by Linda Tucker
Since we humans lost our telepathic love bond with Nature—that creative force that gave birth to us and sustains us throughout our living, breathing, functioning lives—we ourselves have been left feeling unloved and meaningless. That’s the danger. When a discipline separates itself from its natural source—which science tends to do in order to analyze, dissect, categorize, or label—it inevitably limits its own validity. Of course, there’s value in test-tube experimentation, analysis, classification, and categorization, but it’s the connection between things, rather than the separateness, that interests me.
I can hear a hippo grunting in the river nearby and the pearl-spotted owl calling in its unique crescendo; then the sports channel is turned up to a deafening pitch, with some raucous cheering blasting from the bar area. The racket takes me back to the gang of pro-hunting neighbors in this same venue eight months ago, kitted up in their khaki safari suits, firing questions at our panel on the frontline. Over the months, we too have somehow developed our own unspoken uniform. It amuses me that I haven’t once had cause for a designer outfit since my arrival. Those are long forgotten in boxes in the storage room outside the kitchen door. Every day, without fail, I’ve worn shades of khaki—tops, shorts, longjohns, jackets, Tshirts, pullovers, caps—and suede hiking boots. I can barely imagine wearing anything else.
I walk to the bar to order a last round for our group. Propped up next to me on the barstool is a large, glum figure of a man in standard safari-suit gear, and in an advanced stage of inebriation. We haven’t met before, so I introduce myself while we wait.
“Sssso you’re that arrogant bitch, Linda Tucker?” he retorts, spluttering in disgust.
Of course I’m taken aback, but my first feeling is defiance rather than fear.
“Don’t you think you should meet me first, before you decide?” I inquire, with a slight curious smile.
“Ya wanna come pisss in our patch, huh, Lady? Make fucking sure you can aim.”
Before I know what’s happening, the man suddenly grabs me by the back of my crown and pulls me closer. I don’t know whether he’s about to kiss me or smash my head into the bar counter. But he’s seriously intoxicated. His rapid action throws him off his balance and he teeters over backward, off his barstool, nearly taking me with him. Just before he crashes to the ground, his grip loosens, and I pull myself away in time to see three of his buddies step forward. Next thing, they’re carrying him out of the pub.
I’m pretty shaken but more saddened than threatened. There was so much suppressed rage in such an individual that I can only feel concern for his health. What exactly have I triggered? Returning to our group outside, I make a conscious decision not to mention the incident that’s just occurred. At all costs, I want to avoid a pub brawl that ends violently. Not that any member of my group—despite appearances in their khaki fatigues—has a tendency to act with testosterone-driven violence.
Outside now, I find that the food’s finally arrived. Meanwhile, the discussion has turned to the question of hunting, and I sit down, bracing myself for this old, wounded topic. Having spent so much time watching lions devour their favorite meal, and even witnessed lions make their kills in the wild while on tracking sessions with Jason, I don’t have an aversion to occasionally eating meat myself. To me, the key is “conscious eating”—being totally and completely aware of what one is ingesting and accepting this sacrifice from Nature and the life that’s been taken, with utmost reverence and gratitude. My objective remains a commitment to serve Mother Nature, just as she served us.
So I take a moment to contemplate my dinner—grilled calamari steak and salad comprising lettuce, baby tomatoes, olives, and feta—and offer a silent prayer of thanks to Nature for all she provides.
But I’m shaken up and I have pretty much lost my appetite. I can still feel the man’s viselike grip around my skull and neck, before he toppled back. I actively try to get this image out of my mind, and enjoy the rest of the evening.
The group has its teeth into the big, bad hunting issue, always a raw and emotive topic. But for the moment, the hunting our team is discussing is the predation strategy expected of Marah in order to feed her cubs, once she’s released into the wild. I feel everyone’s burning frustration. For Marah to hunt successfully and survive in her natural habitat, she has to get out there as soon as possible. After nearly nine months of waiting, the pressure is mounting among our team members. I keep thinking the stress on Marah herself must be enormous. Because she’s so highly telepathic, she must be picking up everyone’s tensions, worry, and creeping doubt about her ability to command her natural environment. Our entire team’s hopes are pinned on her, yet in reality, after her five years of forced captivity from birth onward, everyone is secretly wondering: what hope is there?
