EVERYTHING WAS GREEN. No one could remember it ever having been so luxuriant as late summer tucked up into autumn. The high-water mark was etched by a line of lush buffalo grass. Wildebeest, eland, zebra and the other grazers had never had it so good. But in nature green is to brown as love is to hate in affairs of the heart: opposites in one direction but back to back in the other. Hard and brittle was the normal kind of love you’d find in the Limpopo Valley, the main food of affection being Eragrostis curvula, otherwise known as weeping love grass.
Zulu, however, was not as happy as he might have been as he crunched on the succulent tufts of grass. That was partly because horses don’t really like leafy grass, preferring rough grass stalks like those on the Mongolian steppes where they evolved. But it wasn’t even the lush green buffalo grass, the crunchy shoots of love grass or the cotton-topped stems of succulent wild oat grass that perturbed him. It was because he was a herd animal and he was alone.
Horses feel vulnerable without a herd. Zulu had taken flight in the storm with Tommy, Ironsides and Frankie. They had been heading in the same direction through the woolly downpour. Then all of a sudden the others were gone. Zulu had searched and called for them relentlessly, frantically. He had moved beyond his instinctual fear of drawing untoward attraction from predators, that universal fear of a monster in the dark, and was properly screaming.
Zulu issued lip blows that signalled alarm. He squealed whenever an unexpected shape loomed ahead, signalling alarm and aggression. He whinnied in pretty much the same way dogs bark or wolves howl: “I know who you are but I won’t threaten you if you don’t intimidate me. But I won’t back down either.” When that did not work he began to do what is called a dragon snort. The meaning of which is something akin to: “Something is wrong but I don’t know what the hell it is!”
He whinnied and whinnied and whinnied until the whinnying became indistinguishable from squealing and snickering until Zulu was rendered (dare we say) hoarse with calling. Exhausted, he was behaving like a swimmer in a rip current. He was running this way and that, taking little heed of his surroundings and thereby advertising himself as easy prey. His confrontation with the wild dogs had left him panicked.
Luckily for him, due more to exhaustion than common sense, Zulu finally began to take stock of his situation. He began to notice fresh scent trails criss-crossing the veld. It was a fresh slate on which every animal language of Mashatu was being newly written. In time the fresh droppings of zebra stallions would lead him to more of their kind, but in the meanwhile he began to take note of the other dignitaries of Mashatu.
He had encountered them before but when on safari he and the other horses had not had to think much for themselves. They were told where to go, when to walk, when to canter, when to gallop. When to stop and when to eat.
Mashatu Game Reserve is named after the dominant tree of the valley, Xanthocercis zambesiaca, but it is often referred to as the “land of giants”. Within its borders lives just about every mega animal and plant of the African savanna. Everything and everyone living there was informed and influenced by biological gigantism. You could not move among such awesome organisms and not appreciate your place in the pantheon of titans and mortals.
None was more iconic than the mighty baobab, the largest tree in Africa. It is impossible to accurately date these trees as they are succulents with no hard wood or growth rings, only fibrous pith inside. In dry times elephants will tear into the trunks with their tusks to get to the water-storing insides. Old trees – baobabs can live as long as 2 000 and maybe even 3 000 years – show small pock-marks where wooden pegs have been driven into the soft trunks, creating ladders for Bushmen to access beehives high in the arboreal architecture. There is only one thing a Bushman loves more than raw eland liver and that is wild honey.
Zulu slouched past spindly, yellow-barked fever trees (Acacia xanthophloea)1 that grow along the “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River”, unaware of their bad reputation. It was once thought they were the cause of malaria (mal aria – bad air) because they grow in low-lying swampy regions where noxious mists and fevers seem to coalesce. However, when he sought shade it was under one of the huge, dense canopied mashatu trees and there he would loiter.
The word mashatu comes down to us from an ancient tongue and means python, because pythons like to make a home in old trees where the trunk has divided to create a deep hollow in the centre. They are also called nyalaberry trees after the shy nyala antelope that skoffel under them for the fallen fruits. It might as easily have been named impala-, bushbuck- or kudu-berry, baboon-, wild pig- or jackalberry (except there is already another tree called the jackalberry, the African ebony Diospyros mespiliformis). The many animals that eat the fruits don’t care which of the trees is fruiting any more than they can pronounce their botanical names.
And not many people can either after a third or fourth glass of Amarula, a liqueur that is made from the fruit of marula trees which grow in higher, sandier locations. The fruits, especially those that have fallen and begun to ferment, are to elephants what wild honey is to Bushmen. Early on in the days of the Limpopo Valley camp, the chef Joyce got fed up with elephants continually pushing over one side of the mess tent trying to get at the ripening fruits of a spreading marula.
