Ted Botha

He’s a ranger, not a guide, and you’re there to do more than spot the Big Five.

Leon has a Czech-made Brno rifle slung across his shoulder. You can see that under his olive green trousers and button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves there is a powerful, sinewy body ready to snap into action. Which I’m grateful for. I have little doubt that if a buffalo charges, Leon will be ready to shoot.

“You have to get a buffalo right in the forehead,” he says. “Just below the horn, otherwise it ricochets. There’s not much space to hit. If you miss, you’re dead.”

We walk along the dry Timbavati River in Kruger National Park. It’s crisscrossed with spoor, the remnants of animal traffic. Leon points out a lion’s pawprint. I don’t see how he can make out one track from the other, all faint indentations in a river of sand. Then he indicates the toe formation. “That’s how it’s different to a leopard.” What I do recognize, simply from its sheer size, is the elephant spoor. Or is it rhino? Again, we look to the toes. Rhino. Nearby we come across a place where an elephant was recently digging for water, even though there’s water in a dam barely a hundred yards away.

“If there’s a choice,” Leon explains, “elephant will go for cleaner water.” He scoops at the now dry hole until the sand gets damper and damper and you can finally squeeze water out of it like a sponge. “Yis,” he says, a combination of gee whiz and the Afrikaans for Jesus, “it always amazes me how they know where to find the best water.”

The grass next to the riverbed is tall and thick, the perfect place, I would think, for buffalo to hang out. Or lion, for that matter. If we meet one, Leon warns, rule number one is to drop everything and run like hell up the slope to the back of us. I wonder how Leon can protect us at such short range. It is only later that his wife tells me how once, when a rampant elephant chased them up a hill, Leon put it down with one bullet. “He’s an excellent shot,” she says. “No, she’s an excellent shot,” Leon retorts. You can hear they’re love.

I look more for buffalo than at the scenery around me, which is what Leon’s talking about, potato bushes, a trail of army ants, a kudu behind the large-leafed rock fig, whose root formation creeps down the kopje like some creamy liquid. “Yis, it looks just like candle wax,” Leon says. He could be seeing it for the first time, although it’s easily the thousandth. Then a birdcall distracts him.

“An arrowmark babbler,” he says, but quickly changes his mind. “No, a red-hooded wood hoopoe. I always mix up the two. They call it the shlegomafaas in Zulu – the babbling of women.” With any birdcall he usually names the object it most sounds like, a telephone or a siren or a beeper. “That makes it easier to remember.” I wish I had a tape recorder with me to take down the details of what he says, but all I have is a piece of scrap paper that I don’t want to look at too much, seeing there’s walking to do and buffalo to watch out for. So I scribble.

“Jackal berry tree. Hyena tracks. Calcified dung of hyena. Try to break. Impossible. A weeping Boer bean. Vine of gem squash no animal eats. Cut open. Bitter. Impala tracks. Tambotie tree. Bark gives diarrhea, sap cures it. Eland on ridge. Oxpecker – call leads to animals, also alerts them. Mud wallow of buffalo. ‘Nice word, wallow.’ Warning cry, tree squirrel. Car alarm. Impala. ‘Beautiful. Hardy.’ (Impala hardy?) Giant land snail, empty. Hyena will eat. Black mamba. Longest he’s seen was 16 ft. ‘Yis.’ Klipspringer. Loose fur. Leopard might only get mouthful fluff. Paradise flycatcher. Should’ve flown north already. Appleleaf a.k.a. rain tree because of nectar dripping. Five crocodile on bank. ‘Scare me more than anything else.’ Buffalo in reeds. Mites in eye like makeup. Big, black, mean-looking. ‘Have soft spot for them.’ Leadwood tree. A thousand years old? ‘Your lifetime in nature is nothing.’”

Instinctively, I look at my watch. Barely an hour has passed since we set off.

To anyone who has ever been on a safari, several things are wrong with this picture. First, no one should be thinking about shooting an animal with a Brno, let alone talking about actually doing it. Second, we should not be walking. Being on foot in an African game park is, like shooting, a major no-no. You are supposed to stay inside your four-wheel-drive at all times. The farthest I’ve ever been taken without wheels under me in the past was an hour-long stroll in Kenya, the reason being to reach not a better understanding of the wild but the spot where we were to have cocktails at sunset. Third, there’s Leon, who is a ranger.

