by Clay Wilson
Laura Marchitto lived on a small farm near Orlando, Florida, surrounded by animals. We clicked from the moment we started chatting online and then exchanging emails and phone calls between Botswana and Florida. I knew, however, that it was one thing to say you had always wanted to live in Africa, and another to actually tough it out there. Apart from a diving holiday in the Bahamas, Laura had never been anywhere else outside of the United States.
Of course, even before we thought about her moving to Botswana, we had to see if we could get on in real life as well as we did in cyberspace and over the phone. We decided to meet as soon as I got back to the us from Botswana. We lived about an hour and a half from each other and I suggested to Laura that she might like to visit my place on the coast.
“Bring a change of clothes with you if you like,” I said to her over the phone. “If you do decide you’d like to stay, I can put you up in a spare room.”
“Okay,” she said. “Oh my god, I’ve just seen a rattlesnake!”
“Excuse me?”
As it happened, Laura had been rollerblading on a road near her farm when I had called her on her cellphone. I’d been telling her about the elephants and lions I’d encountered in the bush and now she had just seen a snake.
“And there’s a water moccasin!” she said, referring to another poisonous but rarely seen snake. It seemed like Laura was having her own little game drive, or game “blade”, as she rolled along. Only two people with a deep abiding passion for wildlife would see the appearance of poisonous snakes as a good omen for love, but we did.
From the moment we met, Laura and I clicked. She pulled up outside my house and as I helped her lift her bag out of the trunk of the car, I asked her what she had in it – it sure was heavy.
She smiled, a little self-consciously. “A week’s worth of clothes.”
The chemistry was right. I loved the way Laura truly adored animals and, personality wise, she came across as a very easygoing woman – not high maintenance at all, unlike other women I’d had come to stay with me in Botswana. All was fine with some of them until the electricity went out and the hairdryer couldn’t be used, or an elephant decided to rub himself against the back fence and knock it down in the process.
Laura had the type of job that allowed her to work remotely, so she was able to set herself up in my house and carry on with business while we got to know each other. We spent three wonderful weeks together in Florida and Laura soon agreed that having met me, she still wanted to come to Botswana and try it on for size.
We flew together from Tampa to Atlanta and then Johannesburg, where we spent a night in a hotel before making the last hop to Botswana. We arrived at Kasane Airport on a typically clear, sunny day and it was just a short drive of a few minutes to my place on the plateau. We stopped long enough to drop off our bags and change into shorts and T-shirts, and before Laura could take in too much of my humble home, I bundled her into my Land Cruiser and we set off for the entrance gate to Chobe National Park.
We’d gone from the glitz and glamour of Florida, a coastal playground and haven for wealthy retirees, through urbanised Johannesburg, and now we were on the edge of wild Botswana, within reach of the flawed paradise I now truly called home. I wanted to get Laura into the bush as quickly as possible so that she could get a feel for the real attraction of this place, and to see if she truly could share my passion enough for her to be able to cope with the obstacles that would inevitably land in her path.
After we signed in at Sedudu Gate, the boom gate was raised by the green-uniformed ranger and we hit the winding, sandy road I knew so well. I’d driven it countless times already and never tired of it because no two drives, no two days, were ever the same. It was the excitement of exploring mixed with the wonder of nature, and it was as addictive as any drug ever concocted or grown by man. But would Laura be hooked?
As we drove I watched for and soon found the telltale swish of a tail and the flap of big ears. “Elephant.”
As I switched off the engine and coasted through the sand to stop just a few metres away from the massive bulk of the bull elephant, Laura just sat there, not uttering a word, taking in the spectacle of life as it had been lived for millennia. She was clearly awestruck by the sight of her first elephant.
“It’s gorgeous,” she said at last. We drove a while further and I stopped the truck at a picnic site in Serondella.
We got out to stretch our legs. She had been super keen so far on the drive, even when we’d stopped to look at a leopard tortoise crawling across the road. It turned out Laura had a real thing for reptiles and I was overjoyed that she could appreciate the smaller animals and not just the legendary big game of Africa. In fact, I think she was even more excited about the tortoise than she was about her first elephant! I saw the look on her face as she gazed out over the Chobe River, the light suffusing her features with a golden glow.
“You feel like you’ve been here before, don’t you?”
She turned to me and nodded. “I do. It’s all so familiar. I feel like I belong here. On the flight over I was willing myself not to get excited, just in case it wasn’t what I hoped it would be. But it is … and more.”
Back home Laura worked for Met Life, an insurance agency. It was an important job, and for her to walk away was not like quitting work as a burger flipper at McDonald’s. Moving to Africa would also mean being away from her farm and her son, who was in his late teens. She did some serious thinking during her three weeks in Botswana and came to the conclusion that she would move here, permanently, with me.
On the last day of her visit we were both sad that our time together again had gone so quickly, and I suggested we go on one last game drive into Chobe National Park to keep our spirits high. Laura agreed.
