A Meandering

My father was a scout master, so it would seem only fitting that my travels would follow along the lines of “be prepared” – besides, I’m known to be somewhat paranoid at the best of times. When travelling with flatmates in Europe one late summer, they were surprised to discover I had on me the phone numbers of embassies and consulates in various countries for no apparent reason other than “just in case.” My only response to their laughter went something like: “Don’t you dare ask me for the number when you can’t get it anywhere else.”

Yet despite always having that option of calling home, in a lot of my travels? I have tended to let go of a lot of rational thought once I hit the ground. I think it’s a good way to be – because though you will always go into a new situation with some expectations, the less solidity you allow them to have, the more childlike your wonder can be.

I recently spent two weeks derping around a private game reserve in Limpopo, South Africa – and I say “derping” in that I was technically a volunteer, though I believe I was more underfoot than overly useful. Yet to my mind, the experience changed a lot of things in my dodgy excuse for a brain. I decided to go on something of a whim in January, though I had long intended to go to Africa as something closer to an eco-tourist than just a sightseer. Things were likely shuffled along by my father recently spending a six month stint working in Richards Bay and tormenting me with pictures of his days off at various reserves in the KZN area, but my heart was singing for something new and I figured I now had the chance and motivation to learn the words for myself.

I prepared for the trip only in a practical sense, gathering my kit and collecting various phone numbers and advisories (although I must say the only real trouble I ever had stemmed from Jetstar being the endlessly unreliable aviation service they will likely always be; they considered it a fair deal to strand a lone female traveller in Johannesburg instead of making the slightest effort to put me on the plane still waiting on the tarmac despite their delayed service, for example). But I didn’t think too hard about the animals. I had chosen this trip specifically for the animals, but I just didn’t think too hard about them. I wanted no expectations. I just wanted to feel something, again.

There was always one little niggling expectation there, though – because we all have our favourite animals, don’t we? A friend I knew well in high school told me once that I was “independent as a cat,” and I guess she had a point. I am a cat person, probably because I can be precisely as snotty as one. And for reasons I have never understood, I have always loved cheetahs. When I arrived at Karongwe, I was therefore looking very much forward to seeing them, in person and in the wild, for the first time.

My first experience with the cheetahs turned somewhat fraught, however. Up until that particular day, for whatever reason the trucks I had been on had primarily dealt with the lions, and likely also a fruitless hunt or two for the infamous Tsavo, a leopard who might as well be a ninja for all the substantial glimpses I caught of that big boy.
But when the day finally came when I travelled on a truck that also carried a rifle – a mandatory accessory for a cheetah walk-in – there were two small problems. Firstly, I was doing proper field telemetry for the very first time. Secondly, we had Tom onboard – Tom being a very quickminded and clever photographer who also had to ship out again at twelve. So, we had no time for dilly-dallying, as they say.

Let’s just watch me dilly-dally.

One very humiliating bout of mobile tracking later, I wanted to just sit down in the long grass and bury my head in my hands, possibly with a t-lem antenna poking me in the eye as punishment for being a particularly poor excuse for a data-collecting volunteer. And yet I kept trudging along in my little boots, face grimly set and a box pressed to my ear, ever taunted by the beeps of an implant that was there but not. And then, finally: the cry goes up.

“Found them!”

Two cheetah males, lying in the early morning sun, full bellies lightly dappled curves under an African sky. It wasn’t silent, of course – we were too excited for that. It was more of a back and forth, a pendulum swing between murmurs, rising wonder; and then comes the quiet, the awe of knowing that we stood but feet away from creatures so utterly unlike ourselves, and yet they shared this space with us despite all we’ve done to take it from them.

I could have watched them for hours. I would have been quite content just to hunker down on my knees, to forget the horror of finding them, and just…be there. Silent and watchful, yet another passing shadow in the tenebrous lives of these cats. But I would be a shadow that lingers, perhaps: not quite ready to leave the warmth of that brightness they gave to me that cool winter morning.

fig. i: INSERT IMPALA HERE

I saw Jabu and Djuma again in my time there, of course. In fact I will be endlessly grateful to Andreas, because on the last proper drive of the two-weekers of June 2013 he indulged my falteringly-voiced hope that we could perhaps see all the cheetahs, and allowed us to find both the boys and also the mighty Ketswiri – and both sightings were extraordinary and also ironic, considering we needed the rifle for neither. In fact we almost drove straight past the boys, sunning themselves in the company of jackals right on the side of the road by a boundary fence (and some industrious workers, no less). Ketswiri, on the other hand, had very recently taken an impala and had the battlescars to prove it: with one eye held closed as she breathed hard, the bloody carcass to one side as she kept her good eye on those who came to see her about her work.

