Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  It was still early when we left the hunters on a track near the boundary of the game reserve. Wes was sitting on a special seat across the back of the truck, his rifle clipped at the ready in a rack in front of him. We waved goodbye and turned southeast into the game reserve toward camp.

  Just before noon, a few minutes ahead of our scheduled radio contact with the Safari South Office in Maun, we crested East Dune above Deception Valley. In camp, I set the HF radio on the fender and clipped the wires to the battery terminals. It crackled to life, and Delia stood waiting for the call. I went to the dining tent and started transcribing field notes.

  “Zero-zero-nine; zero-zero-nine, this is four-three-two, do you read, over?” It was Dougie Wright, another hunter, calling us from Lionel’s camp, where he had just arrived with more clients.

  “Four-three-two, this is zero-zero-nine. Good afternoon, Dougie. How are you? Over.” Delia answered.

  “I’m afraid I have a bit of bad news for you, Delia, over.”

  “Oh . . . Well, okay, Dougie . . . what is it? Over.”

  “Lionel and Wes shot one of your lions this morning.”

  “. . .Oh . . . I see.” I could barely hear Delia as she asked, “Do you know the color and number of the ear tag, Dougie?”

  “Uh . . . he had an orange ear tag in his left ear . . . number zero-zero-one.”

  “Mark! My God! It’s Bones—they’ve shot Bones!” She choked and dropped the microphone. I started from the dining tent, but when I got to the truck she was gone, running across the riverbed.

  “No . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . no!” Her sobs drifted back to me on the wind.

  14

  The Trophy Shed

  Mark

  When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings.

  —Stanley Kunitz

  THE SHED, old, dark, and musty, was filled with animal skins, stiff, salted skins with shrunken ears and hairy rawhide strips for tails. Each had a bullet hole, some several.

  Against the bamboo walls, shelves held stacks of bleached white skulls: There were wildebeest, zebra, buffalo, impala, kudu, leopard, jackal, and dozens of others. And lions. Each had a red metal tag wired through a socket where once a clear, bright eye had been.

  We found his skin in a bale of others. The orange tag, 001, was scarcely visible inside his wizened ear. Heartsick, I pried at the folds of cartilage with a screwdriver, but they would not give up the tag. Pebbles of rock salt showered our feet when we pulled his hide, flat and stiff, out of the bale, its hair like so much steel wool. The scar from his broken leg and our crude surgery was still there over his knee. We made some hurried, clumsy measurements for the sake of science, wrote them in a notebook, and walked outside into the bright sunlight. Tears were brimming in Delia’s eyes, and it was some time before I could speak.

  Bones was killed in the dry season, when there was no water in the Kalahari. More than a thousand gemsbok had passed through the woodlands along the Deception rivercourse and east out of the reserve into the Safari South hunting concession area. He had apparently been following these antelope, for the Kalahari was ablaze with grass fires and prey was extremely scarce.

  They had found him resting under a bush with Rascal and one of the Blue Pride lionesses, just a few yards outside the reserve boundary. When he heard the truck he raised his head from his paws. Wes and Lionel drove to within fifty yards, stopped, looked at him through binoculars, and shot him through the heart. If they had áeen him sleeping next to our camp, they would have known that they could practically walk up to him and put the muzzle of the rifle against his head. Hadn’t they seen the orange ear tag? It wouldn’t have mattered if they had. Unfortunately, lions don’t understand the laws of man; he and the others had become fair game when they left the game reserve to find food.

  At the shot, the lioness dashed away into the bush, but Rascal stood at Bones’s side, snarling defiantly and charging whenever the hunters tried to collect their trophy. They were able to frighten him away only by firing their rifles into the air and driving at him with their truck.

  The news that Bones had been shot crushed us. We stood beneath the ziziphus tree, cursing and crying and holding each other as the hurt slowly seeped in and fed on his memory. For days we were swamped with depression. If they had seen his ear tag, it was incomprehensible to us how they could have shot him since, only hours before, they had been so touched by his story. Finally, there was despair: Bones had been the symbol of what we had hoped for, and believed could exist, between man and other animals. When he was shot, everything we had been trying to accomplish for the conservation of Kalahari wildlife seemed lost. He had first been our patient, then our friend and mascot. One friend had killed another.

  As trained biologists, we knew that we could not fault anyone personally for the death of Bones. He had been a legal trophy, and it was not the hunters’ fault that he had left the game reserve. Besides, carefully regulated hunting can be a useful tool in the conservation and management of some animal populations. Unfortunately, many governments insist that wildlife is worth conserving only if it can pay for itself through hunting, tourism, or some other means. Knowing this was true of Botswana, we tried to overrule our emotions and deal with Bones’s death on a more rational level.

  Though we had never objected to hunting per se, a few of the hunters we knew openly admitted that they were consistently disobeying Botswana’s hunting regulations and other recognized sporting codes. They described chasing animals with their trucks, letting clients shoot several antelope until they got the trophy they wanted, setting grass fires to make tracking easier and to burn lions out of thickets, hunting inside game reserves, and shooting game in areas where the quotas had already been exhausted. We had no way of knowing whether they were exaggerating, but this began to strain our friendships.

