Rattray, in his vigorous mid-sixties, was a horse breeder and horse racer, with a stud farm in the Western Cape Province. He had become an environmentalist at a time when hunters were still blasting away at anything that moved. He was a bon viveur with a knack for running hotels; a stickler for details, something of a taskmaster, a financier of public works — his tall, Italian-made road bridge over the Sand River had withstood the terrible flood of 1999. He was a teller of rich stories and also a fund of good ideas.
‘Rhino are taking a beating — what?’ he said to me in the bar one night, waving his stick for emphasis. ‘Being flogged something awful. And why? Because a rhino horn, retail, is worth $75,000 in Macau — or so I’m told. What’s the answer, Paul?’
‘What’s the question, Mike?’
‘Whither the rhinos, their fate? I say’ — and he whisked his stick — ‘rhino farm! A farm that produces rhino horn. People groan like blazes when I mention it, but you see a rhino horn is like a fingernail. You cut it off and it grows back. So you start a farm with white rhinos — the black ones are bolshie, never mind them — and you harvest the horns by sawing them off. That way, you cut out the poachers, cut out the middlemen, and the horn grows back in three years, ready to be trimmed again. But will anyone listen to me? No, they think I’m dilly.’
I stayed in a lovely thatched hut in Main Camp and went on game drives in an open Land-Rover with a ranger before dawn until mid-morning, and at dusk, and now and then in the darkness, the time of night when the lion and the leopard were creeping through the high grass, looking for cowering impala to eat. My ranger was young and expert, Chris Daphne. His assistant, John, who was a Zulu, sat with a rifle across his knees.
The bush was dry and dusty in the South African autumn and on the first drive we saw buffalos and a herd of elephants, a mating pair of nyala, a bachelor herd of kudu, and some battered torchwood trees — battered because elephants loved the taste of the oily peanut shaped fruit.
Mala Mala was not a wilderness but a reserve and the happier for that, because the animals were not shot at, and they had become so habituated to the prowling vehicles and the crowing passengers that — keeping at a humane distance — it was possible to see them in their unselfconscious, non-threatened natural state. The animals were generally complacent and well fed and unstressed. And the reserve was so well run that a tourist such as Margaret Thatcher or Nelson Mandela — both of whom had stayed at Mala Mala — could drop in, see some big animals, and leave, without inconvenience or discomfort.
A herd of 200 buffalos was not unusual at Mala Mala; twenty elephants placidly chewing trees, deforesting a hillside, was not out of the ordinary. Hyenas — ‘The quickest of all predators to recognize weakness,’ Chris said; a pair of white rhinos — ‘Did you know the rhino is related to the horse?’ Chris asked. A tuskless elephant — ‘Probably more aggressive for not having tusks,’ Chris said. The birds were spectacular: the greater blue-eared glossy starling, the blacksmith plover with its characteristic tink-tink, the yellow-billed hornbill.
And one night, on the walkie-talkie in the bush, Chris heard that a leopard had just pounced upon an impala and bitten and broken his neck. We drove quickly to the spot in time to see the leopard dragging its kill — the dead impala was the same weight as the leopard, about 100 pounds — to a high branch thirty feet up a saffron tree, and wedging it firmly into the cleft of a branch. This way the leopard could devour his kill in peace without attracting opportunistic animals. In spite of the bright flashlight the leopard went on tearing the impala’s flesh, tearing at the haunch, crunching and splintering the bones in its spine and pelvis, and by my watch gobbled the impala’s entire hind leg in ten minutes.
And at the same time, the guests at Mala Mala at their evening meal were sitting in a circle under the stars, gnawing on impala steaks that had just been barbecued. The eaters’ canines flashed in the firelight, their fingers gleamed with meat fat, and after they swallowed they sighed with satisfaction, rejoicing in their safari.
I was late for dinner because of my leopard viewing, but I found a seat near Mike Rattray and asked him how he had gone about ending the hunting on this property.
‘It was hard! The hunters were very cross! Wanted to come here and go on flogging lions,’ he said. He smiled, perhaps remembering the opposition, for he was a man who liked a challenge. ‘This was a popular hunting area. Princess Alice! Flogged a lion here, yes!’
But he had foreseen the decline of the game and the simpler economic fact that hunting was for the few — the unspeakable in pursuit of the stuffable — and game viewing was for the many. There was more sense and more money in becoming eco-friendly. While other reserves were still hosting parties of hunters, Mala Mala eliminated hunting, practiced game management, hired university-trained rangers, and began to see a profit. And the animals thrived.
‘You see, the trouble with hunters is that they take the best animals — the prize specimens,’ Rattray said. ‘They jigger the gene pool, they disturb the balance of nature. They screamed at me, but I screamed back. “You want to hunt? By all means, hunt! But you have to take the ones with weak eyes, weak ears. Kill the weak ones — take what the carnivores take.” ’
‘What sort of reaction did you get?’
Even over dinner, Rattray had his stick handy for illustrating a point. He seized it and swung it. ‘They didn’t like it! But I said, “Don’t take the clever ones.” You have to be clever to live in the bush. At the end of the drought you have the best animals. They wanted trophies, they wanted the clever ones. I said no.’
It was an inspired decision. When the dominant males are killed and their heads mounted, the male cubs stay in the pride and mate with their mothers and sisters, and ‘jigger the gene pool.’ A pride without an aggressive leader becomes easy fodder for predators. In the past decade, Africa’s lion population has dropped from about 50,000 to about 15,000. Botswana instituted a one-year ban on lion hunting in 2001 to determine the health, and numbers, of its lion population. At the same time, the Arizona-based Safari Club International — composed of millionaire big-game hunters and Republican fund raisers — intensively lobbied the Bush White House to put pressure on Botswana to reverse the ban. Botswana resisted, but at last relented. Anyone with $25,000 can play at being Hemingway’s Francis Macomber and kill a lion in Botswana.
In my succeeding days at Mala Mala, driving all day in the hot bush, I saw three giraffes drinking at a pool, their long legs widely splayed, their bodies canted and kowtowing, so they could drink. A baboon with his finger in his mouth lurked behind them among some boulders in a krans — a cave. I saw hippos in a murky pool, wallowing and diving, peering at me, just their eyes and nostrils showing.
The T. S. Eliot poem ‘The Hippopotamus’ contains a dozen observations about hippos, all of them mistaken, from ‘The broad-backed hippopotamus/Rests on his belly in the mud’ — something they never do — to the characterization of their gait. I saw zebras with reddish highlights in their brushlike manes, and a mother rhino with an eight-day-old calf, fifty baboons in a big troop, and many birds — barbets, shrikes, coucals, hornbills, cormorants, kingfishers, eagles and vultures (‘The eagle’s grip is much stronger than the vulture’s,’ Chris said). I saw twelve lions, big and small, creeping through the bush just after dark, stalking a skittish herd of impala cowering in a copse.
All this was superb game viewing — healthy unafraid animals holding their own in a bush setting — but just as splendid and imposing was the striding pot-bellied figure of Michael Rattray, who was inimitable. Stories circulated about him, always admiring ones, and odd tales of life in the bush, often involving difficult guests.