Running Wild Read online

  After obligatory military service, Ruff headed for England with a letter of recommendation. While working as a groom for Lord and Lady Nathan on their estate, Collyers Farm, near Lickfold in Sussex, he spent three years plying the medieval jousting circuits of Europe. Riding as the rebel knight Sir Ironhoe, with a boar’s head on his shield, he dented many an opponent’s shield and many a lady’s reputation. After-tournament parties resembled medieval banquets.

  “We rode hard during the day, and even harder at night,” he later recalled with a chuckle.

  During that time he earned a Master in Horsemanship and did a farrier’s apprenticeship. Zimbabwe under draconian President Mugabe offered him little, so he returned to South Africa and spent the next sojourn of his still young life as a meat bomb – as members of the elite maroon-bereted parachute battalion referred to themselves. To everyone else they were Parabats and you gave them respect and your seat in the canteen.

  His first job once out of the military was at the Medical University of South Africa, Medunsa, a university restricted to black students under apartheid segregation, as a veterinarian farm manager. Like all institutions for black people at that time, Medunsa had minimal facilities, so they relied for much of their means on Onderstepoort. That was Ruff’s first encounter with the place, where the discriminatory whites-only students referred to him, his colleagues and their black students as me-dunces.

  For the first three months, before he managed to squirrel away enough money for an iskoroskoro, a rattletrap, he would run to work and back home. Parabat training never went to waste. But a car gave him more freedom and it allowed him to take up eventing again, which would remain his real passion throughout his life. It was at a fundraiser event in Kyalami, a horsey heaven in the peri-urban fields north of Joburg, that he met Lois.

  She was eye-turning gorgeous and she rendered him short of breath. She was tall and graceful, long dark brown hair … imagine the most beautiful tall, slim, smiling young woman you can and that was Lois. He followed her around the circuit and she seemed bemused by his attention.

  “It was game, set and match on day one,” Ruff would later muse, “and we were married within a year.” She came with several hectares in Kyalami and a stable full of horses, some for eventing and some for her passion, Riding for the Disabled. Then, somewhat more bitterly, “It’s amazing when you see someone like that, to think that later you wish you’d never met them.”

  A patina of bravado masked the scar tissue. What the relationship did for him, in a more profound way, was to moderate his chauvinistic ego and basically rescue him from sliding into a life of undiluted misogynism.

  There was a side project at Medunsa that kept Ruff there way after his sell-by date. A Professor Boyzofel had his own Arab stud on the university grounds which brought in very good pocket money. In Ruff the senior academic acquired a silent partner and a stud manager of exceptional quality. However, when the call came from an old army connection who was kick-starting a department of equine sciences at the nearby Pretoria Technikon, Ruff jumped horses mid-stream. The next few years were spent doing very much the same thing, teaching black students how to be vets.

  Late in 1996, Alec Gurney, having recently completed his PhD at Onderstepoort mapping the thoroughbred line in South Africa, received an unexpected visitor. It was Garth du Preez, the manager of Mashatu Game Reserve in the Tuli Block, just across the Limpopo in Botswana. The reserve had recently come under the directorship of a dynamic young team whose mission was to take Mashatu out of the sticks and put it on the international safari map.

  At that time it could not compete with the more luxurious game lodges in places like the Sabi Sands or the Okavango Delta, so they decided to go for a different market. They were going to offer adventure safaris – walking, mountain biking and horse riding. The only problem was that no one there knew much about riding.

  “Go and speak to the people at Onderstepoort,” MD Ewan Davidson barked down the phone line to his man on the ground, Du Preez. “I’ve heard they know a thing or two about horses.”

  Gurney knew the game manager from his time doing a PhD on elephant population dynamics, the field work of which was done at Mashatu.

  “I can tell you what parasites are in its blood,” Gurney told his visitor. “We’re just horse scientists here, doesn’t mean we ride the things. For that you need to speak to the Cowboy.”

  “Where do I find him?”

  “Here, but not today because it’s Tuesday. He’ll be here tomorrow, because it’s Wednesday.”

