Whatever You Do, Don't Run

  Whatever You Do,

  Don’t Run

  My Adventures as a Botswana Safari Guide

  Whatever You Do,

  Don’t Run

  My Adventures as a Botswana Safari Guide

  PETER ALLISON

  First published 2007 in the United States by The Lyons Press, a division of The Globe Pequot Press, Guilford CT USA. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. This Australian edition published 2007

  Copyright © Peter Allison 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for is educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Allison, Peter.

  Whatever you do, don’t run : my adventures as a Botswana safari guide.

  ISBN 9781741753196 (pbk.).

  1. Allison, Peter. 2. Safari guides – Botswana – Biography. 3. Safaris – Botswana – Anecdotes. I. Title.

  916.8830432

  Cover designed by Darian Causby

  Typeset by Blue Rinse Setting

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Australia

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to anyone who works to protect wild places and the animals within them, but in particular to the safari guides who taught me so much.

  My particular thanks go to Chris Greathead, Devlin Foxcroft, Iain Garrett, the Marais family (including Sally), Helen Dewar, Duncan Menzies, Alpheus Mathebula, Titus Indloovu, BK Setlabosha, Lloyd Camp, Clinton “Cliffy” Phillips, Grant Woodrow, Mike Myers, Lex Hes, Richard Field, Paul Allen, Colin Bell, Russell Friedman, Chris Kruger, Julius Masogo, the late great Rantaung Rantaung and the sadly missed Nandi Retiyo.

  Everything I know about animals I learned from this group, so any mistakes in this book are their fault.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Whatever You Do, Don’t Run

  The Lesson

  How I Got My Name

  The Great Mouse Plague

  Deliverance

  Buffalo School

  Learning to Walk Again

  Princesses and Jacks

  Pets

  The Drowning

  The Chase

  The World’s Worst Bathroom

  Scars

  Khama: A Love Story

  Beau Goes Back to Nature

  Mona Lisa

  Bird Nerds

  The Fool and the Snake

  Lost

  The Conversation

  A Guide Dies

  A Night in the Madgkadigkadi

  Ya-ya and Tsetse

  A Friend in Hand

  Bad Actors

  Bale and the Snake

  Encounters with Salvador

  Big Mistake

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  This book couldn’t have been written without the able assistance and encouragement of a wonderful group of women. Without Flavia I would never have had the courage to start this book, let alone finish it. My sister Laurie was subjected to some of the earliest drafts without visibly wincing. Without my magnificent agent and friend, Kate, I would never have found a home for the book and met Catherine, Clare, Richard (okay, he is clearly not a woman, but thanks anyway) and Kelly at Allen & Unwin. To all of you I give many, many thanks.

  Introduction

  When I was nineteen, after two years in a job that was going nowhere, I bought a ticket and set off for Africa, with the intention of staying for only a year. I went to Africa for two reasons. The first was that I wanted a challenge. The second was that all of my life I have loved and been fascinated by wildlife.

  After six months of backpacking I had spent much of my money, and the rest had been stolen in a Malawian camp ground. This helped fulfill the criteria of a challenge. Kindly fellow Australians offered to drive me to South Africa, where I could arrange for more funds, and during our journey we stopped at a game reserve.

  At the end of two astonishing days which I had spent in a state of euphoria, my enthusiasm was rewarded with an offer to run the bar at the camp. Happily putting down my backpack and cutting off my long hair I accepted.

  Living in the bush was more than I had ever expected was possible. I had grown up in some of Sydney’s most sedate suburbs, and in my own mind had none of the qualities you would expect of a rugged bush man. I’m markedly uncoordinated, can’t repair vehicles nor understand how they work, I don’t like guns, and I sweat profusely when nervous or excited—which is exactly how most animals make me feel.

  Nevertheless, over time I advanced in position, and became a guide, then a camp manager, then a teacher for others who wished to become guides. My short holiday to Africa has been keeping me busy since 1994, and I don’t foresee it ever ending.

  These are the stories from the life of an unlikely safari guide.

  Whatever You Do, Don’t Run

  The first place in Africa that employed me was a camp called Idube. The people who came there, like the people who came to every camp where I have ever worked, loved a thrill, something different. So we took them out to dinner.

  Not far from our main camp we had a small setup, inventively called the Bush Camp. It included a teepee over a toilet and a clearing where a fire could be built. Around this, chairs and tables were set, ready for the delighted guests who would be brought in the dark for their meal. Firelight is romantic and makes everyone look beautiful, just as it did for the Bush Camp. With lanterns lit and a beaming staff, the place looked perfect. But during the day it was only a sorry patch of earth, and the teepee was filled with spiders. The guests loved it, and the nights were cheap for the camp’s owners, so they insisted we run them at least once a week.

