Cry of the Kalahari Page 24

  Brown hyenas are also remarkable for their ability to go for months—even years, in times of drought—with nothing to drink. They actually kill little more than about sixteen percent of what they eat, but they do hunt occasional small prey in the dry season, digging springhares and other rodents from their burrows and occasionally stealing bird or antelope kills from jackals, leopards, or cheetahs. The tissues of such prey and carrion are needed as much for moisture as for food, for though a hyena can make a meal of bone, it provides little fluid, even if it is fresh. If the rains have been good enough to produce a crop of wild melons, the browns eat these for moisture.

  At the same time that we were studying brown hyenas, Gus Mills1 was conducting a thorough study of the hyenas’ foraging behavior in the southern Kalahari. But there were still many unanswered questions about this species: for example, the type of social organization they maintained. Mills and his colleagues were then describing the brown hyena as a solitary species,2 but we often saw as many as five of them meet and socialize while scavenging on large kills left by lions. We knew that, at least during the rainy season, they lived in clans with a social hierarchy. Perhaps, after the lions and their large antelope prey had left the valley in the dry season, such group contact between the browns would dissolve, since there would be fewer large carcasses to bring them together; perhaps individuals would then have their own separate ranges.

  By radio-tracking them, we did indeed learn that clan members met less frequently in the dry months and that individuals foraged alone. But though they were often separated by several miles, they stayed in touch with one another by leaving scent marks along common pathways over a shared range. Furthermore, the group maintained its social hierarchy throughout the long dry months. But we still did not know why the hyenas bothered with all these social conventions. Since they had to separate and travel all over the landscape to find enough to eat, why did they even try to keep contact with one another? The answer to this question continued to be one of the main objectives of our brown hyena research.

  One day Ivey, the dominant male of the clan, was sloping through the bush and woodland along the crest of East Dune. The zigzag course he followed improved his chances of picking up the scent of a kill made by a predator. By a scavenger’s standards it hadn’t been a bad night; he’d already run a jackal off a freshly killed guinea fowl and fed on a kudu leg he had cached some days earlier. No longer hungry, he only had to scent-mark the eastern boundary of the clan’s territory to finish his night’s tour.

  A stranger’s scent suddenly filled his nostrils. He froze in mid stride, hackles bristling, as McDuff strode from a stand of acacia bushes not fifteen yards ahead. A large male with a cape of blond hair over his thick neck and broad shoulders, he carried his big, brutish head high. When he saw Ivey he seemed to grow even larger. Both males squared off, pawing the ground with their front feet. They measured each other for several seconds, and then Ivey lowered his head and attacked. McDuff stood fast, waiting. They went for each other’s neck with unearthly barks and shrieks, shouldering each other and muzzle-wrestling through churning dust and splintering bushes. The stranger scored first. He knocked Ivey off balance and seized him by the side of his head, shaking him violently. Blood dripped from Ivey’s face. He screamed and thrust back and upward, struggling to break the vise-grip, tearing his face as he tried to wrench free. Like a warder leading a prisoner, McDuff marched Ivey in circles, shaking him until he flung him to the ground.

  McDuff tried to shift his grip, but suddenly Ivey spun around and grabbed his neck. Turning and stumbling like sumo wrestlers, they chewed at each other’s neck and face, pausing only to catch their breath. Finally, in a great show of strength, McDuff turned around and stripped Ivey’s teeth from his neck. Then he began to run, with Ivey charging at his hind legs and nipping at his heels. But instead of leaving the territory, McDuff circled back, and fighting on the run, the two males disappeared into the bush.

  Several nights later we found Ivey again. His neck and face had been severely mauled. But the thickened skin on the neck of a brown hyena can take such punishment, and it would heal quickly. There were more battles between Ivey and McDuff, who usually won, and we saw Ivey less and less frequently; then not at all. McDuff seemed to be everywhere, feeding at kills with Patches and Star, and patrolling the clan’s territory as he scent-marked up and down the valley. The Deception Clan had a new dominant male.