  “If you can wait I can put you up at my place tonight, we can go out to the Dros for a couple of frosties and some slabs of cow. He works at the Tech and brings his students over each Wednesday to teach them about horses, but more generally to rough them up a bit, get some real African dust under their African skins.”

  The last thing Gurney said to Du Preez on bidding him goodnight was: “Ruff was born on a horse. In the bush. So, from that point of view he’s your perfect man. But what he really is, is a loose cannon.”

  “I guess you’d have to be to make a go of the horse safari thing,” said Du Preez to himself as he slid into alcohol-induced dreamland.

  During that period Stevens was riding his mealie off and doing very well at three-day eventing. Life on the outside was good but work sucked. He had been with the Tech for several years but was getting nowhere professionally. The problem was that, not only was he an Engelsman, but also an uitlander, and the Afrikaners who ran things did not like either very much. They had not finished fighting the Boer War even as they were busy fighting the African War.

  The call of the wild was already ringing loudly in his ears when Ruff took the weekend off to attend horse trials across the border in Gaborone, capital of Botswana, about four hours’ drive northwest of Pretoria. He won the event on the Sunday, narrowly beating an old army pal of his, Sluice Blewitt, so that night was a write-off. Gaborone nearly ran out of beer.

  Arriving back at the office the next day he walked in late for the Monday morning faculty meeting. Immediately, as he sat down, the head of department, a dour, overweight bureaucrat, started picking on him. Ruff just absorbed it while the rest of the faculty kept a close watch, expecting an explosion at any moment.

  But Ruff was writing something on an exam pad so the head man thought he was sucking it up and actually taking notes and, as bullies will, kept on nit-picking. No one really took any notice when he tore out the page and started folding it. Until he launched the paper aeroplane. There was complete silence as everyone watched it arc through the chilled atmosphere, land on the head’s desk, bounce once on his desk pad and come to rest right up against his belly. The man picked it up, opened it and read the short message, which said, “As of right now, I resign.”

  “No, you can’t,” spluttered the enraged man. “You have to give a month’s notice.”

  “Yes, I can. You have never seen fit to put me on permanent staff so I only have to give you one day’s notice. That’s it,” he said, pointing to his airmail delivery.

  Ruff stood up with a brass band blaring in his head but acting completely calmly and in a measured voice said: “Please arrange to have my pension and outstanding leave pay ready for me to collect next week Monday.”

  Then he turned on his boot heels and the Cowboy left the building.

  As he drove back home all the weight of the world seemed to lift. He found his wife at the paddock, where he knew she would be, and shouted as he approached.

  “Looks like we’re going into the horse safari business sweetheart.”

  “Who’s we, Pale Face?” she asked, as she kissed him.

  The pay-out amounted to R75 000, a small fortune back then. There followed weeks of phone calls back and forth between Kyalami and the Tuli and within a week the urban cowboy was well on his way to becoming a bush cowboy. The biggest dollop of luck was learning that the partners in the snake serum project had come to an impasse and Onderstepoort would be selling off horses
from Karl Plaas. Alec Gurney said Ruff could have first choice.

  Then Ruff went shopping. He bought an old army Bedford truck and a horse trailer and started his rounds searching for affordable stock and tack. Tight as he was by nature, the one thing he did not skimp on was saddles. He bought 20 new Australian stock saddles from Trident Saddlery located near the Turffontein Racecourse for R1 000 each, more than he paid for all but one of his horses.

  He bought coils of riempie, dried strips of leather that were the bush equivalent of duct tape, and punch pliers for leatherwork. For hoof care he bought double-sided hoof knives, farrier nails, nipper hoof cutters, to add to the bits and pieces of his own equipment. He even remembered bott knives for digging fly eggs out of horses’ legs.

  Saddle racks and much besides would have to be made with newcut mopane poles and windfall leadwood logs on site. But he had to buy new numnahs and saddle blankets, head collars with fly masks (midges tended to bite around the ears and eyes), bridles, curry combs, tick grease, fly sprays, veterinary rubs and salves and gels and pastes. He had to buy reins, stirrup irons, stirrup leathers, halters, bits, bridle hooks and bridle bags. Stable forks and buckets.

