Dark Star Safari

20. The Wild Things at Mala Mala

The big furry reason that draws most people to Africa is the possibility of viewing dangerous animals from the comfort and safety of a Land-Rover, wearing a silly hat and carrying a scorecard. At the end of the day, the score has to show the Big Five. I could tick off only one of those, a tottering tembo I had accidentally glimpsed from the train in Tanzania. Much as I despaired of tourism in Africa and mocked the voyeurism that amounted to pestering animals in the bush, my idea was to satisfy myself that my own improvised safari would also include a week of peering at the wild creatures Africa was famous for.

I had seen so few — some jaw-snapping hyenas in Harar, shy gazelles in Kenya, a few loping giraffes and the trudging elephant from the windows of the Kilimanjaro Express, some mottled hippos in the Shire River, an ostrich glaring at me in Zimbabwe, dikdiks and baboons here and there, birds everywhere. No rhinos, no leopards, no herds of anything. But I could relate to animals in their awkwardness, for they looked like loners in the bush and all of them were more or less fleeing. The gazelles had fled with sharply lifted knees as though in a steeplechase.

The most dangerous creatures I had seen so far in Africa had been the shifta bandits firing their rifles over the truck I was riding in just north of Marsabit: wild men. The most exotic were the Ugandan hookers in their nighttime plumage, hissing at me from the roadside trees in Kampala: wild women.

A year or so before my African trip, there was a massacre of tourists on a gorilla safari on the Uganda Rwanda border. Not content with leaving this pathetically diminished number of poor beasts alone, and aiming to intrude on their shrinking habitat so that they could boast of having had the ultimate primate experience of paddling paws and pinching fingers with a 600-pound silverback gorilla and his mates in the dripping seclusion of the bewildered apes’ bower, a dozen trekkers panted into the high Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda and were mauled — not by apes but by gun-toting Hutu rebels. Eight tourists were murdered, the other captives managed to escape. While tittering insincerely that Africa was full of dangerous and unpredictable animals, most foreign visitors were much more preoccupied by the thought of dangerous and unpredictable Africans. By comparison, the Big Five were rather sedate and safe and standoffish.

Tourists in Africa were whisked to a game park, and within a few days could boast of having bagged photos of the Big Five without a single horror story. At the end of the safari the foreign travelers, sounding like the rambling over-privileged fat-heads of a century earlier, would rate their trip, as I was to read later in an American travel magazine.*

‘[African staff] try to make you happy’… ‘[African staff] do everything — you really feel pampered… ‘[African staff] wake you gently with a small breakfast treat at bedside’… ‘[African] waiters are willing to set up a picnic wherever you like’… ‘No bugs to contend with,’ and of a lodge in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater, ‘After the guided safaris and cultural tours, have your butler draw you a bath.’

This was the tidier, deep-pockets-in-the-safari-suit, small-bore-in-Africa safari, the romancers’ one of deluxe howdahs on elephant expeditions in the Okavango, picnic hampers in Amboseli (‘Pass the Gentleman’s Relish, Nigel’), and luxurious tents in the Masai Mara Reserve and the Serengeti. It was the ‘Yes, bwana’ Africa of escapists and honeymooners and so-called ‘consumer travelers’ in designer khaki. This Africa in which Hemingway’s gun-bearers had morphed into Jeeves-like butlers and game spotters was available to anyone who, like Ernie, had lots of money and no interest in Africans. In a moment of candor, in a travel essay written in the seventies, Martha Gellhorn, the penultimate of Hemingway’s four wives and a sometime Kenya resident, confessed her indifference to Africans. Writing breezily in Travels with Myself and Another, unaware of giving offense, she said how her love for Africa’s natural world ‘did not extend to mankind in Africa or its differing ways of life.’

