Bush Vet

by Clay Wilson

The elephant also stopped and shook its head again. It flared out its ears and let rip a terrifying trumpet blast. I pulled back on the elastic draw cord as far as I could, took aim and let the steel ball fly.

  THWACK! The projectile hit the elephant right between the eyes. It shook its head again and turned away from me. The blow had certainly not been enough to cause it any harm – an elephant’s skull is extremely thick and only a heavy-calibre bullet will penetrate it – but this one had decided I wasn’t worth worrying about after all. I leant against a tree, panting. I had come close to losing my life, and it would not be the first time, but I was high on the heady mix of fear, adrenalin and the pure lust for life that only the bush can elicit and satisfy.

  In 1987, after five and a half years of study, I finally qualified as a vet.

  My first job was in South Africa, working on racehorses at a track. I was a newly minted animal doctor, but it felt like I didn’t really know what I was doing. I managed to muddle through and gradually felt my confidence growing. One thing my two years there taught me was that I didn’t really like horses. These highly bred and neurotic animals would test me with bites and kicks, sensing my fear and inexperience. My heart might have still been back in the bush, but I needed to further my career and make some money.

  The other reason I needed to get serious was that I had met an Afrikaans-speaking girl, Julietta, and we had got married. By 1990, things were getting tense in South Africa, and while I’d ignored my birth country’s tempestuous and controversial politics for as long as I could, it seemed to me and my new wife that if we wanted to get ahead, we would need to emigrate. Once again, I found myself on a plane heading back to the other country that had a claim on me, America.

  We went to Florida, where I had studied, and after passing examinations to prove my competency, despite having a qualification from one of the world’s top three veterinary colleges, I was registered as a veterinarian in the us. With the help of some seed money from a friend, I bought two adjoining houses in the town of Cortez and set up my shingle as a veterinary clinic.

  One of the reasons I was able to buy the houses for such a good price was because they were crack dens! Drug addicts had taken over the vacant dwellings and we had to clean out all their trash before Julietta and I could set up home in one, and the clinic in the other.

  Business took off and it wasn’t long before we could move out, to the much more up-market neighbourhood of Cortez North, which was on the water. It was the Florida equivalent of Beverly Hills, but, like my clinic, this house too had a dark past. At the bottom of the yard there was a private boatshed, which – so I was told – had been used by the previous owner as a funeral parlour.

  Apparently the boatshed undertaker’s specialty was burials at sea. Bodies would be prepared in the shed and then taken out on a boat for interment in the deep, the last wish of many nautical types. It was a clever idea and the business was bigger than people realised, because once the funeral home owner had completed the burial at sea he would then retrieve a new cargo – shipments of cocaine that had been left wrapped in waterproof plastic and anchored to the ocean floor – for return to shore.

  My business, however, was strictly legit, and while my patients – mostly the pampered pooches and kitties of little old ladies – might not have been as exciting to work on as lions and elephants, they more than paid the bills. Over time, I was able to grow the practice to the point where we were turning over a million dollars a year and employing 20 people.

  In addition to the usual domestic animals, I occasionally got to treat some of the exotic pets that people in the US love to keep. I had the odd mountain lion in the surgery, along with snakes and iguanas. The only creatures of African origin that came across my operating table were lemurs, small primates endemic to Madagascar that look like a cross between a dog, a cat and a squirrel. Lemurs must have been pretty popular in Florida, because I treated quite a few. As word spread of my newfound expertise, I started getting referrals from all over the country.

  Because of its warm weather, Florida is a popular tourist destination and many wealthy Americans from the northern, colder states have holiday homes there. People would bring their dogs and cats with them to their winter home and I would treat their animals. Some of my clients were so wealthy that if they had returned home, to New York or Michigan or wherever they spent the rest of the year, and their prized poodle got sick, they would put it on an aeroplane and fly it down to me to treat. I’d then put it back in its travel kennel and send it home, by air. It was crazy, but also heartening the lengths Americans would go to in order to care for their pets.

  Florida has its own wildlife and I would often treat deer and wild birds that had been injured in accidents. I did this for free, out of concern for the native animals, and because it was interesting work. In time I became an avian specialist, which would later help me in the bush. Sadly, when I sold my practice the new owner started charging for the treatment of wildlife so, predictably, people stopped picking up injured animals from the side of the road and bringing them in.

  Despite my pro bono work and my lifelong love of animals, I managed to piss off the animal rights activists at Peta, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It was because I had carried on my love of hunting from early days as a kid in the hills of Mexico, potting birds and rabbits. Although my day job was saving animals’ lives, on the weekends and on holidays I was an avid hunter.

  I went hunting wild pigs in the forest with a friend and his son, and after we bagged a couple my friend put a picture of his son with the first pig the boy had ever shot in the local newspaper. I was in the picture too, and this attracted the ire of Peta, whose local members began protesting outside my surgery. They couldn’t understand why I, as a vet, could condone and take part in the killing of animals for sport.

