Running Wild Read online

  The idea that a little dose of poison can be a good thing had been around for a long time. If you are careful and don’t kill the patient, you might kill the disease. As in the use of arsenic to cure syphilis until not so long ago, Jenner, a country doctor, noted that milkmaids infected with relatively benign cowpox did not seem to contract deadly smallpox. He reckoned that pus in the blisters milkmaids got on the job protected them. Jenner took some pus from a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes in his village of Berkeley and injected it into the arm of eight-year-old James Phillips, the son of his gardener. Young James developed a fever but no serious infection.

  Jenner’s next step was the truly brave one – more for James than Jenner in truth: “Sit on this stool here and trust me, I’m a doctor.” Jenner injected the lad with smallpox … but James did not react. The rest is history, excepting for those feloniously misguided people in these supposedly better informed times who think inoculation against deadly diseases is a bad idea. But then you cannot argue with drunks, fools or true believers.

  Jenner further postulated that cowpox came originally from a disease in horses then known as “the grease”, so horses might be the ideal partners in the business of producing smallpox vaccinations. But back to snakes and how to milk them (carefully mostly).

  In order to create industrial quantities of serum you need to start with lots of horses and a similarly large amount of snake venom, which entails milking a lot of serpents. First you take a black mamba, boomslang or gaboon viper (the three most lethal specimens of their kinds). Then you take a glass or plastic receptacle over which a latex membrane has been stretched. You hold your snake firmly behind the head – this is important – which causes their fangs to project. Pierce the membrane with the fangs and then massage the venom glands that are located below and behind the eyes. The venom thus extracted is dried (freeze-dried these days) and then handled with great care in order to avoid inhalation.

  What they did at Onderstepoort is pretty much how it was first done by Albert Calmette, a French doctor working in Vietnam in the 1890s. Following a spate of cobra bites in the wake of a flood in Saigon when 40 of his patients died, he milked monocled cobras and injected judicious amounts into horses he had rounded up for the task. After allowing time for antibodies to be produced (following the published works of people like Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur), he drew blood from the horses and made a serum, which he then used with great success on snake-bite victims (presumably cobra ones).

  The stable building at Onderstepoort was bare red brick with a green corrugated-iron roof. The heavy timber rafters were exposed but the roof had a quaint roof lantern, a raised structure that ran the length of the central spine, which allowed light and fresh air to flood into what would otherwise have been a gloomy barn. The horses had soon relaxed into the daily routine of Karl Plaas, being well – if cavalierly – looked after by the grooms.

  Weekdays were workdays, with a precise schedule. It was a routine of needles: sedation, envenomation, waiting, blood extraction. It takes months for a new horse to start producing usable antibodies as they are slowly introduced to the various snake poisons. Some horses were given only one kind, some two, others as many as possible, and the resulting blood samples carefully monitored. Zulu seemed to be one of the more resilient subjects of the programme, so he was one of a small group of extra-special horses that was put on the tough “liquorice allsorts” poison plan. Tommy, once gelded, was another. Sturdy in both body and temperament.

  Weekends were free for the horses that had not been recently envenomed and were being monitored, and they ran untethered in the fields during the day. In summer they had to be back indoors before sunset when disease-carrying biting insects became active; in winter, before frost.

  The feed store was located at one end of the stables, always full of oats and lucerne to supplement their grazing along with bags of commercial feed supplement pellets. Without a ceiling, when warmed by the sun, a smell of baking bread would overlay the sweet-sour stable scents.

  The tack room alongside had the smell of leather, sweat and Dubbin, “redolent of cigar smoke and Shiraz” an epicure might pontificate. There was a barn for tractors and cutters and a store for general maintenance and cleaning paraphernalia. Beyond that were rather Spartan lodgings for the black staff. On Sunday mornings the horses knew the drill: the volume and duration of the noise coming from the staff quarters the previous night would determine the time they would be fed and let out of the stables.

