My Natural History (15 page)

I had taken a sublime joy when I heard my first
unilaterally
identified first willow warbler of spring. That had been the previous year: the song expressed all my delight in spring, in wildlife, in my own growing familiarity with wild ways and wild things. Now, hearing the first willow warbler of the spring on Barnes Common, I didn’t know what to think. Certainly I didn’t take my cap from my head and hurl it into the air, as I had done the year before. And the bird, the song itself: was it a vindictive irony? Or was it, in the end, cosmically appropriate?

I visited the hospital often, or quite enough, and for the first few weeks, I heard the willow warblers singing every time: singing their ecstatic hymn to territory, to sex, to life; firmly, it seemed, they believed and truly. I would take the train to Barnes station and walk across the common, along
the path that lay on the far side of the hedge. I would hope to find her asleep and so have to leave, and then feel
dreadful
shame at this fearful thought, and hope she was awake, but that she didn’t want me to stay terribly long. At these times, our own pain, our own emotions, seek centre stage, and that is highly inappropriate. So I would find her and greet her, and talk and read to her: I kept a volume of
Palgrave’s Golden Treasury
in my bag, because the words of the Victorians gave her some kind of peace. Some kind of pain, too, because she always wept. There was a sweetness about her at the end, something she never showed the world, perhaps never knew about herself. That was how I remember the last bit, the last visit: a sweet and mostly unfamiliar person.

So I left her for the last time, not knowing it was the last time, and Barnes Common stretched out before me; the willow warblers, now silent, were busy with the task of making more willow warblers. So did the willow warblers give me consolation, then? Did they help me to
understand
that despite everything, despite the bad, sad things that can be thrown at us, life goes on, and that the
ineluctable
forces of nature continue? Did they give me balance, perspective? Did they give me acceptance? Did they give me sanity? Did they give me a sense of cosmic
appropriateness
?

Did they fuck. Bloody birds.

17. Leopard

Panthera pardus

M
anny Mvula was one of the first Zambians to pass his exams and become a guide in the South Luangwa National Park. At his oral, he gave a brilliant performance: easy, confident, quietly humorous, ironical, and above all, knowledgeable. One of the panel, white and an old Luangwa hand, asked him: “How did you come to know all this?” With a smile on his face and mischief in his heart, Manny answered politely: “I’ve read a lot of books.”

I met Manny a few weeks after my mother’s funeral. I was taking a two-month sabbatical, and spending it at Mchenja Bush Camp, thanks to the generosity of Savannah Trails, who were then operating the camp, and in
particular
, to Bob Stjernstedt, the Baron and birdsong guru I had met on my first trip to Africa. Cindy, with still greater
generosity, had given her blessing to the trip,

For two months, my home was a hut on the banks of the Luangwa River, in a camp that lay at the opening of an ebony glade. I had a plan: I was going to write a wildlife book at the end of it, and I took pages of notes on all the marvels I saw. But I ended up writing a novel. If you spend a couple of months in the bush with the same people, you are going to establish an intriguing dynamic. There was Bob: the son of a Swedish baron and an English architect. There was Manny, the number two guide, and there was Jess, who had left England and ended up in the Luangwa Valley. She was 23, and she managed the catering with varying degrees of panache and panic. And me.

There were also two game scouts, uniformed men with ancient, battered rifles whose job was to keep us safe when we walked in the bush. Perry Nyama, tall and impossibly slim, was the cool one. I’d have faced a charging elephant with him. In fact, I did: we were close to a small group, me, Perry, Manny and a tough old girl of an English client, when a small female elephant got wind of us and gave us a bit of a charge. Perry, nonchalantly leaning on his rifle, merely let go of the weapon and gave a handclap; Manny did exactly the same thing at the same moment as the
elephant
got within, say, 20 yards. She turned and made off, as if embarrassed by her faux pas.

There was also the backroom staff. Fackson Banda, the cook, was a Friar Tuck figure who had constant rows with
poor Jess; Derek Banda, a man with an extraordinarily soft voice, looked after the rooms and woke clients each day with a whispered good morning; Aubrey Njovu could fix absolutely anything and it was he who kept the whole Heath-Robinson organisation on the road.

