The Kalahari

Often, I will think back to some of Mother Africa’s more remote regions; her deserts and forsaken corners that until the twentieth century few men would dare venture in to. Torrid, sun-riven tracts, vast enough to swallow the British Isles a hundred times over – hot enough to flay the skin from your face and the soles from your shoes. Places inhabited only by wild beasts, the scorpion and nomadic desert dwellers, the San; more wily than the fox, more resilient than the beings and the plants they feed on – the Basarwa, guardians of the deep Kalahari – a place they call, The Great Thirst...

... After dinner, I sat alone in the dining car; the stewards went about stripping off tablecloths and filling up salt and pepper pots. Everything had to be just right for breakfast. Outside, bruised by oncoming nightfall, the sky was filled with blues, purples and high, pink Cumulus clouds; the stewards said it was a sign of the oncoming rainy season. Up here, where we were, it rained in the summer; in winter it just went dry and a bit colder, but not much.

Every hour I was learning something new, England was falling further and further behind. Africa had taken hold of my hand.

‘Penny for them?’

‘Penny for what?’ I grinned at the steward. He was a nice man; a kind face.

‘For whatever you’re dreaming of.’

‘All sorts,’ I said. ‘Wild animals mainly, out there in the jungle.’

For a moment, the steward paused from his work and stared out with me; into the twilight – through to that wild place on the other side of the window.

‘Wouldn’t want to walk around out there,’ he said. ‘The Kalahari Desert runs from here all the way to the sea.’

‘A long way?’

‘More than enough for the likes of you and me, young man. Strange things go on out there.’

‘Cannibals?’ I hoped he would say no.

‘Who knows what you might find. Lions, elephants, snakes...’

‘What about tigers?’

‘No tigers in Africa. You have to go to India for tigers.’

‘What else?’

‘Springbok – thousands of them.’

I looked at him; my interest provoked – my imagination running riot across the dining car.

‘What are they?’

‘Antelope,’ he told me. ‘Black, white and gold with sharp horns and they can jump really high.’

‘How high?’ I grinned, thrilled by his stories of leaping, multi-coloured antelope.

‘High as the window,’ he looked out. ‘Sometimes in their millions. I’ve read about them somewhere.’

That night, wrapped away in my top bunk, through my mind’s eye I saw them; covering the wilderness, a sea of wild antelope – bounding through the Kalahari, jumping high as our train’s windows...

Sons of Africa; an extract:

...Mathew rode head to head with the American, loose on the reins and long into the stirrups. He rode with a natural flair for the mare’s unusual gait, letting her find her easiest speed by changing the lateral drive of her legs to that peculiar, diagonal gait of the trippling horse. Burnham brought them to a halt at the edge of a small plateau and they looked beyond it, down into the valley. Short of a small breeze rustling its way amongst scatterings of sweet thorn there was no sound, no sight of a single manmade thing for miles at either hand.

Burnham shook his feet free of the stirrup-irons.

‘Once we pass that line of hills we’re on our own. No houses, no farms, nothing. Maybe the odd prospector or hunter on his way back from the fly country.’ He looked to the boy alongside him. ‘Just open veld until we reach the Tati River, eight weeks from now.’

‘Suits me fine,’ said Mathew, ‘though right now I’m more concerned with the embarrassment of going back to the wagons empty-handed.’

Up to that point they had seen nothing of any size that warranted the use of a single bullet. The scrubby landscape had been stripped clean of all but the smallest signs of wildlife, what remained had hidden away from the heat in deep burrows and thorn thickets, for even at that distance out from Kimberley, contract meat hunters had been busy with their rifles.

Burnham reached for his saddlebag and drew out a brass telescope. Gently he adjusted the lens to suit his eye then moved the glass through a wide arc. He took his time, probing shadows, rocky defiles and those almost invisible scars left by ancient watercourses. Where the veld was thickest he would let his interest linger there, searching out shapes that were irregular to their surroundings. Sometimes, Mathew heard the American’s breathing catch, and briefly the steady sweep of the spyglass would falter.

 ‘As God is my witness,’ Burnham marvelled, ‘I don’t believe what I am seeing.’ He thrust the glass at Mathew. ‘That break in the hillside. In my entire life I’ve seen nothing like it.’

Mathew adjusted the lens. Through a rolling cloud of dust he saw rank upon rank of wild antelope – a single mass of colour; charcoal, gold and flashes of white; as the fingers of some ancient delta the migrating herd spread across the valley floor.

 ‘I see them.’

‘That’s right laddie, you see them and you will not meet many men who have.’

 ‘What in God’s name are they?’

‘Trekbokken, the Boers call it.  Millions of Springbok. Been known to take upwards of a week for the entire herd to pass the same spot’

‘Stay well clear of the trekbokken,’ an old Boer had warned him, his wagon battered and scarred where the springbok had dashed themselves to a bloody pulp. ‘Even now there are pieces of bone still inside the wood. I think more than a hundred were piled to the side of my wagon.’ And with a wistful smile recalled the memory of his windfall. ‘Ja kerel, my butcher’s knives were busy for three days – enough dried meat for that whole year and not the price of a single shot from my old roer.’

‘So what are we waiting for?’ Mathew handed back the spy-glass and gathered his reins. ‘We should be up with them while we still have the chance.’

‘And how many Springbok would you be planning on shooting?’

‘Ten? Twenty? As many as I have bullets for.’ Already his rifle was out from its scabbard; so much bounty had awakened the urge for him to butcher out of hand...

*