pebbles, but could not get comfortable. Huddled deep inside my sleeping bag against the chill of dawn, I tried to catch a few more minutes of sleep.

  We had driven north along the valley the evening before, trying to home on the roars of a lion pride. But by three o’clock in the morning they had stopped calling and presumably had made a kill. Without their voices to guide us, we hadn’t been able to find them and had gone to sleep on the ground next to a hedge of bush in a small grassy clearing. Now, like two large army worms, our nylon sleeping bags glistened with dew in the morning sun.

  Aaoouu—a soft groan startled me. I slowly lifted my head and peered over my feet. My breath caught. It was a very big lioness—more than 300 pounds—but from ground level she looked even larger. She was moving toward us from about five yards away, her head swinging from side to side and the black tuft on her tail twitching deliberately. I clenched a tuft of grass, held on tight, and froze. The lioness came closer, her broad paws lifting and falling in perfect rhythm, jewels of moisture clinging to her coarse whiskers, her deep-amber eyes looking straight at me. I wanted to wake up Delia, but I was afraid to move.

  When she reached the foot of our sleeping bags, the lioness turned slightly. “Delia! S-s-s-h-h-h—wake up! The lions are here!”

  Delia’s head came up slowly and her eyes grew wide. The long body of the cat, more than nine feet of her from nose to tuft, padded past our feet to a bush ten feet away. Then Delia gripped my arm and quietly pointed to our right. Turning my head just slightly, I saw another lioness four yards away, on the other side of the bush next to us . . . then another . . . and another. The entire Blue Pride, nine in all, surrounded us, nearly all of them asleep. We were quite literally in bed with a pride of wild Kalahari lions.

  Like an overgrown house cat, Blue was on her back, her eyes closed, hind legs sticking out from her furry white belly, her forepaws folded over her downy chest. Beyond her lay Bones, the big male with the shaggy black mane and the puckered scar over his knee—the token of a hurried surgery on a dark night months before. Together with Chary, Sassy, Gypsy, and the others, he must have joined us sometime before dawn.

  We would have many more close encounters with Kalahari lions, some not quite so amicable. But the Blue Pride’s having accepted us so completely that they slept next to us was one of our most rewarding moments since beginning our research in Botswana’s vast Central Kalahari Desert, in the heart of southern Africa. It had not come easily.

  As young, idealistic students, we had gone to Africa entirely on our own to set up a wildlife research project. After months of searching for a pristine area, we finally found our way into the “Great Thirst,” an immense tract of wilderness so remote that we were the only people, other than a few bands of Stone Age Bushmen, in an area larger than Ireland. Because of the heat and the lack of water and materials for shelter, much of the Central Kalahari has remained unexplored and unsettled. From our camp there was no village around the corner or down the road. There was no road. We had to haul our water a hundred miles through the bushveld, and without a cabin, electricity, a radio, a television, a hospital, a grocery store, or any sign of other humans and their artifacts for months at a time, we were totally cut off from the outside world.

  Most of the animals we found there had never seen humans before. They had never been shot at, chased by trucks, trapped, or snared. Because of this, we had the rare opportunity to know many of them in a way few people have ever known wild animals. On a rainy-season morning we would often wake up with 3000 antelope grazing around our tent. Lions, leopards, and brown hyenas visited our camp at night, woke us up by tugging the tent guy ropes, occasionally surprised us in the bath boma, and drank our dishwater if we forgot to pour it out. Sometimes they sat in the moonlight with us, and they even smelled our faces.

  There were risks—we took them daily—and there were near disasters that we were fortunate to survive. We were confronted by terrorists, stranded without water, battered by storms, and burned by droughts. We fought veld fires miles across that swept through our camp—and we met an old man of the desert who helped us survive.

  We had no way of knowing, from our beginnings of a thirdhand Land Rover, a campfire, and a valley called “Deception,” that we would learn new and exciting details about the natural history of Kalahari lions and brown hyenas: How they survive droughts with no drinking water and very little to eat, whether they migrate to avoid these hardships, and how members of these respective species cooperate to raise their young. We would document one of the largest antelope migrations on earth and discover that fences are choking the life from the Kalahari.