I think it was my first night in camp that Bob nearly blew the place up. We had been discussing the voice of the wood owl, and the rhythm of its call. I suggested “now then – whooooo’s a naughty boy?”, but Bob had an
alternative
version. So he found his tape of wood owl and played it, and then we cranked up the volume and played it at the tree in the middle of camp to see if the resident wood owl was at home. He answered with cheery
defiance
, so Bob attached the spotlight to the batteries of the Land Cruiser and squirted at the tree until we had a fine view of this handsome owl. After that we went to bed.

The following morning, Aubrey noticed that there was a certain amount of smoke coming from the Land Cruiser. Bob had placed the spotlight face down on the seat, which was fair enough, but alas, he had forgotten to switch it off first. All night it had heated and smouldered and burned a deep hole into the seat: about the size and shape of a baked beans can. A mercy the thing hadn’t taken light and set off the fuel tank – but Bob has the knack of lucky escapes. The first night of the season, he was showing Jess the
constellations
of the African sky when he stepped off the bank and plummeted ten feet below. Jess looked down at him
starfished out on the bank. “I’ve only known him three hours and I’ve killed him already,” she thought. But Bob scrambled to his feet, leaving a Bob-shaped hole in the mud, like a cartoon, and got on with running the camp, or trying to.

This was, then, something of a ramshackle operation. Mchenja was not classified as a lodge, but a bush camp. Its beauty came not from the luxury-in-the-wilderness thing but from the wilderness itself. Since I made my first visit there, it had made one small step upmarket, and one that I regretted. It now had concrete on the floors of the huts instead of river sand. But the rest was unchanged: my hut had two wobbly beds and a rickety table that bore a polite message asking couples not to entwine on the one bed. The showers were carved into living riverbank, and the lavatories were long-drops – that is to say, the seat was mounted over a deep hole. Fackson did the cooking on a fire and the baking in a tin in a hole beneath it. His bread, made fresh every morning, was a daily miracle. But then every day in the camp was a kind of miracle: one of long supply lines, insufficient money and insufficient clients, made good by people like Aubrey and Fackson.

There were tensions in the camp. Bob was a genius, but not everybody appreciated the fact. His charm,
intelligence
and knowledge generally overwhelmed the clients, but not all the African staff saw the point of him. Jess, as a first-season greenhorn, had to work hard to earn her
respect; and Fackson, being an artist, was easily put out by innovation. “I am a
cook
,” he would tell her, an absolutely unanswerable argument.

It was Manny who kept everybody working together smoothly. He would charm Italian clients in Italian, for he picked up languages with the enviable ease of an African. (Most Africans will speak two or three languages, for an African is the least insular person on earth: in fact, most of the people around the camp had picked up a smattering of Italian.) When Manny spoke in English, he could maintain an innuendo around the dinner table without for a second overstepping the mark of polite conversation, nor ever missing the point of the joke. He could talk with assurance of the ecology of the bush, confidently using recondite scientific terms. He knew all the scientific names of the trees, and also he knew all their medicinal properties, something he certainly didn’t get from books. But also, at times when there were no clients in camp, he would
disappear
into the staff quarters and share
nshima
and relish: mealie-meal mixed with small amounts of meat and fish and veg, eaten with the hand from a common pot. He was as much at his ease there as he was anywhere else in the Luangwa Valley or, as things transpired, in the world.

Meanwhile, I was having one of the great times of my life. Denis’s voice would wake me at 5.30 and I would wait until I had recognised ten birds on call before stirring: a process that normally took about 30 seconds. Then up for
a walk: maybe with elephants and lions, maybe with
antelopes
and birds. Breakfast on return was followed by a shower and a nap. Then I would write up my notes. I had found some ancient staff-backed foolscap notebooks when I tidied my mother’s study after the funeral, so I took them to Africa. I thought it was appropriate. They are filled with my italic scrawl: the unoriginal thought that Böhm’s spine-tail looks more bat than bird; a mention of the duet of striped kingfishers, together with thoughts about why the valley has so many duettists; the urge, on seeing a pride of lion in affectionate corporate slumbers, to fling myself in among them and snuggle up. “To my surprise, everyone else in the vehicle chorused an agreement,” I wrote of this incontinent confession. After lunch, I would sit by myself in the ebony glade till it was time to swallow a mug of tea and set off for the afternoon drive. We would stop, always at some appropriately beautiful place, for sundowners, for me always a bottle of Mosi, the local beer. After that we would drive through the night with the spotlight, looking for the night shift, quite different from the day shift:
white-tailed
mongoose and genet and honey badger. But always, we were seriously hunting for hunting leopards. Luangwa is the world capital for leopards. Find a leopard and we sent home happy clients: and most of the clients we sent home were pretty happy.

