The Wilderness Family: At Home with Africa's Wildlife Hardback - 2001

Excerpt

PART 1

Mahlangeni

A Remote Meeting Place In a faraway corner of the northwest region of kruger National Park, there is a heart-shaped basin of sand and forest where two rivers meet. The Little Letaba enters the basin from the north, the Greater Letaba from the west. They come together in a swirl of froth and gurgling whirlpools, then settle down to continue sedately onward as one waterway, the Letaba River. Its gently moving waters are full of hippo and crocodile, its sandy shores patterned with game tracks. On all sides of the river basin, mopani woodlands roll away into a vast landscape of wilderness and solitude.

The area is called Mahlangeni, which is the Tsonga word for “meet- ing place.”

One of the most isolated ranger sections in the park, Mahlangeni was home to my game-ranger husband, our three daughters and me for eleven years.

Our house on the north bank of the Letaba overlooked the merging rivers and the forested basin. Squirrels and mongooses played in our garden. Bushbuck and monkeys were daily visitors. A lone leopard patrolled the neighborhood at night. Other neighbors included baboons, hippos, elephants and lions. Throughout the years various strays and orphans from the animal kingdom were temporary members of our family.

Our days were filled with magical moments and unforgettable adventures. How We Got There Kobus was born and raised on a bushveld farm in the Northern Province of South Africa. Since his early childhood he has loved the African bush and its creatures and wanted to protect them from destruction.

Although I was also born on a farm in the Northern Province, not far from where Kobus was born, we didn’t meet until almost twenty years later when we were both studying at the University of Pretoria.

After discovering that we shared not just a first name (mine being the feminine version of his) but also a farm upbringing and a love of wild places, we became good friends. The first time we went out was to see the movie Born Free—the story of George and Joy Adamson and Elsa the lioness. It was the most beautiful movie either of us had ever seen, and afterward Kobus confided to me that his dream was to become a game ranger. It occurred to me that my dream was to become a game ranger’s wife.

We got married after we graduated.

Kobus applied for the position of game ranger with South African National Parks but learned there were no vacancies. So we went to live in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, where Kobus worked as a journalist and I as a translator for three years, then moved to Johannesburg where we lived and worked for another six years before Kobus finally received a letter from the warden of Kruger National Park, inviting him to Skukuza, the operational headquarters and largest of the park’s tourist camps.

We read the letter a hundred times to make sure it wasn’t a dream.

The letter also stipulated that “the applicant’s wife be present at the interview.” I wondered why, but lost no time in making arrangements for my mother to look after my three young children for a couple of days.

We arrived at Skukuza in the evening and spent the night in the tourist camp, hardly sleeping but listening to the enthralling sounds of the wilderness night.

In the morning we reported to the chief ranger’s office for our interview. It was conducted by the chief ranger and the park warden. They looked stern and official. They asked Kobus why he had applied for the job, and why he would want to leave a good job in the city to work in the bush. Kobus answered simply that the bush made sense to him and that he had wanted to be a game ranger for as long as he could remember.

They seemed satisfied.

They then turned to me and gave me a lecture on the hardships and privations that a game ranger’s wife could expect to endure. They warned me of the almost unbearable summer heat, the danger of malaria, the general hazards of the bush, the inconvenience of living far from doctors, schools, shopping centers and other amenities. They reminded me that not even basic services such as telephones and a regular mail delivery were available. They talked at length of the extreme loneliness that one might experience at a remote ranger station, telling me that a game ranger’s work often took him away from base for long periods of time, leaving his wife home alone. How would I cope with that? “Go home and think carefully about this,” they said. “Give it at least a month. And if you both decide, without reservation, that you are still interested, let us know.”

Kobus and I went back home and talked daily about what life at the Mahlangeni ranger station would mean for us. My main concern was for my children. What if one of them became ill? Or was injured? Where would they go to school?

And yet . . . I so wished for my children to grow up in a time and place where pleasures would be simple, and experiences rich. Wouldn’t the advantages of a wilderness childhood far outweigh the disadvantages?

I believed they would.

So Kobus and I confirmed our interest in the posting and, soon after, received the news that Kobus was hired.

Two months later, in the autumn of 1980, we had sold our house in the city, packed up our belongings and, together with our children, were on our way to a new life at this remote meeting place in the land of our dreams. A Dramatic Welcome The warm air was thick with the earthy smells of the riverine woods and full of the songs of a thousand birds. Splashes of afternoon sunlight played through the traceries of trees on a buttercup-yellow house. Tree squirrels peered down at us from the sprawling branches, twittering enquiringly, bushy tails at full mast. The whisper of small lives was everywhere.

