Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  The pride moved along the riverbed to Last Stop, a small group of trees on the edge of North Pan, where they often scent-marked and rested before leaving the valley. In the early light of dawn they walked slowly toward a herd of seven red hartebeest browsing on silvery catophractes bushes on the west slope of North Dune. An old bull, the tips of his horns worn to shiny nubs, stood a little apart, licking the mineral from a termite mound. Lowering themselves for the stalk, the lionesses fanned out toward the herd, gliding through the brush, ears drawn down beside their heads. Nearly an hour later they were moving abreast, in a line about 100 yards long, still seventy or eighty yards from the hartebeest but moving toward them. Rascal and Hombre stayed far to the rear with Bones. But while the lionesses were stalking north, the hartebeest had turned east; they would miss their chance unless adjustments were made. Chary and Sassy pulled from the line, and slipping behind their pride-mates, they disappeared in the grass to position themselves in front of the antelope. Liesa, Blue, and Gypsy began stalking slowly forward.

  Waiting . . . then moving from bush to grass clump to hedge . . . then waiting some more, the pride worked its way toward its target. The hartebeest sensed something. Staring back at the lions, they began prancing and blowing their alarm calls. Then the herd cantered away.

  The old bull was in the lead. As he dodged an acacia bush, Chary’s thick arm flashed out and hooked over his shoulder. He disappeared into the cover, groaning harshly, his feet flailing wildly. The other hartebeest dashed to the top of the dune and stood looking down, snorting and flicking their tails. Within seconds all the lions were tumbling toward the kill. We could hear their throaty rumblings and the tearing of flesh.

  Bones heard the commotion too, and trotted past us on his way to join the others, Rascal and Hombre scampering through the tall grass behind him. At the carcass he rushed forward, snarling and scattering the lionesses, and clamping his wide paws over the hartebeest, he began to feed alone. The females, with Rascal and Hombre, watched him from ten yards away.

  But Blue began to edge closer, watching Bones and sinking to the ground whenever he shot a glance at her. At about eight yards, she made a slow arc toward the carcass. Bones stopped feeding. A deep rumble grew in his throat and his lips rose to expose his three-inch canines. Blue spat at him. He roared across the carcass, shoveling sand as he charged, and clubbed her across the nose with his paw. The lioness bellowed, her ears pressed to her head as she flattened to the ground again. Bones went back to the carcass, and twenty minutes later the females, followed by Rascal and Hombre, slowly walked away. That night, while their male was occupied with his hartebeest, the lionesses killed and consumed an eighty-pound springbok on South Pan.

  It was the end of May 1975 and almost a month since the last rain shower. The skies were pale and cloudless, the cool nights perfumed with the sweet musk of golden grasses, and the morning wind had a cutting edge. All spoke of the coming winter. The heavy clay soil of the riverbed had lost most of its moisture, and the gemsbok and hartebeest herds had fragmented and moved away.

  We saw the lions less and less frequently; finally they were gone. We missed the sound of their bellows rolling through the valley on the night wind and wondered where their migration had taken them, and whether we would ever see Bones and the Blue Pride again. We knew it would probably be more than eight months before the rains brought the flush of new grasses and the larger antelope back to the fossil river, late in 1975 or early in 1976. The lions would not be back before then. We began concentrating on our study of brown hyenas, learning as much as we could about every facet of their existence.

  Moffet has just finished eating a porcupine, a staple food for desert lions in the dry season. Many of the lions had never seen humans before, and after they got used to us, we could often sit close to them with little danger.

  Top: Our camp within a “tree island.” There were no other people for thousands of square miles. Bottom: Mark enjoys a rare bath in a gallon of water. Except during the short rainy season, we had to haul all of our water in drums from a cattle post fifty miles from camp.

