Creature comforts

Sentimentality does no justice to the beloved wild beasts of SA. By Luke Alfred

ANIMALS trample like an unruly herd through our folklore — Dick King’s horse, Huberta the hippo, Max the gorilla. It is they, not sportsmen or politicians, who populate the great sentimental narrative of contemporary life, roaming through our literature ( Jock of the Bushveld) and providing an exotic backdrop to our suburban longings. Who, after all, would say no to a honeymoon at Shamwari Game Reserve or shark-cage diving off Struisbaai?

Not a month goes by without a newspaper article or a YouTube posting about a bakkie driver jousting with a young bull elephant, or the confused housewife who thought the lion cub was a cuddly toy. Present everywhere but widely misunderstood, animals so entrance us that our relationship has a fable-like, allegorical quality. It might even be interpreted biblically: animals were placed on earth to demonstrate God’s bounty and — clever, this — teach us about ourselves. Such is our hubris that although we listen, sometimes straining to hear, we don’t understand what they’re saying.

Step one in making animals an object of sentimental affection is to name them — “Max”, “Huberta”, “Jock” — thereby domesticating them. Jack the signalman was a baboon taught by his peg-legged master, “Jumper” Wide, to switch the tracks at Uitenhage station in the 1890s. Under Jumper’s lonely eye, Jack was trained to sweep floors and collect rubbish; he walked upright, a cap upon his head.

Despite occupying the place in Wide’s life usually reserved for a wife, Jack was finally a baboon. When he died of tuberculosis he was buried in a lime pit; his literary meanderings remaining unrecorded, his soul and spirit lost.

The enigma of animals is that they leave few traces. They are and they do, they are verbs. This is difficult for we humans. We have a profound emotional need for getting closer, for touching, feeling, for explanation.

This is well captured by the novelist Russell Hoban, who writes unsentimentally about animals and their protracted dance with man through the music halls of time. In Turtle Diary, he whimsically tells the story of two middle-aged strangers who free a group of sea turtles from the London Zoo by driving them to Cornwall and releasing them. Hoban’s idea is no less humanly true for being simple: in liberating the animals the couple free themselves from unhappiness. Freedom begets freedom.

Hoban is fabulously clear-eyed, which means that while he can write that a turtle “felt such a jolly nice little piece of life”, he is under no illusions about the mercilessness of a raptor’s eye.

I witnessed the playing out of such brutal drama recently when on the Bushman’s walking trail in the Kruger National Park. Without warning, a kudu sprang into our camp. We thought it lost, until we witnessed the low, menacing shape of a wild dog running past. We wondered whether the dog was the leader of a troop but the pack never arrived and, after a few minutes, the kudu bounced back over the fence. It was a timeless scene because it had happened before and it would happen again. This is what animals in the wild teach us: what is, the way things are. Everything else is secondary.

Our guides for the trail were rangers Oris and Rodney, backed up by Henry, the doleful cook. Oris was the stern senior, naming flora and fauna in full eye-popping Latin. Despite being seriousminded he would burst into flur- ries of camaraderie, racing the children back to the vehicle down a dirt road after sundowners (he pulled a hamstring), then chummily calling our high-minded eldest “honourable Sam” to tease out his reserve.

Rodney was younger and less socially watchful. He was fun and although I suspect he loitered behind the troop on the odd occasion because he was texting his pregnant wife, he was fine company, silent when silence was necessary and acceptably pedantic when occasion demanded.

Both men were profoundly respectful of their environment without being proprietorial. Watching them at work, and the way they supported each other, was a privilege. It was also a re- minder that the outdoors is not a 4x4 playground, or a theme park, but a place upon which we have only a precarious hold. They walked lightly, disturbing little, so demonstrating to us the virtue of doing the same.

Around the campfire on the final night, they admitted to being concerned. Bookings for the Kruger walking trails were down, they said, and they worried about the possible closing of the Bushman’s. This year, unusually, they faced the prospect of weeks without visitors. They were concerned about the encroachment of noise from the growing communities on the other side of the Crocodile River, and about rhino poaching. It was difficult to combat, given the distances involved and the fact that rhinos’ sight is so poor that poachers get close without being noticed.

Kruger, I reflected later, occupies the role in the lives of many South Africans that a medieval cathedral might if you were a contemporary European — a great space of secular pilgrimage. To think that Paul Kruger had the prescience to devote land to the animals so they could be watched in their natural habitat is a thought of great spread and beauty.

There is very little like the Kruger Park anywhere in the world. The pity is that when faced with a discussion of the animals and their otherness, we invariably revert to the sentimentality only city dwellers can produce.