A Rhino in my Garden Read online

  A Rhino in my Garden

  A Rhino in my Garden

  Love, life and the African bush

  Conita Walker

  With Sally Smith

  First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2017

  10 Orange Street

  Sunnyside

  Auckland Park 2092

  South Africa

  +2711 628 3200

  www.jacana.co.za

  © Conita Walker and Sally Smith, 2017

  All rights reserved.

  d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-2626-3

  ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-2627-0

  mobi file ISBN 978-1-4314-2628-7

  Cover design by Shawn Paikin

  Job no. 003081

  See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

  “If you pursue with labour, the labour passes away, but the good remains.”

  Marcus Tullius Cicero. BC 106

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1 The road to Doornleegte

  2 Bwana

  3 Matriarchs and motherhood

  4 Mothlo

  5 Palala

  6 The hopeful species

  7 Munyane

  8 New beginnings

  9 Home

  10 Waterberg rain

  Photographic Insert

  11 Ayden’s world

  12 Rapula

  13 Rescues

  14 Mokibelo

  15 Moêng

  16 Lonetree

  17 Lonetree II

  18 Walker’s Islands

  Epilogue: The good remains

  About the author

  Acknowledgements

  THIS BOOK HAS BEEN A collaboration between myself and Sally Smith, a long time visitor to the bush camps of Lapalala Wilderness and to the rhino and hippo orphanage at my homes at Doornleegte and Melkrivier. Over the ensuing years we became firm friends with Sally and her husband Ashley, who today reside in McGregor in the Western Cape. My diaries, notes and early manuscript became the basis for this story and I am grateful to my husband Clive who helped Sally steer the final edit with facts and dates. Sally’s contribution has brought this story to life.

  I am further extremely grateful to so many people whom it has been my privilege to know and work with and if I have omitted anyone please accept my sincere apologies. No one ever achieves anything entirely alone and I am no different, for my journey was never alone.

  My late, loving parents were an inspiration to me and my siblings at a time in history that should never be repeated again, the Second World War (WWII). It was during my flying years as a flight attendant, which enabled me to travel the world with so many wonderful flight crews, that I met my husband-to-be Clive, which was to change my conventional way of life forever and brought me and later our two boys, Renning and Anton, into a world of ‘wild’ country and wild animals. We have shared this journey for more than 50 years and this story is as much theirs as it is mine.

  My late mother-in-law, Enid Walker – who was living in our home when I was bitten by a venomous snake and the uproar that created – was a singular inspiration in her own right.

  The following, in no sense of order, deserve my grateful thanks for so much that has enriched my life and helped Clive and me in all our endeavours through the years. Words are inadequate to fully express my feelings.

  Val Ford, Ma Zeller, Rose Smith, Cherylee Pretorius and Heather Cowie who manned our Johannesburg office; the field guides and educators of Educational Wildlife Expeditions and the Wilderness Trust; the board of Trustees of the Lapalala Wilderness School (1985–2003): David Beattie, Val Ford, John Young, Jane Zimmermann, Rob Schneider, Harry Boots and Richard Burton; the Ladies’ Committee of the Endangered Wildlife Trust: Wendy Farrant, Joy Cowan, Anne Deane, Val Whyte, Jill Morrison and Jane Zimmermann; and Petra Mengel of the permanent staff of the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

  Dale and Elizabeth Parker provided the opportunity in 1981 to establish what was to become the magnificent game reserve where much of my story takes place, home to the ‘bush’ school we created at Lapalala Wilderness and then the orphanage for rhino and hippo. Clive and I shared the next 20 years with Dale, who made our home his and Elizabeth’s bushveld home until his passing in 2001. This story is also central to his memory.

  His son Duncan, who took up his father’s mantle together with Mike Gregor, took Lapalala to new heights of excellence in conservation.

  We moved permanently to Lapalala Wilderness in 1993 and were supported by all our staff, Clive and Nikki Ravenhill, Glynis Brown, David Bradfield – head of field rangers – my son Anton, who managed Lapalala East, and his wife René Walker, field rangers and labour force. A special word of appreciation to Rosina and Fred Baloyi, Titus and Lazarus Mamashela, who were an indispensable element in the raising of the orphans in my care. It’s one thing to keep an eye on cattle but a very different matter with a full-grown hippo who doesn’t like men (except Fred and Titus), and a one-and-a-half tonne black rhino – both animals that are amazingly fleet of foot. For their heart-warming welcome to us, from as far back as 1981, we are grateful to Shelly and Arthur Zeederberg, Colin and Joan Baber, Charles and Nina Baber, and Peter and Janet Farrant.

  Karen Trendler deserves special mention for her dedication in raising rhino calves and especially the black rhino bull, Bwana. Many thanks also to veterinarians Dr Peter Rodgers, the late Dr Walter Eschenburg, Dr André Uys, Dr Richard Burroughs and Dr Pierre Bester, and Daphne Sheldrick of Kenya, an internationally recognised rehabilitator of orphan rhino and elephant calves, for her advice on milk formula.