The boundaries of who does what and who goes where in the African bush have long been as clear as a lion kill at twenty feet. The person who takes you around on safari is not a ranger but a guide, normally one from the camp where you’re staying. The quality of the guide usually determines the quality of the safari. Some people call their guides rangers, lots of guides want to be rangers, and some rangers call guides Landrover jockeys. It doesn’t take long for me to learn that the difference is more than name deep.

Rangers work the bush; guides work tourists in the bush.

Rangers are government employees and get paid, the saying goes, “not in currency but in sunsets.” Guides, who are part of the most lucrative tourism network in Africa (a thousand dollars per person per night in some camps is not unheard of), get tipped liberally in foreign currency.

The ranger’s environment is frugal (game parks across Africa are seeing their already skimpy budgets cut even more); the guide’s is often a place where, as one ranger puts it, a little enviously, I suspect, “you get cable, a Jacuzzi, air-conditioning, and your own private Landrover jockey to pull out your chair at night.”
A ranger’s knowledge of the bush, especially in a place like Kruger, is far-reaching – and it has to be. (One of them points out the easily forgettable: “No rangers, no animals.” He might also have added, “… no camps, no guides, and no reason for a safari.”) A guide’s knowledge, meanwhile, can vary as much as his accent. On previous safaris, I’ve been led around by a German whose specialty was birds, an Australian neo-hippy who tripped out whenever he saw Ursa Maior, and a Tanzanian ex-mechanic who knew more about high revs than hyena. With Leon, it’s a whole other story.

Leon Serfontein is one of four rangers with whom I travel around Kruger, part of an unprecedented plan by the park’s so-called custodians to cash in on a market they’ve been missing out on for far too long – tourism. They can do it because democracy has removed not only racial divides in South Africa but also some of the bureaucratic ones. The stodgy game parks of old are being allowed to swing a little. Simply put, the rangers take you out and act like your – well, guide. But as ranger Ralf Kalwa explains to me on my first day in the park, don’t expect to just sit in a vehicle and wait for someone else to point out the obvious.

“Lots of people have experienced all that – the physical of the bush – and now they want to find out about the behavioral, and then, eventually, the philosophical.”

In other words, they not only want to see an elephant on the horizon at sunset and a lion take down an impala, they also want to find out how the African wild ticks. And if anyone can show them, Kruger’s rangers can. They’ve got entree to the workings of the park, something no guide has ever had. Wanna see an elephant captured? They’ll try their best. Wanna get up close and very personal with a rhino? Done. Wanna walk in an area off-limits even to vehicles? Easy. Wanna find out about the mating practices of the sable antelope or know which mammal would win in a ranger’s popularity stakes, the whale or the elephant? Just ask. It’s like being in a museum with the curator whose got the keys to all the rooms and the background to talk about what’s in them rather than with someone who’s doing this as a summer job.

If this rubs traditionalists the wrong way – could Rangers, Inc. and their own line of clothing be far behind? – they needn’t worry. The rangers are only allowed to tout in their free time, and the money that doesn’t go back into the park helps fund a private organization which trains and supports rangers across the continent. Unlike Kruger, which is far and away the most successful animal sanctuary in Africa, many parks north of it are in an abysmal state. One ranger I meet who regularly visits them says the rangers are undertrained, underpaid, and undervalued. In one park last year (he won’t mention the name and the park itself won’t willingly publicize the incidents), a dozen rangers were killed by animals or poachers. What’s worse is that in countless others, rangers continue to poach the very animals they’re supposed to be protecting.

“In the end,” he says, “it’s not poaching that succeeds, it’s rangers who fail.”

Poaching, coincidentally, is my point of departure in Kruger. At 6 a.m. the destination is a stakeout. Several weeks earlier, Ralf tells me as he drives, gunshots were heard a few miles from his house on the southern perimeter of Kruger, near the Crocodile River, and human tracks were found where they weren’t supposed to be. Which meant only one thing. Poachers.