  I don’t really know when we decided to go to Africa. In a way, I guess each of us had always wanted to go. For as long as we can remember we have sought out wild places, drawn strength, peace, and solitude from them and wanted to protect them from destruction. For myself, I can still recall the sadness and bewilderment I felt as a young boy, when from the top of the wi
ndmill, I watched a line of bulldozers plough through the woods on our Ohio farm, destroying it for a superhighway—and changing my life.

  Delia and I met in a protozoology class at the University of Georgia and it didn’t take long to find out that we shared the same goal. By the end of the semester we knew that when we went to Africa, it would have to be together. During this time we heard a visiting scientist tell of Africa’s disappearing wilderness: More than two-thirds of its wildlife had already been eliminated, pushed out of its habitats by large ranches and urban sprawl. In the southern regions, thousands of predators were being trapped, shot, snared, and poisoned to protect domestic stock. In some African nations, conservation policies and practices were virtually nonexistent.

  These were frightening reports. We became determined to study an African carnivore in a large, pristine wilderness and to use the results of our research to help devise a program for the conservation of that ecosystem. Perhaps, also, we simply wanted to see for ourselves that such wild places still existed. But if we didn’t go immediately, there might be little left to study.

  Going to Africa as part of our graduate programs would mean years of delay, and since we had not finished our doctorates, we knew there was little chance of our getting a grant from a conservation organization. We decided to take a temporary, if prolonged, leave from university and to earn the money needed to finance the expedition. Once a study site had been chosen and our field research was under way, we thought surely someone would grant us the funds to continue.

  After six months of teaching, we had saved nothing. I switched jobs and began operating the crusher at a stone quarry while Delia worked at odd jobs. At the end of another six months we had saved $4900, plus enough money for air fares to Johannesburg in South Africa. It was not nearly enough to begin a research project. But it was late 1973 and the Arabs had just pulled the plug on cheap oil; prices were skyrocketing. We had to go then, or not at all.

  Trying desperately to scrape enough money together, we piled everything we owned—stereo, radio, television, fishing rod and reel, pots and pans—into our small station wagon and drove to the stone quarry one morning, just as the men were coming off the night shift. I stood on top of the car and auctioned it all away, including the car, for $1100.

  On January 4, 1974, a year after we were married, we boarded a plane with two backpacks, two sleeping bags, one pup tent, a small cooking kit, a camera, one change of clothes each, and $6000. It was all we had to set up our research.

  This book is not a detailed account of our scientific findings; that is being published elsewhere. Instead, it is the story of our lives with lions, brown hyenas, jackals, birds, shrews, lizards, and many other creatures we came to know, and how we survived and conducted research in one of the last and largest pristine areas on earth. The story was taken from our journals and is all true, including names and dialogue. Although each chapter is written in one voice, we developed every phase of the book together.

  1

  The Jumblies

  Mark

  They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,

  In a Sieve they went to sea:

  In spite of all their friends could say,

  On a winter’s mom, on a stormy day.

  In a Sieve they went to sea!

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Far and few, far and few,

  Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

  Their heads are green, and their hands are blue;

  And they went to sea in a Sieve.

  —Edward Lear

  SLEEPLESS, I rested my head against the thick double windowpane of the jet, staring into the blackness of the mid-Atlantic night. The world turned slowly below as the plane reached for the dawn of Africa.

  With careful grace the cheetah strolls onto the plain. Head erect, its tail a gentle vane turning easily on the wind, it glides toward the stirring herd. Alert, the antelope prance back and forth, but do not run. The cat is hungry and begins loping forward.

  The plane met and passed the dawn. Soon it was standing on asphalt, disgorging its passengers near a hazy city. Customs officials in short pants and spotless white shirts with bold black epaulets called orders and waved clipboards. We filled out long forms and questionnaires, waited in crowded halls, and gazed through chain-link fences. Plenty of time to daydream.

  A perfect union of speed, coordination, balance, and form, the cheetah accelerates toward the dashing antelope and singles one out. Others veer aside and the ageless footrace between predator and prey begins.

  A smaller plane, a shorter ride—we had been traveling forever. On a train this time, again we stared numbly past our reflections in a window. Miles and miles of thornbush, all of it the same, rushed by in time with the clickety-clack of the rail sections as the train swayed along. “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, you can’t get off and you’ll never go back; clickety-clack . . .”