  The exception was when the groom Oupa (an odd name to give a baby) was on duty; his father, Nimrod, had worked for Professor Theiler, founder of the institute. His grandfather, Obed, had apparently marched his son, Oupa’s father Nimrod, up to the door of the institute’s double oak entrance, knocked, insisted on speaking to “die baas” and stated simply that the boy was ready to start work immediately. The reticent first director of Onderstepoort just smiled and shook on it.

  Oupa did not party on Saturday nights, being a paid-up member of the teetotalling ZCC church, but he did love to dance. When Radio Bantu was turned to full volume he could not help but leap up and join in for a while, stomping to appreciative clapping in time to the African township beat in his heavy car-tyre-sole shoes.

  He displayed the obligatory silver star on a black felt swatch, worn proudly on his black military-style cap. When Oupa was on Sunday morning duty things ran like clockwork. Oupa’s son, Mpho Maponyane, called Maps, was a graduate of the Pretoria Technikon’s animal science department and later worked with Onderstepoort’s head of Equine Research Alec Gurney on his pet project, documenting the bloodlines of the country’s thoroughbred stock. The other 75 per cent of their time was taken up dealing with African horse sickness.

  In front of the old Edwardian building where the institute began, now sadly neglected in an administrative back yard of the campus, stands a statue of Arnold Theiler. Actually he is seated and he has both hands firmly attached.

  4

  The Cow boy

  AT THE TIME WHEN THE Bergsig horses arrived at Onderstepoort for the snake serum project, Ruff Stevens was a senior lecturer in equine sciences at the Pretoria Technikon. His job was, at least partly, to give his students a working knowledge of the animals. Each Wednesday afternoon they would board a bus and drive from the city northwards over the poort to the pastures beyond to get some real hands-on experience at Onderstepoort, a real veterinary school which at that time was the haunt of only white students. Although the old “net blankes/whites only” sign had been removed, it would take some years yet before internal structures of the old apartheid system would begin to crack.

  The tech students were all black and their bantu education had hardly equipped them for institutions of superior learning. Most of them had grown up in the townships, dark alter egos of each white town. They would not have had riding lessons let alone their own ponies. The first week of the course was weeding time where their tutor was expected to sort out the vets from the wets. Those with clearly no affinity for horses were smelled out: each student was expected to know the front from the back and what to do at each end.

  On the students’ first day at Karl Plaas, Ruff would lead one of the better-natured horses out from the stables to where the young people were gathered. It tended to be Tommy or one of the Boereperds, never any of the unpredictable Namibian stock. He tolerated Zulu but was not impressed with the black horse’s hoof defect he’d detected. The prospective students were as nervous of their lecturer as they were of the horses. Ruff always wore jeans, a khaki or checked shirt with a sleeveless leather singlet and a stockman’s hat. In his riding boots he stood around six foot six, staring down onto, as well as simply staring down the students. His name there was the Cowboy; he looked like one and he acted like one.

  “A horse is an animal with two ends,” he would begin. “Both are equally dangerous.” It was supposed to raise a laugh but the students, facing a white giant of a lecturer for the first time in their lives, were too intimida
ted to react. It was 1995 and democracy in South Africa was only a year old, so these were not yet the black “born frees” who would later enjoy the fruits of freedom and privilege.

  Still, they were among the intellectual elite of their generation. First the new arrivals would learn basic horse sense, concentrating on the head and mouth, and then the legs. How a horse’s lower leg, anatomically, is really a foot. They would learn about the need for grooming, checking hooves and regular farrier work, how to do basic medical examinations, how to walk a horse, basic schooling and, then, how to ride.

  Pretty much everything had to be taught from scratch. How to mount, how to hold the reins, how not to hurt the horse’s mouth.

  “You must not pull the reins up,” Ruff demonstrated. “A horse cannot go up, off the ground,” and he jumped comically. By this stage he might get a laugh or two.