  There was something about brown hyenas that greatly puzzled us: In nearly two and a half years of following individuals at night, we had learned very little about their reproduction and had not even seen any of their young. Where were they hiding them? We had seen several adult females with Pogo and Hawkins, but there was no way to tell who had been their mother. Our study would never be complete without knowing how often the hyenas bred, how many young survived, and how they were raised.

  Shadow appeared at an oryx carcass one night in the dry season of 1977, and we noticed immediately, and with great excitement, that her udders were heavy with milk. It was our first opportunity to follow a hyena mother to her den. Carrying a leg from the carcass into the sandveld, she quickly disappeared into the brush while we followed close behind her. At the base of West Dune, near Leopard Trail, her signal changed pitch and then suddenly vanished. “She’s gone into a den!” I said, thinking she must have moved underground, where her radio would not transmit well. Three hours later neither she nor her signal had reappeared. Confused by this development, and disappointed that we had not confirmed the location of a den, we strung some toilet paper in a bush to mark the spot and drove to camp.

  At dawn we were back, listening to the radio and watching for some sign of Shadow. Just after sunrise her signal came on, getting closer and louder: She was coming to the den again. When it stopped moving we took bearings on it from three points around the area. Then, like a phantom, it was gone. Two hours later we had seen or heard nothing more of the hyena.

  After two and a half years of waiting, we were determined to find this den. I drove slowly ahead through the bush while Delia observed from the roof, to make certain that we didn’t get close enough to frighten the mother. When she tapped on the roof, I stopped. In front of us was the entrance to a small den dug from the center of a springhare colony. On the mound of earth were the tiny tracks of hyena cubs. I leaned out my window, hung more tissue on a bush, and backed quietly away.

  We sat near the den for the next ten days, and as far as we could tell, Shadow never came back. We were mystified, and we wondered if she had eaten or abandoned her cubs. Perhaps we had stressed her too much in her nervous maternal state; or maybe our scent had driven her off.

  David Macdonald3 found that dominant female red foxes harass low-ranking females with cubs and cause them to abandon their litters. Shadow had the lowest status of any member of the Deception Pan Clan, and Patches or Star may have been intimidating her more than usual. For whatever reason, the chance to find a hyena den had slipped by us.

  Months later we had an almost identical experience with Patches, the highest ranking female in the clan, who also led us to a den. But, just as Shadow had done, she, too, stopped coming to the area before we could get a glimpse of her young, leaving not a trace of them behind. We were baffled about what the female brown hyenas were doing with their cubs. We had no way of knowing then that the answer to this question was closely related to the mystery of why they are social.

  13

  Gone from the Valley

  Mark

  I look down now. It is all changed.

  Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for

  Was a wild gentle thing, the small dark eyes

  Loving me in secret.

  —James Wright

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN the rustle of his feet in the grass that awakened me. I opened my eyes to find Bones standing a few feet away, spraying his acacia tree beside the gauze window of the tent. “Good morning, Mr. Bones,” I said. “Fine morning today. What are you doing
here so late in the season?” He swung his face toward the window and watched us for a few seconds, his tail still snaked to the limbs. Then he padded down the footpath through camp. We followed in our bare feet as he smelled the flap of the dining tent and headed for the fireplace. Mox was washing dishes with his back to Bones when he strolled past the hyena table. Suddenly the lion’s 450-pound bulk filled the kitchen.

  I whistled softly. Mox looked over his shoulder, dropped a tin plate and towel back into the water, and shot around the reed wall into the bushes. A minute later he came up behind us. “Tau, huh-uh,” he chuckled softly. He had grown to love the lions as much as we, and even reported their locations when he heard them roar in the night. “Msadi Blue—huuooah—kwa, kgakala ya bosigo,” he would say in the morning, pointing to the dunes (“Last night Missus Blue roared that way, far away”).