  When Lois found him rummaging around in her stables (they remained her stables), she gave him a proprietorial dressing down. So off he went again in search of hay nets and feed bags, feed trays, feed scoops and poop scoops, hay forks and mucking shovels. The rest of the horse katunda he would have to buy, beg or borrow, while for building tools and materials he would have to rely on the stores and goodwill of Mashatu.

  By the end of that two-week spree his stash was noticeably lighter and he still did not own a single horse of his own.

  5

  The Limpopo Valley

  MASHATU PRIVATE GAME RESERVE IS the largest concession in the Northern Tuli Game Reserve, a large chunk of natural bush that is bordered on the south by the “great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River” of Kipling’s Just So stories. A wedge is formed where the Shashe River, coming from the north, meets the Limpopo and where they meet so do Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

  Climatically the region verges on desert. On the South African side it was considered unsuitable for white farmers to chance their luck, until diamonds were found there. The rivers flow mostly with sand and only seasonally with water after heavy summer rains. When they do flow the water arrives with short warning and great ferocity, carrying a froth of flotsam at the tip of their tongues consisting of grass and twigs, insects, plastic bottles and flip-flops. These are followed by uprooted trees, animals caught in the surging waters and occasionally a human body.

  It is arid and harsh, where one wet year is usually followed by seven dry. Then the brittle ground crackles like ancient parchment, crumbling to fine dust when touched by hand, foot or hoof. Tuli is a local word that means dust. Another is pula, meaning rain. When pula falls, humans and animals alike dance in celebration. The tuli forms mud and rivers that have lain dormant for dreadful months on end suddenly flow in angry brown eddies. Pula is so important it is the name of the Botswanan currency. Money and blood have the same name, madi. There is a local idiom that Madi ya Botswana ka Pula – the money (blood) of Botswana is pula (rain).

  In summer the rain that does fall comes mostly in violent storms. You can sit on a sandstone ridge above the valley and watch the drama. Thunder clouds bruise purple until they can hold no more and they rupture. The water falls in great grey shrouds towards the desperate, dying earth. But here nature often plays cruel tricks. By the end of October the land is so parched and hot it feels like a vast frying griddle. That is when sometimes, before the rain can quench the supplicant ground, hot air rising from the furnace ground vaporises it and it vanishes in mid-air. Maybe a few cold, teasing plops splatter on the ground, only to evaporate as you watch them.

  There was a phantom rainstorm over the hot Limpopo Valley as Ruff nursed his old Bedford forwards. Like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath he was searching for a promised land. Except instead of human companions Ruff had a load of horses to share it with. He called his truck 20/80 “because it goes 20 uphill but can get up to 80 down a mine shaft”.

  Nailed to a marula tree near the diesel pump at Dendron, the last stop before he would be enveloped by the endless mopane woodlands of the Limpopo Valley, was a rusted Ford hubcap with crude hand-lettering. While the tank was being filled Ruff sauntered over and chuckled when he read: “The land of milk and honey” around the top curve, and “just bring your own cows and bees” along the bottom.

  He knew that from there to the border the land would dip imperceptibly and become progressively hotter and drier. He made sure his first cargo-load of safari horses had enough to drink because it would be hours before they decamped at their new home across the river in Botswana. They were his most precious possessions and consisted of the four he had bought from Onderstepoort, namely Zulu and his three oldest companions, Fire, Tommy and Ironsides.

  Ruff had winced at the price that Alec Gurney had extracted from him, for both men knew their value to the start-up safari man. Ruff knew he had little option but to cough up if he was going to start on a solid footing with horses he knew would be reliable, the kind you could throw any palooka on to and not have to fret that one of them would screw up. At least he knew the horses would not. Ruff could afford only three and chose Fire, Tommy and Ironsides but Gurney had insisted he take all four if he wanted a deal. He couldn’t refuse.

