Sand Rivers Read online

  If Brian was surprised that he had seen no elephants - and Hugo and 1 had seen them only once - I was astonished that I had not seen a single new species of bird until the violet-crested turaco that morning. But at the Kilunda Pool, on the return to camp, I saw a second, a bird that had eluded me for years; glancing at what I took to be an emerald-spotted wood dove that had just alighted at the pool edge, I discovered instead the very similar blue-spotted wood dove, with its pearl-gray crown and iridescent night-blue on the wing - not an uncommon bird at all, but easily overlooked among its kin.

  Meanwhile poor Saidi had been sitting squashed up in the back of the Land Rover, in the heat, and when finally he emerged at camp, he moved quite stiffly. "1 used to work hard," he told Maria when she teased him in Swahili. "But now I am old and just sit around letting others do everything -1 am good for nothing." And he burst out in delighted laughter, walking away with his rifle, shaking his head.

  Whenever Philip or Sandra Nicholson left camp, Saidi went along, unless Robin Pope was free to fill that duty. Saidi's main job on this expedition was to sit about with his rifle wherever Philip decided to go fishing, which he decided to do almost every day. Philip, indeed, was indefatigable, bringing home endless strings of barbels for the delectation of the staff, and occasionally a tiger fish or the naked catfish, which were more pleasing to European palates. Meanwhile, Sandy started a collection of the peculiar natural objects of the miombo - the strange hairy seed pods of the crocodile-barked pterocarpus, the winged pods of terminalia and combretum, the beautiful, small, woody pear-shaped pods of the "African pear", and the shiny bronze beans from the long pods of the sterculia. She also struck up a pleasing friendship with young Robin Pope, whose good sense and dependability made him a great asset around camp, although he did not speak Swahili. In his modest way, Robin was very good company, observant and firm in his opinions on natural history - we disputed mildly over the identity of certain species - yet soft-spoken and detached, full of shy humor. Without censure, he described how Tom Arnold and David Paterson, walking through Zambia's Luangwa Valley, occasionally conducted loud political argument from their usual positions at opposite ends of a long line of walkers.

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  unchastened by the silences and splendors of the Africa they had come so far to see.

  One early morning I walked along the thicket of rapphia palms at the edge of the Kingupira forest, keeping an eye out for the lions that we heard each night, and listening to the sunrise plaint of the hadadas and fish eagles and trumpeter hornbills, the shrieking parrots, the squalling and explosive chack! of four boubous chasing through a bush. High in a riverain forest tree, four brown-chested barbets sat very still, gathering heat from the new sun in their crimson breasts, and not far away on a bare limb, a scarlet-chested sunbird preened itself with staccato energy, as if dealing with an attack of biting ants. Beside the track, a songbird came to perch just near the silhouette of what I had assumed was a Gabar goshawk, which will take such unwary birds wherever it finds them; looking more carefully, I saw that the hawk was a lizard buzzard. Interestingly, the lizard buzzard does not take birds, perhaps because it is too slow and lethargic, and more intere§jtingly still, songbirds have learned to distinguish this raptor from the others, and will perch beside it without fear.

  At a place where a porcupine had been destroyed, its beautiful black and white quills lay scattered on the sand. Gathering quills, I heard soft sounds behind me and turned with a start to see old Saidi, bound on foot for Ngarambe village, several miles away. I asked him why he was carrying no bunduki; hadn't lions been seen along this track just yesterday? Knowing that I was teasing him, Saidi gave me a sly look, then burst out laughing.

  V

  It was close to noon on 26 August when we broke camp and headed for the south. Not far from camp, in the full heat of the day, five wild dogs were engaged in a wart-hog kill, yanking and tearing at the dying creature in an open grove of small yellowthorn acacia. In the dust and sun and yellow light, among skeletal small trees, the dogs in silhouette spun round and round the pig in a macabre dance in which the victim, although dead, seemed to take part. But within a few minutes the wild pig had been rended, for the dogs work fast, perhaps to avoid sharing their prey with hyena or lion. The strange patched animals loped away into the woods, lugging big dark red gobbets of fresh pig meat in the direction of their den, returning soon to fetch away the last wet scraps, gray now and breaded with dust in the hard, hot wind.