  The staff didn’t like these dinner nights in the bush. Setting up meant that the usual quiet time, when all the guests were out of camp, was suddenly filled with frantic activity. The one spare Land Rover, a decrepit and spluttering machine called the Skorokoro (which means “too old to work” in Shangaan), would be loaded with firewood, lanterns and a chef named Wusani, whose bulk always made the ageing suspension creak ominously. Wusani particularly disliked these bush dinners, as one afternoon after being dropped off she was unpleasantly surprised. Shortly after she lit the cooking fire, a lion roared, according to her description, “closer to me than a baby is to its mother.” Lions often walked in the soft sand of the dry riverbed that flowed beside the Bush Camp, to enjoy the shade or maybe to startle an antelope that had been lulled to sleep by the cool and tranquility of the surrounds. This lion was not hunting, or it would not have roared, but that didn’t make it any less terrifying for Wusani.

  When the Skorokoro and its driver returned that day with the tables and chairs, they found Wusani improbably perched on the outermost branches of a lo
ng-dead tree. When told it was safe to come down, she would not, because she could not. Adrenaline had fueled the climb, and now she only had the strength to cling on and beg for a ladder that the camp did not possess.

  Finally gravity’s pull resolved the issue. Despite her substantial weight and the height she fell from, Wusani was saved from serious harm—perhaps by her ample padding. But she would never stay at the Bush Camp by herself again, and she warned me against it when I started working at Idube.

  My job for bush dinners was simpler than Wusani’s. I had to transport sufficient amounts of alcohol to the Bush Camp to last the night. I hadn’t been working at the camp long, and as barman I was probably the most lowly staff member after the “gardener,” who watered the lawns that the warthogs promptly dug up. This gave me last priority when it came to loading the Skorokoro.

  “Bugger it,” I thought one afternoon when I had already helped load tables, chairs, cloths, salads and cutlery to the exclusion of the booze. “I’ll carry it there.”

  Animals were the last things on my mind as I loaded up a wheelbarrow with spirits and mixers. All I wanted was to get my job done. Besides, I’d been learning from the guides and felt that I was getting to be reasonably bush smart. With the cockiness of a nineteen-year-old, I felt I could handle anything that Africa threw at me. Whenever an animal encounter of the sort I was about to have was discussed, the advice was always the same: “Whatever you do, don’t run.” This was the solemn counsel of the three guides who worked at the camp. “Food runs,” added Alpheus, the tracker, his rough face split by an enormous grin. “And there is nothing here that you can outrun anyway.”

  After grunting and sweating my way along the sandy tracks that the Land Rovers used, I dropped off my first load and trudged back. All that I needed to take to the Bush Camp now was a case of beer. Filled with bravado, I decided to ditch the wheelbarrow and carry the drinks instead. I hadn’t considered how heavy twenty-four cans of beer gets when you are slogging through soft sand for almost a mile. Only a quarter of the way into my journey, I decided to change routes and take a shortcut along the riverbed.

  At one point I stopped to shake a small pebble from my shoe. Quartz, I concluded, because it was the only rock type I knew. I rested, gently putting the beer down and stretching. Branches met overhead, offering cool shade and a sense of peace that mingled with the constant undercurrent of excitement that comes from walking in the bush. In one of the branches, a type of bird named the grey lourie called, a long drawn out rasp that sounds like a hag telling you to go away. “Ka—weeeeeeeeeeee.” It is not an emphatic sound, but it is irritatingly insistent. Later I would learn that this is just one of the many birds that give an alarm call when it sees a predator. The tricky part is figuring out whether it is saying it because of you (after all, humans are Africa’s most abundant predator) or because of something larger and fiercer.

  I put my shoe back on, hopping around to do so; picked up the beer; and rounded a fallen log. This startled two massive male lions that had been waiting for whatever clumsy creature was making all the noise, probably expecting a buffalo.

  They may have leapt to their feet, they may have flown. I don’t know because it was so fast I didn’t see. The time it took for them to get from where they were to where I stood was too short for my life to flash before my eyes. Instead I skipped to a day in December, when I was seven years old.

  Our next-door neighbours had a German shepherd named Pancho. Pancho scared the crap out of me. On the few occasions that we had been inside their house, he would pace a circuit from the kitchen through the living room to the dining room and round again, dipping his head to a canine rhythm and growling.

  On this day, my mother, sister and I were going to Hawaii so my mother could run in the Honolulu marathon. She was doing this even though she was sick, because she was a proud and determined woman and wanted it done. She was sick enough that while she completed the marathon, it would be the only overseas trip my sister and I would ever get to take with her. The medicines that customs would not allow, and I now carried next door for our neighbour to safeguard while we were away, would prove useless and cancer would take her within a year.