In our morning meetings, the group regularly expresses concerns for Marah’s survival in the wild. Their worries are valid, of course, but I believe our group is seriously underestimating her abilities. Thomas and the team are on this same subject again now. Their sense of doubt has grown, so I focus my entire mind on conveying an encouraging warm image of success to Marah, which I trust she will receive on the ether, rather than their negativity.
“You can do it, Queen—I know you can!” I tell her telepathically.
“Why’s it we’ve no problem with the idea of predators hunting, yet humans with rifles and crossbows are so repugnant?” Thomas postulates.
I find myself tuning in to the group again, and realize that Thomas is directing this query at me, on behalf of the others.
“C’d’you repeat that, Thomas?” I ask, getting my thoughts into rational gear again.
“Well, I’m just noticing you’re not vegetarian?”
“I do eat meat occasionally.”
“No problem with that?”
“I think the key’s to recognize where food comes from,” I explain, slicing another strip off the calamari steak. “Not the supermarket, but from Nature.”
I pause, before continuing. “This may sound obvious, but I think if we were to acknowledge, and show real appreciation and gratitude for, these gifts from Nature—without which we’d all be dead—most of us would stop damaging Nature. It’s the key to our sustainability.”
“Okay,” replies Thomas, carving through his last chunk of sirloin. “So why do we have a problem with hunting? Predators do it all the time in Nature.”
“Well,” I ponder again, finishing my mouthful. “In Nature, predators hunt, but the laws and rules are totally different from humans—not so? Today’s trophy hunter claims the life of an animal for money, or for pleasure. Whereas in the wild, predators hunt for survival. That’s the fundamental difference.”
I always try to harden my heart as this old, painful issue opens up again. For emotional reasons, I’m utterly opposed to trophy hunting. I simply can’t see any reason for blood sport—killing for fun—in our civilized world. On a different tack, Jason opposes trophy hunting for scientific reasons—because it works against Nature’s laws. And that’s the reasoning behind his argument at dinner.
“Natural predation’s the process,” Jason explains, scooping a dollup of butter onto his baked potato, “by which natural balances of interdependent species are maintained. It has intrinsic conservation value.”
Xhosa responds, “I know what you mean, Jase, but I’m not quite following yet.”
In his years of study, Jason witnessed many kills made by lions in the wild. Although he applies scientific knowledge rather than mysticism to his firsthand experience of Nature, both he and I tend to reach the same conclusion.
“I don’t see anything ghoulish in a predator taking down its prey,” he elaborates. “It’s totally natural. You’ll find it’s the young and weak, or elderly, sick, or decrepit, that are predated on by the cats.”
“Darwin’s principle of survival of the fittest,” observes Thomas.
“Precisely,” Jason continues, swallowing his last mouthful of grilled chicken. He pauses a m
oment to consider, before continuing. “But the trophy hunter’s objective is to get the biggest prize as a trophy—the lion with the biggest mane, the eland with the biggest horns, and so on.”
“So trophy hunting acts against natural selection,” Thomas points out.
“That’s my major problem with it,” Jason concludes, pushing his plate aside. “It destroys the genetically superior animals—and weakens the entire species.”
Having finished supper, we stand up to leave. There’s another subtle aspect I’ve chosen not to venture into: the soul connection in the predator–prey relationship. In the wild, where commerce has no place, hunting’s the most natural process in the circle of life, something to be honored and celebrated. It has both sacred and scientific value. Maria Khosa explained, through her time-honored understanding of Nature’s higher laws, that a lioness hunting her prey is a celebratory act: a sacred exchange of energy between souls. In the true order of things, the prey actually offers itself up to the predator, by agreement and according to a soul contract. How could we modern-day humans, whose animal products arrive in portioned packages from supermarkets, begin to understand this? We, who have broken our contract with Nature, time and time again: taking without giving back, receiving without thanking, and consuming with such avarice and greed that we’ve all but destroyed the fabric of love and life that connects all things on our planet.