  Hunting took me back to Africa, the continent of my birth, and it would be there that I was later cured of the pastime. During the 18 years I worked in the US I would often go back to southern Africa to hunt buffalo. The Cape buffalo is known to hunters as “black death” because of its unpredictability and propensity to charge when surprised or riled. It’s probably a bigger danger to hunters or anyone walking in the African bush than any other animal.

  Back then I did most of my hunting in Zimbabwe, in the government-managed hunting concessions around Lake Kariba in the north of the country. I also hunted in South Africa and in Zambia. As with the game I hunted in America, the buffalos I hunted in southern Africa provided food for myself and the game scouts and guides who accompanied me, as well as the villages where these men lived.

  These trips felt like a homecoming for me. My main motivation was not the hunting so much as getting back to my roots and enjoying the continent, its people and its wildlife. I would always make time on these trips to go back to Chobe National Park, not because I could hunt there – I couldn’t – but just to soak up the magic of being back on the river and exploring this game-rich paradise.

  Chobe had wormed its way into my soul. The area was growing in popularity over the years, and as the wars in the neighbouring countries abated more tourists started returning to this part of northern Botswana. Here was a place where you could fish while watching elephants drink and play in the river, where hippo honked happily, and where thousands of buffalos grazed out on the floodplains, ignorant of the borders they were transgressing. Botswana had a stable government and the people seemed happy, friendly and at peace with the world, I thought. If there was paradise on Earth, then this, to me, was it.

  Chapter 2

  Coming home

  “How could you treat an animal so cruelly?” the rich old lady screamed at me as she cradled her white poodle in her arms. “I’m going to see you in court!”

  She was ranting and raving, red in the face as she screamed at me in the foyer of my veterinary surgery in Florida. To listen to her you would think I’d accidentally cut her dog’s leg off without anaesthesia. “My poor baby,” she cooed t
o the poodle, which looked at me and seemed to smile.

  What had happened was that one of the groomers working for me had inadvertently nicked the dog’s skin while trimming its hair. The groomer had, quite rightly, gone to one of the veterinarians who worked for me, and to be on the safe side the doctor had put a stitch in the tiny wound. It was a mistake, because now the owner knew something had happened, and the groomer was in tears. The customer wanted a lot more blood than had been spilt.

  I apologised to the woman again, but nothing I could say would calm her down. She left in a blind rage and I was left standing in my prosperous clinic wondering what the hell I was doing there.

  I had been in America for 18 years. My career had flourished, even if my marriage hadn’t. Julietta and I had divorced after 10 years, and I had moved on. I’d found a new girlfriend, an attractive and intelligent PHD pharmacist named Carmen.

  Business was good, but I was bored. The practice had grown in leaps and bounds but it mostly felt like I was working to pay the rent on the clinic and other people’s salaries. Personally, I felt I had reached the top of my game. I’d learnt just about all I could about treating pets and the local wildlife. I’d performed complicated surgical procedures and established myself as an expert in birds – and lemurs – and there seemed little opportunity for me by way of professional challenges. I’d hunted everything I wanted to hunt and fished my heart out. It suddenly seemed as though my American homeland had little left to offer me.

  “I want to go to Africa,” I said to Carmen.

  “To hunt? Sure, sounds good to me.”

  “No, to live,” I said.

  “Are you crazy?”

  To me it didn’t sound crazy at all. When we had met I had been very clear that I wanted to eventually move back to southern Africa.

  I wanted to go home, to the place where I not only felt at ease but would find new challenges in life. I had a very good life in the US, but now I needed to give something back and become involved in conservation work, which was my passion. There was a good deal of negative media around the decimation of species and environment for profit and greed, and I wanted to do something to help southern Africa’s wildlife and fight poaching.

  I contacted a guy I knew who was in the business of selling veterinary practices and asked if he could give mine a valuation. He came back to me with a price and I told him to put my business on the market; I figured it might take two or three years for us to find a buyer. However, the day my practice went on the market we had a buyer come to us, and it sold that day.

  I called Carmen. “We’re going.”

  “Where?” she asked.

  “To Botswana!”

  She wasn’t as elated as me, however. To her, the idea of leaving Florida, where we both lived a life of comparative luxury, for the heat and dust of the African bush sounded like a madman’s dream. As it happened, there would be a year’s transition while the practice changed hands, and I thought that would give me enough time to convince Carmen to join me. She had been with me to Africa on hunting trips, the first just two weeks after we had met, and while she enjoyed it, she just couldn’t see herself living there.

  Flying from Johannesburg in the twin-engine, propeller-driven Air Botswana boneshaker, I looked out the window and marvelled at the countryside below.

  This dry, semi-arid land was a world away from the wetlands and beaches of Florida. I was leaving behind the life I had led for 18 years and so too was I leaving behind the woman I loved. Carmen and I had parted, amicably, as I had been unable to convince her to accompany me as I followed my dream.

  Botswana is a country of great contrasts. In the centre you have the Kalahari, a parched expanse where only the hardiest of animals and people survive. Here the San people, also known as the Bushmen, have lived off their land, totally at one with nature, for millennia. They take only what food they need and know how to live in this harsh environment without exploiting or destroying it. Now they are under threat, with their government moving them out of their traditional hunting lands to make way for diamond mines.