The safari-as-charade included charter flights, obsequious Africans, gourmet food, bush jackets by Harrods Field Sports Department, pith helmets by Holland and Holland, $500 boots by Gokey, ‘guaranteed to be snake-proof,’ and an Elephant Cloth Bushveld shirt by Orvis, this last item pitched with a colorful flourish:

Our African Train Safari will take you from Pretoria to Victoria Falls in 9 days, stopping along the way for hunts in the ‘bushveld’ country, with more than a hundred beaters driving the guinea fowl and francolin over the line to you. In the desert, you’ll shoot Namaqua sandgrouse from traditional stone butts, where 1000 or more birds fly to water holes in the early morning. This shirt is designed for that kind of adventure.*

This was a far cry from my safari-as-struggle, including public transport, fungal infections, petty extortion, mocking lepers, dreary bedrooms, bad food, exploding bowels, fleeing animals, rotting schoolrooms, meaningless delays and blunt threats: ‘There are bad people there’ and ‘Give me money!’ Consumer travelers raved about flying into Malawi to spend a few days in a lakeside resort; but in Malawi I had been appalled — as a Bible-pious Malawian might put it — at the years the locust had eaten (Joel 2:25).

But while I hated nuisances, I did not mind hardships; and if I had endured some miseries I had also discovered some splendors, enjoyed some adventures, and found friends. I had crossed many borders, picnicked by the Sixth Cataract of the Nile, navigated Lake Victoria, paddled on the Mozambique Zambezi and spent a day with my old friend the prime minister of Uganda. En route, whenever someone asked me to sum up my safari I just stammered and went mute, for it was less a trip than an experience of vanishing, a long period in my life spent alone improvising my way through the greenest continent. I was proud that I could not say, ‘Africa’s great!’ ‘Our servants were neat!’ ‘I got a facial in our game lodge and Wendy got a pedicure!’ ‘We had eland bourgignon!’ ‘There was, like, a riot in the capital and we didn’t even know it!’ or ‘My butler drew me a bath.’

Yet I was so immersed in my trip I hardly questioned it. After a week in Johannesburg I had the appetite for much more. Looking at the map of Africa I saw that I was not very far from Cape Town, and so I took a detour in the other direction.

Mala Mala, a game reserve that adjoined Kruger National Park, was highly recommended to me by a trusted friend. It was just north of the fruit-growing dorp of Nelspruit, about 300 miles east of Johannesburg, so near to the Mozambican border that Mozambican elephants wandered over to chew the trees. One of Mala Mala’s virtues as a game reserve was that it was located on a twenty-mile stretch of a good-sized river, far away from any village or the intrusion of poachers: big game were happiest among plentiful greenery, near a safe year-round water source.

On my way to Nelspruit I met Hansie, who was half Boer and half English. He seemed rather slow to answer my questions, rather absentminded or at a loss for words. He said, ‘Sometimes my brain works faster than my tongue.’ I asked him a little about himself and understood fairly quickly the reason for vagueness and his stunned way of speaking. He had been in the South African Army fighting the bush war for five years and had had a harrowing time.

‘I was in the Koevoet,’ he said and explained that the word meant ‘crowbar’ in Afrikaans. ‘It was the military branch of the Intelligence Service. I was only eighteen.’

‘How did you happen to join?’

‘I don’t know why. I guess, because everyone was joining. But it was a tough group,’ Hansie said. ‘Our commander flew to America and went through Navy Seal training, then went to Britain and was put through the SAS course. He adapted those courses for our training.’

‘What a grind that must have been,’ I said, thinking of the physical demands of such training. ‘What was the worst of it?’

‘The worst? Ach, well, I wasn’t prepared for killing people — I mean, killing that many people. The actual killing was the one thing we couldn’t train for, see.’

He had misunderstood me: I thought we had been talking about long marches or swimming underwater, the physical effort of commando training.

‘But it was either them or us,’ he said, still talking quietly. ‘Ach, we had to or we’d get it in the neck. We were in Namibia, fighting SWAPO guerrillas.* I did counter-insurgency. I think I was good at it, but even so, it was terrible, man.’

