COLD, COLDER, COLDEST
Older men and cold weather don’t go well together.
KOBUS DE KOCK
Isuffer from cold feet these days. Cold feet and colder toes. Sitting in a hide waiting for geese to take notice of my decoys is the worst. Nothing to take the mind off those aching toes. Last year’s attempt in the upper reaches of the Duivenhoks Valley was particularly bad.
The Langeberge were topped with snow and the pastures covered in frost, so the geese flatly ignored my carefully arranged spread of decoys. With every inactive minute passing my toes became colder and colder until they felt like frozen icicles that could break off at any minute! Afterwards I rushed off to the local co-op with the hope of finding some kind of magical feet warming solution. That set me off on a journey of discovery
through the world of socks. Mohair (punted as the ultimate), possum fur (from my friend in New Zealand), pure merino wool, cotton blends and bamboo blends, any variety of synthetics, short socks, bobby socks or stockings... bar silk I believe I have tried them all. But my feet stayed cold, until very recently when I revisited the old trick of layering.
Layering I’ve read somewhere, is the answer. And I must confess, using three layers of thinner socks work better than, for instance, just one thick mohair sock. Why this should be is probably rooted in some scientific fact, like air having greater difficulty moving through three layers of fabric, or the warm air getting trapped between the layers, I don’t really know, but it works, trust me. My neighbour, bless her golden heart, once knitted me a pair of slippers for Christmas. With the stitching being rather open the slippers are not very warm when worn alone, but boy when sandwiched between two layers of socks those woollen holes trap so much hot air even Eskimos will get jealous. By all means use those mohair socks, but use it as an air trapping layer in between other socks. However, do remember three layers of socks require bigger boots.
BUILDING CHARACTER
I have often spent cold days in the veld. My military service immediately springs to mind having received my training near Kroonstad and Bethlehem in the Free State. I was in the engineer corps and building those old and heavy steel Bailey bridges next to the Bloemhoek Dam near Kroonstad was a character builder never to be forgotten. Unless you wore some kind of leather glove it felt as if your hands would instantly stick to the steel. On those sub-zero mornings the water in the fire buckets was frozen solid. You will often hear that fire bucket story when ex-military servicemen reminisce about how tough their camps were. Jip, I lived through them too!
Then many years later, while doing a camp at Lohatla a bloody captain conveniently forgot to tell us we were going to sleep out in the veld that »
» night, so we didn’t take sleeping bags and additional warm clothing along on our reconnaissance. We got lost and by midnight the captain decided it would be better for us to stay put and wait until sunrise so we could re-orientate ourselves and find out where we were. Part of our convoy was an ambulance and it was the best thing I could find to shield me from the bitterly cold wind sweeping over the open veld. Have you ever tried sleeping in the dead of winter in a metal box on a military stretcher clad only in army browns without a sleeping bag or blanket? I hated that captain. Wearing his entire wardrobe of winter woollies he crawled into his warm pisvel- lined (Afrikaans army slang for a flannel inner) sleeping bag. The bastard knew very well we were going to end up sleeping out in the cold. He even managed to squeeze his greatcoat into that bag. With nary a thought of the shivering troep sharing his cosy abode, he immediately fell into a deep, sonorous sleep, dead to the world whilst I bounced around shivering on that stretcher till I thought I was going to freeze to death. Just before sunrise I could not take it anymore, so I crawled out of that ambulance and to my chagrin found the rest of the troepies snugly around a fire!
Then there was my Kalahari trip in the middle of winter, looking for sandgrouse. The days were lovely but once the sun dipped behind the red dunes you better be prepared. We camped under a kameeldoring tree and the farmer graciously gave us plenty of firewood. But once it got dark all that wood did not help, even with a big fire going it was just too cold for stargazing. We dived for our tent, got dressed in our warmest flannels and snuggled into the sleeping bags. The wife and I zipped our bags together, which by the way, works much better than sleeping alone in your own. The heat from a hissing Coleman lantern kept us warm as toast.
In the morning the thermometer read -5 ⁰C. But a cup of scalding hot coffee and the rising sun soon warmed us and by the time the Namaqua sandgrouse started flying we were ready for them. The point being that one can endure and even enjoy the cold, if you are prepared! Unlike the case engineered by that sadistic bastard at Lohatla.
But I was young in those days, my blood still thick and the circulation good. Being cold was temporary and one quickly recovered. Not like today when cold feet and toes require long and vigorous action to warm them up again. I presume those blood-thinning aspirins are not helping either. Take your pick the good doctor said, cold feet or blood clots in your brain, the choice is yours!
THE COLDEST SHOOT
When we still lived in the good old Transvaal I often had the opportunity to shoot birds in the Delmas and Kendal districts. Good mielie- producing areas, part of what they called the Mieliedriehoek, as we were taught in Standard 5 geography. Delmas is the best mielie country my boss told me, the rest of the “Driehoek” is good for sowing, though not always good for reaping! What they teach the kids these days I do not know. Probably that it is prime coal mining country, essential for the production of our country’s fossil energy-based electricity. Prob-
ably nothing about the environmental damage the mines are causing, the horrific pollution and the water pans that are drying up! On a recent trip back there I was shocked by the visible environmental degradation.
