The Great Unexpected

Part 2: The Animals

One of the South African men who work here at Singita says, “Yes your son is a very busy man.” I too am very busy here in Africa. Busy in the sense that a 10-year-old boy is—absorbing and exploring every sight, sound, smell, taste. I’m looking at an elephant right now. I’m feeling the breeze. I’m smelling the fresh, fresh air. I’ve got my hands full. So busy. A busy I love. So different from my busy at home.

 I’m distracted in the old sense of the word—picture a circus ringleader or a Route 66 road sign that says, “Come experience our fantastic distractions!” Not distracted from the moment but the moment so full of fascination that it is the distraction. My brain is so full of what I’ve seen and heard that I am mentally exhausted but simultaneously exhilarated at what is coming next.

This world is surreal. I’m waiting for the cardboard backdrop to be wheeled away, the curtain to be pulled back to reveal the chaos of real life. But maybe this is the real life—tranquility and the simple life of animals. They sleep in the sun, meander and graze, hunt, eat, and mate.

But that is where I err in my thinking. Soon into the daily routine of 6AM wake up call, hot coffee and rusk in the brisk morning, 6:30AM safari bumping along, covered in a blanket as the sun eases up and stretches its rays luxuriously over the dreamy land, then lunch and lounging, then afternoon safari in which the sun becomes a tight ball of serious orange or fierce red and sinks down toward the darkening horizon like a deep dark secret sneaking away, I learn that animal life is not simple at all.

It is complex. Not stupidly complicated or confusing like mine, but complex and intricate. Every seed, leaf, tree, bush, insect, bird, kudu, rhino, warthog, elephant, leopard, cheetah, snail shell, grass blade, dust swirl, dung ball has its own story.

Like a silver duster leaf tree—a gnat makes an incision on one of its branches then the area of the tree swells and that swelling becomes the gnat’s nest.

A bird eats mistletoe seeds but cannot digest them so regurgitates them and they graft themselves onto a tree.

In another type of bird, the male will weave the female into a nest after impregnating her. He leaves just a small hole into which he feeds her all day. She lays the eggs. When they hatch, she breaks out of the nest then weaves it back it together, again only leaving a little hole. Now the mother feeds the babies all day until they are grown enough to peck themselves out.

There were many deer-like animals that I could not keep straight, despite their distinctive rear end markings called “follow me signs.” Imagine being in a herd of kudu running with hundreds around you that look just like you. You only have time to raise your eyes for moments as you hunker down and run, trying to stay in the middle to keep safe from predators chasing your group. Well I guess I shouldn’t feel bad for not being able to recognize the different types when they themselves need butt signs to remind them they are in the right group.

Termites build enormous complexes—hills that end in a tube that looks like an uncircumcised penis. Imagine seeing hundreds of those in a day. They’re everywhere—so many that you start to not see them like city folk who stop seeing sidewalks or fences. The complexes have been studied and imitated by human architects trying to match their ingenious methods of heating and cooling to perfect temperatures. It takes 10 years to make a soccer ball size mound so these mounds you’re looking at are hundreds of years old because they are mostly at least 5 feet tall and 5 feet around at the base. The female is a huge meaty mass that can be the size of a loaf of bread. She doesn’t move. If she needs to be moved because an animal is trying to dig into the mound to eat some tasty termites, the androgynous soldier termites, which are small, hustle together to carry her. All she does is breed.

Hyenas get a bad rap for being ugly, scruffy, eerily laughing their way through the day. But we watched these pups tumble and snuggle in sheer cuteness. 

OK the mother is a bit ragged, but also very strong. Hyenas can bite through bone. The female is the dominant sex and has exterior genitalia. In Botswana our guide, Water told us of a family that was camping years ago. An 11-year-old boy asked if he could open the tent flap to take photos in the evening. He was told to be sure to secure it before going to sleep. He forgot and a pack of hyena dragged him from the tent and killed him before his family could get to him. I can’t vouch for the truth of that story—maybe it’s like old time fairy tales that were written to scare morals into kids.

But it sure scared something into us. The night we heard that story, my daughter got a nosebleed at dinner. We had to be accompanied back to our tent early. On the way back, the guide’s flashlight swoop caught sight of the hunched shoulders of a hyena creeping in the distance. Did it sense and get excited by blood like a shark? My skin prickled as I pulled my daughter closer, willing her to be a baby in my belly again. Unlike the tent in Water’s story, our tent was elevated and seemingly fortified on a hefty platform. Other nights we zipped down only the mesh flaps and kept the heavy tarp flaps tied up. We enjoyed the cool African night breeze and the crash of hippos walking by. But that night we zipped ourselves in. Without saying a word, all three of us contorted into a single bed, my backside against the tent flap. Why we didn’t move two of the single beds together remains a mystery. 