Three blond-haired little girls, Hettie, aged eight, Sandra, seven, and Karin, two, skipped and danced among the trees, babbling and laughing.

“So where is this? Where are we now?” asked Karin.

“Our new home,” explained Sandra.

“. . . the magic faraway land,” sang Hettie, “where the wee folks dance hand in hand.”

The buttercup-yellow house had an enormous kitchen, a comfortable living room that opened onto a broad veranda, three bedrooms and two bathrooms, all with large windows through which the fresh fragrance of the garden filled the house.

The garden was huge and half wild, a shady oasis of green lawns and indigenous trees and shrubs. The north side of the garden faced the mopani woods, the south side the rivers. Near the west fence, a little thatch-roofed guest cottage nestled among marula and bauhinia trees.

“And what’s that?” asked Karin, pointing up at a sausage tree.

“A fruit bat,” replied Sandra.

“A tree fairy,” suggested Hettie. “Tree fairies come disguised as fruit bats.”

“It’s upside down,” remarked Karin.

“That’s how fruit bats sleep,” explained Sandra, “hanging upside down.”

“Tree fairies live in an upside-down world,” offered Hettie.

“Oh, wow!” sighed Karin happily.

In the south fence of the garden I found a gate. It opened onto a stone stairway that ran down the steep bank to the shore of the Letaba River.

I sat down on the top step.

Below me, the wooded bank gave way to a wide, sandy beach. A small rowing boat was moored near the edge of the water. Storks, herons and egrets surveyed the scenery from various perches along the shore. The river was calm and serene, its surface smooth and shiny. Some distance upstream, big rounded rocks showed above the water, the currents forming shimmering ripples around them. Abruptly one of the mounds reared up in a spray of droplets and gave a snort. A hippo head! Further upstream, to the west, the Little Letaba came into view from its northern origins and flowed into the Greater Letaba, the waters meeting and mixing in a foamy swirl. On all sides of the rivers, mopani woodlands rolled away to distant horizons under a crystal-blue sky. The whole riverine landscape seemed half asleep, drugged in the autumn sunshine, lost in a faraway dream . . .

It seemed to me that I was the one dreaming, and the landscape a figment of my imagination.

I got up and went to look for Kobus.

At the back of the house a small, square outbuilding crouched under a huge sycamore fig. I found Kobus inside, studying an array of maps. Some were spread on a desk in the center of the room, others hung from the walls. Shelves full of books and files took up the rest of the wall space. A few chairs stood around the desk. On a shelf near the desk was a VHF radio transmitter.

“Ah!” I said, taking in the room. “This must be the game ranger’s office.” Then something clicked in my mind, and I added with wonderment, “And you are the game ranger, aren’t you?”

“It looks so to me too,” Kobus grinned.

I skipped round the table to get a big hug from my game-ranger husband.

the driver of our furniture truck had been given a detailed hand-drawn map of the area. Fortunately he managed to find the place, arriving just before dusk.

The truck had to be unloaded at top speed to avoid working in the dark. By nightfall the house was in chaos, with boxes, crates and bits of furniture all over the place. We managed, at least, to have our beds in position and found sheets and pillows for everyone in the midst of the confusion.

It had been a long day for us and we were exhausted. So, after a light supper of sandwiches and tea, it was early to bed.

Despite my exhaustion, it took me a while to fall asleep. And when I finally did, I was immediately woken by a strange sound.

“What’s that?” I asked my slumbering game-ranger husband.

He slept on, unhearing.

I lay awake for a while, listening and thinking about this strange, dark house, a small haven amid the wilderness. Did I really hear something? Or was it merely my nervous imagination?

I started to doze off, but suddenly heard the sound again. This time I woke Kobus up. “What’s that?” I asked him.

“Hmm?”

“A funny noise. Didn’t you hear it?”

“Hmm?”

I lay quietly, waiting for the sound to repeat itself. But it didn’t.

Kobus drifted back to sleep.

After a time, I did too.

But again the mysterious sound woke me.

“Kobus! Did you hear that?”

“Huh?”

“That noise . . .”

An owl screeched outside.

Kobus mumbled, “Owl.”