‘What was your particular mission?’

‘We had to be able to go to a guerrilla camp and destroy it, and leave no trace that we had ever been there.’

‘That would mean killing everyone.’

‘Ach. Yaw. Everyone. And do it alone if we lost our partner — as sometimes happened. I mean, I lost my partner, but not in the bush. He was black, a Namibian. He went to a pub to celebrate his birthday. A SWAPO informant was there and called some chaps and reported that four of our men were there. The SWAPO chaps came to the pub and started shooting. But see, the birthday party had started, and a woman there knew my partner was celebrating. She threw herself in front of him to protect him.’

Amazing.

‘Yaw. But they just shot her, and shot him, and shot the others. Four dead, and they left the woman there to bleed to death.’

It was a horrible story, without a moral, but after it sank in I asked Hansie what birthday his partner had been celebrating.

‘That’s interesting,’ Hansie said. ‘Yaw, he had seen his whole family killed by SWAPO gunmen, so he joined when he was fourteen. He was a big chap, and they have no ID cards up there, so no one knew. He was celebrating his sixteenth birthday.’

And SWAPO got into power.’

‘All the people we fought against are now in power — in Namibia, and Zimbabwe, and here.’ Hansie chuckled grimly. ‘It’s crazy. They were called Communists. Well, were they? They were trained by Russians. They got their weapons from China and Cuba. They knew how to use them. And the landmines! They had a Russian landmine made of Bakelite plastic that you couldn’t detect. It was really lethal. Friends of mine got blown up that way. I lost so many friends — and for what?’

After telling this sad rambling story, Hansie was quite upset. My questions had led him too far down this bleak path of bad memories. But that was often the case in South Africa. A few idle questions inspired reminiscences, and brought back the past, and the past in South Africa was dark with martyrdoms.

‘Ach! If I lost one of my kids in something like that I’d go doolaly,’ Hansie said.

The closer we got to Mala Mala Main Camp the more chewed and trampled the trees, as though a tornado had whirled through, stripping and smashing the woods.

‘Elephants,’ Hansie said. He explained that because of hunters the place had been almost devoid of elephants in the 1960s. There were now more than 600 elephants here in an area that should have been supporting about 150 — thus the damage.

He pointed out a herd of browsing buffalo with ox-pecker birds on them, some of them stabbing at insects, others cleaning wounds. Also a pair of warthogs. ‘That bigger one’s injured. Probably from a leopard. Some of them get away, see.’ The warthogs frowned at us with knobbed tusky faces in an appearance of indignation that was gaping animal alertness.

But I was hardly looking, scarcely listening, for I was still thinking of what Hansie had told me: Ach, well, I wasn’t prepared for killing people — I mean, killing that many people. I heard stories of maulings and tramplings and gorings but this ‘Crowbar’ counter-insurgency mayhem was ever so much worse. The boy who had enlisted at fourteen because he had seen his whole family murdered; his sixteenth birthday party at the pub; the snitch; the arrival of the enemy with guns blazing; the woman shielding the birthday boy, and Hansie’s remorse. While ‘dilly’ was just peculiar, ‘doolaly’ was the extremest form of military madness, from Deolalie, the name of a nineteenth-century nut house in Bombay.

At this stage of my trip, having seen so much of Africa, it was impossible to be heading for a safari lodge without comparing animal cunning with human savagery. I believed that I had reduced the risks in East and Central Africa by admitting that as a white stranger I was prey, and by avoiding predators — doing what animals did, moving quickly in the daytime, staying alert, and not going out at night. Predators are mainly nocturnal — lions and hyenas just sleep and lollygag in the daytime. And it is a fact that except for the cheetah, all the wild predators in Africa are slower than the prey — warier, twitchier, fleeter of foot, prey had evolved into hard-to-catch creatures.