The number of incidents in Kruger has fallen dramatically – from about one hundred a week back in the 1980s to maybe forty a month. “But as long as there are animals,” Ralf says, “there will be poachers.” To remind himself, he keeps a wall in his office plastered with gruesome photos of lion with their necks torn away and antelope whose eyes are missing because witchdoctors want them. Outside his house are three thousand snares that he and his men have collected since 1996, everything from rusty barbed wire to state-of-the-art stainless steel.

Going from the latest band’s use of guns and from bits of intelligence Ralf has gleaned, it’s clear that they’re into commercial hunting. Subsistence poachers would be using cheaper, cruder methods. “These guys dress well, have new gumboots,” Ralf says. “We think they’re going for meat – maybe to sell to a butcher – not for horns or ivory. But that can change at any time. Their needs determine what they go for” – a graver tone comes into his voice – “and that can even be rhino.” Despite a CITES ban on its sale since 1977 and relatively little killing of rhino in Kruger, rhino horn can still be found quite easily in Maputo market, barely one hundred miles away – along with the claws of vultures and lion, as well as animal intestines, testicles, and hair.

The presence of firearms at the stakeout makes it unsafe for Ralf to take me any closer, so I have to be content with watching his men, junior rangers, load their R1 rifles and don camouflage before they strap on their backpacks and head off in file, in silence. Even if I hadn’t guessed by now, Ralf tells me the obvious: He and his men all had to undergo paramilitary training.

Driving away from them, in the opposite direction, we come across something in the middle of the track. Ralf brakes suddenly and, his face full of anticipation, he leaps from the vehicle. I suspect that he’s found a piece of evidence related to the poaching operation, but it’s actually a huge pile of dung. To show how fresh it is, he makes me feel the dry, coarse warmth of the midden. Sifting through the feces with his hands as if he’s looking for a clue, he picks out the telltale chips of branch that have been eaten at a 45-degree angle.

“Black rhino,” he says, “marking his territory.”

You can hear how pleased he is, not (as anyone who’s ever been on a safari with a guide might expect) because we might catch sight of the culprit at any moment, but because of simple arithmetic: He now knows that one of the precious few hundred black rhino in this part of Africa is on his turf. They’re moving farther afield, which is a good sign, a sign that the rangers are succeeding (or rather, poachers are failing) – and you can’t help sharing his enthusiasm.

For the rest of the day and the next we drive and walk around Ralf’s 125,000-hectare section of the Massachusetts-size park. Before long I notice something strange happening. Instead of paying attention to the animals we see – which I would normally do on a safari – I listen to Ralf. His stories about living and working in the wild for the past twenty years give the animals and the bush a perspective that no mere sighting ever could. There’s the details of the horn borer moth, and the story of what he did when 23 elephant escaped from the park into a nearby sugar plantation, and why dogs are good to have around as lion detectors, and the sad tale of how one of his trainees got killed by a leopard. Ralf even makes a detour to introduce me to the junior ranger who risked his life to go out in the dark, find the perpetrator, and shoot it.

“He risked his life,” Ralf says, bursting with pride.

This is the first of many times I wish I had a tape recorder, but I don’t. One, because the only time you usually need one in the bush is when you want to draw a bird out by playing its call back to it. Two, because I’m convinced it will intimidate the rangers. Before I meet them, I have developed this picture in my head: It’s of an out-of-touch, fairly reticent group of men who haven’t had to learn the people skills that guides can’t do without. (Rangers and guides throughout Africa are, by the way, almost always male. Only recently has Kruger appointed a woman ranger, as well as its first black warden).

But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Ralf is sunkissed, sunglassed, and quite the showman, totally unfazed by questions, no matter how personal they are, or even by having a camera shoved in his face for so long it would make a politician cranky. He sets the record straight for me. “Rangers come in all types, from bullshitter to the silent guy to drinker to nondrinker to someone who likes guns, someone who sings, and good painters.” He pauses. “Actually, we make very good painters.”

