Jill Wylie, Javelin the search dog, and duiker Berry |
The ethologist
Paul Shepard has said that our need for animals
is no vague, romantic, or intangible
yearning, no simple sop to our loneliness or nostalgia for Paradise. It is as hard and unavoidable as the
compounds of our inner chemistry. It is
universal but poorly recognised. It is
the peculiar way animals are used in the growth and development of the human
person, in those most priceless qualities, which we lump together as
“mind”. It is the role of animal images
and forms in the shaping of personality, identity, and social
consciousness. Animals are amongst the
first inhabitants of the mind’s eye.
There’s no
mystery as to why I’ve ended up writing mostly about ecological matters and our
fellow-animals, incorporating them into my teaching when I can.
My mother Jill
Wylie is a self-educated naturalist. She
was the centre of her local SPCA for forty years; she made a career of training
a series of dogs to find other lost dogs (most often caught in snares in the
hills and bush); and she protected a privately-owned, non-profit wildlife
sanctuary in the Bvumba mountains of eastern Zimbabwe. I grew up with innumerable orphans: kittens
and puppies, bushbuck and duiker, genets and mongoose, chickens and hares.
We all shared,
she joked, one big bottle of warmed milk, with a little egg and calcium for our
orphaned bones.
Animals formed
my personality, identity, and social consciousness.
And she would
take me into the forest in the late evening, when reddening sunlight slanted
through that rich, safe world, and say, “Look! How the sun just picks out that leaf, that twig! Amazing!” An attentiveness that, without rhetoric or
inhibition, sacralised even sheer accidents of light.
And I still do
that.
The mystery, I
suppose, is why, despite all my father’s best efforts, I failed to understand
the internal combustion engine. Indeed,
I have come to believe that the oil-fired engine has set the whole world on a
temporarily comforting but ultimately self-destructive course. The first to suffer, of course, are the wild
animals and their habitats. While my
father laboured in his workshop on mechanical projects of improbable ingenuity, my mother
set out to rescue and rehabilitate such animals as she could reach.
And then wrote
about it. Endlessly. Diaries, letters, columns for newsletters,
articles for journals, books. Three
books are in print: Call: Life with a
Basenji (available here http://megabooks.co.za/shop/brand/jill-wylie/
); and two parallel sequels, Search
(about Javelin, Call the Basenji’s Doberman successor as search dog; available
direct from me); and Wildwoods: The
making of a wildlife sanctuary (available here http://megabooks.co.za/shop/wildwoods-the-making-of-a-wildlife-sanctuary/). I hope in future to share more of her
(actually very good) unpublished work on this blog. Meanwhile, here is a piece I wrote back in
2006, but hadn’t got around to placing elsewhere. I hope it
makes an interesting introduction to the unique, often quite perilous venture
of a remarkable person.
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Dan, Call the Basenji and Jill Wylie [Photo: Martin Glover] |
Mother
There are voices on the hill. Intruders. The dogs yelp. I follow my mother into the forest, running.
For more than thirty years I have
followed my mother into this forest, along this path. This path is the central thread in my
childhood, still as strong and essential to my being as my spinal cord is to my
body. My childhood runs even now through
my vertebrae, as through a tunnel of trees.
The forest clings to the
mountainside like an injured child.
My mother owns this part of the
forest, it is her property, there are boundaries. Ownership of a forest is as problematic,
however, as ownership of a child, and the status of boundaries is vexed these
days. Money once changed hands, pegs
were surveyed and marked. But my mother
says, It doesn’t belong to us, we belong
to it. I am just a temporary custodian of this acreage of life.
The intruders are here to remind her
of her temporariness. They are carriers
of arrows and irony.
We are running to catch up with
them. I am barefoot, like the child I
once was, wincing a little now, my soles plump with civilization.
The
property my mother possesses, or is possessed by, takes a cut like a sirloin
from the flank of a ridge called Zohwe.
Zohwe is part of the Bvumba mountains of eastern Zimbabwe; its
northeastern end noses into Mozambique.
Bvumba means ‘mist’ in Shona. Often the mist rolls across the top of the
grassland-coated batholith we call Forest Hill, scuds down the inner thigh of
Lion Rock’s granite prow, leaps with ease the deep Ravine onto Duiker
Hill. The hill is dressed in
brachystegia woodland light and open as a smile; it nudges up against the
forest proper, its hundred-foot figs and podocarps, cathas and cussonias,
albizias and crotons.