Once we remember the love bond that exists between all things in creation, we’ll be on the path to reclaiming our own souls. I know that is what Marah and the White Lions are here to teach us.
CHAPTER 26
Tsau: Starlion River
AUGUST 30, 2005. OUT WALKING WITH THE DOGS in the bushveld, I encounter human footprints ahead of me in the sand. It’s less than a week after our outing to Jos Macs and the incident with the drunken neighbor. As I study these tracks closely—the imprint from army-style boots—stabs of tension seize my body. Summoning my shamanic shielding technique, I reinstate the forcefield of love I’ve created around the heartland’s perimeter, surprised that an antagonistic intruder could have invaded my territory.
True, I’ve been suffering from a creeping low-grade depression for weeks, and I may have let my guard down. Normally, I’d feel no fear whatsoever—neither from man nor beast. This is my home now, in a deep ancestral kind of way. And the power of these lands makes it easy to believe Maria Khosa’s unusual instruction that there are vast ancient civilizations buried deep beneath the Timbavati soil. The earth holds such resonance. Down in the riverine areas beside the magnificent Tsau River are two-thousand-year-old trees, reaching up into the skies, gnarled and knotted, like ancient pillars of wisdom holding up a green and golden canopy over the sacred lands.
Picking up my tension, Sam looks up into my face, questioningly, waiting for instruction. The track doesn’t resemble any of our staff’s familiar shoe prints. The damp earth clearly records army-issue imprints—which passed here very recently, since frost fell this morning. I immediately draw my radio from my belt to put out an urgent call to our security duo, Nelias and Nelson, now armed.
“Nelias-Nelias-Nelias Ntete or Nelson-Nelson-Nelson Mathebula, come in,” I radio urgently, waiting for their response to crackle back.
Nelias responds immediately to my radio call: “Standing by.”
Describing my location and the nature of the prints ahead of me, I am greatly relieved to discover that these tracks, in fact, belong to the new patrol boots issued by Jason as part of our security uniform a few days ago. I wasn’t aware that Nelias and Nelson had already changed over. By unlikely coincidence, it turns out that Nelias himself is out on a foot patrol about five hundred meters ahead of me, heading for our northern border. These are his tracks.
I radio back and ask him to stand by. Then Sam, Cibi, and I beat a path through the riverine undergrowth, following Nelias’s tracks until we catch up with him. There he stands, a familiar comforting figure, reed-thin but strong and upright. Never having had the luxury of a warm shower in his life, he looks great in his security uniform and new army boots. It’s an honor and privilege joining this distinguished man on his patrol—suddenly every animal track comes alive, and every broken twig or scratchmark on the base of a tambotie tree tells a story. Leading the way, he walks bolt upright ahead of me now, reading both the skies and the Earth for signs.
IT’S THE TAIL END OF WINTER. The bitter cold has eased, but the drought hasn’t abated. Timbavati has a summer rainfall, so one would expect a dry winter season, but this excessive drought is unnatural and perturbing. At the river’s verdant edge, the soil remains moist and fecund, but beyond the evergreen borders of the Tsau River is a wasteland in drought, stretching out on all horizons.
To add to my worries, the continuing drought has created a famine, and the prey animals are beginning to die. In the bushveld, the parched grasses are now being eaten down to their roots, and the earth is tinder dry. Waterholes have become dustpans. Nelias and I have just passed the second skeletal carcass of a bushbuck succumbed to starvation.
As I trudge behind the elderly tracker, I look beyond the fringe of green leaves to the parched wasteland all the way to the horizon, lying dormant and fallow, awaiting the Queen’s paw print to revitalize it. This sustained drought might have seemed like a natural disaster, but Jason has explained to me the dire consequences are the result of human mismanagement. Under natural winter conditions in a vast wildlife region such as this, starving animals would normally migrate to greener pastures, sometimes crossing great distances—provided fences don’t block their way. Instead, relatively small units of land have been carved up and fenced in by people who believe they can “own” a piece of nature. An unintegrated patchwork of properties formed, without any coherent overarching plan in support of Mother Nature.
