Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  Whenever he was smelling a female’s scent, Bones would lift his head and raise his lips to expose his teeth. Then, as air passed through his pharynx, he would wrinkle his nose in a grimace. This behavior, termed flehmen, is a way of “tasting” the scent, or better discriminating its chemical message by passing it over a special pouch, filled with sensory cells, that is located in the roof of the mouth. A lion showing flehmen reminds me of a wine connoisseur who draws air into his mouth and breathes it out his nose to better experience the bouquet and flavor of his selection.

  Lions generally kill large antelope by suffocation. First they knock or pull it down, and then seize and hold its throat, or occasionally clamp their jaws over its muzzle. I had always been curious about how they could accomplish this with a giraffe, who may weigh up to 2600 pounds and whose throat may be seventeen feet above the ground. Late one afternoon the Blue Pride showed us their giraffe-hunting technique. They had eaten little more than a gemsbok calf and a springbok fawn for several days—not much for over 3000 pounds of hungry lions. After spending the day in Tree Island on South Pan, they began to hunt through the open woodlands of West Dune. A light rain began to fall, and they lay down along either side of a heavy-game trail used by antelope to cross from the fossil river to the bush savanna. Their heads were raised and their ears were perked to catch any sound, each one of them looking in a slightly different direction. For nearly two hours they had scarcely moved, lying like statues. Instead of stalking, Kalahari lions often hunt by waiting along game trails, especially where there is little cover.

  But now all the females drew themselves to their haunches, leaning forward, their muscles bunching. Near the foot of the dune a large bull giraffe walked into view, browsing the green leaves from the tops of the acacia trees. Chary and Sassy were closest to him; they slowly rose to a low crouch and each began a divergent course around the unsuspecting giraffe. Liesa, Gypsy, Spicy, Spooky, and Blue spread out in an arc across the trail. Over the next hour they stalked slowly toward their prey, using grass, bushes, and trees to cover their approach. At the same time, Chary and Sassy managed to skirt the giraffe and hide in the grass beyond it, along the same trail but farther west.

  The five lionesses who were working together got to within thirty yards of the giraffe. Suddenly he wheeled and went thundering down the trail toward the dune, his tail curled tightly over his rump, flinging chunks of sod from platter-sized hooves. When it seemed they were about to be trampled by the 2000-pound bull, Chary and Sassy sprung the ambush. The giraffe dug in his feet, trying to stop and sidestep the lions charging from both front and rear. But his hooves failed him in the wet sand. Like a collapsing tower, he slewed forward out of control, right into Chary and Sassy. Instantly the other lions were at his flanks, raking and tearing at his belly and sides. The giraffe bolted forward again, trying to outrun the lions, but Blue locked her jaws around his right hind leg just above the hoof, set her own legs stiffly in reverse, and hung on.

  For twenty-five yards the giraffe staggered forward, his eyes white and his breath ragged, dragging the lion clamped to his leg. Refusing to release her hold, Blue’s claws plowed up clumps of grass and left deep furrows in the sand. The others ran along beside the bull, slashing at him until his entrails burst from his body. Finally he collapsed, flailing weakly at the gang of predators.

  There was no way Bones could drive his hungry females from this mountain of meat; there were too many of them and too much of it. But during the week that the Blue Pride spent at this giraffe kill, we noticed that the relationship between Bones and the two young males, Rascal and Hombre, had changed dramatically. The youngsters were now nearly three years old, and shaggy ruffs showed where their manes were coming in. Their very presence seemed to incense Bones. At first he wouldn’t let them feed at all, driving them off with snarls whenever they ventured too near him at the carcass. Only after he had sated himself did they manage to snatch a few bites.

  By restricting their food supply Bones was forcing independence on Rascal and Hombre; before long they would leave the pride to become nomads. The next two or three years would be a critical period for them, without females to help them hunt. In the coming dry season, prey would be scarce and there would be little cover for hunting, and what was more serious, their predatory skills would still be dangerously underdeveloped. They could easily starve to death—many young inexperienced males do—before they were big enough and aggressive enough to acquire a pride of females and a territory. Somehow they had to survive together until the rains, when hunting would be easier.

  In the Kalahari Desert it may be more important that young male lions learn how to hunt on their own than it is in a more moderate climate, such as that of East Africa. As adults they will be separated from their pride females more often, and for longer periods, than males in areas where prey is more readily available and lion pride territories are generally much smaller. When a Kalahari male appropriates a kill from his females and they move on, it frequently takes several days for him to find them again. During this time he may have to hunt alone, killing somewhat smaller prey like springbok, young gemsbok, and steenbok.

  Rascal and Hombre were growing up fast, and as the weeks passed, they were less and less inclined to back down in confrontations with Bones. They would often seize pieces of carcass, snarling and threatening him—muzzle to muzzle—before he cuffed them into retreat. They were developing the aggression they would someday need to take over and hold a pride area and its females.

