Running Wild by David Bristow

Author:David Bristow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781431426249
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2017-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

12

The Night of the Hyenas

THE ANIMALS OF MASHATU WERE following the drying rivers. The Jwala was bone dry and the Majale had just a few stagnant pools, running more as sand with interspersed pools and not much grazing to be found between. This was the time when large, sometimes even huge, flocks of birds – saddle-billed and yellow-billed storks, grey herons, great white egrets, hamerkops – gathered around the fringes of the last pools pulling out barbel that were trapped, writhing in the grim sludge.

When the Majale dried to just stagnant pools the zebras resumed their slow drift towards the Pitsane. Along the way they passed the ruins of Bryce’s Store, set up to supply the needs of the Zeederberg coach line more than 100 years before. Considerable drama had played out around the store – little more than a wood and iron shack really.

It had been flattened by an artillery shell during the Anglo-Boer War, possibly by a gunner who felt he’d been cheated by the wily Scots storeman. (Actually, it was the Boers’ doing, who had correctly surmised Bryce was supplying ammo to the empire.) Even today a jackal might sniff at an old container or a zebra might kick over a flattened, rusted bully beef tin or shell casing. Evidence of this backwater skirmish is still in evidence at Fort Tuli on the east bank of the Shashe, and the barricade of dolerite boulders Boers had erected hastily on the ridge alongside Nel’s Vlei.

The wide floodplain around the vlei is a favourite among grazers that feed on the greenery well into autumn. But come winter, which was fast approaching, the apron of black cotton soil turns to stoneware in the furnace of the African sun, pocked by deep impressions where elephants sunk in with their mammoth feet when it is still sodden. Once set, the clay is more rock than soil and extremely hard to negotiate.

By the time the main zebra herd reached Nel’s Vlei, the grazing was all but gone, scrumptious guinea grass and foxtail buffalo grass tufts grazed to their nubs. Most grazers eat only the more nutritious grass leaves and the upper stalks, so they had long moved off in search of greener pickings. But equids can eat right down to the dust.

What was left was giant turpentine grass, good only to lions for lying up and setting ambushes behind the two-metre-high stalky screen. The grass has a strong oily taste and is not fancied by any animal. Since there was no longer water or grazing to be found around the vlei, the zebras and their honorary member turned course for the upper Majale catchment. If they did not find good water there it would augur hard times ahead.

The ground around the Matabole, a tributary of the Majale, was entirely bare with just a thin grey-green line of vegetation showing where the streambed ran. Sheet erosion, the kind that follows heavy thundershowers wherever there is not much ground cover, had washed the surface down to bedrock and gravel.

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