  "There's nature in the raw for you!" Melva exclaimed, as unsettled as all of us by the strange scene.

  In these closed woods, weighed down by the gray sky, yellow baboons descended stiffly from a tamarind and moved off like old men. The long-faced kongoni looked depressed in the gloom of the burned miomho, but a pair of oribi, bright rufous, the first of these small antelope that we had seen, stood alert among the scaly leaves of stunted rain trees, so called because of the froghopper insects that ingest the sap, then spit out droplets of nearly pure water.

  The tsetse invaded the Land Rovers and bit hard; occasionally a nerve was hit by a bite of fire. There was much slapping and sweating in

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  the humid heat, and tempers were short. Tom Arnold and Maria in particular had no tolerance for tsetse, and Tom commanded Rohm Pope to keep his car windows tightly closed, despite the heat and the poisonous miasma of insecticides.

  Apparently tsetse are attracted by the movement of cars and by dark colors; they favor wart hog and are put off by zebra, as was discovered after thousands of zebra had been massacred as "carriers" in early unavailing experiments in tsetse control. Of the twenty-odd species of tsetse fly, most occur in some place or other over more than half the thinly populated reaches of Tanzania, but this mioinbo species is the common or savanna tsetse, Glossina morsitans, which has spared a vast area of Africa from human destruction. Due to poor soil or insufficient water or both, most of the mioinbo fails to support a human population large enough to maintain an adequate area of bush in the cleared state that inhibits tsetse, which survive in small pockets and may carry the trypanosome parasites from wild animals to domestic ones, or to human beingS; even in well-watered regions such as the Selous, all but a few hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers are.^riven out.

  Our long day in the tsetse woods was not improved when a Game Department Land Rover honked and passed much too fast, and Brian banged the steering wheel with his palm: "Just look at them! No wonder the machines don't hold up on these rough tracks! That's the so-called anti-poaching unit, 1 suppose!" He clacked his false teeth, then burst out again. "They'll go all out to Madaba, wrecking the machines, and hobnob with the people who are clobbering elephant up there, have some drink with them, then go on home!"

  Toward midday we met Rick's truck on its way back from the south. The track was extremely rough. Rick said, and the truck had mired down; he was very dirty but also very happy and excited. "Beautiful place, man! Ten herds of elephants, big herd of buffalo, lion - the lot!" But before Brian could take heart from this good news, we were overtaken by a Land Rover containing the white Zambian hunter and his black Tanzanian partner, whom he serves officially as an assistant; they were on their way back to Madaba, and stopped to chat.

  Brian demanded that the Tanzanian hunter explain the suspicious evidence of helicopters. The hunter, dressed in vivid forest green, acknowledged that helicopters seemed to be visiting Madaba, but looked unhappy and evasive when pressed for details. He denied that Tanzania Wildlife Safaris had killed all those elephants; it was the Game Department, and anyway, only 96 had been taken, not 126. Why, Brian asked, had any elephant been slaughtered inside the Selous Game Reserve? Well, actually, a report had come that elephants outside the Reserve were doing severe damage to cashew plantations, and the government had ordered one hundred killed. However, none had been located on the cashew plantations, so, you see, the quota had to be met

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  somewhere else! Why^ Bri
an repeated coldly. Giving me a baleful stare, he turned away without waiting for an answer and got back into his Land Rover. He had captured a live tsetse fly, and while waitmg for the other people to get back into their Land Rovers, he held it between thumb and forefinger and tickled its abdomen. Realizmg 1 was watchmg, Brian murmured, "For some reason, this makes them swell up - they can't seem to expel the ingested air. Quite interesting, really." And he gave me his bad grin, cheered up momentarily by my disapproval.

  The track led on across woods and flat-topped ridges, and by mid-afternoon we came down into the Muhinje Valley, which in other days had been inhabited by a few tribesmen. 1 rode with Brian and Goa Mwakangaru, a small, quiet man in a straw hat, who had been Nicholson's gunbearer and tracker here in the Selous, and who had joined the safari only yesterday. In the back seat, Goa sat up like a little boy, hands on the seat ahead. He knew this country and was happy to be back here. And it was Goa who called out "Tembo!" in his hushed deep voice; his tracker's eye had picked out pale gray shapes deep in the woods. Brian smiled, shaking his head; these were the first elephant he had seen in the Selous, but the event was now so anti-climactic that he could not comment.