The warthog is among the animals that transport me to the Jurassic age or make me feel I'm doing one of those kids’ books that have animal drawings cut into three sections so you can flip the pages and put different heads, middle sections, and legs together. The other animals that look prehistoric or put together with random parts are giraffe, rhinos, and elephants—just a mix of armor-like skin, bristly hair, horns nubby or cone-shaped, tusks turned down, tusks turned up like handlebar mustaches, long necks, no necks, stumpy feet, pointed feet like high heels, tree trunk legs, spindly tree branch legs, beady eyes, long eye lashes, long paintbrush tails, short paintbrush tails, and the oddest of all—a trunk. What the hell? And to see that thing move--wow. The very end is like a chameleon's mitten hand with the most delicate movements. But the rest of the trunk is wormy, ridged, floppy, with a life of its own, like a sea creature. My next post is going to be all about elephants because they truly merit their own showcase. 

One day on a ride in Botswana with Water, we spotted some warthogs. Water greeted them in a gentle voice as he did all the animals, “’ello warthogs.” Then Water says, “He’s wondering why I am calling him. Because as a boy, I hunted warthogs.” Water told of how they drove warthogs into a hole using domestic dogs. Then they smoked the warthogs in the hole. The oldest boys then forced the youngest boys to form a chain, sometimes three boys long, and go into the hole to get the warthogs, who were hopefully dead. Water was the littlest and had to go first, like a sacrifice to the gods. He cried, shook, and shivered in terror but he had to do it. And now he talked to the warthogs with sadness and maybe a guilty memory.

On any South African safari, you will hear about The Big Five—the lion, elephant, rhino, leopard, and Cape buffalo. They are the five animals that are most difficult and dangerous to hunt on foot. The Cape buffalo’s danger seems to be its revengefulness. At least that’s my interpretation of what our Singita guide, Shelly told us. To kill the Cape buffalo, you have to shoot it in the brain for instant death. Seems like that would be pretty hard to do through the helmet-like horns (but I don’t know a thing about shooting animals—something I’m happy to remain ignorant about). If you hit the heart, the Cape buffalo can keep going. And the direction it will go is after you. The Cape buffalo will track and hunt you down. But apparently only if you hunt it first because as you can see, here we sit in the middle of a herd like farmers watching their cows munching grass. The guide says it will take 30-45 minutes for this herd of about 500 to move past us.

As for danger vis-à-vis the rhino, let’s turn it around. Most dangerous to the rhino is mankind. According to the Save the Rhino organization, at the beginning of the 20^th century, there were “500,000 rhino across Africa and Asia. This fell to 70,000 by 1970 and further to just 29,000 in the wild today.” The poaching of a rhino happens just for its innocent horn, which is made of the same stuff as our fingernails. The rhino horn is ground into a powder and used mostly in Traditional Chinese Medicine. There is a false belief that it can cure cancer or at least a headache. Can they not try chewing their fingernails or maybe taking an aspirin? These people are creating a highly dangerous and completely unnecessary market.

I’ve heard of programs in which friends to the rhino do a sweep of an area and humanely remove their horns, leaving the poachers no reason to kill rhinos. But our Singita guide, Daniella said that was a pretty big endeavor and all the rhino in an area have to be de-horned around the same time or they are left in a vulnerable state within their own kind. And not only that but I also heard that a large cache of horns that were being held under lock and key in some African government facility were stolen. Daniella told us of a new campaign in which poison is injected into the rhinos’ horns. If the poisonous horns do get on the market, human buyers will be severely deterred from buying them ever again—severely deterred as in dead (or at least seriously ill). 

The last few stories tell me that when the complex and intricate lives of animals meet the complicated and confusing lives of humans, things just get ugly. The food chain doesn’t make me too uncomfortable. Animal predators and prey seem natural. Though I do agree with comedian Louis C.K. that I’m glad we humans are not part of the food chain. He imagines if we were and how we might get up, get ready for work, rush out the door, get to the train station, and “Oh crap! Cheetahs!” Can you imagine being chased by animals as part of your daily commute? That would suck and I’m glad we’re above such behavior. But are we? We humans do some pretty horrible stuff to our own kind. And we have no excuse like animals do. We don’t have to eat each other to survive. Well not literally. Maybe metaphorically.