Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  At large carcasses, such as a gemsbok, even the low-ranking Shadow had a chance to feed. But at smaller ones, a steenbok or springbok, the competition was much more intense: The hyenas would feed faster, and only the first one or two arrivals would get anything to eat. When the carcass had been reduced to less than forty or fifty pounds, a dominant would often tuck all the ragged bits and pieces into a bundle and, tripping over dangling flaps of skin, carry it off, a trail of jackals tagging behind.

  Lions, wolves, and other social carnivores usually sleep, hunt, and feed with at least some members of their group. But though the browns lived in a clan, they usually foraged and slept alone, only meeting other group members occasionally, while traveling along common pathways or at a kill. They have a limited repertoire of vocal signals, and none with which to communicate over large distances, as do the spotted hyenas. This may be because the dry Kalahari air does not carry sound very far, or perhaps because their territories are too large for clan members to transmit and receive even loud calls effectively. For whatever reason, brown hyenas do not attempt to communicate vocally over distances of more than a few feet, and they do not have the loud whoo-oop, or even the “laugh,” of their spotted cousins.

  This lack of a loud voice might seem to present a problem for animals who roam separately in a jointly owned territory as large as 400 square miles but must also maintain contact with other group members. However, the hyenas’ well-developed system of chemical communication through scent-marking—pasting, as it is termed—probably takes the place of loud vocalizations. Spotted hyenas also paste, but not quite as extensively as browns, who use it as the most important means of transmitting information among individuals. Clan members appear to recognize the sex, social status, and identity of one another by the paste. For a social animal who must spend long hours alone searching for scattered bits of food, it is an ideal way for group members to stay in touch by “phoning long distance.” The hyenas of the Deception Pan Clan also pasted extensively to demarcate their territorial boundaries.

  So, the brown hyenas were a curious blend of social and solitary: They foraged and slept alone; they fed together on large carcasses, but carried away the remains for themselves at the first opportunity; they did not use loud vocalizations to communicate with each other, but did leave chemical messages. And, at least for a while, the females allowed the youngsters to follow them when they searched for food.

  But when Pogo and Hawkins reached adult stature, at about thirty months of age, Patches, Star, Lucky, and Shadow no longer tolerated their tagging along on foraging expeditions. The subadults were forced to find food on their own. In order to secure a position in the pecking order, Pogo had to compete with the other females, and Star never let the young female forget for a minute who was boss.

  On one unforgettable occasion we watched Star neck-biting Pogo for over two hours, chewing and shaking her by the neck for more than a quarter of an hour at a time. The youngster made loud humanlike screams, and it was difficult for us not to interfere. After Star had emphatically made her point, Pogo accepted her status and began displaying the deferential crawl of the subordinate in their greetings.

  Hawkins had a different fate. Early one morning, while feeding on the remains of a lion kill, he looked up to see Ivey coming from the north. Hawkins walked slowly toward the dominant male, and he had begun to submit, when Ivey lunged forward, seized him by the neck, and shook him vigorously. Hawkins shrieked and struggled to free himself. Ivey chewed the youngster’s ear, the side of his face, and his neck until blood ran through his blond neck hair. When Ivey tried to change his grip, Hawkins broke free. But he did not actually run away; instead, he loped in a large circle around the carcass until the dominant male easily overtook him. They faced each other, clopping their powerful muzzles together, each wrestling for a grip on the other’s neck. Ivey succeeded in again seizing the young hyena by the neck. This time he shook him violently and threw him to the ground.

  Hawkins managed to get away, but again he made little real effort to escape, as though inviting another chance to challenge the other male. The stakes were high: The opportunity to remain in his natal clan and its familiar territory hung in the balance. Ivey soon caught him again. The contest continued for over two hours, with Hawkins taking all the abuse.