Elephants own marula trees when they are fruiting much like Bushmen will own a particular honey tree and they will kick up a dust storm if anyone or anything comes between them and the fallen fruits. Not knowing this, Joyce ordered the cleaning staff to gather up the fallen fruits onto a tarpaulin and toss them somewhere beyond the camp boundary. When the elephants arrived the following morning for their fermenting breakfast and found none, they trashed the kitchen. The kitchen was moved.
Elephants, the world’s largest land creatures and the only wild animal capable of altering an ecosystem, dominated animal affairs at Mashatu. Zulu mainly kept his distance from them; even lions mostly did. Elephant society is ruled over by matriarchs who preside over the breeding herds. Mature bulls keep mostly to themselves and join up with the female herds only when in musth and sexually active. The sign of this is a sticky ooze that trickles from temporal glands and it is also a sign for others to stay well clear.
Around this time there was one particularly aggressive old female, Mrs Floppy Ears, who would charge horses or humans on sight. In most cases you can tell when an elephant is serious about a charge and when it is a mock charge. As is often the case with animals, the first clue is the ears. Flapping ears and trumpeting are all bluster. Ears laid back, trunk curled up and a long, high squeal are your cue to gap it. With Floppy Ears you couldn’t easily tell so the guides knew to keep well clear of her.
Old elephants tend to be grumpy because they can get tumours, cancerous growths, painful ear cysts, arthritis, tooth abscesses and even piles, much like grumpy old people. Under most natural circumstances, elephants die when their teeth wear down and they can no longer eat so they slowly wither away from malnutrition.
Of little threat to anyone including Zulu were the giraffes of Mashatu, the tallest of all land animals, and he moved freely between their loosely bound herds. Giraffes are mostly silent and seem to gaze down on everyone and everything with equal disdain. Their general silence and rolling, slow-motion gait on weirdly long limbs gives them the appearance of inner sagacity.
Another thing that is extremely long in a giraffe is its tongue, blue or purple and leathery. It is thought the colour is to protect the tongue from sunburn while the world’s tallest animal goes about the laborious business of stripping dainty acacia leaves from heavily spiked branches on the sunlit canopy, rather than down below in the shade like most other browsers do.
If giraffes were strange, then those large flightless birds of the Bushveld were positively goofy, the avian equivalent of those clowns of the Bushveld, wildebeest. The ostrich is famous for being the only vertebrate animal whose eye is larger than its brain. But bigger-brained animals know to keep well clear of ostriches; their enlarged, dinosaur-like middle claws can easily rip open the stomach of an over-inquisitive stalker.
Mashatu is also home to the world’s heaviest flying bird, the kori bustard. Males weigh up to 18 kilograms, double that of the biggest turkey. Where ostriches can appear to be comical and inquisitive, bustards are utterly dismissive and will stride powerfully away from any intruder. They eat on the go, kicking up insects as they march across the veld. You will sometimes see bee-eaters perched on their backs, going along for a taxi ride and free lunch.
The Northern Tuli conservation body comprises around 1 000 private stakeholders, some of them hunters, but for stock market opportunities more than game (although the occasional illegal “take off” for the pot is not unknown). It is also home to African wild cats, jackals, civets, wild dogs, hyenas, cheetahs and leopards, worthy hunters all. But when the carnivores of Mashatu attend a board meeting it is a lion that takes the chairman’s seat.
When Cecil John Rhodes set out to carve his Rhodesian empire in the African bush he drew an arc on the map into land that belonged to the Tswana people under ruler Khama the Great. Rhodes called that slice of the African pie the Tuli Circle and he used it for breeding disease-free cattle. He gave orders to eradicate lions for fairly obvious reasons, as well as buffaloes that were suspected of carrying bovine tuberculosis.
It took decades for lions to re-appear. Very occasionally buffaloes still do but, with the continued paranoia about disease, they are shot on sight. In the absence of their favourite prey, buffaloes, the lions of Mashatu turned to hunting eland, largest of all antelope and comparable in mass to a buffalo.
It is hard to believe that, when the Limpopo and Shashe rivers dry up, monster Nile crocodiles can endure there, but they do. As dry winter advances and the waters retreat, they dig into the riverbanks or find hiding holes in the root masses of giant mashatu, sycamore fig and waterberry trees. There they wait for the next summer floods, and if the rains don’t come then they simply hang in estivating until they do. In every pool of standing water crocodiles will be lurking, ambush specialists up to five metres long, weighing half a tonne and with the most powerful biting force of any animal scientifically tested (22 kiloNewtons or 2 500 psi for the meter readers; hyenas clock in at around 1 000).
