Sand rivers (30 page)
Our recent adventures with animals have broken down some of the formality between blacks and whites, the separation between their safari and ours. Kazungu tells me that he has never been on a foot safari before, nor have any of the young porters except Mata. Through the big voice of Kazungu I try to explain to the young Ngindo how precious this wild country is, where the water is clean and the game plentiful and even the dread rhinoceros is so peaceful. All the young porters nod fervently, saying "Ndio, ndio, ndio," and Abdallah^ays, "It is good to see our country, and where the animals are staying," at which they all murmur "Ndio!" once again. It turns out that Abdallah is not an Ngindo but a Makonde, the coastal tribe now famous for wood sculpture. Although he seems no older than the rest, Abdallah is married and has one child, and Kazungu says that he himself has plans to marry, possibly next year. Kazungu has kept up his journal:
About 9 a.m. we suddenly met a rhino. ... To avoid being attacked by this rhino, we had to go slowly backward. 1 was very frightened. For a few minutes, nobody knew which way to go . . . This was the first time I saw a rhino face-to-face.
After leaving the rhino we went right down to the river to make the porridge, then resumed our safari. The people were behaving very well, there was no trouble, they were more attentive now to what they were told, they were polite. . . . The safari was hard for people carrying loads on their heads and shoulders, but through good cooperation in a tough position, everybody was happy. They were tired, but still they were enjoying themselves. The only trouble they had was getting adjusted to hunger before the morning meal.
As we were proceeding with our safari, we met some elephants resting. When they realized we were around they started screaming, and we were shocked, and ran away and climbed on the trees, leaving our belongings behind. I knew I would be all right because I stayed close to the person carrying the gun. Everybody ran away except Goa, Bwana Niki, Bwana Peter, and me.
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Of the afternoon's encounter, Kazungu wrote:
We could not see this elephant, could not see or hear anything with our ears and everyone was trembling. The elephant started screaming very highly, and this time the belongings were scattered around, and even I dropped my luggage and ran away. Later we started callmg to see if we could find each other.
After all this, we went down to the Mbarangandu.
Sand rivers, river thickets, green mbuga and dry black cotton marsh, grassy ridges and airy open woods, yellow and copper, red and bronze under blue sky - the miombo woods are bursting into multicolored leaf, well before the onset of the rains.
In mid-afternoon, along the edge of the wood, a female kudu steps out into bright sunlight. She is crossing one of the black granite platforms inset like monuments in the pale grass, so that even her delicate hooves are clearly visible. A second doe, already off the rock, awaits her. Then a magnificent bull kudu - all adult males of the greater kudu may be called "magnificent" - moves in the same slow dream-like step over the rock. The kudu are upwind and do not scent us, nor have they heard the sound of our approach. They fade into the woodland. But where the elephant path tends uphill toward the woods, the bull awaits us; this time he raises big pink ears as if to listen to the oriole in the canopy, then stops and turns and gazes at man for the length of a held breath, displaying all the white points of his face - the white muzzle and cheek stripe, the white chevron beneath the eyes, the ivory tips of the great lyrate horns. Then he wheels and canters up the ridge, disappearing in seconds, although a kongoni that pronks along behind him is visible for a long way into the woods.
It is late afternoon when white sand bars and the blue gleam of the Mbarangandu appear like a mirage in the parched valley, and near sunset when we reach the river plain. Near the river, Goa's sharp eye picks out an elephant skull deep in the thicket; he emerges carrying two tusks, which he will deliver to the Game Department. But the gunbearer cannot be expected to carry, and Abdallah and Mata take them away from Goa without grumbling and strap them on to their own loads, although each tusk weighs at least twenty-five pounds.
East of the river a dust devil arises, and one of the porters murmurs "Mow" - "Fire". Brian explains that the dust devil is actually a kind of thermal, upon which Goa, who almost never speaks except when spoken to, makes one of his rare utterances. As the younger Africans stare at the white men, wondering how we will take it, Mzee Goa says forcefully, "No!" Brian awaits him. "No!" Goa repeats in his deep voice. "That wind is made by a very big kind of snake. This snake lives in the Taita Hills, under the hill called Kasigan; this snake looks after the well-being of our
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hills. When it stirs, there are rock slides, and when it emerges, the spirits take it up into the sky in one of these spiral winds. The big snake is not visible, but if you listen carefully you can hear a kind of ringing."