  Below me as I flew north were the vast white expanses of the Makgadikgadi salt pan, home to an even more extreme ecosystem. To the west of these lay the remarkable inland Okavango Delta, an oasis in the middle of the Kalahari that is home to bountiful wildlife and popular luxury safari camps.

  My destination, however, was on the far northern border of the country. My new home would be the tiny town of Kasane, on the edge of Chobe National Park. As we began our descent, I could see the glittering track of the Chobe River catching the sun as it provided life to man and beast. This was not the best-known part of Botswana – the Okavango probably claimed that distinction – but it was my favourite.

  When we touched down and the flight attendant opened the door, I felt the heat roll into the cabin and saw shimmering forms through the heat haze rising from the tarmac. I knew from my earlier time here that the temperature could easily reach 40° Celsius during the summer rainy season, but the dry winter months, from May to October, were blessed with daily highs of around 27, perfect blue sky days and cool, crisp evenings.

  It was good to be back, and as I set foot in Botswana again I knew that for the first time in my life I truly was home. I figured I’d picked the right country in which to start anew. Overall, Botswana had a good reputation in terms of its governance and human rights. In 2007, when I arrived, it was ruled by President Festus Mogae. His deputy, Ian Khama, the son of the country’s first post-colonial president, Sir Seretse Khama, would take power the following year. Notwithstanding the plight of the San, the people of Botswana had access to the best healthcare and medical services in the region. Those diamonds were providing a good income for the government and the people.

  For many years after qualifying as a veterinarian in South Africa, I had continued to be licensed in that country, paying my annual subscription to the relevant authority when they sent their renewal notifications. Eventually, however, I’d dropped off the mailing list and had neglected to follow it up, so my South African registration had lapsed. In order to practice in Botswana, the easiest thing for me to do was to reactivate my South African registration, which I was able to do by sending copies of my qualifications and a letter from the veterinary council in the us saying I was a person of good standing, and paying my dues. Once I was re-registered in South Africa, I applied to the veterinary council in Botswana and was consequently registered there.

  I had done well from the sale of my veterinary practice, and while I had kept a house in Florida, I had liquidated or shipped my other assets to Botswana. I was bringing with me two bakkies, a flat-bottomed aluminium boat and a Cessna 182 light aircraft. I had earned my pilot’s licence in Florida and looked forward to using the aircraft here. The first time I flew the aircraft was from Tampa to Orlando, where it was partly disassembled and loaded into a shipping container for the voyage to South Africa.

  During my earlier visits to Botswana, I had stayed in touch with a friend who had worked as a pharmacist in South Africa while I was doing my first veterinary work there after graduating from Onderstepoort. He had moved to Kasane, and he and I had become partners in a riverside safari lodge, which we planned on running as a commercial venture. The lodge was in a perfect position, on the eastern edge of town just outside what passed for the central business district. We built several suites overlooking the Chobe River and guests could moor their boats right outside.

  Kasane had grown since I’d first been there, back in the eighties, from a one-zebra town to maybe a three-zebra town. Over the years the number and range of stores had increased, and so too had the level of human occupation. The town is strung out along the banks of the river from which it draws its life. A main road runs parallel to the water, about a hundred metres in, and there are one or two more streets heading inland. And that’s it.

  There’s a cluster of shops around the Spar supermarket in the centre of town, a couple of banks, some general-purpose stores run b
y Indians and Chinese, a few cafés, and a dozen or more lodges, B&BS and camping grounds ranging from budget to luxury. There’s a golf course with a resident team of warthogs acting as mammalian green keepers, and on the day I arrived, as we drove past I could see a trio of them down on their front knees, ruffling through the grass with their snouts.

  The development extends along the river, from east to west, and ends with the Chobe Safari Lodge on the very edge of Chobe National Park. Unlike the big game reserves in South Africa where I had worked, there is no elephant-proof electric fence surrounding the national park. This wild place is open wide for animals to come and go, although people are allowed access via a couple of entry gates in daylight hours. Just west of the safari lodge, tucked away in the bush, is a Botswana Defence Force (BDF) tented military camp where soldiers patrol on foot and by boat in search of poachers, illegal fishermen and illegal immigrants.

  Namibia, on the other side of the river, has been at peace since gaining independence and majority rule in 1990, and while the country overall is in pretty good shape politically and economically, the Caprivi Strip – the region visible across the water and floodplains – is the poorest part of Namibia. Ethnically and culturally separate from the rest of the country, the Caprivi is also on the border of Angola, which had been wracked by civil war for many years and whose poverty-stricken people often cross into Namibia in search of food and a better life. Zambia to the north is not nearly as prosperous as Botswana, and in the years leading up to my arrival, Zimbabwe to the east had been going from bad to worse under the tyrannical rule of Robert Mugabe. With Kasane in the middle of these three struggling regions, it is no wonder that criminals and refugees from these countries pose most of the problems for the BDF in the area.

  For me, though, Kasane seemed like the carefree place I had always found it to be. Life moved at a slower pace here, which after the hurly-burly of my time in the us sounded just fine to me.