Sand rivers Read online

  In 1860, the German explorer von der Decken, who gave his name to the common hornbill of this region, complained about the lack of game in this southern country - very likely, a direct consequence of the ivory trade and the great slaving caravans that were still passing between Kilwa and Lake Nyasa. The ivory hunter Jim Sutherland took some elephants along the Luwegu River in 1912, but traditionally they remained scarce in southeastern Tanzania until the advent of the British, whom the elephants were popularly believed to have accompanied from parts unknown. Yet in the 1930s more than 2500 animals were shot each year in the southeast on elephant control, and as late as 1961, 800 were shot in Kilwa and Utete Districts alone as an encouragement to their companions to avail themselves of the peace and quiet of the Selous Game Reserve, where sensible elephants might retire when they got fed up with human administration, instead of just trumpeting off across the land.

  Even so, adventuring elephants still wander out of the Selous, and in trying to account for elephant scarcities, it is well to recall that elephants come and go according to whims and vagaries of their own, disappearing for years and even decades from likely areas, only to colonize the place again when least expected. In 1880, contesting the commonly held idea that the supply of ivory was inexhaustible, the British explorer Joseph

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  Thomson took note of the sad state of affairs in what is now Uganda: "In my sojourn of fourteen months during which I passed over an immense area of the Great Lakes region, I never once saw a single elephant. Twenty years ago they roamed over those countries unmolested and now they have been almost utterly exterminated." Eighty years later Murchison Falls, now Kabalega, in the north part of "the Great Lakes region", was the site of the first elephant-cropping program in East Africa. In the 1890s, the ivory hunter Arthur Neumann encountered no elephants at all while crossing the entire extent of the Tsavo country; in 1970-71 more than 6000 elephants died at Tsavo on account of drought and degeneration of their habitat caused by over-crowding. In 1913 the first safari into the Serengeti found no elephants at all; in 1968, with Myles Turner and George Schaller, I saw more than 500 in a single herd.

  In an air survey made in 1976 by Alan Rodgers and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the estimate arrived at for the Selous was 100,000 elephants, about a third of the Tanzania population (which, with Zaire, claims half the elephants in Africa). Douglas-Hamilton says that this figure may have been too low since many animals must have been missed due to the rough nature of the terrain: "If you want to be conservative," he told me recently, "just say 'over one hundred thousand'." The survey noted a remarkable lack of the habitat damage so pronounced in most of the parks, probably because the elephant were broken up into small groups, mostly five or less, widely distributed throughout this vast, trackless and well-watered reserve - which I like to think accounts for the fact that on the ground one might encounter rather few of them, even along the river margins. But to judge from what we had seen so far, of course, it is too high. Brian Nicholson says that in the 1960s, he and Alan Rees, at that time warden of the western sector of the Selous, arrived separately at the same figure of 30,000, using a ground-survey technique worked out between them. Nicholson however has complete faith in the competence of Alan Rodgers and feels that the survey must have been more accurate than his own figure, since he and Rees could only extrapolate from a rough sample taken in a relatively small area.

  If Brian's uneasiness about their scarcity is well-founded, then they may have departed of their own accord for elephant kingdoms in other parts of this vast country. Thus we may hope that in the far south the hidden thousands will appear. At supper the night before someone had spoken of a recent novel in which the last herd of Loxodonta, fleeing the insatiable guns of blood-crazed Homo, hid themselves in a huge swamp by walking in there backward, in order to persuade their pursuers that they had departed from that place.

  On the far side of the Madaba River, the track passed a stack of junk and rusting fuel drums; collapsed and splayed out in the undergrowth lay the

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  tin roof of what once had been a hut. "In my time," said Brian, "there was a permanent patrol post here - four men, rotated every three months. Old Bakiri Mnungu used to be in charge here. He's been at Kingupira for the last three years, and he told me he still doesn't know that country; in three years, he said, he hasn't yet been sent out on patrol, not even once." The Warden gazed about him bleakly. "They're running out of people who still know the bush; Bakiri and Goa are among the last. All these new people do, when they do anything, is run up and down the roads wasting petrol and beating up the machines, like those ones that you saw this morning. Not their fault, of course; there's nobody in authority any more who is interested enough to set them an example."

  The Nicholsons drove on, and Hugo and I followed, feeling very subdued. But as the track continued to deteriorate, pushing ever deeper into the bush, kongoni, wart hog, wildebeest and zebra began to appear in encouraging numbers, with a few waterbuck, buffalo, and elephant, another bushbuck, a bush duiker, and two bull eland, one of them a lordly specimen of august hump and swinging dewlap and thick spiralled horns. The game was especially abundant on the further side of a deep sand river called Kipilipili, a steep-banked barrier to vehicles which was only crossed with the help of Hugo's winch; we hauled his machine out of the sand bed, using a tree, then winched out the other vehicle, which had got buried to the axles trying to bull its way up the steep bank. There were more bones of dead elephant than seemed natural for one locality, and in one place two skeletons lay together, suggesting that the beasts had died at the same time. Both of the big skulls had worn-down teeth, an evidence of age which might have meant large tusks. "That's what's happening, all right - bastards! And that so-called anti-poaching unit, running out here at top speed all the way from Kingupira, wrecking the machines and turning right around and going back -!" Realizing he was repeating himself, the Warden left the rest unfinished, shaking his head.