  Because of our responsibilities as ecologists, we encouraged better enforcement of hunting regulations by the Wildlife Department and objected strongly whenever we discovered that one of the hunters had shot animals inside the game reserve. We also recommended that desert lion quotas be reduced and that license fees be increased. These actions were difficult for some hunters to understand, and it was easy for them to believe we were working against their interests, especially since they had helped us so much through the years. But not all the hunters or clients shared these attitudes or participated in illegal practices, and some remained our good friends until the day we left Botswana.

  Botswana’s Department of Wildlife has next to the smallest budget of any of its government agencies. It is hopelessly understaffed and cannot hope to effectively patrol large, remote areas. Officials told us that in one year alone, more than 600 lions, most of them males, had been legally shot by ranchers, safari hunters, and tribal hunters. Additionally, a large, undetermined number, again mostly males, were shot by poachers for the black market trade in skins.

  Unfortunately, the Botswana government has encouraged the eradication of all predators outside parks and reserves by enacting a sweeping predator control law. It permits the shooting of predators on ranchland if they are deemed a threat to livestock, crops, water installations, or fences, whether or not they have actually molested domestic animals. This is reason enough for native people to kill every predator they see outside game reserves and national parks. Another section of the new law permits a rancher to keep the skin of a predator that has killed his stock. A lion skin brought about three hundred pula (about $300) on the market in 1978. This law cites as predators two endangered species, cheetahs and brown hyenas, as well as lions, leopards, crocodiles, spotted hyenas, baboons, monkeys, and jackals.

  Safari hunters told us that “shootable” lions—those with full manes—were quickly becoming scarce in most desert hunting areas and that they had been virtually eradi
cated from others. Some of their clients were shooting young males that had mere fringes for manes, simply because they had bought a license and could find no older lions.

  This startled us. We were concerned about how long Kalahari lions could withstand such a high mortality rate, especially since it was primarily among the males. Surely the welfare of the population would be undermined. Studies of Serengeti lions, by Brian Bertram,1 showed that the reproduction of pride females who have lost their males suffer from a reduced fecundity for a considerable period after new males join the pride. A strange lion may even kill cubs that are not his own, so that the females will come into estrus sooner and bear his cubs. If, whenever their males were shot, Kalahari pride lionesses experienced a reproductive depression similar to that found in Serengeti prides, the population might very well be threatened. We had to do something to find out.

  Since no long-term wildlife studies had ever been conducted in the Central Kalahari before, the most fundamental knowledge of the lion population was totally lacking. No one, including the Wildlife Department, had even the vaguest idea how many lions there were. And though we had been studying them whenever we could, lions had only been on or near the riveri>ed, where we could find and observe them, for two or three months each year. In these brief periods, we had been able to learn very little that would benefit their conservation. Out of our feelings for Bones grew a compulsion—perhaps an obsession—to do more. We were determined to find out how many lions roamed the Central Kalahari, what they ate and whether there was enough of it, what habitats were needed by them and their prey, and what, if anything, was threatening the survival of the population. It was essential to know how many were being shot and trapped each year, how many were dying naturally, and how many cubs were surviving to offset this mortality rate.

  Since the Kalahari is a desert, one of the most important and intriguing considerations was how lions, and other predators, were satisfying their need for moisture. Large as it is, the reserve contains no water except during the brief rains. But did lions have to drink? The longest anyone had seen wild lions go without drinking was nine days; perhaps they could survive even longer than that. But even if they could, presumably they would be forced to leave the protection of the reserve for months each year to find some place to get water. Maybe Bones had been traveling to the Boteti River when he was shot. If this was true, then, large as it was, the Central Kalahari reserve was too small to offer adequate habitat during dry seasons and drought.

  Even if we could learn all these things about lions, in order for any of it to benefit the Kalahari population, we would have to sell the Botswana government on the idea that predators are a valuable resource, one that could bring in much more money if they were conserved. At the time the attitude of many officials was that since predators prey on cattle, they are vermin that must be eradicated.

  A large scale study of lions in thousands of square miles of untracked wilderness would be impossible unless we could somehow maintain daily contact with our research animals year round. The use of an airplane and radio-tracking equipment was the only way this could be done. But the very idea that we could get a plane for our research seemed preposterous. Neither of us knew how to fly, and I had only been in a small plane a few times in my life. Furthermore, airplanes are exorbitantly expensive to own and operate in Africa. With just a Land Rover to keep going, we had practically starved while trying to keep our research funded. It was ludicrous to think we could raise enough money for an airplane. But we had to try.

  15

  Echo Whisky Golf

  Mark

  Only when we pause to wonder

  do we go beyond the limits

  of our little lives.

  —Rod McKuen

  ON A HOT AFTERNOON in late October 1977, we stood on a dusty track in Maun reading a letter from Dr. Richard Faust, director of the Frankfurt Zoological Society in West Germany. I was electrified by the news that the society was seriously reviewing our request for an airplane. But they wanted to know my pilot’s license number and how many hours of flying experience I had. Somehow I would have to learn to fly before answering that letter.

