by Clay Wilson
We drove back to the lion and I stuck my dart gun out of the window and took aim. The projectile left the barrel and I hit first time, on the lion’s rump. In his weakened condition, he barely managed to stand and circle in a few steps, rather than trying to run away from the sudden prick of pain. He slowed, swayed a bit and dropped to the ground again.
Once John judged the lion was truly out for the count, we got out of the Land Cruiser and moved cautiously forward. This time I had my .416 with me. I had purchased a larger-calibre rifle, as I realised I would need more stopping power for large animals such as buffalos and elephants. Even though the lion was supposedly drugged and definitely badly wounded, if the Zoletil had not fully taken effect, I had to be ready in case he charged us.
But this animal was down. We moved him into the shade and as we began our treatment I marvelled at the fact that here I was, in the middle of the African bush, tending to a wild lion for the first time in my life. I’d treated mountain lions in the States, but this male, even though he still had some growing to do, was far bigger and way more powerful. Even in his knocked-about state he was still impressive.
The lion was badly dehydrated so the first thing I did was administer subcutaneous fluids. Although this was not as effective as setting up an iv route, it was more practical in a bush setting and quickly rehydrated the patient. We next set to work shaving and cleaning his wounds. The worst of his infected abscesses we cut open with a scalpel, to let the pus out. We flushed all his abscesses with chlorihexidine, a topical antiseptic, and finally sprayed all the wounds with gentian violet, a purple-coloured antibiotic spray.
When we had sorted his wounds as best as we could, I drew up syringes of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory and injected the lion. We hadn’t performed major surgery on the big cat, but rather administered first aid and medicine to him; it was like treating a prize fighter midway through a bout. When the bell went again I wanted this guy to have a fighting chance at taking on the champ. Who knew? As a result of our work he might take the title one day and sire a new generation.
It had been absolutely fantastic getting so close to such a magnificent animal, and I had appreciated the way John had mentored me through the whole process, passing on technical advice about dosages and procedures, and tips about working with dangerous animals. The next day the lion was seen stalking and then taking down a small impala – we knew it was him because the purple spray on his wounds was clearly visible to the guides who reported the sighting. It was a fantastic feeling to know we had brought this animal back from the brink.
When Doctor John Wakasu was gone – he was rarely in Kasane – I was left to my own devices when it came to treating wildlife, and a lot of the time in those early days I was pretty nervous. Just about everything I had learnt about treating big game had come out of a book, not from practical experience.
In some respects an animal is an animal, and you know how it will react to a particular medicine or treatment, but what I was learning – sometimes the hard way – was that in other respects wild animals follow no discernible pattern when it comes to their metabolisms and reactions.
For example, I learnt that if I wanted to immobilise an elephant, I would generally need 1 cc of etorphine, the opium derivative drug commonly known as M99. However, if I wanted to put down a buffalo, I needed 2 cc of the same drug, even though a buffalo is a much smaller animal than an elephant.
There was also a fair amount of trial and error involved for me. I found out that some of the doses I had read about were actually incorrect, and in some cases I would have to increase the dose by up to a hundred per cent to get the desired result.
Around town I was still finding it hard to gain acceptance from the local community. However, my immediate neighbours where I lived on the plateau were friendly. All of the families who lived near the little, two-bedroom cottage I had rented were black, and they welcomed me to their community. I felt safe and there was always a smile and a wave from the people in the street as I went about my business.
I had spent most of my time in South Africa during the years of the apartheid regime, and I had seen hard-won trust and friendship between black and white people fray to breaking point in Zimbabwe during the disastrous farm invasions in the late nineties and early years of the new millennium while I had been hunting there each year. Botswana, by contrast, seemed to be a model of racial harmony. Black people way outnumbered white, but everyone seemed to get on just fine in Kasane.
Living in Botswana required me to adjust my attitude in many cases. As an American I was accustomed to getting to the crux of a matter immediately, whether it was dealing with a sick animal or buying a loaf of bread. In America people do not beat about the bush or waste time on etiquette; they get down to business from the get go. Here I was relearning the art of exchanging pleasantries before getting to the subject at hand. I would have to remind myself to ask how a person was, and how their family was, before they asked the same of me. There would be a handshake with a man, in three parts – the first in the Western manner, the second interlocking thumbs, and then back to the first. These little rituals slowed the pace of life, but also made it more pleasant. It was too hot to rush anything in Kasane, particularly as the long, dry, winter months gave way to the oppressively heavy heat of the rain-laden summer skies.
While my social life was non-existent, I wanted for nothing on the material side of life. The stores, while fairly basic, had all I needed to survive on. I could get alcohol and ice; my air conditioner worked most of the time; and I had reasonably good Internet access, which gave me a link to the outside world – and the opposite sex.
Since breaking up with Carmen, I had registered with an Internet singles site and had shifted my search for a potential mate closer to where I lived, primarily towards South Africa. I did meet some women through that site, and some of them made the trip up to Kasane to come and stay with me.