  “Keep your hands down,” he demonstrated. “Pull back, into your guts, to stop. Pull sideways … no, keep those hands down, in your lap, now pull – gently – one side or the other.”

  Riding with one hand would come later, as would using a loose rein rather than pulling on the bit. The best would get to enjoy the freedom and joys of riding bareback, some even without reins, Indian style.

  “As soon as you touch those reins you are sending messages to the horse. Then it will send you messages back. You need to be aware of them and know what it is expecting you to do next. The horse is learning what kind of person you are by the way you ride.”

  That was a revelation because, for most, their most intimate interactions with animals up to that point would have been throwing stones at township mongrels.

  Slowly their riding was nuanced. Balancing, learning how to trot in order to save theirs and the horse’s backs, in sync with the rising and sitting.

  “It’s called rising to the trot,” the lecturer explained. “Each horse has its own pace and rhythm, but each conforms to the same count, one-two up, one-two down. Try to get the beat right. You should all know about the beat!”

  Ruff was born in Zimbabwe when the country was still known as Rhodesia – a pivotal red piece in the African puzzle that Cecil John Rhodes had dreamed of fitting into a colonial fiefdom. They, Ruff and his kind, still called themselves Rhodesians while others knew them as “when wes”. Even 20 years of civil war had not dimmed their belief that they had been born to rule the darker masses of Africa. They sought out their own kind to drink and reminisce about when we did this and when we did that.

  Ruff watched each student closely. Their posture, their rhythm, timid or confident, jerky or smooth, bully or ally. How they handled the enormous and unexpected power in a horse’s body.

  Back at the stable yard he would demonstrate: “Horses can’t talk, you know. You are supposed to be the intelligent species, so use it!”

  Stones or thorns could get stuck under the hooves, burrs in manes and tails – “a tail is a horse’s limb for reaching hard-to-get-to places, so it needs to be kept in good condition”.

  “Flies and miggies love their eyes, and that drives a horse crazy. Always make sure they are clear of muck.

  “Horses have soft soles inside the outer hoof wall, look closely,” he explained to the crowd, picking up a hoof and pushing on the spongy tissue. “The outer wall, which we think of as the hoof, needs to be kept at an even length all the way around the sole.

  “Some of you, at least those of you who graduate, are likely to work in the townships or on farms where you see this kind of thing, and worse. You might be the only professional they ever get to see, so do it right.

  “Be careful when scraping the sole and always use a hoof pick, never a knife or any piece of metal that comes to hand. How would you like someone to scrape a wound on the sole of your foot with a piece of rusty iron?”

  They laughed but got the point.

  “The back of the hoof, this triangular bit,” he pointed out, “is called the frog. It is soft and needs to be protected by the surrounding hoof. Each hoof is different and needs to be shod differently. That’s why farriers have jobs. As vets you’ll have to check when a horse needs a manicure because they walk and run on their toenails. They can also get ingrown nails, just like us.” A few sniggers.

  “Basically, you are looking for …” he picked up the demonstration horse’s front hoof. “Look at the bars on either side of the frog, these are very pronounced. See how I can lift them with my finger. It’s not a deformity, some horses just have large ones.”

  A ripple of giggling moved through the group but the lecturer was not privy to the joke about “some men”.

  “And look out for fungal growth,” he told them. “You’ll get to see lots of that where animals are kept in dirty conditions. You’d be surprised how many people walk around with huge fungal growths between their toes ….”

  “Ugh!” in unison.

  “Horses cannot clean their own feet so we have to do it for them. And look out for abscesses and cracks.”

  “How do you tell an abscess?” It was the first time a question was asked, clearly the students’ confidence was building.

  “You look for any spot that just does not look right, does not have a matching spot on the other side. They are usually darker and they look sore. A healthy hoof looks healthy, and if it doesn’t it usually isn’t. It is common sense, but you find out that common sense is actually not so very common. We have to learn it.”

  Ruff sent one of the students to fetch Zulu from his stall. He was led out to the brick-paved yard.