Then the mist rolls on down and
dissolves at the valley floor, where the one road loops and writhes. Mist is oblivious to boundaries.
The property’s boundaries are
imaginary. No one but dead municipal
mapmakers and my mother know or heed them.
There are no fences, bar one along the road at its narrow foot: our
intruders this morning must have walked around the end of it. To the northeast the woodland brushes
seamlessly across the ravine to Elephant Head, and onwards. To the southeast the big forest goes on,
equally seamless, up into the head of the valley, the cupped hand of its
watershed, its life source. The imagined boundaries of all the property-owners,
sketched on air, are violated by nature with impunity: the Starred robins flit
through them in a second, the somango monkeys leap across them, unmannerly
trees crash from one property into another.
And violating all of them, in their
grooves more ancient than any men, the streams, whose fan of tributaries mesh
in the small river which runs the length of the valley and feeds the houses and
the coffee-farms, the flower-plots and the nut plantations.
Without the forest, the coffee and
the nuts would die.
Stippling the deep shadows of the
forests, like shy colonists – or runaway slaves – are more coffee trees, seeded
there by Silvery-cheeked hornbills which have raided the farms for berries for
their nesting wives. The boundary
between the cultivated and the wild is
indistinct, however much my mother might wish it were otherwise.
But that is consequential on the
Sanctuary’s essence, my mother recognises.
This is a Sanctuary without borders, the animals must be free to come
and go as they please. That is why it is
a Sanctuary, because it is open.
It is not a Sanctuary by anyone’s
law or legislation. It is a Sanctuary
solely because my mother is there.
She nurtures it by walking it, by
walking and knowing.
And by the animals’ knowing that
they too can walk there, without threat.
For the child trotting and laughing
in my marrow, the forest is the safest place in the world.
Now we are running, but with
urgency, pursuing voices. The voices are
speaking casually in Shona. They are not
stray American or Swedish tourists. They
are black people.
***
We
are white people. Being white in Zimbabwe
is a tricky business. Robert Mugabe’s
ZANU-PF regime has been wreaking belated revenge on the political descendants
of Cecil John Rhodes, whose 1890 ‘Pioneer Column’ violently annexed Zimbabwe
(Rhodesia) to British imperialism.
Zimbabwean poet John Eppel calls Rhodes ‘the cash-box bandit’.
Now we have a new generation of
cash-box bandits, masquerading as state legalism. In a few short years, agriculture has been
eviscerated, industry is collapsing, fuel chronically dries up, inflation runs white-hot
at 1200 per cent, four million people face famine. The police sell confiscated sugar at 400 per
cent profit, ungovernable warlordism threatens, the dissenting press is bombed,
opposition party officials disappear, Mr Mugabe flies to Malaysia on holiday.
Conservation of wildlife and the
environment is caught up in the mayhem.
An African proverb: When two
elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
The grass beneath the msasa trees
glows like blond flame this morning. It
releases scents, somewhere between the aromas of cinnamon and dust, sparking
with crisp dew.
As a child in Kenya, my mother ran
all day in such grasses, and refused to wash when she came home; those smells
lingered on her skin and made her drunk with pleasure.
Just that colour gets under the
skin. After many years away from my
homeland, I saw a film, an iconoclastic Zimbabwean-made film called Flame,
which recounted the career of a young woman freedom fighter. It opened with a shot of the dawn sun glowing
through these grasses: sharp coppers and edgy, fragrant yellows, tipped with
cerise memories. It felt as if my skin
was being turned inside out.
Of such ephemera we build our
identities.
Now I am ‘home’ – the inverted
commas are becoming obligatory, sharp as the black commas on an Augur buzzard’s
wings: I have not ‘lived’ here in more than a decade – we are running through
the grass, the thin blades razoring coldly across my knees.
The set of our dogs’ noses tells us
the intruders have gone up the firebreak.
Fire is a talisman of threat. Lightning sets off fires, but less often than
cigarette butts spun from car windows, less often than honey-gatherers smoking
out bees from the hollows of waterberry or mutsungunu trees. Sparks escape thoughtlessly; whole mountain
ranges burn.