  During these early years we learned a great deal about the wet-season diet of Kalahari lions by watching the Blue Pride and Springbok Pan Pride hunt. To supplement this information we collected, dried, crushed, screened, sorted, weighed, and identified bits of horns, hooves, bone chips, and hair in dozens of lion scats. One day I called Mox to join us at the edge of camp, where we sat with bandanas tied over our faces, a smelly cloud of white dust rising around us as we smashed lion feces with a hammer. He arrived just as I was pouring the powdered remains of a scat to be weighed into an extra dinner plate. When he saw what we were about, he clamped his hand over his mouth—“Ow!”—shaking his head and staring in slack-jawed disbelief.

  But before long Mox—though a little reluctant at first—had disappeared in his own white cloud, hammering and grinding away at a pile of feces. A day or two later, however, I noticed that he was no longer bringing his enamel plate to our camp to be washed with our dishes.

  11

  The van der Westhuizen Story

  Delia

  It is not easy to remember

  that in the fading light of day . . .

  the shadows always point toward the dawn.

  —Winston O. Abbott

  WITH A LONG sweeping motion Mark stripped the silver-grey leaves from a thin catophractes branch. He dipped the stick very slowly into the drum of gasoline, pulled it out again, and pinched the spot where the coating of liquid ended. “This has to last us for eight more weeks.”

  It was May 1976, twenty-one months since we had received the $3800 grant from National Geographic. Once again our money was nearly gone. Without another grant very soon, we would have to abandon our research and earn the funds to get home. We also desperately needed money for radio-tracking the brown hyenas and lions, who were difficult to follow in the thick bush savanna, where they spent most of the dry season. In this habitat we could usually only follow the hyenas for an hour or so before losing them. And so far, we had no idea where the lions traveled in the hot months. We had done just about all the research on them we could do, without more sophisticated equipment.

  A few days after Mark had checked our gasoline supply, a bush plane zoomed down the valley just above the treetops and buzzed camp, circling and dive-bombing the island like a mobbing bird. We ran out just in time to see a small bundle tumble out the window and the aircraft waggle its wings in salute and speed away. Our mail from Maun, tied up with string, lay in the grass. We never found out who had done us this favor.
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  We opened the package and found a handwritten message from Richard Flattery, Maun’s new bank manager, telling us that a Mr. van der Westhuizen would be in the village soon with some money for our project. Van der Westhuizen was the name of the director of the South African Nature Foundation, to which we had applied for a $20,000 grant. Declaring the night a holiday, we celebrated with pancakes and homemade syrup.

  Next day we packed the Land Rover and started for the village before the sun had reached East Dune. Night had fallen when we wound our way through the jumble of earthen huts, each softly lighted by a flickering cook fire and shrouded in a drifting haze of smoke. The Flattery’s house was a flat-topped stucco standing opposite the reed fence of Dad Rigg’s place. Through the screen door, patched and repatched with an assortment of mesh, we could see Richard cleaning fish over a bucket. His wife, Nellie, was frying fresh bream over a gas stove.

  “Glad to meet you . . . heard all about you . . . yes, Mr. van der Westhuizen has money for you. We’ll tell you all about it—stay and have some food and a cold beer.”

  We sat down to a meal of fried fish, potatoes, and fresh bread in a small raftered dining room that might have been in an English cottage, except for an active termite mound protruding through the floor.

  As it turned out, Richard knew little about the grant—only that Mr. van der Westhuizen would be arriving in Maun the very next morning. Later on, after a pleasant evening, we asked Richard to invite our prospective sponsor to join us for lunch the following noon at the “Riviera,” a ramshackle retreat set on the banks of the Thamalakane River.

  The owner of the Riviera, an innkeeper from Selebi Phikwe, had given us permission to use the camp on our supply trips to Maun. The complex consisted of five dilapidated reed-and-straw huts that clung to the steep banks of the river like abandoned birds’ nests. The largest hut, which we used, had a partially caved-in roof and leaned heavily toward the river, straining against guy wires that tied it to a massive fig tree. The shaggy encampment, a welcome refuge from the desert, was all but hidden in tall grass. We pulled two rusted camp beds from under the fallen section, swept off the spotted mattresses, and hung a mosquito net—more mends than mesh—from a rafter over our sleeping bags.

  Mark Muller, a young bush pilot, also stayed at the camp, in one of the smaller thatched huts. The next morning we were awakened by a grinding clatter before dawn. Muller was starting his ancient Land Rover, a roofless relic resembling a World War II German staff car. He left it ticking over idly at the top of the bank while he went back to his hut for something. The next thing we knew, the nose of the truck crashed through the wall of our house with a splintering of reeds, stopping six feet from our bed. The hut swayed dramatically around us as thatch, reed, and poles rained down. We both jumped up, afraid the house might collapse any second, but it slowly steadied itself. Muller ran down the hill after his runaway truck, muttering incoherently to himself. “Sorry,” he said and backed out of our bedroom and drove away.

  We began immediately preparing a special lunch for our meeting with Mr. van der Westhuizen. Mark stoked up a rust-eaten pot-bellied wood stove that squatted beneath the fig tree, and, tears streaming down my face from the cloud of smoke that belched from the stovepipe, I baked a loaf of orange bread while Mark went for supplies. About noon we laid out a lunch of cold sliced mutton, fresh fruits, and hot bread—the most extravagant meal we had prepared since coming to Botswana.