  Finally, Ivey released the younger male. He walked to the water hole to have a drink and, panting heavily, lay down. Having followed him, Hawkins began to saunter back and forth in front of the older male, as if daring him to attack again. When Ivey ignored the challenge, Hawkins carried a stick to within eight yards of the old champion and made an obvious, if not terribly impressive, display of mutilating it. When that brought no response from Ivey, he began pacing back and forth in front of him again, drawing nearer and nearer, until he was within five yards. After resting, Ivey charged once more, and again began mauling Hawkins, who took several more minutes of this punishment before he finally broke free and started walking slowly toward the East Dune woodland. Ivey did not follow him.

  Over the following weeks, Hawkins found it more and more difficult to forage and feed in the clan’s home range without being harassed by Ivey. He took to roaming in the outskirts of the territory, and finally he disappeared. If he survived on his own as a nomad, someday he would challenge the dominant of another clan and perhaps become its only breeding male. Should he be unsuccessful in his bid for females and a territory, he would remain a solitary outcast, eking a living from marginal habitats away from the prime river valleys. His only chance to breed would be to mate with the occasional nomadic female or to sneak a copulation with a clan female.

  Despite the fact that they always foraged alone, brown hyenas, we now knew, were social—and quite social, at that. But animals associate for some adaptive purpose, not because they enjoy being together. Lions, wild dogs, wolves, primitive men, and spotted hyenas hunting in a group are able to kill larger prey than can a single individual. Brown hyenas were scavengers, for the most part, and they rarely hunted. But since they did not hunt together, why did they live in a clan and share large kills left by lions? Why did they need each other? Why did they bother to socialize at all? There was a single answer for all these questions, as we were to discover.

  6

  Camp

  Delia

  I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

  —Lord Byron

  SHORTLY AFTER the fire, we found our original campsite too exposed to the persistent winds, so we had literally molded a new one into the interior of a tree island, cutting two or three dead branches to make room for the faded tent given to us by a friend in Maun.

  Our island was thick with ziziphus and acacia trees standing in long grass and tangled undergrowth. The ziziphus had multiple trunks that splayed, at about fifteen feet above ground, into hundreds of smaller, thorny branches, which fell back toward the ground in a snarled tumble. The flat-topped acacias and the drooping ziziphus interlaced, forming a roof over our heads so dense and green that in the rainy season we could barely see the sky. Camp was surrounded by the open plains of the ancient riverbed, which stretched to the northern and southern horizons. On the east and west, duneslopes crept gently to their wooded crests.

  Because we hated to disturb the small mammals and birds in the island, we had left the dead wood, “sticky grass,” and undershrubs in place. Only narrow footpaths led from the kitchen, in an open alcove at one end of the grove, to the tent. For the first year the island was so overgrown after the heavy rains, and our camp so well hidden, that now and then a giraffe’s head would suddenly appear in the canopy above us. After stripping some leaves from a thorny branch, he would discover us and our few belongings tucked away below. Curling his tail over his rump, the giraffe would clomp over the riverbed for a way, and then look back as if he had imagined the whole thing.

  And sometimes, during the rainy season of 1975, as many as 3000 springbok grazed so close that we could hear their stomachs rumbling.

 
Because this was a desert, every living plant was important to some creature. We became obsessed with saving the leafy branches and wilting grass, even to the point of always asking our rare human visitors to stay on the footpaths. I once became very annoyed when some visiting scientists cleared a large area in the center of camp for their sleeping bags. For months after they had gone, until the rains came again, their bivouac was the dusty “vacuum which nature abhors.” Our behavior was perhaps a desperate attempt to fit in, to slip back into the natural world without being offensive or noticed. We felt as if we were guests who had been away for a long, long time.

  I stood on the woodpile and watched until the heat waves swallowed the bleary image of the truck. It was early in the rainy season of 1975, and Mark was driving into Maun for supplies. Because he would be gone for three or four days, he had not liked leaving me alone in camp, but I had insisted that I remain at Deception to catch up on paper work. The drone of the engine faded from the dunes, making me one of the most remote people on earth. I stayed behind not only to transcribe notes, but also to experience the sensation of total isolation. Looking over the riverbed for a while, I let the feeling settle over me. It was comfortable.