I recall many October days, the
hills blanched to a pale thick blue by pervasive smoke, when we flailed with
sacks or green branches at the edges of fires that crept or stormed up the
Sanctuary’s lower slopes. The blazes
scorched our cheekbones, left a sifting pungent darkness and the bones of small
creatures. We’d pick across the coughing
aftermath like survivors of an apocalypse, stabilising logs that might roll in
the night and spark it afresh. Hope that
the wind wouldn’t awaken in the night while necklaces of red eyes laced our
dreams.
Many of the Shona people who fought
the fires alongside us thought we were crazy.
But they needed the work.
Later – as in former years - some of
them would use fire to drive the whites out, destroy what they loved. Fire as politics.
Once, in the worst of the droughts,
no man alive could hold it, the winds whipped it up like an acrid spitting sea,
even the great evergreen forest was too dry to resist. The hornbills were nesting in the craibias,
the females bricked in with mud; the males wouldn’t leave them until the nest
itself was consumed; on fire themselves, braying with terror they spread the
flames through the desiccated thickets of dried creeper that weighed the
treetops, thirty unreachable metres above any firefighter’s head.
Like the most innocent women in a
war, the most beautiful trees proved the most vulnerable: the great strangler
figs, whose muscled, latticed, serpentine, spilling roots had throttled huge
host trees to death and split rocks, were shown to be light and friable; they
burned like bridges, like long hair.
The steepest side of Duiker Hill is
one of my mother’s treasures. Saving it
from fire remains one of her most tenaciously held ambitions. The soil here is stony and loose, as prone to
russet erosion as a leper’s skin. In the
early years of her ownership, she nursed a thin scattering of emaciated,
child-like trees: msasas, munondos, muzhanjes, a few Prince-of-Wales-feathers,
waterberries in the gullies. She
ringbarked the Australian eucalypts that stole a thousand litres of water a day
from the gaunt water table.
Under the weak canopy, an almost
unique ecosystem. Grasses, nutsedge, St
John’s wort, blackjack, wild tobacco, streptocarpus, crackling brackens. Cane-rats and moles. Stands of leonotis with their storied crowns
of orange blossoms that fed the slender bills of Black and Double-collared
sunbirds. Baboons came from Forest Hill, foraging for the soapy-cored yellow muzhanje fruits, barking and squabbling and
bashing down the accumulations of dry grass-debris, so no fire that did come
through would burn too hot.
She hoped. Then the baboons did not come. Poisoned.
Baboons adore the bark of young pine trees, grown on plantations on the
far side of the ridge. So they were
poisoned.
Then the leopards were no longer to
be found either. Poisoned, by the
carcasses of the baboons.
In the Ravine, liberated from
predation, the bushpigs flourished. On
Duiker Hill, grass-brakes mounted up. A
fire got away. It coursed up those
fragile slopes. Too hot; far too hot.
The struggling trees burned and crumbled.
My mother looked across at those
many years of protective work, the shallow dongas just gaining sufficient
thicket to shelter her rehabilitated bushbuck, the vetiver grass she’d planted
on the erosion wounds just beginning to take: gone. She wept.
Then she and the natural processes
started again.
Life, green life, seems to be
unconquerable. It conquers cinders and
time. It conquers the despair of women
and their visiting sons. It may yet
conquer humankind altogether. There are
little muzhanjes coming up everywhere, with oversized leaves, like urchins
wearing borrowed adult finery. New grass
snouting up in punky tufts. On the
forest edge, the pioneer cathas flourishing a vivid adolescent lime-green. In the new glades in the deep forest, where
great trees had crashed in flames and breakage, bringing the open sky down with
them, creepers we’d never seen before swarmed over the rocks and debris,
healing, holding. Then, nettles almost
the height of a man. Then the new
albizia and cabbage-tree saplings burrowing up into the light.
It will all take time. But time itself takes time. And time until – what? Restoration.
The mythic As-It-Was.
But what will be restored? What original Paradise do we have in mind
here? We know this forest long ago
housed mountain communities of healers, hunters and hermits; we have found the
ancient foundations of huts, subtle as ringworm, and pots buried to the rims in
earth, deep in burial caves. We know
that the forest was long ago plundered for its hardwoods: here and there the
axe has left its flat, hard-eyed signature.
