Tracking

We walk for seven or eight hours a day carrying backpacks and rifles. Walking - there is a blank automaton quality to this everyday habit. But somehow it gives us a pattern, in its simple two-step, to solve a self-alienation. 

           The Latin proverb means, it is solved by walking. What is it we seek to fathom? The ancient treaty between the self and the land. An antidote to longing, the exact terms of the covenant between desire and grief that seems to structure much of our lives. To feel whole, the separate elves we have lobbed off reconciled. To leave behind cold constraints of the self and to replace those with the constraints of the natural world.

           In walking we might reconnect with our principles. Also our errors, the greater unities beyond the people we love or the things we have experienced. A search for synthesis. We are together here moving through this land and we have no memory of this place and its gauzy horizons. We are rearranging furniture inside ourselves, this is how it feels. Who will we be when we leave here? We may struggle to remember ourselves – who we loved, what we wanted – before we came here.

            There must be a force behind geography, we think. These abrupt rains, heavy humid sky of a winter warm front. This place where we are least and most at home.

 

We came around a tree and nearly ran into his backside. The elephant was facing away from us. His ears billowed back and forth slowly as he grazed, using his trunk to tug up clods of grass and sod. These he inserted delicately, almost surgically, in his tent-shaped mouth.

            We sat down, unnoticed still, on the grass. We stayed there a long time. So long I had to adjust my posture twice to save my knees from seizing up – not easy to do when you have a rifle in one hand and you are not allowed to let the butt rest on the grass.

            The elephant came closer and closer until he had consumed everything in our field of vision. I wonder what will happen, I thought, as the elephant’s trunk edged toward us. He hadn’t seen us; it was twilight and their vision is particularly poor in these interstitial times of day.

            As the elephant’s forefoot came within five metres of us, my heat pounded out a single alarmed beat. I felt my hand tighten around the stock of my rifle.

            We will have to do something now, I thought. It’s only seconds before the elephant is upon us. I looked at Adam. His face would tell me what to do. He was framed in twilight. His eyes had deepened from blue to khaki green. His profile was etched, then, dark, certain and uncertain.

            He took off his hat and scratched it in the grass. The elephant stopped, one forefoot off the ground. He turned his head, to angle his vision better. He paused, his ears a slow breeze around his head. Adam continued scratching in the grass with his hat.

            The elephant turned elegantly, swinging on his hindquarters, and slowly walked away. He stopped on the other side of the umbrella thorn that had partly obscured us, and toyed with one of the branches.

            Pretending to feed, Adam whispered to us, his eyebrow raised. It was the first we had spoken in ten minutes.

            The bull carried on, swinging wide around us, and began to feed – this time for real – on a tree nearby.

            We moved in formation across the opening the bull had just vacated, and drew up to our vehicle. Wonder and delight moved through us. We had been so close and so easy with this giant creature, who towered even more convincingly over us as we crouched on the ground. We had held our nerve.

            ‘I let him know there was something there,’ Adam explained. ‘He thought it was a small animal, a warthog maybe. Enough to give him a sense that another animal was feeding, but not enough to frighten him.’

            The elephant growing and growing in front of us, like an exercise in visual perspective, the night shrinking behind him as darkness gathered and his bulk seemed to absorb the night, becoming full and dark and more dense. Adam’s profile, etched against this same night. The look in his eye so strange, an alloy of pleading and command. How I had thought his eyes were blue but saw now they were green, or vice versa. Suddenly he was more than I had taken him to be – braver, crazier, denser with knowledge. He has the mind of an animal or knows enough about the mind of an animal to be one himself, when needed. Through him I might be able to get somewhere. He could be the conduit. 

Some days embed themselves in your flesh. Acacia days, thorns of hours.

      Our days in the bush are decorated with event. But also the so much the same that time has lost its spatial dimension and no longer feels like time but a river.

        The red and yellow barbet, its military parade jacket colours. The sand grass, hollows of rough-leaved shepherds trees. We roll through these hours, they envelop us. We are not insistent anymore that time be meaningful, that it dispense anything to us. We dissolve into minutes where nothing happens, until it does. 

         A hyena loping through the long grass, we see only its head, surfacing like a buoy on a grass sea. Walking through its paths and corridors, the lion occulted in the long grass, the African fish eagle who watches us, measuring our consumability, as we pass beneath it. The bush bristles with alarm. The gutteral blare of baboons, nervous chatter of vervet monkeys. The threat assailing them can be parsed from their position in the trees – if it is a Verreaux’s eagle they fear they perch close to the trunk; if a snake, they go to the end of the branch, ready to swing to safety.

       Knowledge is a conscious effort, but also it is simply time spent. Every day we are learning, our minds are saturated with understanding. That is why we sleep so soundly at night. 

This is what we call our meetings with dangerous game: encounters. We tot up our encounters in our Dangerous Game Logbooks – elephant 10, buffalo 8. A more evasive term than meet, with its slippery noncommital quality. Encounter means two creatures who recognise each other’s power but shy away from testing it out. It is often employed next to the word sexual, and in this sense it is the right term. There is a savage intimacy in it, a recognition that we share the same moment, are stranded even, have been driven by the same hungry current to a reckoning.