A well-fed crocodile is a shy thing. The time to fear them is when the first rains arrive and they come out of their long torpor, ravenous. Together in a platoon, riders and horses would be safe enough crossing in a big splashing group. Zulu had always been wary of water and now, alone, likely would have felt doubly vulnerable. Typical of his kind he would hesitate, pawing the water each time he faced a crossing. He had other impressive reptiles to consider, including rock pythons.
Pythons are not poisonous but a bite can leave lacerated wounds. Horses are wary of snakes, venomous or not. But, being the inquisitive creatures they are, will often approach for a closer look – not unlike drivers on a freeway slowing to a crawl to see the carnage as they pass an accident.
One snake, thankfully rarely encountered, ranks alongside the crocodiles, lions and elephants for awesomeness. The black mamba is largest and most lethal of all venomous snakes on the continent. It ranks alongside zombies and cannibals in African folklore and it is fitting not to dwell long on these things lest you allow one to slip into your subconscious.
With his nose so often close to the ground, Zulu would certainly have had the chance to meet some of Mashatu’s small giants, like stick insects that look like stems of elephant grass – until they move a slender limb. You would need a ruler at least half a metre long to get their measure. Game guides love putting these docile insects on their shoulders, as a pirate might a parrot, to impress their guests.
There were bullfrogs that squatted in the muddy fringes of pans. They too could estivate in baked mud for several months and emerge, croaking like foghorns at the first rains of the season. The size of party balloons, with brimstone yellow bellies and all algal green and warty on top, they could scare the bejesus out of a horse as it bent to drink, only to have one of the these flubbery amphibians rise out of the murky water and bark at them.
The veld is a library written in the language of passion and conflict. Middens, animal dung heaps, are the calling cards of the Bushveld. Males and females leave different messages, females their come-hither notes when in oestrus and males countering with back-off scent warnings to other potential suitors. Middens preserve a catalogue of messages that inform others about who has passed, when they have, which mares are in heat, which mares are part of which stallion’s harem, even the order of a herd hierarchy.
The scent trail led Zulu northwards across the Majale River and into the upper catchment of the smaller Jwala. He passed near Olifantshoek but there were no ya-nagas or “wild horses” anywhere thereabouts. The lesser tributaries had already receded to scattered pools and the grass was sparse. As the horse nosed along, francolins and guineafowls, some with fluffy chicks, flustered and whirred out of cover, no doubt giving him heart palpitations each time. Striped field mice and gerbils scurried away, skinks and agama lizards darted across the path.
Equids have nearly all-round vision – except for a blind wedge directly behind their ears. This makes their neck and upper back vulnerable. In the dense riverine bush Zulu was nervous and extra cautious. Tall leadwood and sausage trees stood interspersed, their upper branches obscured, perfect ambush platforms for leopards. He could feel a tingling down his back as he moved through the dense sylvan tunnels, imagining the laser burn of cat eyes on his hide. “Inkwe eyes” guides called it.
Turning eastwards, Zulu moved across ground where piles of zebra dung grew increasingly fresh. These were not the markings of old established territories but the traces of animals on the move. Each night alone would be an ordeal for the solitary horse. Chilling whoops of hyena clans calling, male lions walking and throat-coughing out new territorial lines would have made sleep fitful at best.
When he reached the alluvial plain that stretches out below Cheetah Koppies, the droppings were fresher, not yet rendered scatological sawdust by the harsh sun and dry air. Zulu picked up his pace. The trail veered southwards and forced him to follow the arcing tree line of the Pitsane River as the segment of sandy ground narrowed towards its convergence with the Shashe. Here the scats were no more than a day old, still slightly moist as he proceeded, following his nose.
Then he heard them, the high-pitched sneeze-coughing qua-ha, qua-ha from which Bushmen named them quagga. They were not of his own kin but the next best thing to pitses, pitse-ya-nagas. For Zulu the search was over but now the struggle for acceptance was about to commence.
It seemed like all the zebras of the Tuli region had gathered there. The typically small breeding herds, called harems, had coalesced into a minor migration where social divides were temporarily overlooked in the greater quest for solidarity in cataclysmic times. Facing Zulu were some 200 mildly bemused plains zebras. Now was the time for Zulu to issue the fourth mode of equine articulation, ecstatic arpeggios of whinnying that would have alerted every other stallion that there was a new boy in town.