She had packed her bags and dressed for the flight, and she looked great, as always. She had done her hair and was wearing a short skirt and her platform shoes. The rainy season had begun and there was a fine drizzle falling as we entered the park and drove the sandy tracks that had now become as familiar to me as the suburban streets in Florida where I had whiled away too many of my years in pursuit of pleasure and gadgets.
“I’m going to tell my family over Thanksgiving that I’m moving here for sure,” Laura said as we drove. I admired her courage. It took a lot of guts for her to give up her home and her life in the us, but I was over the moon that she had made the decision to come and stay with me.
“Look at that impala,” I said, putting on the brakes.
I pulled out my binoculars and focused on the delicate-featured creature. They’re so numerous in southern Africa that most people take them for granted, but they are truly beautiful antelope. But this one was in trouble. “Snare. We’ve got to do something about this.”
As I got out of the truck I turned to look at her. She was hardly dressed to slog around in the mud and sand helping me catch an impala that had been caught in a poacher’s cruel wire trap.
“I’m ready,” she said.
I smiled. I drew up a dart of M99 and Laura held the bottle for me as I worked. “You know just a single drop of that etorphine can kill you, so be careful with it.”
“Now you tell me,” she laughed. But she held the bottle extra steady.
I loaded the dart gun and got back into the 4×4. We caught up with the wounded impala again and I stopped and took aim. I hit it and the herd scattered at the noise of the gun and the sight of the animal’s startled movements. I got out and started running, trying to keep it in sight while it went down. I glanced back over my shoulder and had to smile as I saw Laura hobbling over the wet ground in her platform soles. She carried my bag with her and again I was touched by her pluck and dedication.
“Get the camera as well,” I said as an afterthought. One thing I had quickly realised was that I could not rely on the government of Botswana to pay me for my services or to even pay for the drugs and other consumables I used in treating wildlife. My practice in Kasane was making nothing, and I knew I woul
d have to look elsewhere for financial help. I am not a people person, but my personal funds from the sale of my Florida practice were finite – and fast disappearing – and I was increasingly realising that I would need the support of others in the future to continue my work.
I had started a blog and a Facebook page and, to my surprise, the number of people following my online presence increased rapidly and in proportion with the number of posts I was able to write. People loved pictures, too, and I had an incredible rush of support after posting pictures of the lion Doctor John Wakasu and I had treated.
Even if I was having trouble making headway here in Botswana, people in other parts of the world were incredibly passionate about Africa’s wildlife, and I was humbled by the messages of support I received from them whenever I posted my news.
I met other friends and supporters through the cyber world, such as an English guy living in Portugal, Matthew Wilkinson, who runs a very informative and conservation-aware web forum called Safaritalk. Through Matthew and the members of his forum, word of my work spread around the world. So the camera was important.
“Holy fuck, Clay,” I heard Laura swear behind me as she went back for the camera. I was chasing the impala with single-minded determination, as I didn’t want to lose it.
Always mindful of the presence of opportunistic predators, I kept an eye on the bush around me. I still had the impala in sight, and ran up to it as it collapsed. I was panting. Laura jogged back to the Land Cruiser, drove up to where I was with the impala, and got out with the camera. The drizzly rain had intensified and her hair, nicely coiffed that morning, was now plastered to her cheeks. She looked even more beautiful like this to me. She knelt down in the mud, knees bare below her short skirt and laid a towel we carried in the back of the Land Cruiser for this purpose across the impala’s face.
The M99, or etorphine, I had given the impala via the dart was an opiate, similar to morphine, but a thousand times stronger. The impala was down, but it could still see, so covering its eyes helped reduce its stress. It couldn’t feel anything we did to it, because of the drug, but it would try to react to visual stimulus.
“Good work,” I said to Laura.
“Yeah, but I can’t make the damn camera work.”
I was already attacking the snare around the impala’s neck. It had cut through the skin as the animal had pulled it tighter and tighter while trying to escape. As often happened with snared animals, this one had been able to snap the wire trap from its anchor, but in doing so had nearly severed its own windpipe. This was the dual evil of this form of trapping – even if the animal didn’t die immediately, it would often suffer an even worse fate of a lingering death through choking, infection, or an inability to feed.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. The PR could wait.
“No, I’ll go get another battery for it. It’s important we get some pictures.” She was right. Laura trudged back off through the mud and the rain to the Cruiser and came back, reloaded the camera, and got some shots.
“Can you pass me the gentian violet, please?”
“The what?” Laura said, fossicking in my vet’s bag.
I was forgetting that although she had assisted me with a couple of procedures in the bush, this was all still terribly new to her. “The purple spray. You know, the antiseptic stuff we spray on wounds.”
She found it and passed it to me. I had removed the snare and cleaned the laceration with a surgical scrub. I administered antibiotic and antiinflammatory injections, and the final step before reversing the M99 was a liberal spraying of gentian violet all around the wound. “Okay, let’s get packed up. You did great, honey.”
Laura smiled as she replaced the contents in my bag. I have a temper and I am impatient, but she never – well, rarely – grumbles. She took the towel off the impala’s face and carried it, the camera and the bag back to the Cruiser as I injected the antelope with M5050 diprenorphine, a potent morphine antagonist and reversal drug, and stepped back a couple of paces while I watched and waited for it to recover.
