by Whatever You Do, Don't Run- True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (epub)
We had a full camp of twenty people, but I was taking out only a family of four on drives, because it included two teenage daughters that other camps had warned us were “difficult.” We decided that since we were asking the other sixteen people in the camp to tolerate our little rodent infestation, we should not inflict a couple of California brats on them while they were trying to enjoy the wildlife.
So I endured the family alone.
The teenage girls were both of the age that they craved attention, but they were not yet mature enough to use their feminine charms to get it. Instead they were “afraid” of everything. I’m quite sure they were punishing their father for dragging them all the way to Africa for a holiday, instead of letting them hang out at the mall with their friends like they would have, like, liked.
On drives they would flinch away from every insect. “Is it poisonous? Does it bite? Does it sting?”
“It’s a dung beetle. All it does is seek out and home in on crap,” I answered. The father smirked at this; the mother didn’t.
When we saw lions, the girls gripped each other and wailed, “They’re going to jump in the car and kill us all!”
Safaris in Botswana don’t use closed vans like they do in Kenya. We had Land Rovers with the top lopped off. I explained that if the animals were in the habit of leaping in, we might change our policy on that.
“You’ve always got a smart answer,” the older sister said. “You think you know everything.”
“Naaaah,” I drawled the word. “I don’t even come close to knowing everything . . .” I was smiling, perhaps a little cocky because it was so rare for me to deal with clients younger than myself, “. . . but I’m never wrong.”
On their last night in the camp, the family stood as one after dinner to head to their tents. Every evening we escorted people to their rooms in case there was an animal on the path. Taking the “Torture Twins” had been a teeth-grinding nightmare on the two previous evenings, but as I was their guide it was my responsibility. I grabbed three flashlights—one for the parents, one for the girls, and the last for me.
We ate dinner every night on a raised deck, and as soon as we stepped off it you could hear the rustle of mice moving, searching, feeding. The fake whimpers started, and I set off at a faster pace than I usually would take in the dark. My flashlight swung from left to right, illuminating the path and anything that might be lurking beside it. Behind me another beam stayed resolutely at our feet, and I presumed this was the father’s. The last beam flitted through the night sky, whipped around and behind us, then up and down, creating a disco effect. The girl. Maybe she was looking for vampire bats.
Apart from the strobe light, the night sky was mainly clear, as it was almost every night in winter. Missing, though, was Scorpio, which should have been on the horizon, but it was obscured.
We’d taken maybe three dozen paces from the deck and were about to walk under the canopy of a rain tree when there was a rustle in front us.
“Oh my god oh my god oh my god is it going to kill us?”
“It’s a mouse. It’s only a mouse. They’re bloody everywhere,” I said crankily.
At that, a branch on the tree shook violently.
And I saw tusks.
Then a trunk.
Then I realised that Scorpio was obscured by an elephant.
They’re big.
We were standing about three feet from it.
Oh my god oh my god oh my god, I thought. I guess I’m not always right.
“Let’s head back to the deck,” I said as calmly as I could, hoping that my voice hadn’t really broken on the last syllable. “The elephants have been a little upset, what with all the mice.”
We got back to the deck safely, the elephant standing perfectly still in the way that only an elephant can. The branch shake had just been a polite warning for us not to come any closer. This sort of courtesy from an animal astonishes people, but I was more amazed that neither girl had said anything about my obvious gaffe. Could they have missed it? Perhaps in that uniquely American way they had been hearing everything I’d said, but not listening. For the first time ever that thought comforted, rather than offended, me. The family would be leaving tomorrow, but I had to work with my colleagues for years, and they were just as keen as the girl was to see me make a mistake. Not out of any malice, but because it would give them a wonderful story to tell at my expense.
Within minutes I watched the older girl whisper darkly into the manager’s ear. Damn.
Eventually the manager went to bed, and so did my guests, this time without incident. I pointed out Scorpio for no other reason than to show that I knew something. They didn’t seem impressed. I went to my tent, still embarrassed. The mouse plague would end, as nature took its course, but the people I worked with would never forget my mistake and often started nights at the fire with, “Let me tell you about the time Peter almost got his guests killed, when he mistook an elephant for a mouse.”
Deliverance
Chris liked Ella.
A lot.
Chris’s confidence was a problem. Despite his impressive height and the physical presence that came with it, and despite being one of the best guides most people had ever met, he took forever to make his move. “Chris’s seductions are slower than cancer,” his brother Andrew told me grimly. “But nowhere near as deadly.”
The two had hit it off though, after an excruciatingly long time, but they were still at the stage that Chris felt the need to convince Ella she hadn’t made a dreadful mistake. As a camp manager he had had little opportunity to impress her with one of his greatest assets—his ability as a guide. When a friend of ours named Allison was visiting from another camp, he made a plan for us all to go on a night drive, in which he would take the wheel and show off his formidable bush knowledge.
With Chris driving, Ella in the passenger seat beside him, and Allison and I on the pewlike row behind them, huddled under a blanket against the winter chill, we set off for a place where the lions had been seen snoozing that afternoon. We hoped to catch them before they set off for the night and follow them hunting.