  The cheetah is a blur across the plain. Fifty, sixty, seventy miles per hour, the living missile streaks toward its target. At this moment, as it draws near the flashing rear quarters of its prey, the awesome beauty of their contest is inescapable. Each is a sculptor who, using eons of time as its maul and evolution as its chisel, has created, in the other, something of such form, such vitality, such truth that it can never be duplicated. This relationship is the best Nature has to offer; the ego of the natural world.

  It is the moment of truth for the gazelle. The cheetah, still at full speed, reaches forward a clublike paw to destroy the balance of its prey. The antelope cuts sharply, and what was ultimate form is suddenly perverted. At seventy miles per hour the fence wire slices through the cheetah’s nose, shatters its jaw, and snaps its head around. Before its momentum is spent on the mesh, its elegant neck is twisted and broken, the shank of a splintered white bone bursts through the skin of its foreleg. The fence recoils and spits the mutilated form, ruptured and bleeding, into the dirt.

  With a hissing of air brakes the train lurched to a stop and interrupted the nightmare. We shouldered our backpacks and stepped down onto the sandy station yard in the black African night. From behind, the diesel rumbled and the car couplings clanged as the train pulled away. Standing alone by the ramshackle station house at two o’clock in the morning, it was as though we were in a long, dark tunnel. At one end a grimy sign beneath a dim yellow light read GABORONE BOTSWANA.

  The quiet darkness seemed to swallow us. Alone in a strange country with too little money, all of it stuffed in the pocket of my backpack, we suddenly felt that the challenge was overwhelming: We had to find a four-wheel-drive truck and a study area and accomplish enough solid research to attract a grant before our money ran out. But we were exhausted from traveling, and before worrying about anything else, we needed sleep.

  Across a dirt road from the train station, another weak light bulb dangled over the tattered screen door of the Gaborone Hotel—a sagging building with flakes of paint peeling from its walls, and tall grass fringing its foundation. The rooms were eight dollars a night, more than we could afford.

  As we turned and began to walk away, the old night watchman beckoned to us from the hotel. A flickering candle cupped in his hands, he led us through the bare lobby into a small courtyard choked with weeds and thornscrub. Smiling broadly through teeth like rusted bolts, the old native patted my pack and then the ground. We bowed our thanks and within minutes we had pitched our small pack tent next to a thornbush and settled into our sleeping bags.

  Morning came with the chatter of native Africans moving like columns of army ants through fields of tall grass and thornbush toward the town. Most of them wore unzipped and unbuttoned western shirts and dresses or pants of mix-matched, bright colors. Women swayed along with bundles balanced on their heads—a pint milk carton, a basket of fruit, or fifty pounds of firewood. One man had slabs of tire tread bound to his feet for sandals, a kaross of goatskin slung over his shoulders, and the spotted skin of a gennet cat, the tail hanging down, set at a rakish angle on hi
s head. These people eked out their livelihoods by hawking carvings, walking sticks, and other artifacts to travelers through the windows of railroad coaches. They lived in shanties and lean-tos of corrugated tin or cardboard, old planks or mud bricks. One was made entirely of empty beer cans.

  Looking over the scene, Delia muttered softly, “Where the devil are we?”

  We made our way toward the haze of wood smoke that covered the town of Gaborone, which sprawled at the foot of some rocky hills. It is the capital of Botswana, known before its independence in 1967 as the British Bechuanaland Protectorate. Architecturally, it is a crossbred town: One avenue of small shops and a few three-story office buildings of Western design rise from a mishmash of mud-and-thatch huts called rondavels. Dusty paths were crowded with Africans in European clothes and Europeans in African prints.

  It is an interesting blend of cultures, but nothing happens very fast in Gaborone, and for two months after our arrival in Botswana we were stuck there. Day after day we walked from one isolated government department to another, trying to arrange residence and research permits and meeting with people who might know something about a suitable study site. We were determined to find a place—one far from fences—where the behavior of the predators had not been affected by human settlements.

  From all accounts, the best places for the type of study we had in mind were in the remote regions of northern Botswana, but none of the Wildlife Department personnel had ever been to the most inaccessible of those areas. Without anyone to guide us, the expedition seemed more difficult and risky than we had supposed. Even if we could find our own way into such an undeveloped part of Botswana, setting up and supplying a research camp would mean moving food, fuel, and other supplies over vast tracks of uncharted wilderness. Besides, practically the entire northern third of the country was under water from the heaviest rains in its recorded history. The only road to the north had been impassable for months.