Running Wild Page 7

  By the time they’d drained their second beers the owner had explained why he was selling. The horse had been his daughter’s and she had been a good rider and horse carer, until her first year at college. A new Beetle and boyfriend were the end of all that. One Saturday night she had arrived home in a miniskirt so short that as she staggered out of the car he could see she was not wearing underwear. He also noticed a tattoo where no stranger’s hand should go. The next day she lost her car, her apartment in town and her allowance. On the Monday morning he called.

  “Farmer’s Weekly advertising department, how can we help you?” a pert East Rand voice answered.

  From a dealer in Volksrust he brokered a “three for the price of two”, taking his cue from dealings with the bookie-wise professor at Onderstepoort. Most notable among them was a huge horse at 17 hands and a few fingers, a bay Clydesdale named Frankie. Ruff gave him the stable name of Frankenstein when the horse tried to nip him while being led out of his pen and onto the trailer. It turned out Frankie had had a sore in the corner of his mouth, but Ruff was slow to forgive. Frankie turned out to be among the more laid-back horses in the Limpopo Valley herd.

  “Those two,” the trader pointed to Frankie and a grey Shire-cross elephant-size mount appropriately named Ndlovu, “were headed to Zimbabwe to pull a cart.”

  Frankie became a star horse until a day when he was pushed too hard, while Ndlovu never really took to safari life and slowly lost condition. If it wasn’t the animals breaking cover in front of him that gave him the bejibbers, it was the over-rich feed that caused him to develop colic.

  Next was a call to a horse breeder (some said rustler) on the Pongola River, the border between the farmers of KwaZulu on one side and Swaziland on the other. If the heat turned up he could skip over into Swaziland where it was said he had fathered a small tribe of café au lait offspring.

  “Several wives,” they nodded over coffee and rusks in conservative Paulpietersburg.

  The man said he needed the space for fresh blood coming in.

  Only males, Ruff insisted. “I’ll have my hands full without having to deal with horse love issues.”

  With them came a chilled 15-hand Boereperd gelding with no name. Not all horse dealers are horse lovers, some are more like slave traders. Which is why so many slave-descended Coloured people in the Cape are named January, February and so on. That was usually the month in which their ship docked. Ruff named him on the spot – Pongola, after the river on whose bank they were negotiating. On safari Pongola proved to be extremely sure-footed but was prone to wandering.

  Last of that bunch was an Appaloosa, but this time the salesman had a name.

  “Bought him from a Coolie, was why I named him. Geronimo,” the man said smugly.

  Ruff did not bother to explain the difference between an Asian Indian trader in nearby Wasbank and a rebel Native American chief. Fools and drunks, as his father would say, were not worth arguing with.

  No doubt its colouring stood out and would attract undue attention for the slave-horse trader. Ruff had not wanted the mottled, flea-bitten horse but the deal was too good to refuse. Geronimo had not been well cared for. His hooves were uneven and his mane and tail tangled. He must have come from stock shipped out from the United Sates during the Anglo-Boer War, Ruff figured.

  After delivering the second load of horses across the border along with hay, tack and tools, Ruff did a final sweep of the butchers and abattoirs he knew. First this time came Rasta, whose mane and tail were so matted Ruff half expected to see a joint between his lips. Pale Face was a Palomino and Ruff could not believe anyone would want to turn such an attractive animal into dog food. Bazooka, a liver chestnut with a white face, earned his name when he shot out of the stable door the moment it was opened and disappeared into the surrounding veld.

  Which was how Ruff came to find poor old Socks.

  “Want to buy a horse cheap-cheap, boss?” asked one of the casual staff who helped round up Bazooka and load him onto the trailer.

  When Ruff put his head inside the dark, rancid hovel it took some time before he could make out the starving strawberry roan standing backed up against the far wall. He was hardly a hair taller than 14 hands and just four years old but had already been retired as a cart horse “because he just cannot pull anymore” the back-yard coal merchant explained. Ruff had to kick away a pile of dirt to get the door fully open and inside the gloomy stall he could see why.

  “What the hell is that?” he shook his head slowly.