There were no guests with us, so we were speaking freely, and each of us had a drink in our hand. Allison and I were both aware that Chris was trying to be impressive, and we were aiding him by trying not to laugh when he told us things about the bush that we already knew.
We had left as the last light fled the sky and the crepuscular creatures crawled from their burrows. The remaining red in the sky bled out as we reached the place the lions had last been seen. We expected to catch them still sleeping, or up and slowly stretching, getting ready for their night of violence. But they were gone. We shone the spotlight around, scanning for the forms that would appear grey in the darkness.
There was nothing.
“Okay chaps,” Chris said. (He called everyone “chaps.”) “It’s a bit naughty, but let’s see if we can draw them out.” His plan was to make the sound of a dying impala and attract the lions with it, as they are even happier than hyenas to steal a kill from another animal rather than hunt themselves. Calling them like this was on the border of unethical, because we didn’t like to disturb any animal out making its living, but since they had only just got started and lions take a while to warm up, we all agreed that it wasn’t too grievous an offence.
Chris shut off all the lights and killed the engine. Blackness enveloped the world, and I realised there was no moon.
“Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh,” went Chris. “Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! Blaaeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!”
It was the most ludicrous sound I had ever heard. The strangled gargling sounded like a goat that was having an unpleasant sexual encounter.
“Bleeeeeeeeeagh!” continued Chris, and beside me I could feel Allison shaking with barely contained laughter. I began to chortle myself but pulled the blanket up over my mouth to muffle the sound.
My eyes had adjusted to the faint starlight that was our only illumination, and I could see
that the surrounding plain was empty. Not even a hyena had been drawn by the feeble cries.
“I’ve got an idea Chris!” I said. “Squeal like a pig!”
Chris, still desperate to impress and show that he could summon lions at his command, switched to a high-pitched squeal, his six-foot-four frame expanding with air and slowly deflating as he let out his tortured death call.
“Qweeeeeeeee! Qwooooeeeeeeeeeeeee!” A warthog dies with little vocal elegance, and Chris’s squeal was equally as unpleasant to hear. “Qweeeeeeeeee!” he persisted admirably if unattractively, his voice cracking like a pubescent boy’s. Now I saw that Ella too was vibrating with mirth, and a snort escaped me.
Somehow over his death call, Chris heard my own little pig noise and said, “What’s so funny?” and we lost it. Ella, Allison and I burst into raucous laughter while Chris sat looking wounded. He shot me a dark look. I’d agreed to back him up in his seduction efforts and was now laughing the loudest.
“Fine,” he muttered, turning the key in the ignition and flinging on the headlights, illuminating a lioness that was within two feet of us.
In the thousands of hours I have spent watching lions, I have never felt that one was about to jump into the car, except this once. Her posture was low to the ground; she was definitely stalking. She was practically under our noses, and not one of us had seen her get there. There was a determined set to her face as she looked for a free meal from whatever was dying so noisily on the vehicle.
The laughter had stopped mid-chuckle, and we all sat dead still. I heard a click as Chris turned on the handheld spotlight, then he swung the beam of light into her face.
She batted her eyes, and her body relaxed. She rose fluidly from the low crouch she had been in, blinking and squinting at the light as if to say, “Aw come on, knock it off would ya, I’m looking for some bacon!” She walked around the vehicle once, sniffing and listening, saw nothing worth eating, and wandered away making the soft, low contact calls a lion uses when it is separated from its pride.
“That,” I said to Chris, “was very impressive.” And I meant it.
Clearly Ella thought so too, because a few years later she married him.
Buffalo School
When I first moved from South Africa to Botswana, I had to hit the books and prevail upon other guides to educate me about a number of things that were new to me. There were antelopes in the Okavango that I had never even seen before but was required to speak knowledgeably about. I would also face African wild dogs for the first time, and there were many types of obscure creatures that could only be found in the region as well.
One animal, though, would require the steepest learning curve—buffalo. The reserve that I had come from in South Africa was rather impoverished when it came to buffalo, and there were only three sad and lonely old bulls that lived in thick vegetation by the Sand River. I had seen them only a handful of times, from a distance as they sat deep in impenetrable reeds and always from the safe haven of a vehicle.
I did know a fair amount about buffalo from books, but I also knew that books were often too narrow in their definition of how an animal might behave. What the books did agree on was that old male buffalo were just plain cranky. Experienced guides told me the same thing—avoid bachelor buffalo at all costs. In a herd, the males offer protection to the group but have the backup of hundreds, even thousands, of their own kind. Understandably they feel secure in this situation and are less likely to trample you, or jab you with their pointed horns. Once aged, the males start to lag behind the group and are forced to live on their own. This tends to put them in a bad mood. Occasionally they form small clubs, but even these grumpy old bulls are likely to vent their insecurity on any slow-moving guide who crosses their path. Before moving to Botswana I’d held a secret belief that the reason guides claimed so much fear of buffalo was because if they were attacked by something, they wanted it to be a bit more glamorous than a glorified cow.
