SENIOR GUIDE HARVEY, WHO HAD worked his way around the horse safari business, came up with the bright idea of appealing to young riders in the UK. So they sent out emissaries to BUCS, the British Universities and Colleges Sports equestrian events organisation based at the Coventry University Equestrian Centre. Make a hit with them, he reckoned, and every young rider and their travel agent in the UK would be on board.
It has been observed that people who work with horses, much like those who work with dogs (Walkies!), tend to be bossy at best, peculiar at worst, often both. So it did not cause an untoward stir when Ms Bossy Boots from Coventry Equestrian Centre arrived for a look-see. Typically a safari group consists of up to eight clients and two guides. Ms Coventry joined a mixed group of couples and singles, with Sparkie the former Australian stockman as lead guide on Zulu and Big Masego – a guide-in-training – riding back-up rifle on Pongola (there was also the cook Small Joe who would, in time, become a lead guide as well as one of Botswana’s top eventers).
After a quick cup of coffee and rusks around the campfire they set off at sunrise and rode towards Nel’s Vlei to watch a herd of elephants drinking. On the way they passed a fallen apple-leaf tree where a family of hyenas had set up a den in the hole beneath the root tangle. The carnivores were lying in the open, waiting for the sun to warm them and they hardly stirred as the posse rode by.
It was a great place to canter and gallop and after two hours the riders were tiring. A halt was called around mid-morning among a scatter of fallen leadwood logs surrounded by crotons. Guest riders were not nannied but left to dismount on their own and tie up their horses where they could easily graze. Big Joe signalled to Sparkie that one of the party was missing and pointed past a clump of croton bushes.
Sparkie walked Zulu slowly around the tall green bushes. He was just starting to worry when he came upon a sight that would go down as one of the great legends of the Limpopo Valley. There was Pale Face munching contentedly while Ms Coventry lay stretched out on a log, boots on, jodhpurs unzipped, waistcoat, blouse and bra laid neatly across the trunk. When she saw him she gave him a snaggle-toothed leer and said: “What took you so long soldier? Let’s do what they do in the jungle.”
He tried to but could not suppress a sharp laugh, which rather spoiled the moment. She really was not his type. But a lady does not like to be denied, naked and unrequited in the African wilderness. Without another word she stood up, with astonishing dexterity dressed, untied her horse and cantered away while Sparkie was left to bring up the rear. He knew he was in for trouble when he came across items of her clothing strewn over the ground.
“He tried to take advantage of me …” Sparkie heard the breathy protestations as he rode up to the nonplussed group. You could barely see Big Joe for the reflection from his dazzling radiator grin.
“Let’s keep the drama down to a minimum, shall we,” said the stockman. “We can still enjoy the rest of the ride and sort this out back at camp.”
Back at camp the spurned woman played her part well. Ruff needed her business but she was also ruining the camp mood. To say the lady doth protest too much would hardly do justice to her virtuoso performance. Needless to say they did not receive a flood of young British riders and the business struggled on. The tale of Lady Godiva, as the BUCS woman was ever thereafter remembered, was told for many years around the camp fires of Mashatu.
By the end of his first year in the valley Ruff was running crazy. He was too busy putting out fires to keep track of things properly, not least of all the march of time and all the water flowing under his own domestic bridge. And so he eventually heard from his wife that she would not be joining him. Ever. Ruff reflected to his colleagues one night around the fire: “When the alpha male is away another male lion will move in to his territory.”
He could hardly object since he had enjoyed a brief fling with one of the interns. It happens in the country just as much as in the town.
But what concerned him even more was the number of horses he was losing. The main cause was African horse sickness but it was not the only one. One of the start-up horses he’d saved from the butcher’s block was stolen but later found at a cattle station with his legs bound so tightly most of the tendons in his front legs had torn. The thief was identified and given 21 lashes at the kgotla, or tribal court, but Ruff had had to shoot Impi right in the kraal where he found him.
Having survived the great storm, Rasta was also stolen and never seen again. After that Ruff made his own branding iron and every one of his horses from that day forward wore a large and proud horseshoe and LVHS (for Limpopo Valley Horse Safaris) on its rump. In time Ndlovu seemed to deteriorate for no apparent reason until he could no longer be ridden. Ruff was getting ready to shoot him when one morning Moany found him and announced: “Dat elephant horse of yours,” a short toothless giggle, “he gone to elephant heaben.”