Not to mention the
coffee-trees. Not to mention the
gum-trees building up in terrifying, whispering phalanxes along the
river-lines.
Everywhere we look, we face the
death of purity.
But the Sanctuary depends on a certain
conservatism. It is a metaphor for
continuity.
Our intruders are tearing that
fabric, that myth of protective stasis.
And they are carrying fire. We
can smell it. And then, pushing hard up
the firebreak, we see them. Two
men. One has bow and arrows in one
hand. The other a black can slung on a
handle of fencing-wire, spilling pale smoke.
We pause to call out.
‘Iwe, madoda! Mirayi!
Uya pano!’
***
We
address the men with the respectful form – mirayi, rather than the more
peremptory Mira! – Wait! It is
more unwise than ever to cause unnecessary antagonisms.
‘We are looking for some missing
cattle,’ one of the men calls back.
‘There are no cattle up here. Please come down.’
We continue to move up towards
them. Realising we are not about to be
deceived by this pretext, they take off.
We give chase, this unfit forty-five-year old and this seventy-five-year
old woman and two not very fierce dogs.
I know I have no hope of catching them, nor any clear idea what I might
do if I did. Days were when could call
fruitfully on officers from National Parks to arrest ‘poachers’, but those days
are gone now; they have neither the resources nor much motivation to work
outside their narrowly delineated Park areas.
Indeed, country-wide, Parks officials, progressively stripped of
government funding, are either resourced by rich, upmarket tourist lodge
owners, the odd NGO, or have themselves become active participants in the
plunder of the Parks they avowedly protect.
More or less arbitrary local potentates now regularly sell ‘licences’ to
foreign hunters to come in and shoot at will.
A South African hunter recently boasted of having taken out 1500 zebra
skins in a single week. The slaughter
re-enacts that perpetrated by the first wave of white hunters in this country
in the late 1800s. Poverty has nothing
to do with it.
For these two young men, poverty
might have everything to do with it.
Even if they are local wage-earners, wages have been outstripped by
inflation by an order of hundreds.
At any rate, they have split up and
vanished.
As I pound futilely up the
firebreak, a bushbuck doe steals away: their probable target. Strangely, she does not give the usual sharp
flat bark of warning. As if she knows. Or perhaps because my mother is in
attendance.
My mother sings to bushbuck. She developed a melodious call when she was
raising orphans, so they could learn to recognise her approach, both before and
after rehabilitation. Terrified,
bewildered, often wounded little orphans, susceptible to shock and scouring,
they had to learn to trust. My mother
has an extraordinary ability to feel her way into an orphan’s mind and
sensibility, to avoid, for instance, spreading her arms like an eagle’s wings,
so inducing instinctual panic; to mimic a mother buck’s call to drink; to hold
herself in such a way as to approximate a mother’s flank against which the baby
could butt and suckle.
My mother is the wildest creature I
know.
Once an orphan is healed, has
learned from my mother which wild foods to eat, and has made touch-nose contact
with wild ones through the mesh of the big outside cages at the forest’s edge,
it is released. It will still be
partially dependent on the bottle, and will come in when my mother sings her
call. If not, the dogs, raised alongside
and often taking a motherly interest, will be sent out to track and herd the
little creature back, nudging it along with their noses.
So now, the grown, breeding buck in
the forest, whether they are released orphans, the orphans’ offspring, or even
totally unrelated wild ones, recognize her melodious call, know that the dogs
will take no interest in chasing them; so they will just stand and calmly watch
us pass.
Imagine her distress, then, to one
day find the bushbuck Msasa, successfully rehabilitated orphan and mother of
five fawns born in the wild, torn to pieces by the neighbours’ dogs; or Fawn
Four, hanging bloated from a wire snare laid weeks before, the meat rotting on
its makeshift gibbet, never collected.
She feels every loss like a piece of
her own flesh, torn out. This is the
price of unconditional love.
These two men raise all these
nightmares again.
They have disappeared. The dogs track and find the blackened tin
can, still smoking, abandoned by a path we know snakes back down into the
valley.
In the honeyed evening light, we
turn for home.
***
A beautiful and poignant piece of writing ... straight from the heart! I can only admire your mother.
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