I soon learnt that these encounters would follow a predictable pattern. Typically, the woman would arrive and be over the moon to be in the wilds of the African bush; these women tended to be city types, from Johannesburg or Cape Town. The idea of living in a “frontier town” such as Kasane, on the edge of a great national park, was laced with romance and fantasy. Generally I found that it took very little time, sometimes no longer than 10 minutes, for reality to kick in. The first sign of a water or power outage, or a trip to the local stores, would usually tell me I’d picked the wrong girl – again.
I also learnt that a lot of people lied on their profiles on those sites. The women who I met at the airport sometimes bore very little resemblance to their description and photos when it came to physical characteristics and age. Plenty of them said they had experience living in the bush, but most of them either lied or exaggerated about their ability to rough it. I did remain friends with a couple of the women, but nothing worked out from a romantic perspective.
The real satisfaction in living here was taking a drive into Chobe National Park or cruising the river in my boat, and coming across a lion or a giraffe or one of my beloved elephants. I would cut the engine and coast or cruise up to the giant pachyderms and just sit there, alone, marvelling at these fantastic creatures and thinking how lucky I was to be here, even if I was alone. At those times, however, part of me did think how nice it would be if I could share the sights and experiences and the wonders of the bush with another.
Of course, viewing animals in the bush was different for me as a wildlife vet compared to a tourist on safari. I was always on the lookout for something amiss.
I had been to the wedding of Rene, one of the pharmacist’s sons, and afterwards half a dozen of us went into the national park for a game drive. I was taking a few of the guests in my Ford F350 double-cab bakkie. It’s a big vehicle, and one of the two I’d shipped over from the States after I had sold my practice.
As we were driving along a side road just past Serondella, I noticed an elephant that was limping as it walked. I stopped the truck
and grabbed my ever-present binoculars to check it out. The elephant was about 50 metres away, and I could see it was trailing a snare around one of its legs. The wire had been pulled taut, probably as the animal tried to escape it, and the snare had cut deep into the skin of the leg. It was badly infected and oozing pus. As I watched, the elephant disappeared among some mopane trees.
“Can you see it?” I asked the boys in the back.
“No, we’ve lost it.”
I continued to scan the bush but it seemed the elephant had vanished. The next instant, however, an explosion of dried leaves and twigs signalled the return of the wounded elephant as it burst from the trees, and headed straight towards us.
Normally an elephant will warn you that it’s not happy, with a swing of its head, a flare of its gigantic ears and a raised trunk and a trumpet blast; it might even take a few steps in your general direction to let you know it wants you to back down. But this was no mock charge.
The elephant – it was a cow – was about 30 metres from us and closing in rapidly on the front passenger side of the truck. I planted my foot on the accelerator pedal, which, in hindsight, was the wrong thing to do. The truck started to move forward, but I lost traction in the sugar sand of the track as the wheels of the F350 began spinning. It’s called sugar sand because it’s pale and powdery and sticky when wet, and we began sinking into it.
The great grey creature circled around behind me, lowered its massive skull and rammed the truck. BANG! A couple of tons of Ford’s finest were shunted forward like it was a toy. Fortunately, the impact of the nudge pushed me out of the ruts my wheels had been digging and I shot forward again. Maintaining the momentum and trying not to speed too much, I anxiously checked the rear-view mirror as my passengers shouted encouragement, advice and, alarmingly, updates.
“Clay, she’s still coming!”
I glanced back again and saw her bulk filling the rear window. Her giant feet sent up eruptions of sand with every heavy step as she charged on in hot pursuit of this machine she had unaccountably taken an immediate disliking to. Perhaps she had seen relatives killed by men in vehicles and associated us with the pain in her leg. Clearly she’d had enough of people and we were the target of her frustration and anger.
“Faster, Clay, she’s gaining on us!”
If I tried to drive too fast I would lose control and dig in again, but just as I thought the cow might be tiring of the chase, there was another clang and I felt the entire truck jump forward again.
Finally I was able to pull away, and the elephant lost interest in us. In the mirror I saw her shake her head and flail the air with her trunk, delivering the pachyderm equivalent of the single-finger salute as we headed for safety. A short while later, when I judged it safe, we pulled over and I got out to inspect the damage. As well as being badly dented, the tailgate of my shiny American truck now sported two neat holes where the elephant had tusked us on her second attack.
I searched for the irascible elephant cow for a few days afterwards, hoping to find her and dart her so I could remove the snare and alleviate her pain, but I never saw her again.
The problem of elephants raiding the unfenced rubbish dump continued, and I was called out by National Parks to deal with about another half a dozen elephants that had suffered blocked bowels from eating plastic bags.
As with the first elephant, there was nothing I could do for these poor, bloated creatures except put them out of their misery. With the benefit of that first terrible experience, I could now kill an elephant with one shot. I hated developing this kind of expertise.
Enraged, I wrote an article on the problems of human–elephant conflict in Kasane and submitted it to the country’s major daily newspaper, the Ngami Times. In the article, I covered the related issue of increased development of farms and housing along the Chobe River, which was denying elephants access to the water sources they had visited in the past, which, in turn, was pushing them into new routes that brought them into conflict with more people and more hazards.