  “Just two-fifty rands. I think it’s a freak horse,” said its owner, unsteady on his own two feet.

  Ruff glared at him until the man began to shuffle.

  “Okay, 200 then kla, hey?”

  “You’re the freak,” growled Ruff. “Have you got any tools?”

  The owner disappeared and came back with a broken hacksaw blade.

  “Is that all?”

  “S’all boss.”

  In the blink of an eye Ruff had ripped off a piece of the man’s shirt. The man just stood, his eyes growing wider. Ruff wrapped the cloth around one end of the blade and edged into the stall. The place was not only dark but so putrid and so thick with flies Ruff’s first instinct was to gag. But the horseman in him took hold. The thing’s pelvis and ribs were not so much showing as almost poking right through its scabby skin. But worst of all were its hooves with nails like those of Indian fakirs who never cut their fingernails so they grow in whorls around their hands.

  Ruff whispered sweet kind nothings in the young horse’s ear, then lifted a hoof onto his thigh. He could buy new jeans. It looked like a surreal incarnation of one of the winged-footed horses of Roman mythology. One by one he cut off as much of the hooves as he could.

  “We’ll have to clean you up back at the farm, old chap,” he told the horse. He threw two R100 notes into the dirty stall, pushed the man to the ground and gently led the horse out to the trailer without saying another word.

  Socks was the smallest of the herd, the word dainty came to mind. When standing next to Ironsides, Frankie or Ndlovu, you could imagine he was not exactly of the same species. In evolutionary biology it has been noted that there is often more anatomical variance within a species than between two closely related ones. For example, all dog breeds are one species, whether German shepherd or miniature poodle and both, all, are descended from wolves. Consequently, German shepherds and wolves are evolutionary cousins, not brothers or sisters.

  Once the horses were all delivered safely to their new home in Botswana, Ruff had to wait a few days before the help he’d been promised began to pitch up on the backs of rattletrap bakkies and on clunky old dikwiel bicycles. He slept the first few nights cowboy-style, on the ground beside a roaring fire. He didn’t know what animals might be around but he did know scorpions would be scuttling round in the night so he stuffed his socks into his boots.

  The horses were tied to a long line and that was when the pushing and shoving began. Natural extroverts like Fire, Moyeni and Pongola pushed their weight around, while the more reserved horses, including Zulu and Tommy, stood back as the pecking order was being established. With Ironsides and Tommy as his allies, Zulu created his own circle and life in the paddock settled down to a working standoff. In that first year there would be no lock-up stables, starting with just lengths of rope strung tree to tree to create a delineated corral area. Enormous Frankie and Ndlovu kept to themselves and did not get involved in stable politics.

  The next thing to do was get the diesel generator going so they could pump water up from the riverbed into a green JoJo tank. Once Ruff had put his new team on to the task of cutting mopane logs (the default building material of safari lodges) he set off back to South Africa on a shopping trip to Pietersburg (later Polokwane) to get supplies to feed and build a camp.

  He ordered new safari tents as well as camp beds, mattresses, folding chairs and tables. In time they would make better stuff from fallen timber picked up around camp. The camp technolog
y was pretty much farm-learned. Paraffin lamps, two long-drop toilets – his and hers, where “hers” had a canvas camp chair with a hole neatly cut out of the centre of the seat, and “his”, where you sat when you needed to on an elephant’s lower jawbone. Donkey boilers, for heating water, consisted of 44-gallon water drums on top of a wood fire. It was all really bush but it worked just fine.

  The cool room was an ace bit of bush Heath Robinson engineering: old cooldrink crates filled with charcoal formed the walls of a shed that supported the main water tank, from which water trickled down to keep the charcoal permanently saturated. As it evaporated it cooled the interior on the same physical principle as a fridge – by drawing off heat energy. But in the scorching summer temperatures you still needed minus-40°C chest freezers in the kitchen for meat and the other perishables. Until the cash started flowing in they ate African style – putu and nyama.