  “Look closely at the hooves, can you see anything different?”

  No response. Everything looked peachy.

  “He’s got one box foot, can you tell which one? The front ones, look more carefully.” They looked more carefully.

  “The right one, the hoof band is thicker than the others, can you see it? It is not necessarily a problem, but it can be. Some breeders consider it to be a deformity and if a foal is born with a box hoof they’ll put it down.”

  “Why?” asked one female student.

  “Because, one way or another, whether riding or pulling, every horse has to earn its keep. A horse that cannot work has no value.”

  Ruff was the kind of person you would want by your side under fire or facing down an elephant charge, but his social graces could be lacking. He spared little sentiment for other humans. Also, although he knew his forelock from his fetlock, he did not think horses were intelligent beings.

  “They let us ride them, for goodness sake. You have to show them who’s boss.”

  His academic counterpart at Onderstepoort, Alec Gurney, was altogether more empathetic. Yes, he would agree, but they have a sneaky habit of making us want to go where they do. Gurney had observed that Zulu had taken his place as the natural leader at Karl Plaas and that, with mares being absent so as to avoid the fierce competition it aroused, there was very little real infighting among the herd of stallions and geldings.

  “To keep things tidy,” as Gurney saw it, “you don’t want to spend your days sorting out horse relationships when what you are trying to do is keep things simple so you can do some real science.” Ruff also disliked things that weren’t neat and straight. He could see that Zulu was temperate and well-schooled, but he failed to understand why everyone else seemed to favour him.

  “I only use him in classes to show the students the downside of horses,” he confided to Gurney. “He’d make a good riding horse, until he wouldn’t.”

  The Onderstepoort man raised an eyebrow.

  It was Ruff who first noticed that some of the horses in the stable at Karl Plaas had started cribbing. Fire seemed to be the worst. Horses are funny things and they seem to have a collective consciousness. You could call it a kind of mass hysteria. One starts doing something and the others follow. For no sooner had Fire started gnashing at his stable door than others followed suit.

  “Got to ride them more,” Ruff told Gurney one Wednesday. The reality was that some horses were being ridden fairly
regularly but others not at all and they were getting tetchy. Even though he was not directly involved in the place, Ruff took it upon himself to remedy the situation by scheduling extra riding lessons for his tech students. It sorted out the problem.

  Some of the horses at Onderstepoort did not particularly like humans. They came from dubious backgrounds and were constantly being herded into crush pens where their ears and manes would be yanked, needles jabbed into their necks and flanks. They were known to kick, bite, stomp on feet, run, throw and even break the arm of a rough and careless student. They had come from anywhere and everywhere and were as a rule the consequence of anything from neglect to cruelty.

  “From the rich and poor alike,” Gurney observed.

  In other words, from families where the persistent daughter was given a foal for her birthday and had had to bring it up on her own, on only apples and unconditional love. That was never good for a horse. But it was far better than those that had come from the ghettos where the cart horses were treated no better than dogs.

  The Stevens family farm was in the dry western area near Bulawayo, grassland bordering on arid Kalahari, where he had learned the ways of the wild in the company of his siblings and their black playmates, the descendants of Mzilikazi’s impis. As tots they played with clay oxen and wagons made of dolosse, cattle vertebrae. As soon as they could run they learned to make klei latte, green swatches with which to fling clay clods at one another. Next came sjamboks and cattle whips, which created intense competition as to who could crack one the loudest. But in true colonial tradition, as soon as they became of school-going age, white kids were rent from the company of their black brethren.

  Like a Boer child of old, Ruff had learned to shoot a rifle and ride a horse before he had lost his milk teeth. He was a man of the bush more than a man of the town and he suffered the shortcomings of humans with far less tact than he did those of horses. Ruff was a natural horseman and before he had finished high school he was representing his country in junior events. But, as was the custom of the times, the day he finished school his military father asked him in the nicest possible way to pack his bags and get a life.