  In a little while, pointing into some undistinguished woodlands, Goa smiled a little and whispered, "Maji ya Bwana Niki."

  Nicholson turned his head to look at him. "My water?"

  Goa nodded. "Maji ya Bwana Niki."

  And Brian shrugged. "Must have been some place I camped," he said. "I can't remember it. In the old days, we used to name these water holes for the game scouts who found them - gave them incentive to get out and look around. Had a lot of dedicated people then, and more coming up; we'd start them off as porters, and promote the good ones. In those days, the job of game scout was the most sought-after in southern Tanganyika, with good pay and great prestige and a new, smart uniform every six months, with red beret; the job was often handed down from father to son. That tradition's all but gone now. Bakiri says they're not giving out any new uniforms at all. People like Saidi and Goa and Bakiri Mnungu are the last of the old scouts who know this country; this lot today wouldn't dare go off the roads, or they'd be lost."

  Goa Mwakangaru was originally from the Tsavo region of Kenya, the son of a subchief of the Taita, an elephant-hunting people from the Taita Hills. As a youth, Goa hunted regularly with bow and arrow, and was credited with three rhino and two elephant. Subsequently, when an anti-poaching campaign led by the Tsavo wardens put most of the elephant hunters in the "Hoteli Kingi Georgi", Goa gave up his vocation to become a tracker for a professional hunter then working in both Kenya and Tanzania. When Goa was in his early twenties, this man recommended him to Brian Nicholson, whom he served until Bwana Niki quit

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  the Game Department and returned to Kenya. "He has marvelous eyes," Nicholson said. "I reckon the sign of a good tracker is the ability to follow a lion over hard ground in the dry season, and Goa can do that. He worked with me once or twice on man-eaters and often on cattle-killing lions, until I moved up to Morogoro; after that, I was mainly concerned with conservation work and the Reserve."

  In the valley called Nahatu, we made a fly camp between two big trees, an Acacia Sieberiana and a big vitex tree of the verbena family that in season produces a black edible fruit. We drank cool water from the ditch in the bottom of the dry-season karonga and listened to eared owls - the eerie trill of the tiny scops and the hooting of the spotted eagle owl - and slept communally under the kitchen fly, using mosquito netting. Brian and Melva had a tent put up, in which Tom Arnold joined them. Tom made no bones about his nervousness around big animals, and preferred to sleep with a Land Rover nearby. "I wasn't raised to it," Tom said, with a candor that all of us admired.

  That morning, as we continued south, five waterbuck in a glade of red-barked afromisia watched us pass, and a shiny hippo rose from a small lake and walked away among low trees in a sedate manner; otherwise, the tsetse woods were still. The track passed through a region known as Nambarapi, or Place of the Sable Antelope, and we kept an eye out for sable but saw none. Nor had we seen any kudu; so far, these two big woodland animals had remained hidden.

  At a dim crossroads there were crumbling signs, put up long ago under Brian Nicholson, and not far to the west the famous steam engine - the one intended to grind millet to make bread for the soldiery of Count von Lettow-Vorbeck - sat in the long grass off the track. A brass plate commemorated its construction in 1858, and seeing the size of it, one could scarcely imagine the cruel labor of those Africans who were forced to haul it on its iron wheels through a hostile waste of swamp, thornbush, and karonga, all the way from Kilwa, on the coast, to somewhere west of this place, for it was now facing east; unless it had been hauled backward, it was apparently abandoned on the return journey. Though it has tilted and begun to settle in the sandy soil, this prototypical contrivance will serve for many decades hence as the last monument to "the Battle for the Bundu".