  Here and there flew the lovely racquet-tailed rollers that seem to replace the lilac-breasted species in niiombo woodland, and in a big pterocarpus, bare except for its odd, hairy seed pods, sat a dark chanting goshawk, clear gray with long red legs. The track had deteriorated entirely, and at the next sand river, a tributary of the Kipilipili, we ascended the white sand of the bed until the stream was blocked by a fallen tree.

  From this place, we headed off on foot, and almost immediately Goa sprang backward, smiling shyly in apology for his alarm; he had heard a noise from the high grass on the bank. "Probably a puff adder," Brian said. "Come round this way, Melva." We detoured around the grass clump and started off again. Brian walked just behind Goa, and both of them carried rifles. Sandy stayed close behind her father, followed by Melva, who set off bravely but was out of condition; like her husband and most other East Africans, she is a heavy smoker. Try as she would, she soon slowed

  Brian Nicholson at lonides's grave, Nandanga Mountain.

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  down, very red in the face, in the thick high grass and humid heat and the steepening hill. "1 do wish my legs weren't so short," she sighed. Melva suggested that Hugo and I carry on without her, but we didn't wish to leave her behind: elephant and buffalo dung was fresh and plentiful, and the grass in places was well over our heads. Melva tried again, and again slowed down. The Warden was now far ahead, not looking back, though Sandy did so, a bit worried; Sandy herself was more hardy than she looked and was going strong. "He'll never stop," Melva said despairingly. "Not for anybody." In this complaint there was a note of pride, as when she says, "He never takes a day off, never." Desperate, however, she called him and, when he did not seem to hear, called again- "Brian!" Sandy turned around, obviously concerned, but she did not chide her father, and 1 found this odd; his impertinent pretty Sandra Was the only one from whom the Warden would take teasing, and she needled him constantly and to his great delight until she got him laughing, as she said, "like a hyena". Seeing that Melv
a was done for, 1 decided to yell at him myself, and this time he turned, and they awaited us on the open hillside under the big, dark-trunked muyombo trees.

  It was already mid-afternoon, and we had to keep moving. Melva was left in the care of Goa as the rest of us ascended to a foothill ridge under a steep red cliff face of Nandanga Mountain, which lies very near the geographical center of this vast reserve. Nandanga is only 3000 feet high, but it has power, like any isolated monolith arising from low plains; it is an outcropping of basement rock from the great African shield, some of the most ancient rock on earth. On the summit of the ridge stands a handsome stone inscribed with the name of Constantine John Philip lonides, 1901-1968, "erected with great respect by members of the East African Professional Hunters' Association".

  "Old Iodine!" Brian said. "There was a hunter! He had joined the British Army in the twenties just to go out to India to hunt, and when he heard that the hunting was better here, he transferred to the King's African Rifles - that must have been about 1926. When he quit the Army, he became an elephant poacher in the Congo, and finally he signed up with the Game Department, which in those days was mostly concerned with protecting the Africans and their shambas from elephant and lion.

  "Iodine lived to hunt, and he was a superb hunter, with great patience and knowledge of the animal. Took him four months of stalking in the Aberdares before he came out with his first bongo! That animal bays up very quickly to dogs, but Iodine refused to use dogs or salt licks or any of the other tricks that are used today. Getting a bongo later became a sort of ambush, all set up for the client by someone who had a particular bongo all staked out; these so-called hunters went out and got their bongo in a single day."

  From the grave site there was a prospect of the Mkungu Mountains west of the Ulanga River, as well as the great southern distances of the

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  Selous. Looking at the headstone, Nicholson grunted, "Iodine always said he wanted to be thrown out to the hyenas, but that if 1 had to bury him, it should be here."

  As in his attitudes toward human beings vis-a-vis snakes, there was a suggestion of posing in lonides's attitude toward his own remains: "I strongly object to being a nuisance after 1 am dead," he had told one interviewer. "I've been a carnivore all my life, and I'd much rather benefit a few local vultures and jackals." And to another he had said, "One of the most stupid of all premises is that life is in some peculiar way sacred, and that every body must have some sort of ceremony performed over it. Nature is an adequate arbiter in these matters. My hyenas would dispose of me satisfactorily." His fond mother - perhaps the only person, and certainly the only woman, he was ever known to put himself out for-confided to one of his chroniclers that her son "was ruthless by nature, absolutely ruthless." It seems mildly surprising that he confessed a wish to rest his bones here, since in neither of the two published accounts of his life with which I am familiar is there any important reference to the Selous; it seemed as if, when he left the Selous in 1954, he had lost all interest in his life's greatest accomplishment. Not that lonides thought in terms of making a contribution; indeed, he liked to boast of his own selfishness: "I'm completely selfish. Whatever I've done has always been for my own ends and my own enjoyment, because that's the only way to live, in my view - and who else's view is there any sense in living in, for God's sake?"