Almost immediately it climbed, unsteady at first, to its feet. Within a few seconds it was bounding away from me, no worse the wear for its time on the ground and, in fact, much better off. I felt certain that nature would now take its course, with a little help from man and his drugs, and that this animal would make a full recovery.
Laura came to me and hugged me. I kissed her. “Let’s get you to the airport.”
“In the state I’m in?”
“You look fine.”
I would be sorry to see her go, but didn’t have time to dwell on that as the moment I got into the car I felt a stinging, biting sensation on my ankles and legs, which were bare beneath my shorts. “Ow!”
“Shit, ouch!” squealed Laura.
“Ants!”
Safari ants, also sometimes called matabele ants after the fierce warriors of old Matabeleland in western Zimbabwe, travel in an organised column in their hundreds and strip anything in their path that is edible. I stamped my feet in the foot well of the truck, then stopped the vehicle and jumped out. “Where are they coming from?”
Laura was slapping herself and kneeling on the front passenger seat. She looked into the back of the truck, then at me, then opened one of the rear doors and tossed out the towel she had used to cover the impala’s face. “They were all over this!”
We shooed the ants out as best as we could and they were soon marching into the bush in search of something, or someone, else to eat. We got out and started slapping ourselves like a couple of Bavarian dancers. Laura put her hand to her mouth but couldn’t hold back the laughter. It was infectious, like her optimism and her fascination with the paradise we would soon share. I started laughing too and we hugged each other there in the bush and the rain.
Laura made her flight, despite the ants and injured impala, and got home to the States in time for Thanksgiving, where she told her family she was packing up and moving to Botswana.
As pleased as I was about Laura’s decision to pack up her life and permanently move to Botswana with me, there was an emerging problem to deal with in Kasane – and one that could have been prevented.
Like other African towns, Kasane had a dog problem. The local people liked dogs, but they didn’t always look after them properly. Pets and strays mixed and bred and there were always dogs nosing about in the garbage in town and wandering the streets. Those animals that did belong to families were very rarely dewormed or vaccinated for anything, and as I had learnt, their owners generally only ever called a vet if their pet was at death’s door.
I could see the problem and had volunteered my services to the local SPCA, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, to do something about the number of dogs breeding around town and help educate dog owners. Eventually, I neutered about 160 dogs. The SPCA offered the service for free and I charged them a token fee that didn’t even cover one packet of suture material.
One hot sticky morning in January, a man brought in an Africanis dog that he said was sick. This breed of small, tan-coloured dog is a tough, hardy animal that has evolved through cross-breeding in order to survive in harsh conditions of southern Africa. The dogs have a wonderful, loving nature and an immunity that far surpasses any pedigreed dog. In spite of extreme abuse and illness, I have seen them recover and thrive where other dogs would not have survived one third of what these local creatures endured. In all cases – I ended up adopting nine of them over the years – they became wonderful loyal pets that wormed their way into my heart.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked the owner.
“His nose, Doctor Clay, it’s running. Maybe he has a cold?”
I checked the dog and he did, indeed, have a severe nasal discharge. As well as the runny nose, his owner said the dog had been vomiting and had diarrhoea. As I examined him he started chomping at me, biting down on thin air. I noticed too that his skin muscles were twitching.
I had never in 25 years as a veterinarian
seen all these symptoms at once, but I knew immediately what they signalled. Distemper.
All veterinarians learn about distemper. It’s an extremely infectious virus that is transmitted by one dog coming into contact with another, even by sniffing each other’s stools. It wasn’t something I had come across in Florida, and I hadn’t seen a case since I had come to Kasane, but it worried me greatly.
Later that day, as I drove through town on an errand, I paid more attention than usual to the many dogs that roamed the streets of our busy little tourist town. What I saw horrified me, as I started to put the pieces together. I counted about 10 dogs that all had snotty noses. When I went back to the SPCA to continue my work, I saw another case. Within the next two days I had seen three more infected dogs and very soon I was up to a head count of 16 – and that was just dogs I had personally seen. We had a distemper outbreak on our hands.
I kept that first dog that had been brought to me in quarantine and under observation in my clinic. Despite intensive treatment, it was dead in three days.
This was very bad news for the dog population and the dog owners who had never thought to have their pets vaccinated against this and other life-threatening diseases. It was also potentially disastrous for the wildlife of Chobe National Park, which was right on our doorstep.
The first thing I did was to contact all of my regular clients and offer them distemper vaccinations for their dogs, even if they couldn’t pay. As the wet, hot summer was the quiet season in the safari business, many were on holiday, so if they weren’t home I went to their houses, let myself into their yards and vaccinated their dogs on the spot.
I went home that evening and went on the Internet to refresh my knowledge of distemper. I found out that there had been outbreaks in Kenya and in the Kalahari area, close to us, and that, as I suspected, the way to deal with such a fast-moving and widespread problem was to vaccinate and eradicate. What this meant was that any dog that was infected, or that I could not vaccinate, would have to be euthanised. It was an extreme solution to an extremely dangerous problem.