I am thinking of Jabu and Djuma tonight because while flicking back through updates on the GVI page, I had the terrible realisation that I had missed something from last month: Jabu has died, leaving Djuma to go on without his brother. And it is peculiar, of course, to think of how hard that knowledge hits. From my very first drive I saw how life works in the wilds of southern Africa – for some time I watched a male lion gnaw his way through a waterbuck. My tummy even rumbled in carnivorous sympathy, apparently recalling the earlier assertion that many of our own meals would be vegetarian. I understood that this is, as the mighty (and coincidentally placed-at-the-top-of-the-food-chain) Musfasa would put it, the great circle of life.

(Although we likely weren’t so philosophical about it in our lower little monkey-brains half an hour later when we were pushing a vehicle to jumpstart a dead battery some fifty metres from said lion, but then again he'd already had dinner; why go out for hamburger when you’ve got steak at home? Besides, I’m the other white meat, and well-insulated to boot; he’s better off sticking to the lean and mean cuts, and I suspect the old man knows it.)

So, knowing that Jabu is gone and that what happened is a natural occurrence on a reserve that is home to various large carnivores is one thing. Understanding it is another. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a veterinarian. I certainly had the scholastic ability (I am a practising pharmacist, and despite all rumours to the contrary the qualification does require at least rudimentary understanding of various hard sciences). Yet I always suspected I was too weak of heart, mind, and soul to ever do what is necessary.

You cannot explain to an animal that what you do might hurt, but in the long run it will heal. And I felt I could not betray an animal’s trust that way. The last time I took my parents’ crazy-ass Calico to the vet, I cried all the way because she was meowing plaintively from the carrier and I couldn’t tell her it was for the best, that I was doing it to get her medicine, so that she would not have to keep rubbing her goopy little eye until the damn thing fell right out of her head or something.

It’s hard to think that this is how the world works, I guess. Grief comes in many forms, and is caused by more causes than we could name. And so often we wonder if the fault is ours – if matters could have been different, it we had only acted differently ourselves. We say we are trying to mimic nature, and yet our control is ephemeral – imaginary. Humans can be cruel, but then perhaps Nature is crueller yet.

But then, maybe it is not even cruelty at all. It is just…time. Going on, as it always does. Some of my fondest memories of Karongwe are of sitting in the back of the truck, wrapped up in a borrowed blanket with a ridiculous llama hat on my fool head, face turned into the caress of the wind’s chill fingers while the truck lurched down another dirt road. And then would come the slowing, the stop, and the curl of excitement low in my tummy when our driver would stick a head out of the cab and call: “Cheetah boys, please!” And there we would be, ears straining for the tell-tale boop that said they were near.

On Karongwe, that won’t happen again. Not for these boys, at least. And that breaks my heart, even as I knew it to have been just how our world goes on. And I remember how last weekend I flew all the way to Christchurch for the sole reason of needing to see animals of their ilk, again.

"I got you, homie."

And I watched three cheetah brothers devour their meal, then fastidiously clean each other of what little gore their neat and efficient eating left, and now my heart aches for knowing Djuma has lost his brother. But life goes on – Ketswiri has her cubs, and so the next generation has their shot.

I touched a cheetah, back in March. Two, in fact. Also brothers. At Wellington Zoo, for an extra fee they gave us that chance. Knowing that the money would go both to their care and that of their brethren – the Zoo supports the Cheetah Conservation Fund, particularly in their efforts to use Anatolian Shepherd dogs as deterrents to cheetah taking domesticated stock in preference to wild game – I went in with these boys, and I felt them purr. I felt them breathe. I felt them live.

The tail is the best part.

I had stopped writing, by the time I arrived in South Africa. Though I took vague notes, and felt the tug of a spirit beyond my own while there, I didn’t start again. Perhaps it’s coming back now; I lie here and I know I can close my eyes and be back there again, and when I am? I want to translate that feeling. I want to give it breath and spirit and life, again, though I only have my inadequate words. Either way, what I have now is just a memory, because even in the few short months since my departure the life there has become something different, something new. The land’s forgotten me. But I still remember. It’s just a matter, now, of knowing what I need to do to make something more of it – something that might last a little longer than the last of us, perhaps.

Life does go on.

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