  A man who was on Brian's staff when he first came to the Selous had been conscripted as a youth to help haul this steam engine, and the grandfather of Bakiri Mnungu also served in this part of Shamba ya Bibi as a soldier for the Germans. Before leaving his village he declared, "Naomba Mungu Naingarezi Wasiniue," meaning "I hope that God [Mungu] keeps the British from killing me," from which, according to Bakiri, the villagers gave him the nickname Mnungu which has persisted as his family name. Or perhaps Bakiri preferred this spelling and interpretation to the simple "Nungu", which means "porcupine".

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  At the spring called Mingwea, camp was made in a grove of tall, airy, dark green legumes known to the Nyamwezi of western Tanzania as muyombo; this is the Brachystegia species from which the miombo habitat derives its name. Here the Game Department car that had passed by with such intemperate haste the day before stopped off on its way back to Kingupira, and Brian Nicholson, leaning one elbow on the hood of his Land Rover, his cigarette holder in his mouth and a sardonic look upon his face, studied the eight game scouts whom the car disgorged. Led by a man recognized by the Warden as a former skinner for a professional hunter, the eight smiled wanly at the expression on the face of Bwana Niki, and, to my relief, their leader thought better of offering his hand. Still leaning against the car, Brian responded to the greetings of "the General", as he later referred to him ("had bigger and better boots than anyone else, so I assumed he was in command"), by asking what the game scouts imagined they were accomplishing out here. The former skinner, dressed mostly in civilian clothes, admitted cheerfully that he did not really know: they had investigated a report of poachers and, finding none, were on their way back to headquarters. ("Probably expected to find them sitting on the road," Brian commented later.) This man too had heard reports of helicopters and, like the hunter we had met the day before, he appeared uncomfortable with the whole subject. Brian said shortly, "We have to get on about our business," and the eight retreated to their car again.

  Remembering Bakiri's information that Game Department uniforms were no longer available, I felt sorry now for the only man among them who was trim, clean, and in full uniform, even to his red beret and lanyard, a good-looking young African who in other days would probably have won the grudging favor of Bwana Niki; his forlorn effort to wear his uniform with pride seemed very gallant.

  Before departing, the men told us that they had seen greater kudu near the track, and Hugo and I, accompanied by Goa, headed further west toward the Madaba River. Soon we met another Game Department car, and also a big truck that carried some sort of cargo under a tarpaulin. Considering the fact that the patrol post here had been abandoned, there seemed to be an awful lot of activity in this region, and we wondered if that cargo meant that more elephants had been found dead.

  The kudu were gone from the place described. "'Watu wenge," Goa said: a lot of people. But kongoni at least were abundant, and there were elephants and, standing just inside the track, the first bushbuck we had seen in the Selous.
r />   At the Madaba airstrip, where David Paterson was to come in that day with the supply plane, we rejoined Brian, Melva, and Sandy, whom we accompanied still further west on a pilgrimage to lonides's grave on

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  Nandanga Mountain. "They've let all the tracks go, as you see," Brian warned Hugo, whose Land Rover was a new one. "We'll have to do a bit of bundu-hashing." And indeed the track up to Nandanga was entirely overgrown and rutted, with dangerous potholes, and so dim in places that Goa had to get out and hunt around in order to follow it at all. No effort had been made to clear even the smallest trees; instead, the few drivers who had passed in recent years had detoured around through the woods and on to the track again.

  On a high open ridge that overlooked a wide expanse of the Selous, Brian stopped to point out landmarks to the south and west, and that note of homecomnig excitement came back into his voice again. "That's Mberera Mountain, where the Kilombero River comes down to the Luwegu at Shuguli Falls to form the Ulanga Rive^; from here, the nearest point of the Ulanga would be just over there, due west, behind that ridge. Further north, the Ulanga joins the Ruaha and becomes the Rufiji, which is of course the largest river in East Africa, and it's just north of there that the Rufiji turns east toward Stiegler's Gorge." Melva Nicholson had got out of the Land Rover and was staring around her at the wide lowland spread beneath, with its swamps and water courses and stretches of savanna, and now she cried out, "Nothing! Used to be full of animals down there, and now there's nothing!" Her husband had been saying the same thing in so many places for so many days that he was sick of it; he scarcely nodded. My binoculars could not turn up a single animal, and after a little while Brian said mildly, "Haven't been here for ten years now, perhaps more. I must say, 1 hadn't expected such a change."