Impala go bounding off in all directions, as if to spread the bad news of man's arrival, and in an harmonious broad bend of the river a group of kongoni on an evening outing walk sedately on the sand, escorting with ceremony a new and pretty calf, as if they could scarcely believe that it was theirs. Seeing the oncoming men they bounce away upriver, and because the calf still runs like an antelope, it keeps up with their odd progress, making long ground-gaining leaps like a small impala. But neither impala nor kongoni have run far before the flight impulse forsakes them and they turn their big eyes and big ears to take us in.
Beyond the kongoni five elephants, dusted the red color of the Tsavo elephants of Goa's youth, stand peacefully in the sun-bloodied water, and downriver a solitary bull feeds in a meadow just behind the bank. Like all the bulls that we have seen this is a young one, with small ivory, and reading my thoughts Brian says, "Where are the big bulls, Peter? I can't pretend to myself much longer that all those elephants seen from the air are back up in the thickets, or the big herdsiDf buffalo, either; we've been back in the thickets, and they're just not there." I remind him that we had been lucky to see rhino, despite the abundant sign of rhino presence everywhere; it would have been simple to miss these enormous beasts entirely in a country as huge and wild as the Selous. Brian nods; he is not really upset. "Upriver from Kibaoni, now, where this river opens out in great flat plains, there's a lot of wild cane that elephants seek out in the dry season; perhaps that's where they all are. Perhaps they've all gone further south."
On the river sand, the footprints of ten men obscure the sinuous tail trace of a large crocodile, set off by hieroglyphs of odd long-toed feet. September sandpipers sweep up and down the bars, and a sand plover flutters forth in injury display from a nest depression somewhere near our path; the sandpipers are autumn migrants from the northern continents, but for the sand plover of austral Africa, it is now spring.
An open point set off by borassus palms, with a prospect of open plains and hills and broad bends of the river, and animals in sight in all directions - here was a camp site of the Old Africa that would have been chosen by those men of unknown color who left stone tools on the black granite, more than a thousand centuries ago. We bathe in the river, and afterward I fix myself a whiskey with fresh river water and sit propped up on my cot, on a low open bluff under borassus, gazing out across the sweep of sunset water to the green plain of Africa beyond; I feel tired, warm and easy, and awash with content. Kazungu brings good buffalo stew, and as the stars appear we listen to a leopard just over the river - big deep coughs, well-spaced and strangely violent in a way that the lion roar is not, followed by that rough cadence so like the sound of a ripsaw
PETER MATTHIESSEN
cutting wood. Perhaps the leopard is disturbed by the unfamiliar light of a fire across the river; perhaps, like that gentle rhino, like the tame antelopes of the southern Selous, it is only vaguely troubled by our intrusion, having had no experience of man.
"I reckon the leopard is about the w^ildcst animal there is. He's keen in eyesight and hearing as v/ell as sense of smell, and he can hide so well that you can't see him when he's right there next to you; that's why following up a wounded one is bloody dangerous. Back on the old farm in Subukia, when 1 was a kid, there were still a lot of leopard about, raiding the stock; 1 had a big skin on the wall of my room that scared me, I used to imagine awful encounters with leopards." In his disreputable green shuka and red sneakers Brian lies back on his cot, fresh-shaven, towel around his neck. "My stepfather was mauled by one. This leopard had been taking his pigs, and he got a shot at it and wounded it. Perhaps half the time a wounded elephant or buffalo, even a lion, will push off again when you follow it up, but not a leopard. A wounded leopard is going to come for you the very first time you bother him, every time; sometimes he doesn't run for the thicket at all but comes straight for you after the first shot. He's so bloody fast that you don't realize he's coming until he's already covered half the ground between, and he isn't a big target, either - if you manage to stop him before he's on you, you're bloody lucky. Anyway, my stepfather was a farmer, he hadn't much experience of the bush. When he went after that leopard he was torn apart, and later they had to amputate his leg. No antibiotics then, of course; he was lucky he survived the septicemia."