  From Dendron it took an hour to reach Rhodes Drift border post. Ruff parked the trailer under a spreading mashatu tree on the riverbank, which was just as well because it took a further two to clear customs. Botswana was, is, a major beef exporter to Europe and has stringent foot-and-mouth disease controls. The paperwork was monumental and the reservoir of ink needed to fill them in and stamp them all oceanic.

  Mashatu general manager Garth du Preez had selected the spot for the new operation and was waiting for Ruff at the Botswana customs building (he always arrived with a full cooler box in order to facilitate smooth passage for his staff and clients).

  “Far enough away from the main safari lodge not to encounter our game drives. So you can’t hold them up and steal their jewellery,” the general manager grinned as he extended a hand to Ruff. “Good luck.”

  And then suddenly they were there, Limpopo Valley Horse Safaris. Ruff led the four horses down the trailer ramp and looked around for the two helpers Du Preez had assured him would be there on the day, but they were not to be seen. More loads of horses would have to be transported later from their holding paddock at Kyalami but right now he had to begin a new camp, a new life.

  The weeks preceding his arrival had been spent scouring the country for affordable and remotely suitable stock (if it’s breathing it can be ridden he would say). He visited horse breeders and traders; he called in at horse-meat butchers and abattoirs and even ventured into townships to look at cart horses, usually skeletal Saddlers that were covered with sores beneath crusts of flies. One thing he knew when he saw it was a good horse, no matter how badly neglected it might appear at the time.

  For Ruff Stevens there were two kinds of women: those he wanted to bed and those he did not. For him there were also just two kinds of horses: those he wanted to ride and those he did not. Horses were easier because you weren’t expected to talk to them afterwards. Then there was the beer factor which got you to do things like dance badly, sing too loud and pick up “five-beer women”. Or buying second-rate horses when you were desperate.

  When buying horses for his embryonic safari business, Ruff was not looking for horses he wanted to ride, but for horses that would be rideable by just about anyone else. “Hussies,” he called them. They would have to be tough, first of all, to put up with the rigours of bush life. But they would also have to have good bearing since he could expect to host good riders from around the world. He couldn’t put them on hags and expect them to return, or advise their friends to.

  There was one breed of horse in southern Afric
a that fitted the profile almost perfectly, the Boereperd. They were stockier than regal and tougher than any fancy riding horse, of the type used by the Boer forces during the Anglo-Boer War. The relatively small and under-equipped Boer forces’ ability to endure against the British army for three years was in no small part attributable to their tough-as-taaibos horses.

  None of the Onderstepoort four excited Ruff as riding horses, excepting maybe Fire, but he was too feral in the Cowboy’s eyes. When he spoke of “riding” he really meant eventing, for which you needed something more refined than a farm horse. For Ruff physique was everything, in horses as in women. Brains were all very well but half a brain would do just as well.

  Nice character would also be handy, requiring less maintenance, but was not on his list of “must haves”. Which partially explained much of the troubles in his life with both women and horses. He would overlook the real stars of his stable, such as Zulu and Tommy, preferring to focus his attention on high-maintenance horses like the refined but haughty Moyeni.

  Most of his horses ended up costing between R200 and R400 but Moyeni (the name meant air or wind) had come at the much heftier price of R2 000. Ruff would sometimes joke that he’d once won a race, by mistake. When he saw the big dark bay he knew he had to have it. He’d found it through an advert in Farmer’s Weekly: “Good riding horse, only one owner …” Yeah, yeah, thought Ruff, just a little TLC needed, as he drove through the leafy streets of Morningside where property boundaries seemed to go on and on and behind hedges and walls you saw glimpses of swimming pools, tennis courts, and occasionally a paddock with jumps.

  When he pulled up to a smallholding with the number he had been given he was met by the master of the spread; beyond in a white-poled corral he could see a horse with its head and tail held erect, legs lifted high as it trotted towards the fence. Sixteen hands Ruff reckoned. From day one it was his favourite lead horse.