  The lady of the house was on the front lawn, brushing Pancho while holding him by the collar. Afterward my father, who considered himself an animal expert, would state that Pancho must have mistaken the medicine in my pudgy fist as a weapon. I was always convinced that the motive was much more simple—hatred. Pancho hated everyone except his owners, and here I was, coming like a sacrifice.

  To get to me, he violently twisted his neck, breaking his collar and leaving it in his owner’s grip. My father had always said to me that if a dog attacked (and even before that December day, I knew he must have been warning me about Pancho), that whatever I did, I mustn’t run. I had always imagined that if a dog (all right, if Pancho) did attack me, it was my mother I would make proud by standing bravely. She had also warned me about animals, and in a rare case of agreement, had repeated my father’s words: “Whatever you do, don’t run.”

  I ran. As fast as my little seven-year-old legs could whir, I ran for the low brick fence, insanely convinced that if I could just clear it, Pancho would stop at the boundary set out by some long-forgotten property surveyors. I could hear his owner shouting, “Pancho, no!” and “Pancho, come back!” so I must have outpaced him for only as long as it takes to say those words. With the fence still agonisingly far away, he pulled me down and mauled me.

  Twelve years later on another hot December day, I once again had every instinct telling me to run.

  “Let’s see if you’ve grown,” was one of the only things I had time to think before the two lions were at me.

  The other thing I thought, and it shames me to admit it, is this: If you drop the beer, it will get all fizzed up. And which motive was the strongest, I don’t know. But I stood my ground and gave my best attempt at a roar back at the lions.

  The lions stopped. Only an arm’s length away from me, they bellowed and spat and then, with a visible release of tension in their bodies, trotted around me and carried on down the riverbed as if they had pressing business elsewhere.

  I put the case of beer in the sand and sat on it as a stool. I shook, and listened to the birds. I felt the fear that hadn’t had the time to arrive earlier and let it wash over me. But through the fear I felt something else.

  Pride.

  The Lesson

  “You should learn how to walk,” Chris said to me.

  I was nineteen and had been getting around on two feet with relative ease for some years, so the comment might have seemed strange to an outsider. But we were in a safari camp, and the walking Chris was talking about would involve in-depth knowledge of trees, tracks, insects and all the smaller things that were usually overlooked on a safari drive. I had only recently been offered the chance to become a guide and was doing my best to absorb the knowledge and skills required.

  There was the possibility that on one of these walks that I, and the tourists that I was being trained to lead, would inadvertently find one of the larger, more dangerous animals that we hoped to see only from the safety of a vehicle. In this case it was important that I had the ability to remain calm—and not run.

  Because of this it was important to make sure that if something did charge, I “had what it took.” This was safari-speak for having the ability to stand your ground against something that was hurtling at you with the full capability and possible intent of eating you. There is no point trying to outrun any of the dangerous animals in Africa anyway. Humans are almost laughably slow, not able to outpace even the obese hippo, the top-heavy giraffe or the surprisingly sprightly warthog.

  Iain, one of the guides training me, used to tell a joke at mealtimes about this lack of speed: Two guys are out walking when they see a lion, and it starts stalking them. One of the guys kicks off his hiking boots, reaches into a backpack, whips out some running shoes, and starts lacing them up. “What are you doin
g?” the other asks. “You can’t outrun a lion.”

  “I don’t need to,” comes the reply. “I only have to outrun you.”

  The joke always got a laugh, so it was recycled with almost every group that passed through. I heard it plenty of times before I ever got close to a lion on foot, so it came to the forefront of my mind when Chris walked into the camp office carrying a rifle.

  “There are lions right outside camp,” he said. “It’s the Ravenscourt Pride. They’re a bit nasty at times.” This was an understatement. They were the prime suspects in a man-eating case from a year earlier. “It’s been a while since I faced a charge. I want to see if I’ve still got it.”

  I wasn’t sure if my one experience with lions counted, as I suspected it was fear and not confidence that had rooted me to the ground. “I’d like to come along, and see if I’ve got it at all,” I piped up.

  Then I poked Chris in his not-quite-flat belly. “Besides which, I reckon I could outrun you.”

  Chris didn’t comment at first. He just put some rounds in the rifle, then chambered one. He smiled benevolently at me. “Not with a bullet in your leg.”

  I watched his smile to see if it wavered, some indication that he was joking. But he held it admirably firm, and I was somewhat relieved when after an hour or so of tracking we decided the lions had moved away. I would have to wait for another day to see if I had what it took to be a guide.

  How I Got My Name

  If you have spent any time in Africa and haven’t been given a nickname, you aren’t doing enough to get yourself noticed. A nickname can be just as important, and is far more likely to be used, than the name you are given at birth.