  Leaving Mox in the village, we raced back to camp, threw our best clothes into the truck, and set off for Johannesburg. At four o’clock in the morning several days later, covered with dust and grime, we quietly slipped inside the gate at Roy and Marianne Liebenberg’s home in Benoni, a Johannesburg suburb. We had met Roy, a captain for South African Airways, in Maun about a year earlier, when he had flown some tourists to the Okavango River delta. He had been interested in our research and had offered to teach me how to fly if I ever needed to learn. Spreading our sleeping bags on the ground to get a little sleep before dawn, I hoped he would remember his offer.

  At 5:30 A.M. the milkman stepped over us, carrying a wire basket of tinkling bottles, and a couple of hours later Roy and Marianne came to investigate the truck and the two lumps parked in their front yard. Captain Liebenberg, a middle-aged man, neat, soft-spoken, and precise, pulled at his sharp nose; a grin cut through the black stubble on his round face. Almost before we could get out of our sleeping bags, he offered us the use of their guest cottage while he taught me to fly.

  Six weeks later, after numerous delays from bad weather, I had almost finished my training. We wrote Dr. Faust that I was about to get my license and that I had accumulated forty-one hours of flying experience. I assured him that Roy had given me adequate preparation for bush flying.

  We could hardly believe it when the grant was approved and the money sent. That someone we had never met could have such faith in us and our abilities was very gratifying. After shopping around, we bought a ten-year-old blue-and-white Cessna tail-dragger with EWG—Echo Whisky Golf—painted under the wings.

  Our first heady reactions quickly gave way to some serious contemplation. We had been so determined to get an aiiplane and learn to fly, that we had not given much thought to the next phase of the project: getting the plane to camp. With a mixture of anxiety and anticipation, I realized that soon I would have to fly into the Kalahari, an area so remote and featureless that Botswana law prohibited pilots with fewer than 500 hours of experience from flying over it. For the next year, until I could get the required hours, we would have to avoid flying near Gaborone. If civil aviation officials there learned that we were operating a plane in the desert, they would probably ground us, and that would be the end of our project at Deception Valley.

  Other problems seemed even harder to solve: Once Echo Whisky Golf was at camp we would not only have to maintain her, but also find a way to haul the thousands of gallons of fuel needed to keep her running. Besides the logistical problems, just learning to fly around the desert without getting lost would be a major challenge.

  At dawn the morning after I received my pilot’s license, I got ready to take off on my first flight across the Kalahari. It was only my third solo cross-country, and Roy seemed more nervous than I. “Now don’t forget, after crossing the Gaborone-Francistown road there will be no more landmarks to help you navigate. Make sure of your position at the railway line before going on.” He double-checked the pencil I had tied around my neck and made sure that the black plastic sheet for making emergency water was stowed in the tail.

  I kissed Delia goodbye and shook hands with Roy. They would drive the Land Cruiser and pull a trailer back to camp, leading a heavy truck from the Botswana Wildlife Department loaded with drums of aviation fuel. They watched anxiously as I climbed into Echo Whisky Golf and taxied across the field to the grass airstrip. Then, when I turned and began revving the engine for takeoff, Roy came running toward me, waving his arms frantically and pointing toward the windsock. I was headed the wrong way. Waving back—and smiling sheepishly—I spun the plane around and accelerated down the runway. With a roar and a rush of cold air, I slipped into the smooth morning sky. The sense of freedom and the exhiliration were narcotic.

  Euphoria didn’t last long. At 300 feet the plane bega
n to fly sideways—or so it seemed. I had climbed into a strong crosswind. I eyeballed a drift correction on the mountain peak ahead, then leveled off just below a layer of cloud at 1500 feet above the ground. On the radio, Jan Smuts International Airport advised that the stratus would be lifting and that the weather looked okay for a flight to Botswana. The charts showed the ground elevation dropping away from Johannesburg, and I relaxed a little, knowing that I would have more room between cloud and ground as I neared the Kalahari.

  Half an hour out, the radio chatter died away and there was nothing but the droning engine and whistling wind. A gap between two peaks let me through the Waterberg Mountains, and soon the last traces of civilization faded as the Kalahari began to unfold below. Four hours from now, I would have to find a tiny tree island with two tents in the middle of this incredibly vast wilderness. Without navigational aids or any way to check my position on the featureless map, it would be a little like trying to push a piece of frayed thread through the eye of a needle. I could only hold my compass heading and hope that I had made an adequate correction for the crosswind that was trying to push me off course.

  Instead of lifting, the clouds began to drop and rain began to fall. To stay beneath the clouds, I began a low descent. “Stay high so you can see Real Deception Pan,” Roy had cautioned. “Remember, it’s the only landmark you have to show you where the camp is.” But the clouds forced me lower and lower until I could see grasses bending in the wind and rolling, bush-covered sand ridges flashing by a few feet below. Because I could not hold my altitude, I might fly past Deception Valley and never see it. Flying for hours with no way to fix my position, I felt suspended in time and motion—lost.