  Top: Mark bores a hole in the shell of an ostrich egg, then shakes out some for breakfast. By taping over the hole and burying the egg to keep it cool and fresh, we could enjoy the egg for as long as ten days or two weeks. One ostrich egg is the equivalent of two dozen chicken eggs. Bottom: Pepper, a brown hyena cub, visits Delia in camp on one of the cub’s first trips away from her clan’s communal den.

  Top: Hansel and Gretel, two jackal pups, play-fight on the grass of the fossil riverbed in their first rainy season. Bottom: Gretel begs from Mate, her mother, who then regurgitates food for her. Carrying food in her stomach is a safe way for Mate to get food to her young without its being stolen by a brown hyena or another jackal.

  Top: Captain, Mate’s mate, fights for a share of a gemsbok carcass abandoned by the Blue Pride lions. Bottom: Captain fights off vultures to protect a scrap of food.

  Hansel gets soaked by a heavy rain while he sleeps on the riverbed, and then shakes off the cold water.

  Top: Still soaked, Hansel gives us a forlorn look before beginning the night’s hunt. Bottom: Camp after a storm. Overleaf: Chary’s and Sassy’s cubs have one of their first drinks of water ever. During the drought, for more than nine months, the lions only liquid came from the fluids of their prey.

  Mark stalks a half-drugged lion with a syringe.

  Top: Mark treats Chary of the Blue Pride after immobilizing her. We usually darted lions and hyenas at night to avoid subjecting them to the severe heat and light of the desert day. Bottom: Bones, still weak from the surgery on his broken leg, struggles to drag the gemsbok we gave him into the shade.

  Bones mates with Blue.

  Top: Bimbo nibbles at Blue’s chin while Sandy rests on her back. Bottom: Bimbo and Sandy play-fight next to Blue.

  Bones charges Blue as she tries to get a share of a kill she made herself.

  Top: Sassy bites at Spooky’s belly in play. Bottom: Spicy and Spooky rest after playing.

  Satan and a lioness of the Springbok Pan Pride.

  9

  The Carnivore Rivalry

  Mark

  Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.

  —Edward FitzGerald,

  The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

  DELIA elbowed me in the ribs. “Did you hear it?” she asked.

  “Did I hear what?” I groaned, lifting my sleepy head.

  “The drums!”

  “Drums?”

  “Quick, we’ve got to answer them!” It was a bright and frosty dawn. She wormed out of her sleeping bag and, clad in nothing but panties, pushed back the flap and hurried outside. Her breath coming in clouds of steam, she huddled against the cold, listening.

  “Maybe you’ve been in the bush too long,” I teased her. Then I heard them too. Turn, turn, tum-tum-tumtum—a very low-pitched sound, like someone beating a large bass drum.

  “What can I use to answer them?” she asked, searching the kitchen area. I suggested—not seriously—the five-gallon pail we used for our oven and a tent stake. Holding the pail under her arm, she began clobbering the bottom, mimicking the cadence of the drums. After each series, she listened for an answer. But the drums had gone silent. She whacked the pail again and again, and I buried my head inside my sleeping bag to shut out the racket. Finally she gave up and scrambled shivering and subdued back into bed.

  For days, at sunrise and sunset, we heard the drums. It must be a Bushman hunting party, we reasoned, since we first heard them south of camp, but later in the west and north. They seemed to be moving up and down the valley but avoiding the part of the riverbed where we could have seen them. Delia kept her pail and tent stake handy. But each time she answered the drums, they fell silent.

  Thinking that Delia’s clatter had been frightening the hunters, instead of answering one evening when we heard them, we dropped everything and jumped into the Land Rover. Safari hunters had told us that the few truly wild Bus
hmen left were shy people who avoided contact with modern man. We would probably be lucky even to see them before they ran away.

  We drove slowly toward the drums, craning out the windows of the truck and taking a compass bearing each time we heard them. Tense with anticipation, we imagined that at any moment we would round a hedge and see little black men in animal skins, with bows and arrows slung over their backs, gathered around a small campfire, roasting a steenbok for their supper. Or maybe one of the hunters would be beating a drum while the others danced around in a circle. We wondered what they would do when they saw us, and if we should have brought sugar or tobacco to offer them.