  But total solitude takes some getting used to. Although I was the only person for thousands of square miles, it took a while to shake the feeling that I was being watched. While making tea I talked to myself openly, but with the urge to look over my shoulder to make sure no one was listening. It never was being alone that bothered me, but rather the feeling that I might not be alone when I was supposed to be.

  I walked to the kitchen, poked some life into the grey coals and moved the old enamel kettle over the fire for tea. It was coated in flaky layers of black—the history of a thousand campfires—and its worried old handle wore the tooth marks of the brown hyenas who had often stolen it from its perch. The kettle was our only source of hot water, and whether we wanted a sponge bath or a cup of coffee, it was always ready.

  I made a simple bean stew for myself, and soon the pot was bubbling on the heavy iron fire grate that Bergie had given us. Then I kneaded bread dough, put it in the black three-legged mealie pot, and set it in the sun to rise. Later I turned a five-gallon pail on its side and set two dough-filled bread pans inside. Using the spade, I sprinkled glowing red coals beneath and on top of the bucket oven. In the midday temperature, with the wind blowing steadily, the bread would bake in seventeen minutes. It took as long as twenty-five minutes to cook if there wasn’t any wind, and during the calm, cool, and more humid night, an hour.

  Our food supply was limited by what was available in Maun, what we could afford to buy, and what would survive the long haul to camp in the heat. Sometimes even staples like flour, mealie-meal, sugar, lard, and salt could not be found in the general stores.

  We had no refrigerator, so we could not store perishables of any kind for very long. Onions kept for several months if left hanging in the dry air, and the carrots, beets, and turnips that we bought occasionally from the gardens in Maun lasted for two weeks if buried under the sand and sprinkled with waste water, and if moved from time to time to fool the termites. Oranges or grapefruits stayed edible for up to two and a half months in the dry season, the rind gradually turning to a tough shell that protected the succulent pulp from dehydration. Nothing rotted in the dry months.

  In 1975 we were given permission by the Department of Wildlife to shoot an occasional antelope, in order to analyse its rumen contents. We hated to do this, but it was important for the conservation of the animals to know which grasses or leaves they ate from season to season. Mark always took many hours to hunt, carefully stalking an individual separate from the others, to keep from disturbing and alienating the herd. These precautions paid off, for during our entire stay in Deception the springbok and gemsbok showed no more fear of us than when we had first arrived.

  We learned how to make biltong—jerky—out of the antelope meat by soaking raw slices overnight in the washtub, in a concoction of salt, pepper, and vinegar and then hanging them up to dry on wire hooks. They dried in three days and could be kept for several months. Often our only source of protein were these biltong sticks, dipped in hot mustard, which were quite tasty. But we soon tired of this stringy meal, so I tried to prepare the meat in more creative ways. One recipe we devised was Biltong Fritters:

  INGREDIENTS:

  Two slabs of very dry biltong

  desert-dried onion

  desert-dried green pepper

  short pastry

  Pulverize the biltong in the bathtub with a five-pound hammer and a trailer hitch, then soak in water with onions and peppers for some time. Drain well and fry briefly in hot oil. Cut pastry into triangles, place one tablespoon of biltong hash on each and roll up. Fry fritters until crisp and golden brown.

  Biltong also tasted good with Camp Cornbread (eggless), one of our standbys:

  ⅓ cup tinned margarine

  ⅓ cup brown sugar

  1 cup flour

  3 teaspoons baking powder

  4 tablespoons powdered milk

  1 cup water

  1 cup mealie-meal (cornmeal)

  1 salt to taste

  Cream the margarine and sugar together. Mix in the powdered milk and water. Add the flour, mealie-meal, baking powder, and salt and mix well. Place in a greased pan and cook in bucket oven with moderate coals for 25 minutes (15 if the wind is blowing steadily).