“No, not that! It was . . . a sort of . . . huffing noise.”

“Probably a leopard,” he muttered sleepily.

“Leopard?” I asked, alarmed. “But it sounded as though it was right here in the bedroom!”

We remained silent for a while, listening. Down by the river a million frogs were croaking to high heaven. A hippo snorted. Far away, a hyena howled. Other strange sounds drifted through the night. But inside the house all seemed quiet.

Finally Kobus said, “You’re probably imagining things. Try to re- lax . . . get some sleep.”

“Yes, OK,” I said. It was probably my imagination, I decided. Evidently the peculiar silences of the strange house were troubling me in my sleep.

Finally I drifted off.

Before long, a small, distant voice penetrated the thick fog of my sleep. I woke up. One of the girls was calling me. She couldn’t find her way to the bathroom in the dark. The electric generator wasn’t running, so we couldn’t switch on a light. I reached for the torch on my bedside cabinet and got up.

After helping my daughter, I returned to our room and something—perhaps a movement—caught my attention. I raised my torch toward it, and the slender beam picked out part of a huge, glossy, dark-blotched reptilian body. Wheeling the torch crazily, I illuminated the rest of the scene: the “thing” had its tail section inside the half-open drawer of my bedside cabinet, its middle part coiled on top of the cabinet and the rest woven into the slats of the bed’s headboard.

It was such a bizarre sight that it took me a while to realize what I was looking at.

“Kobus!” I gasped. “Wake up!”

Prompted by my urgent tone, he woke immediately. “What’s wrong?”

“A huge snake . . . moving onto the bed!” I stammered.

Kobus leaped up like a bolt of lightning, entangled in a bedsheet. “Stand back!” he ordered.

I didn’t need to be told that. I’d already reversed into the opposite wall.

Disengaging himself from the sheet, Kobus groped his way toward me in the darkness. I handed him my torch. He shone it on the snake.

“It’s a python,” he told me.

Frightened by the commotion in the room, it was recoiling into the safety of the drawer. As we stood watching it with horrified fascination, the sight of the half-open drawer sparked a memory. Earlier in the day, while furniture had been standing outside waiting to be carried in, I had walked past the bedside cabinet and noticed the drawer half open. I had been in a hurry and was carrying a big box, so I had pushed it shut with my foot with barely a glance. In all likelihood the python had been in the drawer already, and so got carried into the house.

The noises I had heard earlier in the night must have been the snake, huffing and puffing in its battle to push open the drawer and find its way out. My torch had been standing upright on the cabinet, probably right in the middle of the coiled-up body. It was lucky that my hand in the darkness had gone straight to the torch.

Using his rifle-cleaning rod, Kobus “helped” the snake maneuver itself back into the drawer. It was a young python, only some two meters long—which is not very long for a python, but horribly long for a snake. Once the whole snake was finally back inside the drawer, Kobus pushed it shut and carried the cabinet outside into the garden. I accompanied him with my torch. Some distance away from the house Kobus put the cabinet down and carefully reopened the drawer. The python remained shyly inside. We left it alone there and went back to bed, allowing the snake to choose its own time to leave.

I thought this had been a rather dramatic welcome on our first night in our new home. But Kobus said this was the sort of thing that happened if one didn’t respect the law of the wilds.

“What law?” I asked.

“Not to bother wild creatures.”

I pointed out to him that I hadn’t bothered the snake. It had bothered me.

“You got him carried into the house,” he mumbled in a sleepy voice.

“I did not! How can you say that?”

He didn’t respond. Probably he was already asleep. How could he fall asleep at the beginning of an important argument?

Poor me. I’d had hardly any sleep at all, and now the night was almost gone. Only through my wakeful vigilance had we escaped an unthinkable battle with a python in our bed. Wasn’t I entitled to a little sympathy and gratitude?

we woke at dawn to find the world a glistening, silvery-green place full of exuberant noise. Hippos were bellowing, wild geese trumpeting, baboons barking, squirrels squealing, a thousand birds singing their hearts out.

Kobus brought me a cup of coffee in bed and so I forgave him all his faults.

Sitting up and sipping my coffee, I looked out through the glass sliding doors of our bedroom. And there, in the silvery-green world, was a small herd of elegant bushbuck grazing daintily along the riverbank at the edge of the garden. It seemed to me that I was the most privileged person in the world to be greeted by such an exquisite sight early on an ordinary Monday morning.