It turned out he had not quite, but could never again be ridden. One of the grooms bought him for 100 pula and made an extra 100 when he sold him on to a cart-horse salesman who plied the dusty cattle stations of the region.
Kalahari was a Hanoverian-cross who had come with the batch of horses from Namibia to bolster waning numbers. He was done in by his own enormous power in perhaps the most bizarre incident to befall horse and rider at Mashatu. Kalahari had already been attacked by a leopard when he was a foal and had broad scars across his lower neck. Guests James and his wife Jane were both schooled in the classical tight-rein tradition and James, an experienced rider, was on Kalahari.
They were cantering along the edge of a treeline one afternoon, just getting into their stride, when a bushbuck ram launched out of the cover and with its dagger-like horns jabbed the horse between its front legs. The antelope dropped to the ground concussed while horse and rider went down. James was thrown clear over the horse’s head while the horse went thumping along on the ground until it came to a dead stop in a cloud of dust, blood and broken teeth.
Harvey radioed for help. Ruff arrived in the Land Cruiser and instructed back-up guide Big Joe to drive Jane and her dazed husband back to camp, then to come back for him. Harvey led the rest of the group across open ground on the most direct route back to camp. Ruff could see Kalahari had a broken jaw and had reached the end of the road. He waited until the others were out of earshot, unholstered his .45 and bid the old workhorse goodbye.
Pongola met a more tragic end the following year. Having also survived the great flood, gone walkabout and returned some time later on his own accord, he was bitten on the leg by a hyena. The grooms reported this most amiable of horses had started behaving erratically, kicking and lashing out in the stables. He was just too large and powerful to contain.
When Ruff went to check on Pongola, the previously gentle and independent grey was foaming at the mouth and could barely be controlled. Nothing can be done with a horse, or a person, that has rabies so he was next to go. This terrible disease is also known as hydrophobia, fear of water. Infected victims foam excessively and go into violent convulsions at the sight of water: it appears the viruses that cause the disease don’t want their host to drink, which would limit their chances of being passed on when the deranged host bit its next victim.
Hyenas would continue to harass the camp for several years, until they slunk back into the real and metaphorical night as Mashatu’s lion population began to re-establish the law of the jungle. During their welcome talk, guests at Limpopo Valley were warned not to leave wet boots outside their tents. Some forgot or did not really believe it and then wouldn’t stop bleating about losing their special boots.
At one time there was a serious infestation of tsetse flies in the valley and the horses were dosed with Samorin. Tsetses are not only carriers of sleeping sickness and nagana disease, their bite is like being pierced with a red-hot needle. If you caught one you could squash it until you felt its body crunching between finger and thumb, throw it down, then a few seconds later see it dust itself off and fly away. But the drug turned out to compromise the horses’ immune systems and they started having trouble with African horse sickness. They lost five animals in as many weeks, upsetting for a person who was supposed to be an expert on the subject.
“On the subject yes,” Ruff countered. “Not on bloody preventing it.”
But in time he, they, did become experts at containing horse sickness. The main problem was that, if they were not on safari, the horses lived out in the open without daily care or observation. And even then few precautions were taken. Horse sickness is a viral disease that manifests as a fever but suddenly escalates to a range of serious symptoms. Death can follow quickly or it can take several days. The death rate is high, especially if the onset of fever is not detected. If the horse continues to be worked it will almost certainly die overnight.
Zebras seem to have acquired a genetic immunity to AHS. The occurrence of the disease almost perfectly overlaps the areas where plains zebras occurred historically, which suggests they have been biologically selected by AHS. By the end of their second year, Limpopo Valley Horse Safaris had lost 10 of its stock to horse sickness and they were buying up horses from wherever they could. Ruff had to do regular rounds of the outlying cattle stations. They had few horses to spare and the local hustlers and rustlers knew how to part a white man from his money.