        An encounter is more than the meeting of ourselves in a radically unrecogniseable but mirrored form in which we finally understand our serene dislocation from each other. It has in its sound a refusal, even a reprisal. We are not willing to understand each other. We are not willing to do the hard work, to continue. We fear each other. We are animals, agents of our separate nights. 

We tracked the rhinoceros through Hutwini gorge, then lost him. We scrabbled around in the undergrowth, in the mopane maze, looking for the tracks. We could see them even when the animal moved onto the crushed leaves and twigs that litter the forest floor in autumn. But then they disappeared. We’ve lost them, we said. We all split up and started walking in revolutions, staring at the forest floor like Archimedes, as if it could deliver an essential truth.

          Later, after we had given up, I picked out the game trail over the ridge even though I was disoriented by the landscape and was not sure what direction to go in. The paths lead down to the pan. Animals know where the water is, Adam said. Their stalkers know where to find them. Their thirst and blind habitual nature and their bulk conspire to betray them. The rhino we were tracking had less than two days to live. Forty-eight hours later they were killed.

 

Adam drills us on our tracks. He is strict, almost severe. There is a brisk pedantic note in his voice as we stop to consider endless smudges on the ground. These marks effortlessly assume the shape of playing cards - hearts, the Ace of Spaces (most antelope), or club-like balloons (buffalo, eland). The thug-toed, canine (hyena), the three-padded Australia-shaped palms of the cats, ringed by satellite claw-less toes – the only cat that cannot retract its claws entirely is the cheetah. Also the two-pronged inscrutable stabs of bushpig, warthog and the Vs of vervet monkey feet, the tell-tale tail drag of their prehensile tail, like a hairy snake. The porcupine with its complex Lego foot, seven or ten pads in all, and the wire-brush scuff of its quill marks on the sand.

          My brain struggles with shapes, with visual information of any kind. At first the tracks we see imprinted on the sand, in month-old mud, on grassy dustlands, are no more than rivers of inscrutable symbols. Animals moving this way, pursued by their future attackers, animals moving that way, to or from water. The dinner plate spoor of elephant who carve their own avenues in dense bush, landscaped by the stepping stones of their dinner plate feet.

         We circle in the mopane scrub, trying to pick up the trail, a group of amateurs pursuing a professional. With a lion or an elephant the great prize at the end is a glimpse of the animal, live, in the act of walking through the world. But also a ribboning satisfaction: we’d caught up with you.  These sightings take on a transport. They are visitations, hallucinations. They are moments. Once unleashed on the world we live in their wake vortices.

Dark begins to solidify at five. This is the hour I stop running, the hour the lions are resurrected from floppy outsize dozing cats to nightmare hunters, the hour that fixed depthless look floods back into their amber eyes. Across from my verandah, beyond the outer firebreak, is a single baobab. It is like most of these trees, leafless, its truck bloated with cellulose. At five the colours of the day sink into the baobab, turning it steel, then mauve, then a dead-fish grey-silver, then a silhouette of itself. There is no swerve to the night at this latitude, at this time of year. The winter tilt of the planet forges a bone cold that can only be dispelled by fire. The nights we have no fire or braai are forlorn. We eat in silence and then go to bed  immediately – the sleeping bag is the only other refuge. To have no fire in Africa is a dark impoverishment. 

Are full of discord and slaughter. The baboons live in a nightly cauldron of domestic violence. We hear the rigid shouts, more vocal claps than cries, of the males, the screech of the young baboons as their mothers are clawed into submission.

           The wife-battering of the baboons is joined by the thrashing and chewing of the impala, who are browsers and who strip the leaves of the trees around the tent with an outsize shear. When the elephant’s trumpeting comes the air is electric, anticipatory. They are feeding near the camp. The sound of the branches breaking under the assault from their trunks has the richochet crack of gunshot.

            At first we sleep badly, woken by any and all of these sounds. But by the end of the second week we sleep through them. Some of us hear sounds that others miss and vice versa. The two Shangaan women who work in the kitchen cannot bear the sound of the lion. Lion he keep me awake all night, Elisa tells me, grimacing. 

            Most creatures that are killed by other animals die in the night. The nights are long, twelve hours, and that is a long time to stay alive, I think, especially when the lion and leopard are also crepuscular hunters. So in total there are around 14 hours a day, perhaps 15, when prey animals cannot relax. When we cross paths in the early morning light I say to Steve, our camp's resident impala ram, glad you made it through another night.

For hours under a blistering sun we puzzle over smudges, heads bent like penitents. Balloon toes of large cats, the narrow rodent prints of the dassie, cleft palette of the giraffe. We do this because we want the competence and knowledge that goes with tracking, to look at the substrate and read it like a text. We want to be free from regret. From the feeling of ghostliness. We are exhausted by our own insubstantiality, by the endless pattern of how experience gives birth to memory, and memory keeps us company, this lasting diffuse simulacra of the real. But our memories are growing in strength. Like unborn children, they need to come out, or they will rupture us.

            We want to get control over our history. We don’t know why we thought it would help us to learn to read the bush like a text, to read the story of spoor and know what animals had passed by,  what they were doing, whether they were walking or running under these stately skies. Why they wanted to come, why they wanted to leave. But we need to read the bush like a text of – what? Signs. Rumours. The dreams of animals.