After breakfast the game guards came over from the staff village to greet us—seven Tsonga-Shangana men, immaculately dressed in khaki uniform.

Kobus and I went outside to meet them.

The men saluted Kobus, but ignored me. (In their culture, to avoid looking at a stranger is a gesture of reverence.)

Kobus returned the salute. After exchanging the customary greetings, Kobus told them that I was his wife.

Still not looking at me, they waited in respectful silence.

I greeted them, saying, “Awuxeni maphodisa. Minjani?” “The sun has risen, guards. How are you?” (In Africa, you always ask people how they are, even if they are strangers.)

Meeting my gaze, the guards replied, “Eh-heeh! Awuxeni. Hikhona. Minjani?” “Indeed! The sun has risen! We are well. How are you?”

“Hikhona. Ka hisa.” “I am well. It is hot today.” (It is good manners to comment on the weather. The accuracy of the comment is unimportant. What matters is to convey that you are keen to talk longer and that you are in no hurry to part company with the person you have just met, because in Africa to be in a hurry is in bad taste.)

“Ah-heeh! Ka hisa ngopfu.” “Oh yes! It is very hot,” they agreed politely. (Actually it was a mild morning, but I didn’t know the word for “mild” in Tsonga.)

“Inkomu.” “Thank you,” I said.

“Inkomu,” they replied.

The chief game guard, Corporal Manhique, then welcomed us to Mahlangeni with a cordial speech on behalf of himself and his colleagues. Afterward we shook hands with the men and learned their names.

Then another man approached us. Dressed in a pair of green overalls, he was stockily built, his short hair graying and his eyes full of the wisdom of his years. He greeted us with a frank stare and a gruff manner. His name, he said, was Filemoni, and his job that of operator—operating the vegetable garden, storeroom, water pumps and electric generator. (Actually Filemoni was Mahlangeni’s general caretaker, an efficient, versatile fellow and respected by all.)

Kobus and the game guards spent a while in the office, discussing the day’s work, and afterward left to do a patrol circuit of the area.

I spent the day unpacking.

The girls investigated the rustle and whisper of secret lives in the garden and discovered a whole community of fascinating creatures: thick-toed geckos with large, angelic eyes, tree agamas with Technicolor dreamcoats; coppery toads, ponderous chameleons, fat skinks, and pearly-colored rain-frogs whose crystal calls sounded like windchimes tinkling in a breeze.

At noon we packed a picnic basket and carried it outside to a stone bench under an umbrella tree in the southwest corner of the garden. As we munched our sandwiches, enjoying the view of the rivers, there was a soft rustle in the grass behind us. Turning, we saw an enormous old tortoise, probably a hundred years old, lumbering heavily across the lawn toward us, its club feet stirring the dead autumn leaves. With an air of preoccupied determination it eventually passed within touching distance of us, neck stretched forward, bleary eyes full of ancient thoughts. We wondered where he could be heading, and why his awkward gait seemed so full of purpose. Perhaps he was, as Hettie suggested, late for an appointment with a very old friend.

A large herd of beautiful impala came to drink at the river, and we sat and watched them for a long time.

I got up reluctantly to go back indoors and finish my unpacking.

Throughout the warm autumn afternoon a procession of thirsty antelope visited the rivers to drink, and each time newcomers arrived, the girls called me outside to admire them.

In the late afternoon when shadows were lengthening across the shores, a lone elephant bull turned up to graze in the beds of reeds that lined the water. Kobus arrived home, and we sat outside in the garden to admire our majestic visitor. The sun sank into the Greater Letaba River, staining the water ruby red. Red deepened to purple, then paled to silver as the smoky-blue dusk enveloped the landscape. Nightjars started the evening serenade with bubbly songs.

The world of bustling cities was very far away.

From the woodlands beyond the house rose the whooping howl of a lone hyena. We sighed with contentment and went indoors to prepare our evening meal.

later that night, long after we had gone to bed, kobus woke me, saying, “Listen! A leopard.”

“Outside?” I asked, alarmed. “Or next to the bed?”

But then I heard the leopard too. And he was outside. Thank heavens.

Media reviews

“Fascinating…The Wilderness Family…is a highly engaging work because of its wealth of detail about the creatures, plants, landscape and rhythms of Africa. Kruger brings us into her world and we learn, as she and her family did, how to make the most of rare experiences and how to hone the survival instinct.” —Bob Blakey, Calgary Herald