  When we didn’t have meat, we ate various stews made of dried beans, com, sorghum, and mealie-meal. Their insipid taste could be improved a bit with onions, curries, chile, and Mexican-style pastries, but it was often a matter of swallowing the food as quickly as possible and following it with a can of sweet fruit cocktail, if one was left in the tea-crate larder.

  In September and October, before the rains begin, a female ostrich lays up to twenty large ivory-colored eggs, each about seven inches long and fifteen inches around, roughly equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs. Although we never robbed an undisturbed nest, we sometimes found an egg that had been abandoned after a predator had chased the parent birds away. Had we guessed then how highly prized such eggs would have been for a brown hyena, who had no water stored in drums or cans of fruit cocktail stashed away, we wouldn’t have taken them.

  With a hand drill, Mark would bore a quarter-inch hole in one end of an egg. Then, holding it between his knees, he would insert an L-shaped wire—first sterilized over the fire—through the hole and roll it back and forth between his palms, scrambling the white and yolk. I would shake enough for one meal into the frying pan, and then seal the hole with a Band-Aid before burying the egg under a shady tree. As long as the contents did not get contaminated, we could have scrambled eggs or an omelette every morning for the next twelve days or so.

  The only danger in eating ostrich eggs was that we could not be certain how fresh one was until the drill bit actually broke through the thick shell. Unless Mark was very careful, the stinking juices from a very bad egg would erupt and squirt him in the face. Whenever he opened one, I left the kitchen, but his language left no doubt about whether or not it was rotten.

  The morning Mark left for Maun slipped away before I could even start on the mountain of paper work stacked on the table beneath the ziziphus tree. We always had tapes to be transcribed onto data sheets and letters to write. Before leaving the kitchen I automatically moved the kettle to the edge of the fire grate to keep it from boiling dry. Conserving water had become second nature; if it hadn’t, we would have spent much of our time and money trying to keep it in stock.

  Whenever low grey-black clouds rolled in over the dunes, Mark and I would rush around placing pots and pans around the tent to catch the rain. Then we would zip the tent, topple gasoline drums onto their sides, stuff cloth bags of flour and all our data books into the front of the truck, cover the food shelf with canvas, set the equipment boxes up on blocks, and cover the fire with the half drum. Finally, after checking the tie-downs on the tents, camp would be secu
re.

  As soon as the downpour eased, we would grab the pots and pans and pour the fresh rainwater into drums. Then we would scoop up as many as eighty gallons of the coffee-colored water that stood ankle deep in camp.

  Later, when the mud had settled a bit, we would drive to the water hole on Mid Pan and, using pots and funnels made from plastic bottles, spend hours collecting more water. It was impossible to avoid including some of the springbok and gemsbok droppings that bobbed on the surface, but they would settle out in the drum and they did no real harm because we boiled all our drinking water. We hadn’t always taken this precaution.

  One month in the dry season of 1975 we both came down with severe intestinal cramps, diarrhea, and lethargy that persisted for days. We kept getting weaker and had no idea what was causing the trouble. Our water supply was nearly finished, and I worried that if our illness worsened, we wouldn’t be strong enough to make the trip for more. Without a radio, there would be no way for us to get help.

  Mark dragged himself from the tent, and pausing frequently to rest, he consolidated into a bucket the last gallon or two from all the drums. As he tipped up the last one, feathers swirled into the pail, followed by the ripe ooze of a putrified bird, which had apparently drowned in the drum weeks before. From then on we boiled every drop that we drank, no matter how clean it looked, and kept the bungs plugged with rags.

  Lionel Palmer, the hunter who had suggested that we work in the Kalahari, had recently loaned us a small trailer and had assured us that we could use it to haul water. The morning after we had found the decomposed bird, we pulled the trailer to the cattle post, where we now got our water, and loaded one drum inside the Grey Goose, one on the roofrack, and three in the bed of the trailer. A single drum filled with fifty gallons of water weighs nearly 500 pounds, so Mark chopped some log wedges and drove them beneath the spring blades of the Land Rover to help support the load.