In that same spirit, decent Africans tried to outwit the rascals, warned each other of dangers, warned strangers too. Theft and assault and rape were generally nocturnal crimes, not merely because darkness helped the perpetrator in his stealth but mainly because the thief or rapist who was caught could be blamelessly beaten to death under the terms of the unspoken African law that sanctioned rough justice.

Territory defined behavior. Different species might co-exist — giraffe and zebra, warthog and kudu. But two rhinos could not inhabit the same general space, and they always battled for dominance, as the gangs did in Soweto.

Yet the bulky mammals and the decorative birds — impressive for their color and size — were predictable. They did what animals do: ate, slept, looked for water; groomed and head-butted each other, vocalized and snorted, competed, fought; made a career out of learning how to subsist while saving their skin. But none fought so cruelly or so pointlessly as the humans, and none, not even the elephants in their fits of trumpeted grief, had the redeeming quality of remorse. As Professor Berger had said, humans were vicious, we had invented mass slaughter, but we were also the most peaceable animal — both much better and much worse than other mammals.

Of all the creatures that inhabited the 45,000 acres of Mala Mala — and that included the regal waterbuck and the brown snake eagle, the nimble klipspringer and the four-foot monitor lizard, as well as the majestic Big Five — the one that fascinated me most was Mike Rattray, the owner and driving force behind the reserve. Though approaching from a great distance, and waving his stick and vocalizing, he much resembled one of his own strutting red-wattled hornbills, he was another species and altogether more colorful and subtle, the jolliest, the fiercest, the least predictable, the hardest to photograph, and usually followed by his attractive mate, Norma.

He was never without the stick. He used the thing to make a point or to single someone out of the crowd or, in a threat posture, as a weapon. He looked a bit like Captain Mainwaring, the same drooping cheeks and deadpan expression, the same drawling way of speaking, always something unexpected.

‘Going to “fight to the death”, is he?’ he would say somewhat adenoidally. ‘Well, let me tell you, whenever someone says they are going to fight to the death they’re ready to surrender. They are dead scared. Your move? Get a stick. Like this’ — and he flailed his own — ‘Give them two clouts on the backside. A good hiding. “Stop playing the fool.” They’ll stop their nonsense soon enough. Know what the nyala bull does?’

I said I did not know much about this large antelope.

‘The nyala bull is a very narrow animal,’ Rattray said, and demonstrated its narrowness by lifting his stick to a vertical position and pressing the palm of his free hand against it. ‘Very narrow. But when they want to frighten an enemy, they swell up’ — he scowled and blew out his cheeks, to look fierce and florid and full-faced — ‘blow their faces up to look dangerous. It’s just air!’

What had been cattle ranches and a hunting lodge and a large game reserve in the 1920s was acquired in the 1960s by Mike and his father, who had owned a ranch nearby. Rich in animals the land had attracted hunters. As many as 200 lions were killed in a single season — for sport and also to protect the cattle. But because of the insects and the weather, the cattle business had never been much good. When they appeared on the market, more abutting ranches and reserves were added to the central piece. Two more lodges were added to the luxurious Main Camp, an atmospheric farmhouse was improved to make Kirkman’s Kamp, and budget (but pleasant) accommodation, Harry’s Camp. Altogether, Mala Mala employed 250 people. In 1993, with Mike’s encouragement the many-miles-long game fence that was also an international frontier, dividing Kruger Park from Mozambique, was taken down. After that, the animals roamed freely, choosing to live nearer Rattray’s watercourse, the Sand River.

Rattray, in his vigorous mid-sixties, was a horse breeder and horse racer, with a stud farm in the Western Cape Province. He had become an environmentalist at a time when hunters were still blasting away at anything that moved. He was a bon viveur with a knack for running hotels; a stickler for details, something of a taskmaster, a financier of public works — his tall, Italian-made road bridge over the Sand River had withstood the terrible flood of 1999. He was a teller of rich stories and also a fund of good ideas.