  While the camp was being built two of the vital positions were filled as if by the guiding spirits of Africa. First was the arrival of a wizened Bushman named Money, who soon became Moany. He was forever grumbling about this groom or that horse, or a guest who had had the impudence to interfere when setting up their mount for riding.

  Moany could have been 40 or 400, it was impossible to tell. But he knew everything there was to know about being a groom. “Worked for a farmer,” was all he told Ruff when he arrived on foot, across the veld, and declared he was going to work there. The one downside to Moany was his predilection for the bottle that frequently left Ruff exasperated and more than once nearly broke. Every Monday the bow-legged man would arrive for work like a giraffe with three legs.

  His new name came about from an incident as his earlier one probably had. One day when he arrived for work with a worse than usual hangover, the guide Sparkie quipped that he moaned like an unpaid whore.

  With quick Australian wit he added: “You know Moany, it’s hard to tell the difference between a ray of sunshine and a grumpy Bushman.”

  The little wrinkled man bent over giggling and the day was saved.

  The other was Joyce, a cook of exceptional talent who could turn out not only fresh seed loaf but anything from baked Alaska to Thai green curry from her oven made in a hollowed-out termite mound behind the kitchen tent. She had worked at a top lodge in Maun but when she heard about this new horse safari operation she had hopped on a bus and headed south. She could not explain why. It took her two days to get to the Tuli fence where she had waited and instructed the first vehicle to pass to take her to the new camp. You could say in the early years that she singlehandedly kept the place afloat.

  The idea had been that Ruff would set up the camp and once it was running more or less smoothly, Lois would join him. During that time she would distribute brochures at horse events and correspond with riding organisations. She had smart brochures made with the name and a natty logo – two horseshoes and a baobab tree – that she handed or sent out to everyone she could. But things never did get to run smoothly in “the valley”.

  There were times when Ruff collapsed into bed after midnight feeling like the farmer he’d seen in some literary movie Lois had dragged him to see. Ruff felt like he too was caught in the eye of a storm that was carrying away his barn and his sheep. It was always one thing after another. If it wasn’t hyenas stealing cooler boxes from the kitchen, or eating guests’ riding boots, it was drunken staff or, worse, an empty camp with rising costs and diminishing cash flow.

  To help keep costs down and admin to a minimum, as fast as they applied Ruff took on three-month wonders for camp staff and stable hands – young interns from abroad who did not need work permits and who actually paid for the privilege of working in the bush. They were young people, mostly women, from South Africa, Australia and England, occasionally France, Sweden or Brazil, all in search of adventure.

  Inevitably there was also an excess of partying and “khaki fever”. More than one had to be packed off back home for indiscretions that included excessive intoxication, relationship conflicts and neglect of the horses. The camp rule was you could do what you wanted after hours so long as you did not scare the guests or the horses.

  “You always feed and water your horse before you indulge yourself,” Ruff would warn them on arrival.

  The main source of trouble was khaki fever: no matter what their age, when female guests (and sometimes it should be noted, male) saw the virile young rangers – there were only men in those early days – in khaki they seemed to lose all sense of decorum.

  It was khaki fever that led to their first marketing misadventure.

  6

  Lady Godiva

  SENIOR GUIDE HARVEY, WHO HAD worked his way around the horse safari business, came up with the bright idea of appealing to young riders in the UK. So they sent out emissaries to BUCS, the British Universities and Colleges Sports equestrian events organisation based at the Coventry University Equestrian Centre. Make a hit with them, he reckoned, and every young rider and their travel agent in the UK would be on board.

  It has been observed that people who work with horses, much like those who work with dogs (Walkies!), tend to be bossy at best, peculiar at worst, often both. So it did not cause an untoward stir when Ms Bossy Boots from Coventry Equestrian Centre arrived for a look-see. Typically a safari group consists of up to eight clients and two guides. Ms Coventry joined a mixed group of couples and singles, with Sparkie the former Australian stockman as lead guide on Zulu and Big Masego – a guide-in-training – riding back-up rifle on Pongola (there was also the cook Small Joe who would, in time, become a lead guide as well as one of Botswana’s top eventers).