I was wrong.
Buffalo started to haunt my morning rounds as I went to wake up the guests. Our camp was built under the shade of ebony and leadwood trees, with the occasional thicket of woolly caper bush and date palm growing underneath—just the sort of location old buffalo like to hang out in. Twice in my first two weeks at Mombo Camp, buffalo charged off as I approached, and I started to wonder exactly how my position had become available—and where the last guy was buried.
Bleary-eyed one morning, with caffeine still missing from my system, I fumbled my way along the dusty path to the guest tents, calling out “Good morning!” in as cheery a voice as the hour would allow (it was barely after five o’clock, and the sun had only just cracked the horizon). I heard a rhythmic thumping, getting rapidly louder, and I turned to find 1,600 pounds of pissed-off cow bearing down on me. Clearly it disagreed with my assessment of the morning.
As much as it would make me feel tough and proud to say that I stared it down or shamed it with a withering punch, I didn’t. That doesn’t work with buffalo anyway. They are never kind enough to mock charge and will always finish any attack they start. If a buffalo is running at you, you have to climb something or throw yourself flat and hope that the buffalo will miss and carry on running.
But there were no trees, or even termite mounds, around for me to scale, just one small acacia bush. And in my attempt to step backward, I tripped over my own feet, knocking the wind out of my lungs and landing deep in the shrub’s thorny embrace. Never in my life had I been grateful for my disconcerting ability to trip on a level surface, but I was now. Never before had I thought that landing in a thornbush could be a good thing either, but again I did now as, wheezing, I watched the buffalo thunder over the spot where I had just been standing, then wheel back and snort. Where I had been before he could see nothing but the bush. And while buffalo can be credited with a degree of intelligence, this one did not possess enough to guess where I was unintentionally hiding. So he turned again and trampled off through the camp.
I tried to exit the bush with the same velocity that I had entered, tearing my flesh and quickly deducing that you can jump (or fall) into a thornbush, but you cannot jump back out. I took out the multi-tool that was attached to my belt and started clipping the branches that ensnared me until I could move without too much blood loss. I got halfway up, put my hands on my knees, and breathed. There was an absence of sound, until I stood up straighter, walked to the nearest tent, and shouted, “Good morning!”
Learning to Walk Again
In the South African reserve where my career started, I boldly carried a rifle on every walking safari that I led, despite having very little idea how to use it. I did know it was intended only for the most dire of emergencies, such as a serious charge from a lion, elephant or rhino, but I couldn’t imagine myself having the heart to actually shoot an animal—particularly because I often preferred them to the people I was leading. “Get up a tree,” I once told a noisy family that had drawn the ire of a normally sedate broken horned rhinoceros. “I’ll shoot you before I hurt him.” And scramble up they did, with remarkable agility for such large people.
Because of this, the walks I led focused on dodging wildlife, not finding it. My aim was for my ineptitude with firearms to never be tested, nor the tree-climbing abilities of the tourists who were with me.
Despite this, the mere feel of steel in my arms became something of a security blanket, and once I had moved to Botswana and was told that I was to lead walks with nothing more deadly than a stick, I was quite anxious. “B . . . But, what if something charges us?” I stammered at Chris, who had explained to me that within a Botswana national park, no firearms were allowed, for any reason.
“You just have to make a plan,” he said, as if that was the simplest thing to do when a large, fast and deadly animal was bearing down on you and the tourists were most likely ignoring your directions not to run.
On my first walk, I clutched at the crooked stick that I carried as a surrogate weapon, explaining to the tourists ab
out tracks, trees, birds, bees and anything else that could be watched safely on foot. The tourists loved the walk and became excited that there was a world as fascinating, violent and fast paced at the micro level as there was at the macro. I was just relaxing into my patter when I heard a sneeze.
It wasn’t a human sneeze, but that of an impala. Impalas don’t sneeze because of allergies, but as a warning that there is danger. Before I had time to explain this pertinent detail to the group, impalas started flying by us, kicking their legs high as they leapt.
Being new to the area, I was bemused by this almost dance-like stride. Later I would learn that the strange, rocking-horse run that they did was reserved for when they were being chased by wild dogs. It was designed to make it harder for the dogs to grab their stomachs and disembowel them. The lesson came quickly, as the dog pack was only seconds behind the impalas. And before I could explain to the terrified-looking guests that the tan, black and white predators were no danger to man, we heard the death rasp of an antelope.
“No problem everybody,” I said, clutching my stick. “We might head back to camp though now—that gurgle will attract other predators that are a bit nasty.” There was no argument, only some sarcastic remarks about how I had explained at the start of the walk that the focus would not be on large animals.
Chris placated me on my return, saying it was a one-off incident. The next day I led another walk, and we bumped into a pride of lions. They politely backed away from us, perhaps wondering about the insane man that was pointing a stick at them as if it was something to be feared.
“This is ridiculous,” I said to Chris, who was finding my run of “luck” very amusing.