Most of the replacement horses bought from the surrounding communities were Boereperd-cross-who-knew-what, which in time became recognised as the distinct Tswana horse. One day the guard at the foot-and-mouth disease control gate sent a message: there was a monna mogolo, a grey-beard, who had a “good” horse to sell. And he did indeed. The old man had worked at the platinum mine at Selebi-Phikwe. A contract worker there packing up to head on to Dubai had sold him the horse. It was a 16 hand plus one finger grey Friesian-cross-warmblood. “Chewbakka,” the old man told him, “1 000 pula.”
Chewbakka was a magnificent specimen, verging on hot-blooded and too big and too frisky for an inexperienced rider. His stable name became Backie and he turned out to be more than just frisky, continually trying to bolt. No wonder the old man had wanted to sell him.
One day, not for the first time, Backie bolted while Ruff was leading the ride. Normally the horse would run himself out but that day he headed for a precipice where the Motlouse River formed a four-metre-high bank on a wide eroded bend. It was wintertime and the riverbed was dry and boulder strewn. Ruff realised that the horse did not realise where it was taking them; in a split-second live-ordie decision Ruff drew his revolver, placed the barrel to the back of Chewbakka’s head and fired. The horse was left were it fell just metres short of the bank, sustenance for the recyclers of the Mashatu bush.
But it was not all high drama. Mostly the likes of Tommy, Zulu, Pale Face, Socks and the rest of the survivors carried on not being attacked by hyenas or tokoloshes. They just went about their day jobs of being safari horses and doing what safari horses are expected to do. Which was hanging around until they were needed and otherwise being generally all-round decent horses.
Then again it was not as if every day in the African bush could be said to be boring or repetitive; on the contrary. Zulu proved to have an uncanny ability to detect lions at night. As soon as he smelled them lurking beyond the light of the campfire he would go back on his heels and start pawing the ground. The grooms and guides knew to watch out for it and would come out with torches and rifles. No guide (with the exception of Ruff) wanted to go out on safari without Zulu.
Elephants are legion there and Mashatu elephants were legendary for being among the most aggressive in the region. They, along with wild dogs and male lions, are among the most peregrinatious of large game; you cannot confine them with fences or even natural barriers such as mountain ranges or large rivers. When they crossed over to the tribal lands in Zimbabwe they would raid maize fields and pumpkin beds, so the farmers shot them. When they crossed over into South Africa they would be shot at by commercial farmers. Both countries were also home to notorious poachers.
Elephants in Mashatu were generally given a wide berth by the horses and their riders – except for Moyeni. The dark bay seemed to have no fear of elephants and would face off with them, even old Floppy Ears. The nerves on one side of the old female elephant’s face had been damaged by a bullet. Almost unique among the females of Mashatu elephants she would charge the horses on sight, suggesting that she had been shot at by hunters on horseback.
Moyeni would stand his ground and, if the rider had the nerve, they would stand as the tusker charged towards and then veered around them. It was a bit of African roulette but if you knew elephants well enough you could tell an intimidatory charge from a real one. If it was a mock charge, and it was 99 per cent of times, the ears would be out and the trunk raised. A real charge would be announced by ears back, trunk rolled up and a screech in place of a trumpet, in which case you’d need to make a run for it.
On most safaris they would be able to ride close to the plains game such as zebras, wildebeest, eland and giraffes. You also wanted to see predators, but only from a safe distance.
For reasons no one else at Limpopo Valley could understand, Ruff never seemed to have time for Zulu. It might have been by comparison to the other more lively warmbloods, or perhaps the black Boereperd’s disdain for the favoured Moyeni. Zulu had the habit of shortening his stride whenever he picked up the scent of elephants or predators. To any other guide this was a godsend but it irritated Ruff.
While leading a safari one day, Ruff was on Zulu when they approached a herd of elephants that was moving obliquely away from them and heading into a line of riverine forest. Ruff wanted to follow but Zulu hesitated. Ruff kicked the horse and shouted “Man up you dumb horse” and gave Zulu a hard slap, or AAK – an attitude-adjusting klap. The guests who saw it were alarmed but you do not easily reprimand your leader when he packs a mean punch and a large gun.
It was the back-up guide Big Joe who saw the lions but decided the best strategy would be to keep the information to himself. After that, Zulu was relegated from lead horse to workaday cowpony, despite his being extremely consistent and composed under fire.