  We were almost on top of the sound and I was easing the truck around a large clump of bushes, when I stopped abruptly. A few yards ahead of us was a large male kori bustard, feathers puffed out from his swollen neck, strutting through the grass, his beady eyes fixed on us: Whum, whum, whum-wumwum! Whum, whum, whum-wumwum! It was his mating call.

  We left the kori to his dance and turned toward camp, promising each other that we would never tell another soul about this.

  During the nights of the dry season of 1975, we followed Star, Patches, Shadow, or any brown hyena we were lucky enough to find on the open riverbed. If we missed a single night of observation, we felt compelled, no matter what the reason, to enter it in our journal: “Alternator on truck broken, severe wind and sand storm; impossible to follow hyenas tonight,” or “had to haul water today; got back too late to look for hyenas.” We had to learn as much as we could, and as fast as we could, about brown hyenas, not only for their conservation but also for our own. We still had to prove ourselves as field biologists if we wanted to stay in Deception Valley.

  We were especially fascinated with the brown hyenas’ relationship to other carnivores, on whom they relied heavily for food. We hadn’t yet learned which species they could dominate successfully enough to steal their kills. Leftovers from lions made up the major portion of their diet during the rainy season, but it would be a short-lived brown hyena that tried to take a kill from them. They could only wait until the cats abandoned their carcass. And though the hyenas often appropriated kills from jackals, their interactions with leopards, wild dogs, spotted hyenas, and cheetahs were completely unknown. We planned to investigate these fundamental relationships during the dry season, while the lions were away.

  We had been censusing antelope one evening, and it was almost dark when we stopped the truck in camp. Mox’s fire glowed weakly from beneath a big, brooding acacia tree. I switched on the spotlight. If we were lucky, one of the hyenas we wanted to follow would be walking by, saving us hours of searching. When I played the light along the riverbed, large yellow eyes winked from the branches of a tree between Mox’s camp and ours. The leopard, whom we had named the Pink Panther, was draped over a limb about ten feet above the ground, his tail hanging straight down. He paid no attention to us, apparently absorbed in watching something north toward Cheetah Hill.

  I turned the light in that direction, and the shaggy form of a brown hyena came into view. It was Star, moving slowly in our direction, following a zigzag course, with her nose to the ground. In seconds she would be directly below the Pink Panther.

  “Mark, he’s going to attack her!” Delia whispered. Since one of our objectives was to learn the relationship between brown hyenas and leopards, I didn’t think we should interfere. Delia leaned forward in her seat, her hands clenched around the covers of the field journal in her lap. If the leopard did attack Star, I was sure—having seen browns lug off the heavy parts from gemsbok carcasses—that we would see a hell of a scrap. Still, I thought the hyena would surely smell or see the cat and avoid the tree. I was wrong.

  Star moved directly under the Pink Panther. Peering down at her, the tip of his tail twitching, the cat carefully drew himself into a crouch. Star began walking circles around the base of the tree, still smelling the ground. The leopard did not move. Half a minute passed. At any moment the attack would come and Star would be tom apart before she could even look up.

  When she walked out from under the tree and started south toward Eagle Island, Delia let out a long sigh and settled back in her seat. Star was about 200 yards away when the Pink Panther climbed down and began walking west. The hyena swung to pick up a scent and saw him. Her hackles rose like spikes along her back; she lowered her head and charged. When she was nearly on him, the leopard launched himself toward the acacia tree that he had just left. By the time he was at full pace, his body stretching into another stride, Star’s open jaws were inches from the end of his streaming tail. He hit the acacia at full speed, and chips of bark flew from his claws as his momentum swung him around the trunk. Spitting and growling, he reached the safety of the limb just as Star made a last lunge for his tail. Her front paws against the tree, she howl-barked at the leopard again and again as if frustrated, while he glared down at her from his perch. Finally she walked off. The Pink Panther watched until she was at a safe distance. Then he hurried down and slunk into the tall grass of West Prairie.