When I ask Brian if he liked his stepfather, he frowns. "My stepfather was a steady sort of chap, but I never knew him well enough to know how much I liked him," Brian says, slightly uncomfortable. "They send you away to school pretty early in East Africa; I was only about eight, and even when I managed to get home, he was always out on the farm all day." Brian raises his eyes and looks me over, as if considering whether to say what he says next. "Didn't know my real father at all. Had a farm at Eldoret where I was born, but lost it during the Depression. My parents divorced when I was three, and 1 was given my stepfather's name when my mother remarried and we moved down to Nakuru. My dad came down here to this country, it was Tanganyika then; his name was Dickinson. He died in South Africa in 1967, and the rest of them were scattered to South Africa and Australia and Rhodesia, all but my half-brother Mike, who's a first-class wildlife painter in Nairobi. Can't say 1 know Mike, really. My mother's in Johannesburg with my full brother; haven't seen her in the last twelve years. My brother's in business there. I can't say I know him, either; never did." After another pause, he shrugs, "lonides was sort of a father, I suppose, though 1 was already nineteen when I first met him."
Considering his history, one can quite understand the susceptibility
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of this young recruit to the fierce lonides, who was not only a legendary hunter but the despotic ruler of a vast, unknown domain. And the impression made was a profound one, to judge from apparent similarities in attitudes and statements, even style: a certain odd smile, a cocking of the head, an indifference to food, alcohol, and dress are all traits that were noticed in his mentor, and so is the defensive habit of trying to conceal enthusiasm or excitement in order to be prepared for disappointment. But Brian Nicholson, for all his self-imposed isolation, needs a woman and perhaps he needs children, and try as he may, he cannot achieve the coldness of lonides or even his notorious "eccentricity", which by all accounts consisted mainly of cranky self-absorption and a rather childish defiance of conventional restraints such as might have been imposed at Rugby School. For example, lonides felt constricted by socks, underwear, and neckties, and dispensed with these even on his rare visits to London.
"Iodine was thought 'eccentric' because he liked living alone off in the bush. He didn't need people. He had all those books he left to me, and he could quote from every one of them, and I reckon that was all the company he needed. They also decided he was 'eccentric' because he didn't bother much about his clothes, and*because he liked snakes, and because he visited a witch-doctor and let himself get bit by a young cobra, to try to establish antibodies in case of snake bite. Not the least bit eccentric, really. I'd have been thought eccentric, too, if I hadn't been more conventional and got married.
"Iodine warned me about getting married, but I didn't listen; I had been out in the bush too long. Having small children, Melva rarely came out on safari in those early years; she scarcely set foot in the Reserve until after we moved up to Morogoro. She keeps the house beautifully, she's a lovely cook, she's good at gardens, and of course she saw to the three children. She helped me in many ways, of course, but she never became part of the work out here, she saw the Selous as a visitor might see it.
"You know, Peter, it's a funny thing," Brian continues, after a pause. "We saw so few people all those years, and now that we're back there in Nairobi, we don't see many people either; I don't even see very much of Billy Woodley. Mind you," he says, "I've been out of the Kenya wildlife scene since I came down here, and I've just been flying bloody airplanes since I went back." He grunts. "Tried to get Billy down here more than once. He always said the same damned thing that Myles Turner used to say: 'You've got a great bit of Africa down there, I'll have to come and have a look at it!' " The Warden shakes his head. "Neither of them ever came. It always amazes me how few people interested in wildlife have taken the trouble to come to the Selous."
Brian sighs. "It used to be that the day I left for overseas, I was already pining for Africa, not just the animals, you know, but the whole way of life out here. But since I've been up in Nairobi, I don't feel like
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that any more; the way Nairobi is today, being there is like being overseas, and I don't mind leaving it at all."
Rick Bonham had once mentioned to me having seen some fine bronzes and old books of Africana that lonides had given Nicholson; to Rick's surprise, Brian had said more than once that he wished to sell them and tonight, in fact, Brian asks me what 1 know about the prices of old books and bronzes, describing those he had been given by lonides. He had long since got rid of a pair of vast tusks, 101 and 103 pounds, from a great trophy elephant that he had shot on license, long ago up on the Kilombero, and he had already sold off all but one of his fine guns, a Rigby .275 that he had kept aside for Philip. The guns had been sold quickly in the bitter year that he had quit the Game Department and returned to Kenya, and perhaps, I thought, he would sell lonides's books in the same spirit; possibly this was a way to put behind him his bitterness about what was happening to the great kingdom of the elephants that he and lonides had created.