  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my gratitude goes to all conservationists – from veterans like Clive and myself to the very youngest ones who may only just be starting out in this most important of careers. Your passion for protecting and healing the natural world has been my greatest inspiration, and will remain my most enduring hope.

  ONE

  The road to Doornleegte

  “MY DEAREST CONITA, I came close to losing my life to a wounded lion today…”

  He was a game ranger in Bechuanaland’s Tuli Block. On my map Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana) was where South Africa ended and the Real Africa began. I’d never been there – I had no idea what kind of a block the Tuli was. I’d never before met any rangers. I’d heard stories though, full of daring and danger, always something life-threatening. Bush planes crashed, wild animals attacked, floods, fires, poachers; safari adventurers got into trouble and faced certain demise but for a last-minute rescue by one of those heroic rangers. Big and bearded, I assumed; a sunburnt, sweaty man who didn’t talk much, but having saved the day, might down his whisky, shoulder his heavy-calibre rifle and stride off into the sunset. John Wayne, only younger, more handsome and not so American.

  I lived in a bachelor flat in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. My bravest adventure to date had been to change careers from teacher to flight attendant. I wore makeup, perfume and a dressy little uniform. If I hunted anything at all it was a bargain in the great cities of Europe and the Far East. The only thing I knew about elephant, rhino and lion or anyone tangling with them was that they were best avoided.

  The fates conspired. A friend of mine was to be married and she invited me to be her bridesmaid. The bridegroom invited a friend, a fellow student pilot, to be his best man. “Clive Walker,” I was told. “You’ll like him. Everyone does.”

  At the engagement party he turned up with unkempt hair and a sunburnt face, a fund of improbable stories and a determination to mark his rare emergence from the bush in as festive a manner as he could contrive with his host of friends. A helpful sort, he offered to take me to the airport two days later when I had to leave for Japan. A 3am pick-up. His promise to be o
n time, like his wild tales, did not convince me. I made back-up arrangements. At 3:15 I was happy to have been proven right.

  Just before the flight was due to leave I was given an urgent message: a man was waiting at the airport fence desperately eager to apologise. Whatever his story, whether he’d overslept after his late-night party or had in fact come straight from the party, I wasn’t interested. He was treated to a cool and distant wave from the aircraft. When we landed in Tokyo there was a telegram waiting for me: “Take special care.” I took offence.

  Back in Johannesburg I received a 15-page letter in which the main event was that hungry lion, and the bravery required to kill it in the nick of time, thereby not only relieving the unspeakable agony of an animal caught in a poacher’s trap but also saving his own life and that of his gun-bearer. He didn’t hold back on his feelings upon finding a magnificent male lion dragging the steel trap which had all but taken off its paw, and followed with a graphic description of the fitting retribution for people who set such traps or gave villagers financial incentives to do so. He appeared to have extremely robust opinions on the matter. As if to sweeten the macho image, he’d included a small and, I thought, exquisitely detailed drawing of elephants around a baobab tree. Art helps him to get through his evenings, he said – long, lonely evenings all by himself in the bush camp, deprived of company and comfort. I wondered how close to those elephants he’d been. Not that I cared, of course. I replied by asking him not to look me up again.

  Within days, another bulky envelope: pages and pages of his exploits in the bush, followed by an indignant postscript – What did I mean by telling him to leave me alone? Didn’t I promise to accompany him to his cousin’s wedding? I tried to wriggle out of it: It had been mere chitchat, I didn’t think he meant it, I was sure he’d have forgotten all about it as soon as he’d got back to the bush.

  Another lengthy dispatch. He feels hurt; he doesn’t chitchat and he doesn’t forget, and his mother had brought him up to believe that a promise was a promise. Was she wrong?

  For his second and last chance he arrived early, impeccably dressed, impeccably mannered and full of admiration for everything: my pictures, my books, my small collection of stones and shells, my dress, my hair. The cousin’s wedding was a happy, heartfelt family affair, as good a setting as you might find for a sincere and handsome young man to show to advantage. By the end of the day I was smitten.

  That was August 1966. On 3 December we got married. It must have been love. He owned – apart from his game ranger’s rifle and his persistence – a lion skull, a dog, a box of books, some art materials and a Volkswagen Beetle.

  A quarter of a century later that was the man I wanted to blame for the situation in which I found myself. On a morning like so many others and yet unlike any of them, I opened my front door, raising its weight by that one millimetre between a quiet escape and a wailing creak that would reach the sleeper in the bedroom. I walked out under the kind of sky you’ll only find in a wilderness area. Stars brightening as the quarter moon swung west. No breeze, but faintly from some distance away, a broom cluster fig’s extravagant fruiting nearing its end; every year that same sticky-sweet, overripe smell of late summer as it ripens into autumn. One season reliably flowing into the next and on into the next one. I longed for the security of such a predictable rhythm in my own life – the comfort of being able to trust what comes next.