If Ralf is the performer, then Marius Kruger is the gentle giant. He runs the holding pen, or boma, in Skukuza, the main camp of Kruger. The boma is the heart of one of the park’s most successful and lucrative venture – the capture and sale of animals. Here is where they await transfer to their new home, which could be another park, a breeding sanctuary, or a zoo, from Berlin to Sydney, Kampala to Cairo. While other parks in Africa are trying to hold their own, Kruger can sell and give away, mostly because for a century the rangers have been the best at what they do.

In 1902, when James Stevenson-Hamilton, an ex-soldier, was given the task of patrolling the newly proclaimed reserve, he struggled to find 25 elephant in the area. Today there are at least 10,000, which doesn’t include the hundreds that have been caught, auctioned off, and translocated over the last decade, earning the park valuable revenue. A single white rhino can bring in $25,000 (black rhino are still too limited in number to sell) – a bill that more than doubles if it is taken abroad.

“It’s a lot of money,” Marius concedes, “but you can’t buy a species.”

I find myself in the boma as an alternative to being on an actual game capture. Instead of seeing the rangers dart an elephant or a rhino, truss it up, put it in a container, and drive it off, I am at the waystation. There have been plenty of captures just before I arrive – Ralf himself darted eight white rhino in his section – and I am repeatedly assured that something might crop up in the next few days. An elephant near Pafuri, on the Zimbabwe border, needs to have a microchip inserted, but they can’t find him. Then there are some crocodiles that have to be caught for a research project. But in the end, everything falls through. Game capture, I discover, is to this new kind of safari what a leopard was to the old – elusive in the extreme.

The first animals we visit in the boma are six hyena that had been causing a problem near one of the camps, a result of having been repeatedly fed by tourists. Rather than shoot them, Kruger is giving them to Singapore Zoo. Not far away from them are several dozen buffalo, who eye us suspiciously from behind the thick wooden poles of their enclosure. They aren’t for export but form part of a program to create a disease-free herd. At present all the ungulates in Kruger are infected with foot and mouth, which means they can’t be sold. A buffalo with a clean bill of health, however, could bring in as much money as a white rhino. It’s hard to see an animal with new eyes, but I suddenly have to. In the past a buffalo for me was simply an animal that formed part of a herd kicking up dust on a plain, the species you always forgot was one of the Big Five, the fifth wheel. Now I see them as more than just a good photo op.

The last animals we reach are 18 rhino – in other words, almost half a million dollars’ worth – that will be flown to breeding sanctuaries in Florida, Omaha, and Australia. Marius explains the procedure of getting a rhino used to the cage it will travel in, which takes several months (an elephant, in contrast, is shipped right after being tranquilized in the field). A young male slowly approaches us, its horn green from rubbing the painted bars. He gets to the fence and, if I didn’t know better, seems quite tame. After telling me that rhino habituate very quickly, Marius nudges me forward.

“Scratch him,” he says.

I feel the base of the horn, thousands of hairs that have grown together, and then, with Marius egging me on, move my hand down the rhino’s body and tentatively reach inside its inner thigh. The rough, sandpapery hide gives way to skin as smooth as a leather handbag, and within seconds the rhino is leaning against the cage, his eyes going the way a dog’s do when you touch behind his ears.

As amazing as it is to almost touch the heart of four thousand pounds of mammal, I have to remind myself that the boma is there for a more profound reason: because animals behind bars can be just as precious as those in the wild. For anyone whose ideal of African wildlife is, say, a lone elephant on the horizon, that might be discouraging. But whether it’s for breeding or moneymaking purposes, the caged animal is often ensuring the survival of the free.

To see one effect of this controlled environment, Marius takes me to a pen about a mile away from the white rhino. There we find three black rhino, which are smaller and rarer than the white. Two come from breeding sanctuaries in the United States and Germany, while the third, an orphan, was reared by a woman in Pretoria. They’ve all been caged for so long, I can’t even recognize their dung. Instead of browsers, who create the kind of 45-degree-angled bites on branches that Ralf showed me, they’re captivity has made them grazers. At this stage, they eat both ways. In the next day or two they will be put into a large enclosure where their movements can be monitored, then into an even larger one, and finally into the park itself. For some reason I think of Born Free, where Joy and George Adamson released the tame lioness Elsa back into the wilds of Kenya. Even though that rare event has now become an almost daily exercise, it still feels momentous.