  Bones went up to the utility table and took a large tin of powdered milk in his mouth. His canines punctured the can and a white plume shot past his nose. He sneezed, shook his head, and sneezed again. The water kettle was steaming on the fire grate, and when he touched the hot handle with his nose he jerked back. Then he walked down the path and into the reed bath boma. His tall backside filling the narrow entrance, he lifted his head to the wash table and found the pink plastic tub filled with the leftover water from my sponge-bath. My arms had been smeared with grease when I washed the night before, and it had taken lots of powdered detergent to get them clean. Bones began to drink the black, sudsy water, his muzzle filling the tub and his immense pink tongue lapping the water to a froth. The more he drank, the more the water foamed, until white suds covered his nose. When he finally finished, he looked up, gave a deep sigh, and belched, blowing a large bubble that hung on the end of his nose. He sneezed again, the bubble exploded, and he shook the suds from his muzzle.

  With one end of the tub jutting from his mouth like a great pink bill, he strutted out of camp. Chewing on the tub, he walked north along the riverbed, dropping bits and pieces of pink plastic from his mouth as he went. A long trek to North Tree, then east over the dunes, and finally he lay in tall butter-colored grasses, wanning himself in the autumn sun, his mane and the grass straw part of the same pattern.

  Later he started walking eastward again. “Sure wish we knew where you were headed,” I said. But this was in June 1977, before our radio gear had been returned, and since we could not collar him, there was no way to follow his migration. The dry season was well under way, and there was no water anywhere in the Kalahari. We wondered if he was headed for the Boteti River, and if he would join the rest of the Blue Pride there. It would be months before the rains and the shifting herds of antelope brought him home to Deception Valley again.

  “Here’s to you, my rambling boy,” Delia said softly, as Bones turned and walked away through the savanna.

  By September 1977 it was hot again and we were exhausted from several months of radio-tracking the brown hyenas. We had not seen the lions since Bones’s last visit to camp in June, so we had not been able to collar them either. Short on supplies, we went to Maun to restock and rejuvenate ourselves. We were driving along the northeast corner of the reserve, on our way back to camp, when we met Lionel Palmer and two of his hunting clients, a druggist and his wife, from Illinois. Hot and tired, we gladly accepted their invitation to stay the night in the safari camp, a mile east of the reserve boundary.

  The camp was set in a clearing on the edge of a belt of acacia woodland that followed the Deception rivercourse for miles west into the Central Kalahari Reserve. Five large bedroom tents of heavy canvas sat beneath shade trees. Deck chairs and small cocktail tables were arranged around a campfire in the center of a sandy clearing. The mess tent stood a few yards away, trim and tight beneath a big acacia tree. Inside there was a long dining table, a gas-powered freezer, and a refrigerator.

  In the kitchen area, surrounded by a reed windbreak, native Africans were busy cooking and baking bread in a large metal box half-buried in the ground and smothered in hot coals. One young man sat thumbing a hand piano, a palm-sized board with metal strips of different lengths, each producing a different pitch. Another was weaving a basket from strips of grass. The cupboards were filled with imported Swedish hams, American mayonnaise, and tinned seafood.

  The skinning and salting of the trophies were done at the end of the encampment, 100 yards from the dining tent. There, dozens of hides were draped about, and vultures sat waiting eagerly in the trees. Piles of homed skulls were wired with metal tags, each with a hunting client’s name and address.

  As we rolled to a stop, several black waiters with red jackets and tasseled hats shouted, “Dumella!” and clapped their hands in greeting. One of them led us to our quarters, a twelve-by-fifteen, dark green manyara tent that had large mesh windows and a fly sheet for shade. At either end of the stoop was a canvas washstand, and in the middle, a table with a mirror, a can of insect spray, a flashlight, a new bar of soap, and a washcloth and towel, all neatly arranged in a row. Inside were two tall iron beds with thick mattresses made up with clean sheets and heavy blankets. Two chairs, another table with more insect spray, and a lantern stood at the far end.