‘Rhino are taking a beating — what?’ he said to me in the bar one night, waving his stick for emphasis. ‘Being flogged something awful. And why? Because a rhino horn, retail, is worth $75,000 in Macau — or so I’m told. What’s the answer, Paul?’

‘What’s the question, Mike?’

‘Whither the rhinos, their fate? I say’ — and he whisked his stick — ‘rhino farm! A farm that produces rhino horn. People groan like blazes when I mention it, but you see a rhino horn is like a fingernail. You cut it off and it grows back. So you start a farm with white rhinos — the black ones are bolshie, never mind them — and you harvest the horns by sawing them off. That way, you cut out the poachers, cut out the middlemen, and the horn grows back in three years, ready to be trimmed again. But will anyone listen to me? No, they think I’m dilly.’

I stayed in a lovely thatched hut in Main Camp and went on game drives in an open Land-Rover with a ranger before dawn until mid-morning, and at dusk, and now and then in the darkness, the time of night when the lion and the leopard were creeping through the high grass, looking for cowering impala to eat. My ranger was young and expert, Chris Daphne. His assistant, John, who was a Zulu, sat with a rifle across his knees.

The bush was dry and dusty in the South African autumn and on the first drive we saw buffalos and a herd of elephants, a mating pair of nyala, a bachelor herd of kudu, and some battered torchwood trees — battered because elephants loved the taste of the oily peanut shaped fruit.

Mala Mala was not a wilderness but a reserve and the happier for that, because the animals were not shot at, and they had become so habituated to the prowling vehicles and the crowing passengers that — keeping at a humane distance — it was possible to see them in their unselfconscious, non-threatened natural state. The animals were generally complacent and well fed and unstressed. And the reserve was so well run that a tourist such as Margaret Thatcher or Nelson Mandela — both of whom had stayed at Mala Mala — could drop in, see some big animals, and leave, without inconvenience or discomfort.

A herd of 200 buffalos was not unusual at Mala Mala; twenty elephants placidly chewing trees, deforesting a hillside, was not out of the ordinary. Hyenas — ‘The quickest of all predators to recognize weakness,’ Chris said; a pair of white rhinos — ‘Did you know the rhino is related to the horse?’ Chris asked. A tuskless elephant — ‘Probably more aggressive for not having tusks,’ Chris said. The birds were spectacular: the greater blue-eared glossy starling, the blacksmith plover with its characteristic tink-tink, the yellow-billed hornbill.

And one night, on the walkie-talkie in the bush, Chris heard that a leopard had just pounced upon an impala and bitten and broken his neck. We drove quickly to the spot in time to see the leopard dragging its kill — the dead impala was the same weight as the leopard, about 100 pounds — to a high branch thirty feet up a saffron tree, and wedging it firmly into the cleft of a branch. This way the leopard could devour his kill in peace without attracting opportunistic animals. In spite of the bright flashlight the leopard went on tearing the impala’s flesh, tearing at the haunch, crunching and splintering the bones in its spine and pelvis, and by my watch gobbled the impala’s entire hind leg in ten minutes.

And at the same time, the guests at Mala Mala at their evening meal were sitting in a circle under the stars, gnawing on impala steaks that had just been barbecued. The eaters’ canines flashed in the firelight, their fingers gleamed with meat fat, and after they swallowed they sighed with satisfaction, rejoicing in their safari.

I was late for dinner because of my leopard viewing, but I found a seat near Mike Rattray and asked him how he had gone about ending the hunting on this property.

‘It was hard! The hunters were very cross! Wanted to come here and go on flogging lions,’ he said. He smiled, perhaps remembering the opposition, for he was a man who liked a challenge. ‘This was a popular hunting area. Princess Alice! Flogged a lion here, yes!’