The two expats, Marius points out, were born of parents that originated in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, countries which once had tens of thousands of rhino in their parks but now have hardly any left. (In fact, South Africa refuses to sell or donate any more rhino to Zimbabwean parks until its rangers can guarantee their safety.) This pair will hopefully ensure that those bloodlines don’t die out.

“So we’re not only giving away to other countries,” says Marius, “we’re also taking back.”

Tne species whose members Kruger won’t be taking back anytime soon, however, is the elephant.

It’s a bizarre anomaly that every ranger I come across talks about quite passionately. Unlike parks in the rest of Africa, Kruger has too many elephant. According to the researchers in Skukuza, there should be at least three thousand fewer than there are. Capture is no longer an option because so many elephant have been caught, auctioned off, and translocated that demand has waned. “Everyone’s full up,” Marius tells me. Whereas they used to catch 200 a year and sell them without a problem, now it’s only 50, each of which brings in about $2,500, a tenth of what a rhino can fetch. Kruger’s biggest success (the redemption of the elephant) has turned into their biggest headache (what to do with it).

“They cause untold damage,” says ranger Arrie Schreiber. “They wipe out healthy vegetation other animals could have eaten – for no better reason than they were feeling rambunctious or angry. There’s enough food now, after good rains, but when a drought comes …” He leaves me to imagine the consequences.

One possible solution is contraception, but it’s difficult, time-consuming, costly, and still being worked on. Another is the acquisition of extra land. A massive piece of Mozambique adjacent to Kruger is virtually uninhabited and animalless, and if the fence between the two is taken down, more than two million hectares would be added to park, creating the world’s biggest conservation area and a so-called transfrontier peace park. Excess animals, or so the theory goes, would have somewhere else to go besides a butcher’s block.

“It’s hard to say if migratory routes will reappear or if elephant will move into less-overgrazed areas,” says Arrie as we drive along some 65 miles of the 220-mile fence that still separates Kruger from Mozambique, “but it’s quite possible.”

In the meantime, though, the problem of overpopulation has become, you could say, elephantine. So the most immediate solution is also the most likely – not to mention the most controversial – and that is to cull the elephant, which for most people is just a polite way of saying to massacre them. Until three years ago, herds were regularly thinned out, with the meat being sent to the abattoir in Skukuza and the tusks stockpiled. Arrie has about one thousand pounds of ivory in a safe off of his office, part of an estimated dozen tons that the park would like to sell, but because of the ten-year-old CITES ban, it cannot. Culling was put on hold after an outcry from environmentalists, but Kruger seems to be steeling itself to take on their wrath again.

To a world that’s used to hearing about elephant being an endangered species, this all sounds like madness. Even more so when one finds out who it is that pulls the trigger. People like Ralf, Arrie, Leon, and Marius, that’s who. It’s at this point that the rangers unavoidably start looking like the baddies. When Arrie tells me that culling is in synch with the park’s policy of “sustainable use of products,” it sounds technical and heartless. It seems as if man has meddled too much. But if he hadn’t, Kruger would probably be no better off than that park in Africa where a dozen rangers were lost last year, and elephant numbers have dwindled to double digits.

On one of my last days in the park, I’m driving with Arrie along the edge of the Lebombo Mountains, halfway up the eastern side of the park. Arrie looks like Ben Johnson, especially when he has a Winchester 357 in his hands. At one point we come across a lone elephant in the midst of an expanse of mopane trees, a hardy indigenous species whose leaves elephant love. When Arrie gets out of the vehicle for a moment, the bull suddenly starts fanning his ears, a sure sign he’s angry, then makes a mock charge. Instead of shouldering the Winchester, Arrie calmly claps his hands together, and the elephant stops short, even seems a bit surprised, and then turns away.

The action puts me so much in mind of a man and his dog that it’s hard to imagine that Arrie might one day be called on to shoot this very same healthy elephant. It strikes me at that moment that he is really two people. The one has a passionate bond with the elephant, the rhino, the trees, the birds, while fighting poachers and doing everything in his power to ensure that the African wild stays intact. The other can wipe out an entire family of elephant without blinking. I find it hard to equate the two, but both men have changed safari for me forever.