  Delia ran her hand wistfully along the sides of the tent. “Imagine having a camp like this in Deception.”

  “Umm. But I’ll bet they’ve never had a lion spray the bushes right outside their window.”

  “Right,” Delia replied, “and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. Anyway, they’ve cut down all the bushes and cleared away the grass.”

  “Tisa de metse!” Lionel called from his tent to Syanda, a tall, laughing Kenyan with greying hair who was in charge of the service staff. Syanda relayed the order, and soon a young tribesman, treading on the cuffs of his baggy blue coveralls, carried two five-gallon pails of slopping hot water to a reed shower stall. An empty pail with a shower head welded to the bottom dangled from a tree limb. The bucket was lowered, filled with steaming water, and hoisted back over the stall, where there was a wooden slatboard to keep the sand off our feet while we washed.

  Freshly dressed, we met the others at the fireplace. Rows of glasses, an ice bucket, and bottles of Chivas Regal whisky, South African wine, and soft drinks were neatly arranged on a cloth-draped table. Nandi, one of the camp attendants, crushed together the smoldering butts of three branches left from the morning’s fire and the flames jumped to life.

  Wes, the druggist, was a middle-aged man with a fleshy face, thick black hair streaked with grey, and delicate, almost feminine hands. His wife, Anne, a school teacher, was small, neat, and pleasant. They were a khaki couple: khaki jackets with dozens of pockets, khaki hats, khaki shirts, and pants, khaki cartridge belts, and boots. They had brought to the camp bags and suitcases full of insect spray, tubes of block-out, and bottles of lotion. Like most of the clients on a hunting safari they looked straight out of an L. L. Bean catalogue. But, they were friendly, and we genuinely liked them.

  Syanda, a white linen cloth draped over his arm, brought a stainless-steel tray with smoked oysters, mussels poached in wine, and cubes of fried springbok liver. We drank, ate hors d’oeuvres, and dissected the day’s hartebeest hunt. To the west, beyond the trees, a jackal called.

  Sometime later, Syanda announced dinner. The chinaware and wine glasses on the long mess table reflected the yellow light of tall gas lamps. Two waiters, who had been standing smartly against the wall when we entered, passed a tureen of steaming gemsbok-tail soup. The main course was eland steaks, french fried onions, stuffed baked potatoes, asparagus, and freshly baked bread with butter, accompanied by glasses of clear, cold wine. Coffee, cheese, and gooseberry pudding completed the meal. With a little help from the rest of us, Lionel finished the store of expensive wines his clients had brought with them on safari.

  The last flame had spent itself on the reddened embers of the fire when, prompted by Lionel, the woman asked us to tell the story of Bones, who had by this time become somewhat of a legend in northern Botswana.


  Anne’s face grew concerned when she heard about Bones’s near death, filled with festering porcupine quills, the splintered shank of bone stabbing through the skin of his leg. She and Wes sat forward on their chairs, watching our faces closely across the fire. They were absorbed by the details of the surgery that cleaned the wound and removed the shattered bone, and of sewing the muscle and skin back into place. Bones’s miraculous recovery and his return to dominate the Blue Pride, as well as his special relationship with us, made their eyes sparkle with tears. When we had finished there was a long silence, and then Anne said, “That’s the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard. Thank you for telling us.”

  The sszzzz of the heavy zipper on the flap awakened us the next morning. “Dumella!” Nandi greeted us, setting a tray of tea with cream and sugar on the nightstand between the beds. We were sipping from our cups when another servant trudged to the stoop, filled the canvas washstands with piping hot water, and laid out towels and washcloths. Breakfast, served in the mess tent, was fresh fruit, sausage, bacon, eggs, toast, cheese, jam, and coffee. All this luxury in the bush costs clients from $750 to $1000 a day.