  It must have been a fluke, we told ourselves, a mishap. Surely sawed-off brown hyenas did not usually dominate leopards single-handedly. But the Pink Panther’s rivalry with brown hyenas was not over.

  Several weeks later, while we sat at the campfire eating supper, a groaning death rattle rose from the darkness just beyond our tree island; a springbok had just been killed. We had started for the truck to go to investigate when the Pink Panther trotted into camp, his muzzle and chest smeared with blood. He stopped within three yards of us, looking quickly over his shoulder, and then hurried up a nearby tree. He had apparently just killed the antelope. But why had he left it?

  On the opposite side of camp we found Shadow, the most subordinate brown hyena in the clan, chewing at the belly of the springbok. We waited, and after about twenty minutes, the Pink Panther reappeared from the island, working his way toward her. She paid little attention and continued gnawing on the antelope she had taken from him. He lay in the grass watching her devour his kill, his ears turned back, his tail twitching. Then, as if he could stand it no longer, he jumped up, curled his tail over his back, and took three pounces toward Shadow.

  Without hesitation, the chunky hyena launched herself over the carcass directly at him, her hackles bristling and jaws open wide. Again the Pink Panther turned tail, and the two now stormed into camp, where the cat streaked up the tree next to our kitchen boma. Shadow sat below for a few minutes, watching him lick his paws, and then she walked back to the carcass. Ivey, the clan’s dominant male, joined her, and the two of them finished off the springbok. The Pink Panther slipped quietly away.

  Apart from our having learned a great deal from this interaction, we were gratified to know that neither Shadow nor the Pink Panther had the slightest hesitation about using our camp as a battleground. We had wanted to blend into the Deception Valley scene. This was testimony that we had succeeded.

  We had gained a new respect for the brown hyenas. Scavengers they are, but they don’t just wait passively for a handout from the predator community. They often steal from quite formidable competitors. Apparently it is too risky for a leopard to fight a brown hyena, whose massive shoulders and neck could absorb many bites and slashes, whereas a single crushing bite from the hyena could break the cat’s leg, or even kill it. As for the Pink Panther, losing a carcass was less costly then losing a leg.

  The browns are as skillful as they are bold. During the rains, they key on lions to such an extent that the clan’s territory almost perfectly overlaps that of the Blue Pride, boundary for boundary. They know the pathways and lying-up places habitually used by lions and leopards, and they keep close tabs on their activities by coming downwind from them once or twice a night to smell if they have made a kill. They even use flocks of circling vultures to help them find carcasses in the early mornings or evenings, and, as we had seen, they find other kills by following the strident calls jackals make when mobbing leopards. If a leopard has
not already stashed its carcass safely in a tree by the time a hyena arrives, it soon loses its meal to a brown.

  We learned that hyenas not only dominate leopards, but they also chase cheetahs from their kills. Cheetahs are less powerfully built than leopards, and much more timid. In the Kalahari, as distinct from their behavior in East Africa, cheetahs often hunt at night, when the browns are busy foraging. Spotted hyenas, on the other hand, will displace brown hyenas at carcasses, though they wander into Deception Valley so seldom that they rarely compete with their smaller brown cousins.

  A pack of wild dogs is apparently too much for one brown hyena. Star appropriated a springbok kill from a cheetah near Acacia Point one night. While she was busy trying to free a leg to cache, the wild dog, Bandit, and two others of his pack rushed to the carcass and chased her off. Two minutes later Star was back, pulling at the leg while the dogs fed at the other end. Without warning, Bandit bounded over the dead springbok and bit Star on the rump. She yelped and galloped away just as the rest of Bandit’s pack arrived on the scene. In seven minutes, the wild dogs completely devoured the ninety-pound springbok, except for the horns, skull, spine, and jawbone. Star did not get one more bite of meat and could only finish off the bones after the dogs had left.