But he had foreseen the decline of the game and the simpler economic fact that hunting was for the few — the unspeakable in pursuit of the stuffable — and game viewing was for the many. There was more sense and more money in becoming eco-friendly. While other reserves were still hosting parties of hunters, Mala Mala eliminated hunting, practiced game management, hired university-trained rangers, and began to see a profit. And the animals thrived.

‘You see, the trouble with hunters is that they take the best animals — the prize specimens,’ Rattray said. ‘They jigger the gene pool, they disturb the balance of nature. They screamed at me, but I screamed back. “You want to hunt? By all means, hunt! But you have to take the ones with weak eyes, weak ears. Kill the weak ones — take what the carnivores take.” ’

‘What sort of reaction did you get?’

Even over dinner, Rattray had his stick handy for illustrating a point. He seized it and swung it. ‘They didn’t like it! But I said, “Don’t take the clever ones.” You have to be clever to live in the bush. At the end of the drought you have the best animals. They wanted trophies, they wanted the clever ones. I said no.’

It was an inspired decision. When the dominant males are killed and their heads mounted, the male cubs stay in the pride and mate with their mothers and sisters, and ‘jigger the gene pool.’ A pride without an aggressive leader becomes easy fodder for predators. In the past decade, Africa’s lion population has dropped from about 50,000 to about 15,000. Botswana instituted a one-year ban on lion hunting in 2001 to determine the health, and numbers, of its lion population. At the same time, the Arizona-based Safari Club International — composed of millionaire big-game hunters and Republican fund raisers — intensively lobbied the Bush White House to put pressure on Botswana to reverse the ban. Botswana resisted, but at last relented. Anyone with $25,000 can play at being Hemingway’s Francis Macomber and kill a lion in Botswana.

In my succeeding days at Mala Mala, driving all day in the hot bush, I saw three giraffes drinking at a pool, their long legs widely splayed, their bodies canted and kowtowing, so they could drink. A baboon with his finger in his mouth lurked behind them among some boulders in a krans — a cave. I saw hippos in a murky pool, wallowing and diving, peering at me, just their eyes and nostrils showing.

The T. S. Eliot poem ‘The Hippopotamus’ contains a dozen observations about hippos, all of them mistaken, from ‘The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud’ — something they never do — to the characterization of their gait. I saw zebras with reddish highlights in their brushlike manes, and a mother rhino with an eight-day-old calf, fifty baboons in a big troop, and many birds — barbets, shrikes, coucals, hornbills, cormorants, kingfishers, eagles and vultures (‘The eagle’s grip is much stronger than the vulture’s,’ Chris said). I saw twelve lions, big and small, creeping through the bush just after dark, stalking a skittish herd of impala cowering in a copse.

All this was superb game viewing — healthy unafraid animals holding their own in a bush setting — but just as splendid and imposing was the striding pot-bellied figure of Michael Rattray, who was inimitable. Stories circulated about him, always admiring ones, and odd tales of life in the bush, often involving difficult guests.

There was the impossible German couple, for example, characters in a story with a tragic ending. The Herr and Frau arrived, were served a good lunch, and went on a game drive with a reliable ranger. But they complained about the food, found fault with the ranger, and were disappointed in the animals. The Herr was milder than his Frau, who loudly objected throughout the afternoon drive, hectoring the ranger. The woman was a harridan and made you think of a scolding gray-headed bush shrike, crying, ‘Schlecht! Schlecht! Schlecht!’

At dinner, Mike Rattray appeared at their table, smacking his stick against his palm. No, he didn’t hit them though he wanted to. The woman began to articulate an objection, but before she was in full cry, Rattray said, ‘You are not enjoying yourselves. You are complaining. There is no charge.’

The couple, mollified by this apparent climb-down by the management, had returned to manipulating their forks and knives, when they saw that Rattray had not moved.

‘You are leaving tomorrow on the first plane,’ Rattray said, and quickly turned, and as he left he could hear the woman ranting.

Before leaving, the woman insisted that Rattray write a letter describing the circumstances of their departure and demanding that he state that they were leaving against their will.