  We gazed about us for a little while at the vast wilderness all around: no sign of man, no marks or sounds, for hundreds of square miles. Even the ring-necked doves had fallen silent. There is a silence in the imminence of animals and also in the echo of their noise, but the dread silence is the one that rises from a wilderness from which all the wild animals have gone. In the dead still afternoon of the old continent, it seemed to me that the silence of Nandanga still had imminence, a listening, a waiting in the air.

  The day was late, and we descended quickly to Goa and Melva, then found our way down through the woods. It was important to cross the Kipilipili before dark. In a green meadow bathed in the humid light of the sinking sun, a family of bush pig was setting out on the evening forage. The big boar was gray and his mane silver, but the sow and all the spry young shoats were rufous red, with clean white manes. The boar sensed something that did not belong here, and while his family moved out of sight, poking and snuffling as they went, he stood motionless halfway up a bank, squinting toward the dim shadows at the wood's edge.

  At the sand river, walking downstream to the Land Rovers, we followed the old spoor of a lion, and crossed leopard pug marks and the three-toed prints of rhino, which looked like strange traces left by the last dinosaur on earth. Before leaving, Goa set fire to the high grass on the

  (Right) Tree frog on a baobab.

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  banks, and the fire leapt away toward Nandanga Mountain. Hugo and I stared at Brian, mildly astonished; in some part of his mind he was still Warden of the Selous.

  At sunset, in single file, seven wild striped horses galloped away over the fire-blackened ground against copper leaves, and a bush duiker bounded straight into the ball of sun that touched the horizon of the ridge. Then it was heavy dusk, and quickly dark.

  Once on the main track we still had thirty miles to go. The headlights wavered along on the rough road, and a thick-knee struck the windshield and went fluttering off ghost-like into the blackness. A skunk-sized creature with white bushy tail, fleeing the light, ran ahead of us for a hundred yards before darting off the path - this was the mustelid called the zorilla, a lesser relative of the civetr Not far from camp, a spotted eagle owl sat on the track, eating a snake without troubling to kill it; undaunted by the huge night eyes of the car lights, it bit at the small, writhing creature in its talons, then lifted its blood-glistened beak, its yellow eyes, to return our stare. At last the owl rose softly from the track, carrying the shining snake into the trees.

  Wild dogs killing a wart hog.

  (Left) Wild dog pup.

  VI

  In the early morning of the next day's journey, while the tents were dismantled and packed into the machines, Mzee Nzui, the head cook, tidied the kitchen. He buried tins, papers, and other takataka, even the plucked feathers of a guinea fowl, under the ashes, then dismantled his dish rack of saplings and fronds; as Maria remarked, Mzee Nzui was much more conscientious about litter than the whites, who were sentimental about the landscapes of the Old Africa while littering it with their cigarette packages.

  Since no one was ready I set off on foot, leaving instructions for them to pick me up along the road. Already the sun was shrouded over with dank cloud, and miasmal humidity had settled into the dark woods. Tsetse abounded, though they did not bite. My footsteps in the soft sand of the track made no sound, and in the windless heat and utter stillness the ominous chinking of a tinker bird, the signal of the black-headed oriole, the see-saw creaking of the coqui francolin deepened the silence. None of these birds showed themselves, and the leaves hung limp as bats in the gray, damp air. Letting my eyes fall to the ground, 1 saw big round lion spoor, very fresh, implanted on top of tire marks made the evening before. Retracing my steps a little I found the place where the lion had left the track, and realized that it might be watching me at this very moment, that I might have passed it. If so, 1 was cut off from the camp. Gazing about, I listened attentively, though for what I did not know: it seemed to me that the woods looked rather gloomy. For want
of a better plan, 1

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  continued on my way, and eventually 1 heard a Land Rover's quiet hum. Brian picked me up, and we went on past the steam engine, to where the Liwale-Madaba track met the faint track to the south.

  Crossing the high grass savanna woodland, we saw scarcely any game at all; not until the track came down into the shallow valley of the Matandu River, a small stream that winds through sour grasslands of black cotton clay, did animals start to appear - a young bull elephant, a yellow reedbuck loping along the wood's edge, then two more by the river, then zebra and hippos and the common antelopes. But the numbers were small, and the sable and greater kudu remained hidden, and Brian became increasingly disgusted. Here, he felt, the scarcity of animals could not be blamed on poachers. The Matandu marks the eastern border of the Selous Game Reserve, but the country beyond the boundaries had been emptied of people years ago in the resettlement schemes set in motion by lonides. No, it was all this unburned grass that had driven the animals away. These tall tussock grasses produced new tissue only during the rainy season; once they had matured and flowered, they turned dry and stalky and lost all nutritive value. If the Selous wef'e to support large numbers of game, the grass had to be burned off every year. Plainly, the Game Department was not doing its duty. Whenever we paused, Saidi or Goa wandered off the track, and soon there would come a harsh snap and crackling as the land took fire, and the tall pale andropogon grass leapt into fierce color, and black smoke rose behind us in the northern sky.