  Sitting on tin trunks on the reed house veranda, we ate our lunch with Mr. van der Westhuizen, a soft-spoken man with greying hair and a slight limp. In the wide, lazy river, a few feet away, coots splashed among the reeds, and on the opposite bank, a group of baboons moved toward the water’s edge to drink.

  As Mr. van der Westhuizen quizzed us about our research we grew more and more puzzled. He seemed to know almost nothing about us or the nature of our work.

  Finally Mark asked, “Haven’t you read our proposal?”

  “Proposal?”

  “The one we submitted to the South African Nature Foundation.”

  “I don’t understand. Oh,. . .I’m afraid there has been some mistake. I’m not from the Nature Foundation.” He went on to explain that he was an architect from Johannesburg who had heard about our research and wanted to donate $200 of his own money to our project.

  Two hundred dollars would barely fill up our auxiliary gas tank and pay for the trip to Maun. We tried to conceal our dismay, saying, “We really do appreciate your contribution, it couldn’t have come at a better time.” But, it was no use. We heard little more of what he said, and after an eternity Mr. van der Westhuizen drove away in his shiny new truck. We stared silently at the river.

  A vise crushed both sides of my head, and a sharp wedge pressed down from above, splitting my brain. The pain of resting my head on the pillow was unbearable. I tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea swept over me. Under the soft mesh of the mosquito net Mark slept restlessly beside me. Without moving my head I nudged him, “Mark . . . some pills . . . I must have malaria.”

  He felt my forehead, then eased from the bed, and brought me six bitter chloroquin tablets from our first-aid kit. I swallowed them with great difficulty. He carried me to a mattress on the floor of one of the smaller huts, which had no holes in its walls. There was no reason to take me to the mission clinic in Maun, which had nothing better for malaria than chloroquin and where there was a good chance of picking up tuberculosis or something worse. In the rainy season Maun was rife with malaria. According to the hunters, “You either take the pills, sweat out the fever, and get better, or you die.”

  The hut was dank, dark. I was buried under heavy blankets of scratchy wool, but I was still stone-cold, my skin clammy. Mark lay next to me, trying to keep me from shivering, but I could feel no warmth. The blood in my head pounded against my skull, and a brilliant light from one tiny window stabbed at my eyes.

  Then my body began to burn. With all my strength I shoved Mark away and threw back the covers. The sheets were damp and a putrid odor smothered me. For a long time my mind floated in darkness, and then there was a kind of peace. I saw home, live oaks and Spanish moss, the red-brick house where I grew up, and Fort Log, built with pine logs as a fortress against some imaginary neighborhood Indians. But when my thoughts tried to focus, I thrashed in the bed and cried out. Home was far away. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, you can’t get off and you’ll never get back. Clickety-clack.

  After a long time, the light from the hut’s window grew softer and my mind began to clear. Tap-tap-tap-tap. We would stay in Africa somehow, and make it work. Tap-tap-tap. Mark was working on a borrowed typewriter set up on a tin trunk near my mattress. He came over to me. Clean sheets and warmth, a snug fresh feeling caressed me. His familiar smile, a kiss, hot soup, and cold, cold water welcomed me back. I tried to get up, but a firm hand gripped my shoulder and pushed me back . . . rest.

  During the days that I had been delirious with fever, Mark had stayed at my side, writing proposals to conservation organizations all over the world, describing our progress and needs. When I was much better he drove into Maun one morning to mail the stack of thick envelopes. I propped myself up on pillows and waited for him to come back. Though still a bit woozy, it felt good to sit up. I watched two scimitar-billed hoopoes flitting about in the fig trees just outside the window. An hour later I could hear the Land Rover growling its way back through the sand.

  “Hi, Boo. Glad to see you sitting up,” Mark said quietly. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Feeling better?”

  “Yeah—I think we can get back to the desert soon.” I smiled at him.

  “Well, we can’t rush it,” he said. He walked to the small window.

  “Didn’t we get any mail, any news from home?” I asked.

  “Uh . . . no.” He went on staring blankly at the river beyond the trees.

  “But isn’t that a letter from Helen?” I had recognized one of my sister’s personalized envelopes tucked in the back pocket of his
cutoffs.

  His hand shot to his hip. He turned and came to the bed, his face full of pain. “God, love, I didn’t want to tell you until you were stronger. There’s some bad news. It’s your dad. He died of a heart attack about six weeks ago.”

  I sank numbly back in the bed. “My mother—what about my mother?” I heard myself ask. “And we don’t even have the money to go home.”

  My father had been one of our staunchest supporters, writing letters of encouragement, sending addresses and reference books, not to mention the newspaper clippings about football games that piled up in our post box at Safari South over the months.

  Mark lay down beside me. One of the hardest things to bear during our seven years in Africa was being away from home at such times. While we were gone, Mark’s mother passed away, and his grandmother. And besides my father, I lost my grandmother. And I missed the marriage of my twin brother. We struggled with feelings of guilt because we were not at home to help our families through the difficult times, or to celebrate the good ones.

  “If you want to go home, I’ll get the money from somewhere, Boo,” Mark told me.