  Around the corner of the house there was a slight movement of cooler air. I tightened the shawl around my shoulders and faced east. The bush was singing. For a while that was enough, but then I closed my eyes and tried to hear past the pre-dawn clamour of bird calls. Nothing. It wouldn’t last. Something was coming that would disturb not only the natural peace that surrounded my home, but also derail whatever safe routines I’d become used to. Reason told me it would be hours yet before I’d hear anything – the heavy truck, bearing its cargo in a reinforced steel container, would only just have begun its long, slow journey to me. For weeks I’d been preoccupied with that cargo. What on earth had made me think I would be able to handle it? My initial cautious excitement had become tinged with nervous dread. So there I was, well before sunrise, listening.

  The light grew and dark mounds turned into umbrella thorns. Something stirred, an impala ram picking its way across the floodplain. I could hear the river. I was tempted to walk down – the Palala was only 500 metres away. Just past the peak of the rainy season it ran full and fast. In a more optimistic frame of mind I might have been tempted to take that as a sign – a propitious omen in a part of the world where, at least if you were North-Sotho or Shangaan or Pedi, every natural element, every seasonal event conveyed messages of ancestral approval or disquiet.

  If there were ancestors watching over that particular patch of African bushveld, they were unlikely to have been mine. I’m German, a daughter of missionaries. Like my mother before me I went where my heart took me. The calling I followed and made my own was my husband’s. Clive might not have been a missionary in the religious sense, but his avowed passion for wilderness was no less of a calling. In those long love letters from Tuli he had made no secret of that. In truth, there was no one to blame for the crucible into which I’d leapt with such naïve enthusiasm. When I chose the man I chose the life.

  After our brief honeymoon in what was then Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique, he was a responsible married man who had to think of more pragmatic matters than his love of the bush. Money, of course. I was tempted to fling my conservative scruples to the winds and go adventuring with my cash-strapped game ranger, but prudence – and a forthright mother-in-law – prevailed. We returned to Johannesburg and he began to look for work with respectable income-generating prospects. He didn’t say so but we both knew it would be an interim arrangement.

  Drawing on his training as an artist he worked as the advertising manager of one of the biggest paint manufacturers at the time, Herbert Evans. I was a senior flight attendant with Trek Airways (later to become Luxavia). But at the first opportunity that we could get our schedules to synchronise we piled some provisions into the Beetle – rather dashing, I thought, white with red leather seats – and headed for the Pont Drift border post. On both the South African and Botswana sides everyone seemed to know Clive. I’d never seen such popularity, or found myself so instantly and fondly included. All those tales of peril and adventure I’d disbelieved turned out to have been true.

  Another revelation was in store for me. In that famed triangle of bushveld between the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, the Tuli Block, I saw my husband in his true heimat (homeland), and discovered my own. At a wide, slow bend of the Limpopo, full of clouds and washed blue sky, I watched a herd of elephant emerge from the shade of giant mashatu trees and stir up dust in their rush down the bank. I followed leopard spoor in the sand of the dry Motloutsi River. Under a full moon, somewhere far beyond the firelight, I heard lions roar. Close by, the furtive conversation of scops owls. There was an eerie cry. Black-backed jackal, Clive said. I had a fleeting glimpse, into the light and out of it again, of a little ghost of the night – a serval. A blood-red sun rose over the sandstone ridges of Mmammagwa and I realised: I’d become one of them – bush-baby, tree-hugger, umweltfreak (environmental fanatic). My husband was delighted to discover in his wife the heart of a conservationist. When we packed for our return to the city I held up my small camping mirror: no makeup, cheeks and nose flushed after days in the generous Tuli sun, wash-and-wear hair. Frau Walker: Naturschützer (conservationist). I would never again feel completely at home except in the wilderness.

  My new-found passion extended also to the creatures that terrified the living daylights out of me: spiders, snakes, crocodiles and the elephants that were Clive’s obsession. In the 1950s he had shot elephant in Mozambique. The excitement of the hunt, he found, was not enough. He would continue to seek them out, not to kill but to study and admire, and to be able to introduce others to the experience of being in the presence of such great wil
d creatures. Instinct and the bush craft he’d learnt from his trackers kept him safe far closer to elephants than I had the nerve for. We struck a bargain – not the one I had wanted, but the one I could get. When I was around he would abide by my definition of safe behaviour, not his; when I was not around, since I was not able to control his actions, I’d much rather not know about them.

  In between our bush breaks we were a young couple with a completely urban life. When the first of our two boys came along his daily pram excursions were on the sidewalks of central Hillbrow. It would have been difficult to find an environment further removed from the wilderness than that one. Clive didn’t complain. Such were the contentments and rewards of love and family that we were thoroughly happy.

  The lure of the bush, however, was insistent, irresistible and growing. He became more and more involved in conservation matters, and I with him. My flying days had ended, without any regrets, with the birth of my children. My family came first and my husband’s causes had now also become mine.

  The founding of the Endangered Wildlife Trust under Clive’s chairmanship – a seminal event in South African wildlife conservation – dates from that time and so does my education in what it meant to be involved in the battle to protect threatened species and ecosystems. I was shocked to discover just how much there was that needed protection.

  I also discovered that, however noble the cause, you had to be prepared to get your hands dirty. Literally.