Back in those days the place was alive with birds. Huge flocks of guinea-fowl had us in a perpetual state of anxiety, making plan after plan, trying to outwit those cunning birds. Swainsons were abundant in the field verges and during rainy years the many pans held all sorts of water birds. It was a wingshooter’s paradise. We walked our butts off and slept under ancient, beautiful weeping willows, and of course we froze our butts off yet again. But it was part and parcel of the memories. I could handle the cold back then. In fact, a trip to Delmas or Kendal wasn’t a trip unless we could brag about how cold it was.
I cuddled old Patrys in the back of my Venture, or braved the cold in a small little tent. A dog is like a small furnace all by its own. In the mornings we warmed our hands around a wooden-fired konka before stepping out, often battling through frost and layers of ice in the shallow waters around the dams. I often marvelled at how tough a dog’s feet are. Once on the run they never seem to feel the cold at all. Imagine those huskies and malamutes, sleeping out in the Arctic’s sub-zero temperatures, with only a handful of hay on the snow! To me it’s one of nature’s greatest wonders.
THE COLDEST YET
After an absence of more than ten years I recently had the opportunity to visit my old haunts again. We started at Villiers, on the Vaal River, where we had warm and comfortable accommodation and spent the evenings around a roaring fire in a closedin lapa. The weather was cold in the mornings, but even an old man’s feet could handle the cold, despite moving out before sunrise to catch the water birds’ early morning flights. It was not bad at all. Little did we know what was to come.
On Monday 2 July (2018) we moved over to a farm near Kendal and happily settled into our makeshift shelter, an old cement dam, with a grand view over an adjacent dam through a barn door-sized opening. Our shelter was covered with a dilapidated corrugated iron roof that flapped around in the wind. Unfazed we quickly secured the flapping roof with a number of rocks and tree stumps before setting off on a long walk after Swainsons. On that day one of the worst cold fronts in recent history pushed in from the south and rolled over the country all the way to Kendal and our rather precarious shelter.
We had good fun that afternoon... shooting enough Swainsons to keep us all happy and we also bumped into a large covey of Orange River francolin, in my mind the most beautiful of our four Scleroptila partridges. A very special little bird indeed. The three German wirehairs worked tirelessly. Towards evening the ducks offered some challenging shooting and we managed only a handful of redbilled teal. But we were happy.
Then the wind picked up, howling fiercely, and the temperature plummeted, with the perceptible temperature getting even worse. We wrapped ourselves in every bit of warm clothing we had and tried to make a fire inside our shelter. Unfortunately the architect involved with the upgrading of our “luxurious” rotunda did not take gale force winds or freezing temperatures into consideration. The smoke from our fire could not escape and we got “smoked” so badly that I feared asphyxiation, we were like smoked hams being mummified. We moved the fire outside which dropped the temperature in the old dam by a number of degrees.
How the guys managed to cook a meal that evening I cannot remember, the best I could do was to hold on to a glass of red wine and mentally prepare for the night – a long, freezing cold night. Whilst the rest of the country sat snugly in bed with electric blankets and watched TV news of snow-filled passes being closed and ice on the roads we did the manly thing of sleeping out in the open. Global warming was far from our minds.
The next morning the reading on the thermometer was -8 ⁰C.
Getting up and moving around was a great relief. All four of us and the three dogs bundled into the Landy and drove around for a while with the heater on full blast in an attempt to warm our bodies and hands. I wore two pairs of gloves with a mohair sock over them, and I still felt the cold of the gun barrels through all of that. The upper reaches of the dam were frozen solid.
One of us shot a gyppo that went down in the middle of a smallish dam and those brave GWPs set out to retrieve it. Koda made two yards over the ice before breaking through and getting stuck like a Russian ice breaker at the North Pole. Even though he was completely surrounded by thick ice, the dog was determined to reach the bird – there was a duck out there that he had to fetch. In times of panic you do not take photographs, but I wish I did. I just shouted to Oscar to get his dog out of the water or risk losing him. Oscar had to haul the dog out by the neck and I couldn’t tell whose teeth chattered the most, Oscar’s or the dog’s. That shoot was without a shadow of a doubt, the coldest one I have ever experienced.
BACK TO SOCKS AND BOOTS
As far as socks are concerned, you don’t have to believe everything I say, my friends will tell you that I do spin the occasional yarn. Do some testing and find out what works for you. Just the other day I was experimenting with layering and found my regular boots too tight for all the socks I wore. It pinched my toes to the point of them becoming numb. Most Comrades athletes will tell you that happy toes are a subtle key to success.
So, I switched to new boots that I got for a bargain at an end-of-range sale. The size was bigger than what I would normally wear but well suited for my layered sock strategy. Unfortunately the boots almost killed me – wooden Dutch clogs is about the best description I can think of. Slipping and sliding, that combination just did not work for me. Polka gave me a few very suspicious looks and she was right... four kilometres was about all I could manage that morning.
To all those hunters who suffer from cold feet, you have my sympathy. And to those who will be suffering from cold feet in the future be warned, prepare well or...