NATURE’S KEEPER
One of the South Africa’s first luxury lodges is keeping the conservation flame alive with a whole lot of heart, writes Elizabeth Sleith
We hear it before we see it: a curious cross between a wheeze and a scream. It’s high-pitched and tortured and whips through the long grass. Eee. Eee. Eee. Suddenly, the face appears, a young impala with a loping gait, clearly exhausted. His head lurches forward as he runs, as if he’s trying to snatch back his laboured breathing or swallow up his own awful sound. For a moment, we five humans on the game vehicle in the Motswari Private Reserve are frozen, spellbound.
Seconds later, the culprit comes in hot pursuit: a hyena, crouched low, looking cool.
“Ooooh, that guy is done for!” declares our guide, Henry Tarr. Canadian-born, his North American twang lends a movie-esque quality to the scene. He throws the vehicle into gear and we hare off in their wake. The tracker, Jacky Mlobela, perched on the vehicle’s tip, points his predictions on where the chase might cross the road again.
The impala is almost certainly lunch, says Henry, keen as a kid on Christmas. They are fast runners and phenomenal jumpers, but they’re not built for long-distance — and his “barking” is a dead giveaway that he’s run too long. Hyenas, meanwhile, are the bush’s best hunters — with an 80% success rate.
Having lost them, we stop to listen. Only silence. Henry fills the void with stories, effusive in his admiration of the hyena.
They are incredibly smart, with sophisticated social hierarchies and systems of communication. Their nasty reputation as scavengers actually comes from their amazing capacity to digest anything. They can live off bones and rotten meat. And in the badlands of the bush, where no day goes by without bloodshed, they are vital to cleaning up the bodies. They are also unparalleled team players. Hunting in packs, they will fan out to exhaust their prey, running relay for the kill.
This time, though, there is no team. Just a lone guy trying his luck. And luck is with the impala after all.
With the engine cut, the bush has returned to its usual symphony of birdsong and breezes. We assume our underdog has lived to leap another day.
As every hyena and impala knows, sometimes you lose, sometimes you win. Earlier on this same drive, we’d seen the dark side of the coin. Lose. A small reedbuck, draped over the branch of a weeping boerbean tree, like laundry on a line.
Shongile the leopard had dragged him up there, out of the reach of thieves — like the hyena — to save him for a takeway. There’s a dark red streak running down the trunk where his blood spilled. A bad day for the buck but a good one for the guests of the quietly elegant Motswari Lodge, whose rimflow pool and dining verandah are just across the dry Nhlaralumi River bed, with a splendid view of this tree.
Just that morning, Henry says, their breakfast was served with a full show from Shongile, prowling around her kill. Motswari, the lodge and private reserve, fall mainly in the Timbavati in an unfenced band of private reserves known collectively as the Greater Kruger National Park.
Bought by Paul and Med Geiger in 1979, it is one of SA’s original safari lodges — Paul, in fact, was a key player in having the Kruger fence, put up to much dismay from the surrounding landowners in 1961, taken down in 1993, restoring the animals’ right to roam here as they had since time began.
The main lodge has 15 thatched rondawels dotted about the property, all unobtrusive exteriors and graceful interiors, satellites to the central open-air lounge and dining area.
There are no fences here either, so every moment holds the prospect of a close