THE LUCK OF THE DOGS
Elizabeth Sleith plays a wild game of chance in the Pilanesberg
EVERY night in the North West province, at that Afro-kitsch temple to the gods of games and the tourist buck, fortunes rise and fall on the whims of dice and the whir of machines.
But as the sun rises over Sun City, only Lady Luck’s most desperate devotees will still be shuffling across the casino floor.
Thirty kilometres up the road, however, I am awake to play a different game of chance.
It’s 5.30am and my friend and I are on the back of an open-topped Landy with an Australian businessman; a cuddling Afrikaans couple; and Gerhard, our plucky guide.
We have all risen in this grey no-man’s hour before dawn to bump along the dirt roads that crisscross the 55 000ha park, hoping to happen upon — let’s be honest
now — some real-life scenes from The
Lion King.
This is the Pilanesberg Game Reserve, 150km north of Joburg in what we’re told is a “transition zone” between the dry Kalahari and wetter Lowveld, which really means it’s home to the different types of vegetation that flourish in both.
And so, among the mountains surrounding the Mankwe Dam, you will find koppies, forested kloofs, open bushveld, rolling grasslands and small woods with, of course, the wide range of mammals and birds that live in these varying habitats.
Around 1 200-million years ago, though, it all looked very different, with a 7 000m volcano — if that doesn’t impress you, consider this: Kilimanjaro is 5 895m — towering over the plains. When eruptions led the volcano to collapse, it left a flat, central caldera fringed by concentric rings of mountains, which today rise up to 700m.
Although it’s commonly referred to as the Pilanesberg National Park — even on the official map, which you can purchase at the gate — it is in fact not a SANParks reserve; it is owned by the North West Parks Board.
Perhaps the confusion comes from its more recent history, when the land was owned by three local tribes. It was the government of Bophuthatswana that bought out 50-odd farmers to establish the independent homeland’s “national park”. The name Pilanesberg is for a rich, landowning Tswana chief, whose grandfather fought with the British against the Boers.
In 1979, “Operation Genesis” saw the fences go up and over 6 000 animals shipped in from all over the country. Today, the reserve is home to more than 7 000 species, including 24 of the larger species and all of the Big Five, plus over 300 species of birds.
So much promise then, yet here we are peering at rhino poo.
Gerhard the Ranger* — a bit of an odd duck, shame. I can just see him being the one who got the wedgies at ranger school — has leapt down from the vehicle and is pointing out the prize pile with two hands aloft, like a pretty girl on a game show.
A midden is like an inbox for rhinos. They gather info from the smell
“This is a midden. It’s like an e-mail inbox for rhinos,” he says. “Many of them will leave ‘messages’ on the same pile, then they gather information from the smell about other individuals in the area.”
Impressed, the Australian points his mammoth lens and snaps the poo.
“From the smell,” Gerhard continues, “a bull will know, for example, if there is a frisky female around or another bull looking to challenge his territory.”
On the subject of the pile’s contributors, however, our ranger is less enlightening. In fact, he’s positively cagey.
How many are there in the park? He will not say, due to the “current situation”. Oh dear. Any recent poaching incidents?
It is a problem, Gerhard admits, but will say no more. It’s all very hush-hush.
Sympathetic to the plight of these poor hounded beasts, I can only support his position. So I will not reveal that they are, in fact, the only Big Five specimens we see on three drives round the park.
Yes, it would be nice to happen upon a pair of black rhino one morning, first thing
out of the gate. They’d be lounging in twilight just metres from the road, their dainty ears at attention, their faces in the dust as if weighed down by the worry of those hunted horns. Now that would be a thing to see, but it’s only a dream.
We do, however, see warthog, tails aloft, trundling through the scrub. There’s a skittish jackal at a waterhole and an imposing kudu lumping its hump across a road. Of course, there are several impala, but not even the Aussie snaps those.
When animals are scarce, Gerhard points out the plant life: the short and stocky shepherd’s tree with its spreading crown of grey-green leaves, often called the Tree of Life as it offers sustenance to both humans and animals; and the scrubby devil’s apple, with whose deadly fruit unhappy wives would end their suffering — by feeding it to their husbands.
We stop for Ouma rusks and hot chocolate under some monkey-thorn trees (in which there are actual monkeys) and bump back along the dusty roads to our lodge for breakfast while a snake eagle wheels in the sky.
And thus we pass a quietly wild weekend based at the Black Rhino Lodge. When we’re not eyes-peeled on the game vehicle, we’re loafing in our thatched chalet, reading, dozing like big cats, a lazy eye on the clock for the next gin-o-clock or feeding time, and watching the tall grasses wave.
At night, we wander under so many stars to the bonfire at the main lodge, where one night a thin Australian mom doles out marshmallows to her three joeys (“two each!”) and makes them toast them with extra-long sticks.
When there’s a grunting at the waterhole just beyond the fence, Gerhard dashes over and expertly cocks an ear: it could be a giraffe, he says. Someone shines a torch. It’s a rhino. But let’s just say it’s a giraffe.
On our final morning, there is some action at the waterhole: some frisky impala and some zebra, all leaping in the sunshine.
But it is on our way out, in our own car, headed for the gate, that we finally hit the jackpot: a crazy-eyed female wild dog, indecisively wandering back and forth on the crest of a hill by a waterhole, turning this way and that, as if she is waiting for someone, or something to happen.
The wild dog is South Africa’s most endangered large carnivore, with a total population in Africa of only 3 000 to 5 000. They are considered to be extinct in 23 countries in Africa.
This one, however, is clearly doing her bit for the survival of her kind.
As she turns, we see the pert outline of her pregnant belly and distended nipples. We sit and watch in silence, our hearts clanging like falling coins to the notion of all those wild pups, lying in wait, unfurling slowly to one day run wild across these plains. * Not his real name.