There was one evening when we had no clients at all. Manny proposed that we took the backroom staff out for
a drive: there was enthusiastic agreement. So off we went, Manny at the wheel, Jess and I crammed tightly together – no hardship, at least not for me – in the front, and seven of the backroom boys wedged hip to hip in the back, not ideal for anyone except Fackson, whose build made for comfort in most circumstances. And so, with a great deal of giggling and shi-yiking, we set off. “
Attenzione alla testa
,” Manny called as we passed beneath a low branch.

At once the game was on. Fackson began it, of course, a man with a huge appreciation for a jape. “
Perché
?” he called. “
Che terribile
! Bloody bad driver!”

At a stroke, they all decided to be querulous Italian
clients
.
Troppo veloce!
Troppo lento!
No me piace – voglio un leopardo!
Manny gave as good as he got.
Zitto! Zitto, eh! Maladetti italiani! Magari se avessi dei clienti simpatici
africani
!
We rolled on through the bush in holiday humour making a mighty din and laughing at the tops of our voices. But as soon as we reached Manny’s favourite ebony glade there was an instant and perfect silence.

Leopard.

Is there anything more beautiful? Doubly beautiful in the dark picked out by the spotlight, the beam from our spot making him glow as if the light came from within. The perfect honey colour, with the immaculate
maculations
, the black rosettes. The long tail carried in a graceful arc, like an italic swash to complete this perfectly
calligraphed
beast. But the way he moved most of all: as if
beneath the skin a gallon of oil lubricated every joint, making each movement preternaturally smooth, almost obscenely graceful. I never saw a pride of lions without wanting to join them: I never saw a leopard without
wanting
to be one.

And a leopard on business has his beauty tinged with the fizz of danger, with the fascination of narrative. What happens next? You have to find out, you must turn the page. The leopard flattened himself belly down, moving with sinuous wiggles towards the group of impala we could see resting up in the glade. Many of them: the more there are, the less likely it is to be you that gets eaten. There is safety in numbers all right: for all except one.

We stopped. Manny switched the engine off to create a voluptuous silence. We shone the light obliquely now, so that we didn’t give away the leopard’s position and spoil his hunt, so that we didn’t dazzle the impala and make the hunt unfairly easy. We sat in a long silence, watching the dance of life and death take place before us: the endlessly patient stalk, the restlessness of the crowd of impala, who knew that something was amiss, but didn’t know precisely what or where. They also knew that to break ranks and stand out from the crowd was suicide. Hold tight, then: and hope it’s someone else that gets eaten tonight.

The silence was perfect and stayed perfect. No whispered conversations, no urgent requests, no shifting of positions despite our buttock-to-buttock seating
arrangements. No real clients had ever held a comparable silence. And almost as imperceptibly as the growing of a plant, the leopard moved in: a process of terrible subtlety. It seemed as if this balance, this silence, this tension, would endure for ever.

And then the killing.

A silent charge, the explosion of alarm, the barks of horror, the crashing of undergrowth as a hundred impala fled, while one stayed behind, locked in the leopard’s death-grip. The leopard’s perfection was now marred by terrible panting: an explosion of effort such as this costs the leopard everything it has. The impala’s perfection was for ever gone: its own grace a fading memory.

For most of our Italian clients, an animal is not an
animal
until it has been accorded an Italian adjective. Anything small or young:
ché carino
, how sweeeeet. A leopard: always
ché bello
, how beautiful. And a hyena was always ugly:
ché brutto
!

It was a hyena that now took over the drama, busting from the shadows of our vehicle – it must have been using us for cover – and cantering with a Halloween grin down to the hapless impala and the almost equally hapless
leopard
. The leopard fled at once: what else could he do? Fighting made no sense at all. A leopard must be perfect if he is to hunt, for a leopard hunts alone. An injured leopard is a hungry leopard, perhaps a dead one. His strategy is – must always be – to avoid confrontation. His strategy is
perfection: and so he spun on his perfect haunches and vanished into the bush.

“Noooooo!” Manny roared out his fury: the boys behind him shouted with the rage of disappointment. There was no joking now: Bastard! Bastard! And we charged him. Against all the rules of the park, we charged, bucketing downhill, everyone holding on with
desperation
, bashing and bruising each other, and the hyena looked up at this roaring, hollering, brightly lit dragon bearing down on him. He made the only possible decision. He fled too.