‘Absolutely not,’ Rattray said. He oversaw the loading of their bags on to the vehicle, and turned his back on them for the last time.

Threats of a lawsuit arrived from Germany very soon afterward; many letters from German attorneys hinting at damages and an expensive legal process which would bring Mala Mala to its knees. This pettifoggery went on for a month or so. Then, just as quickly as the letters had started, they ended. Some months passed. The case had gone so quiet a discreet inquiry was advanced. Why the silence? The word came back: The German woman had killed herself.

The male guests at such game lodges could behave with a strange machismo, wearing shorts and knee socks. But for the visiting women the experience was either uncomfortable and insupportably buggy, or else such a fantasy of khaki and muscly stud muffins and animal desire they became smitten.

In a place where stalking was a way of life for the animals, the women guests developed a stalking mentality, too, and would not be dissuaded from their hunt. I heard a number of stories of this kind of infatuation. While the husband idled complacently in the lodge, swigging beer and staring at the elephants thrashing in the reeds in the river, the rangers were receiving the nudges and winks or smutty suggestions of the besotted wives. And so these rangers on a game drive for predators with an amorous client were in the curious position of stalking stalkers while they themselves were being stalked.

‘Afterwards, they write letters,’ a ranger told me. ‘They call from America or Europe. They say they want to leave their husband and move to Africa. “I dream of Africa.” It takes a long time for some of them to give up. But it’s unprofessional to have that kind of relationship with a guest.’

The stalker in one famous example at Mala Mala was a woman on her honeymoon. I had the presence of mind to murmur, ‘Shocking,’ but I was riveted by the story of the cuckold-in-khaki and new bride, two-days married, who fell for the ranger. Nothing came of it though no one held out much hope for the marriage. I regretted that the story was so short on sordid details.

There were three honeymoon couples at Mala Mala when I was there. They sat together in the bar. They dined together. They vied for attention in swapping stories of wedding-day foul-ups. They much resembled the bush creatures which mated for life and pawed each other, and traded feline nuzzlings, growling amiably in the shade of thorn trees throughout the hot afternoons.

Michael and Norma Rattray were not demonstrative but they were affectionate. They were never apart. They had seven grown children between them and numerous grandchildren. Michael’s task was management and infrastructure, Norma’s brief was the lodges’ décor. They conversed in animal imagery, and were delighted when one of the Mala Mala leopards appeared on the cover of the National Geographic. The leopard was not a wayward predator who had crept darkly from the bush to wreak havoc, but a familiar creature with a pet name, like a favorite over-indulged pussy cat, one of the family, and as Norma said in a doting and rather admiring way, ‘rather a show-off.’

‘Going?’ Michael said to me the morning of my departure.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Back to the States?’

‘Eventually.’

‘God,’ he said. He was concentrating hard, recalling city life. ‘Had some guests from New York. Friends, really. Most of our guests become friends. Chap says to us, “Look us up if you’re ever in New York.” So we did. Went to the chap’s house in this tall building. Couldn’t believe it! He’s way up here.’ Rattray waved his stick, demonstrating the height of the sky scraper. ‘The walls were glass, windows went from floor to ceiling. Norma could hardly look down! Couldn’t wait to leave!’

‘Like living in a tree,’ Norma said.

‘Worse! Chap’s stuck there like a gannet in a krans!’

His vivid image of animal horror made me laugh. I was sorry to leave — I knew I would miss him. And living in luxury in the bush was such a lovely way of passing the time — gaping at large unintimidated animals, bird-watching, reading, in a cozy hut with a desk where I could sit adding pages to my erotic story. This was a small part of the travel experience, the boutique game viewing, with superb South African vintages. I could understand why tourists gushed: it was pleasurable, it was simple and harmonious and safe, no strife, no starvation, it wasn’t upsetting; not many Africans, it was hardly Africa.