To the government’s credit, the rubbish dump was finally ringed with an electric fence. It was a small win for the wildlife of the local area and it made me realise that saving animals was not just about darting them and operating on them; it was about education, action by government and the people, and increasing public awareness of the problems the animals were facing. I had not come to Botswana to be a public advocate of wildlife, or to stir things up, but my article did seem to get results.
I was fast learning that the job of a wildlife vet was busy and fascinating, and that the suffering wild animals had to endure was sometimes of man’s making and sometimes mother nature’s. On one of my regular visits to the park, not long after I’d raised the issue of the unfenced rubbish dump, I encountered a perfectly natural phenomenon that was nonetheless devastating and horrible to watch unfold.
Driving in the park I saw vultures gliding in to land, their massive wingspans spread as they touched down. There, by a water hole, was a dead elephant. On closer examination I could see a dark discharge oozing from its mouth. Anthrax.
This deadly natural phenomenon is a bacterium that forms an extremely resistant spore when infected blood comes into contact with air. The spore can then stay alive for up to 20 years, and it’s usually entombed in the ground. When land starts to erode the spores are exposed and are then breathed in by animals.
Animals with anthrax often die without any apparent symptoms. I had once seen a normal 15-year-old elephant suddenly drop dead while drinking at the Chobe River. When there are symptoms, these include fever, depression, difficulty in breathing and convulsions. Animals can die within two or three days if not treated, and it’s common to see bloody, black, tarry discharges from all natural openings after death.
The anthrax bacterium kills by causing a septicaemia or infection of the blood stream as they multiply in the host. Toxins that are released by the bacteria cause severe damage to cells in the body, leading to extensive bleeding and rapid death. Anthrax affects domestic farm animals and wildlife alike. It’s believed that birds are resistant to the disease, but they do act as carriers of the spores. Wild carnivores become infected by feeding on dead, infected prey animals. It’s not just hyenas and jackals that eat carrion – lions and leopards will also scavenge off the carcasses of dead animals. Humans too can catch the disease, which can cause a potentially fatal lung condition, and skin infection.
If I came across an animal suspected of dying from anthrax, I never opened it up to do a post mortem, because exposing infected blood to the air would allow the spores to form, and the disease would just be perpetuated. Instead, I would take a small sample of blood and examine it under a microscope. Looking at this dead elephant, I was sure it was the deadly anthrax that had ended its life.
I stopped and got out of my Land Cruiser, keeping a watchful eye out for predators that would soon be stripping the elephant of its infected flesh. From my vet’s bag I took a syringe and drew some blood from the poor dead creature. This would need to be submitted to the authorities for them to be able to confirm the outbreak. The only way to stop the spread of anthrax is to burn the carcasses of dead, infected animals, to prevent the spores from forming.
While Doctor Wakasu was the head wildlife veterinarian for the National Parks service, there was another senior vet in Kasane, Doctor Karabo Tsie. His job as the state veterinarian was to oversee the health and wellbeing of domestic animals in the district. He was responsible for the vaccination of domestic dogs against rabies, but his main focus was to monitor infectious diseases of livestock such as foot-and-mouth disease, which was prevalent in the area. Unlike the friendly Doctor Wakasu, Doctor Tsie had always struck me as a very reserved man, almost to the point of unfriendliness, but I had never dwelt on it too long.
Doctor Tsie’s office was also the repository of samples taken for analysis to be sent to the national laboratory in Gaborone. Not knowing who would be handling the sample I had just taken, I labelled it very clearly
as a dangerous bio-hazard and potential anthrax sample, noting that it should be handled with caution. I dropped the sample off at the state veterinarian’s office in Kasane.
Over the next few days I found more dead wild animals whose last hours had clearly been painful as they excreted blood from all their orifices. When I was on official patrols in the park, my vehicle carried a sign saying that I was the national park’s honorary veterinarian; seeing this, some tourists flagged me down to report that they had seen an elephant that looked like it was stuck in the mud, dying, at Serondella.
On my way to the elephant, I was stopped by another three tourist cars and two safari guides in game-viewing vehicles telling me the same story, so it was obviously serious. When I reached Serondella I saw her, a mature female of about 15 years, lying on her side. I took my rifle and got out of the car and approached her. She was barely moving, but as I got closer to her I could see that she was not stuck in the mud at all. She had collapsed and was simply too weak to stand.
Moving closer, I could see that her eye membranes were extremely congested and she was having trouble breathing. It looked like a serious infection to me, and if it was anthrax, as I strongly suspected, she would soon start bleeding from her trunk, mouth, eyes and rectum. I knew there was nothing I could do for her except end her misery.
I called the DWNP office in Kasane and asked for the head warden Doctor Thuto Seema, but he wasn’t there, and neither was David, another guy from the research office I dealt with often. Jack, who was the head of research at the time, was not in his office. Next I tried Thuto’s cellphone and, on a line that kept dropping in and out, learnt that he was in Gaborone.