  After a quick cup of coffee and rusks around the campfire they set off at sunrise and rode towards Nel’s Vlei to watch a herd of elephants drinking. On the way they passed a fallen apple-leaf tree where a family of hyenas had set up a den in the hole beneath the root tangle. The carnivores were lying in the open, waiting for the sun to warm them and they hardly stirred as the posse rode by.

  It was a great place to canter and gallop and after two hours the riders were tiring. A halt was called around mid-morning among a scatter of fallen leadwood logs surrounded by crotons. Guest riders were not nannied but left to dismount on their own and tie up their horses where they could easily graze. Big Joe signalled to Sparkie that one of the party was missing and pointed past a clump of croton bushes.

  Sparkie walked Zulu slowly around the tall green bushes. He was just starting to worry when he came upon a sight that would go down as one of the great legends of the Limpopo Valley. There was Pale Face munching contentedly while Ms Coventry lay stretched out on a log, boots on, jodhpurs unzipped, waistcoat, blouse and bra laid neatly across the trunk. When she saw him she gave him a snaggle-toothed leer and said: “What took you so long soldier? Let’s do what they do in the jungle.”

  He tried to but could not suppress a sharp laugh, which rather spoiled the moment. She really was not his type. But a lady does not like to be denied, naked and unrequited in the African wilderness. Without another word she stood up, with astonishing dexterity dressed, untied her horse and cantered away while Sparkie was left to bring up the rear. He knew he was in for trouble when he came across items of her clothing strewn over the ground.

  “He tried to take advantage of me …” Sparkie heard the breathy protestations as he rode up to the nonplussed group. You could barely see Big Joe for the reflection from his dazzling radiator grin.

  “Let’s keep the drama down to a minimum, shall we,” said the stockman. “We can still enjoy the rest of the ride and sort this out back at camp.”

  Back at camp the spurned woman played her part well. Ruff needed her business but she was also ruining the camp mood. To say the lady doth protest too much would hardly do justice to her virtuoso performance. Needless to say they did not receive a flood of young British riders and the business struggled on. The tale of Lady Godiva, as the BUCS woman was ever thereafter remembered, was told for many years around the camp fires of
Mashatu.

  By the end of his first year in the valley Ruff was running crazy. He was too busy putting out fires to keep track of things properly, not least of all the march of time and all the water flowing under his own domestic bridge. And so he eventually heard from his wife that she would not be joining him. Ever. Ruff reflected to his colleagues one night around the fire: “When the alpha male is away another male lion will move in to his territory.”

  He could hardly object since he had enjoyed a brief fling with one of the interns. It happens in the country just as much as in the town.

  But what concerned him even more was the number of horses he was losing. The main cause was African horse sickness but it was not the only one. One of the start-up horses he’d saved from the butcher’s block was stolen but later found at a cattle station with his legs bound so tightly most of the tendons in his front legs had torn. The thief was identified and given 21 lashes at the kgotla, or tribal court, but Ruff had had to shoot Impi right in the kraal where he found him.

  Having survived the great storm, Rasta was also stolen and never seen again. After that Ruff made his own branding iron and every one of his horses from that day forward wore a large and proud horseshoe and LVHS (for Limpopo Valley Horse Safaris) on its rump. In time Ndlovu seemed to deteriorate for no apparent reason until he could no longer be ridden. Ruff was getting ready to shoot him when one morning Moany found him and announced: “Dat elephant horse of yours,” a short toothless giggle, “he gone to elephant heaben.”

  It turned out he had not quite, but could never again be ridden. One of the grooms bought him for 100 pula and made an extra 100 when he sold him on to a cart-horse salesman who plied the dusty cattle stations of the region.

  Kalahari was a Hanoverian-cross who had come with the batch of horses from Namibia to bolster waning numbers. He was done in by his own enormous power in perhaps the most bizarre incident to befall horse and rider at Mashatu. Kalahari had already been attacked by a leopard when he was a foal and had broad scars across his lower neck. Guests James and his wife Jane were both schooled in the classical tight-rein tradition and James, an experienced rider, was on Kalahari.