Each piece is individually managed for short-term commercial purposes, like farming and trophy hunting, where overstocking with prey animals has led to overgrazing and denuding of the food base. And with the true fabric of Nature torn apart, the complex interrelated ecosystem started unraveling.
Because I am living so close to the land and its wild creatures, I can’t ignore the issues I readily glossed over when I worked as a model in Paris and an advertising exec in London. It’s easy to hang onto illusions when you’re living in a virtual world. But here, Earth issues are all too real—and they demand urgent attention.
Over the past few weeks, every time our team sits down to a meal around the kitchen table, I can’t help thinking of those animals outside in Nature, dying. Not only here on the lionland, of course, but everywhere. Witnessing the drought, firsthand, forces a new perspective. In the past, I simply selected food and paid for it over the counter—never pausing to think about this food’s real production cost and negative impact on our Earth. I’d get my nourishment from the supermarket—a mass-produced and bulk-packaged product, grown and farmed somewhere else on the globe, then transported over many carbon miles to my particular location. I now know that the combined contents of an average shopping cart has been around the world many times. But back in my modeling and advertising days, I never once paused to consider the real cost of that product in terms of waste, chemical fertilizers, artificial preservatives, plastic packaging, pollution, not to mention jet fuel and carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere simply to get my little packaged item to me wherever I might choose to live on Earth. And I didn’t pause to think for a moment of compensating Mother Earth for this real cost. My transaction for the consumables I bought took place only between humans. The fact that I should be repaying Nature for providing everything didn’t occur to me. Now I wonder what on earth I was thinking, or wasn’t thinking! While our natural resources are dying out, our consumer society continues to demand more and more and yet more choices, stockpiling delusions of plenty while we incrementally destroy the Earth’s real wealth.
What a frighteningly dangerous, delusional world we’ve created for ourselves. As a fashion model in Paris and London a
nd New York, I used to feel the global crisis was hypothetical, but here in the lions’ land it’s all too real. In the very heart of the animal kingdom on Earth, I can’t afford to buy into those delusions any longer. I have to give back to Mother Nature and help restore some of the damage—that’s my life task.
Suddenly, Sam and Cibi charge off after some unidentified wild creature. Squinting through the riverine shade, I see two jackal youngsters bound through the bushveld to get away from the dogs, with Sam and Cibi high-tailing it after them. I catch a glimpse of the jackals’ adorable pointy faces and luscious bushy tails—despite the dogs’ best efforts, they’ve managed to establish an increasing distance, before finally disappearing out of sight.
Meanwhile, I summon Sam and Cibi back with a firm maternal voice and sit them down for a talking to. Both expectant faces look up at me, knowing they’ve transgressed our code of conduct. I take care to explain the following:
“Those jackals are your wild relatives, understood?”
I get a “yes” and a guilty expression.
“You may not chase them, right? You have your food dished out in bowls for you every morning and every night because you’re part of the human world now. But your family in the wild has to find their own food. It’s difficult work—and you’ve just chased after them—and used up all the energy they need to go hunting scrub hares and squirrels.”
Very guilty expressions.
“Understood?”
“Understood. Understood.”
We proceed on our way now, Sam walking one step behind me, and Cibi obediently taking up the rear.
Ahead, Nelias stops for a moment to pick up a coil of rusted wire, which he winds into a knot and inserts into the impala-skin bag he has slung over his shoulder before moving on. Jason’s instructions are that any and all man-made debris must be collected on any patrol, to minimize damage to the land. Following the figure of Nelias, I think of the biblical description of a prophetic time on Earth when drought and pestilence will ensue. Often it seems we are approaching that time, the epoch described as the time of Revelations. Species going extinct at an unprecedented rate, large numbers of livestock eradicated en masse due to mystery diseases, including avian flu, bovine TB, and mad cow disease.
