Wild Things

At Phinda, a private game reserve in the Natal bush, you can get as close to the animals as you like--sometimes too close

by E.M. Swift

Photographs by Bill Frakes

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I had a hunch that given the choice between shooting the black rhino and holding fire as the beast charged and tried to impale me, Joseph, our armed tracker, would not shoot the rhino. It was nothing personal. There are only 2,200 black rhinos left in the wild--and fewer than 70 at Joseph's place of employment, the Mkuzi Game Reserve in eastern South Africa--whereas there is an endless supply of U.S. tourists. I was the expendable asset. So I looked around for a tree to climb in case the underbrush exp loded.

There was no tree to climb. We had tracked this rhino on foot to an almost impenetrable thicket where the tallest tree was little more than a brier--five feet high, spindly and covered with thorns. This was exactly the sort of place a black rhino retre ats to when it feels threatened, and exactly the sort of place we'd been warned to avoid. Joseph, who speaks only Zulu and bears more than a passing resemblance to an out-of-shape Walter Payton, signaled for our unwieldy group of seven to take shelter any where we could find it. Cocking his .375 Magnum rifle with a distinctive ker-chuck, he started cautiously into the brush, from which, moments before, had come an unwelcoming guttural snort.

I knelt behind a gnarled Lebombo wattle, hoping to be made invisible by its four-inch trunk. Peter Hammond, a hulking Australian who happens to be my brother-in-law, had his eyes on the same spot. "No worries," he said, shouldering me aside with his be st Crocodile Dundee cockeyed grin. "Plenty of room."

I decided Peter afforded better protection than the thorn tree, so I circled behind him. "That wattle will be a big help when the rhino runs right over it," I whispered. Black rhinos, bad-tempered animals that weigh about a ton, have keen senses of hea ring and smell but terrible eyesight. We'd been told to lie still if one charged. "I'm going to be doing jumping jacks behind you," I told Peter.

It felt unnervingly as if we were the ones being hunted, and our senses had come alive in a way they never had while viewing game from our Land Rover. A claylike smell, reeking of decay, permeated the thicket. The breeze, barely discernible, was in our faces, for Joseph had been careful to keep us downwind of the rhino. I found myself continually scanning the grass for snakes. A staff member at the neighboring Phinda Resource Reserve, the private game park where we were staying, had been sprayed by a Mozambique spitting cobra in his bed the previous week. He survived, but he had to have several skin grafts on his shoulder. These incidents leave an impression on the paying guest. We'd already seen one baby cobra during that morning's walk, and wi th every rustle of wind I imagined I could hear things slithering through the grass: black mambas, gaboon vipers, cobras.

The light, rapid crunch of Joseph's retreating footsteps interrupted this pastoral reverie. He burst into the clearing and waved his free arm in a gesture that was unmistakable: He wanted us to get the hell out of there. Bruce Pitt, the 22-year-old ran ger from Phinda who had organized this tracking expedition, had a brief talk with Joseph in Zulu. "Too dangerous," Bruce translated. "No trees."

The black rhino, a male, was just 50 yards away, and he was aware of our presence. Once aroused, black rhinos are very aggressive. If one charges, it is not for show. A rhino will chase its quarry up a tree, wielding its horn like a pitchfork. Stories abound of rangers being treed by black rhinos. Bruce recently had been forced to lie against the trunk of a tree for 40 minutes, ants crawling all over his face, after he'd helped his last guest ascend and then discovered there was no more room at the inn . The rhino was scurrying around, looking for them, and all Bruce could do was lie still and pray the animal didn't pick up his scent. One ranger friend of his, in a similar pickle, hadn't been so lucky; he was skewered and carried 50 yards on the rhino's horn before being tossed, still alive, into the bush.

So after tracking this particular rhino for more than an hour, following his trail through open savanna and beneath sprawling umbrella trees, past Ilala palms, under yellow-barked fever trees, around water holes and, finally, into this fearsome swatch of scrub, we were turning back without so much as a glimpse of the beast. "We'll try to find another one," Bruce said.

Rare as black rhinos are, I had every confidence that Bruce and Joseph would find one, because ever since our group had stepped off the plane at Phinda's gravel airstrip, we'd been lucky. We hadn't proceeded 200 yards from the plane before we came acro ss five cheetahs, which are endangered in many parts of Africa, sprawled in regal welcome in the tall grass, digesting a meal of freshly killed impala. By the end of the first evening's game drive, we'd seen a pride of nine lions, a half-dozen white rhino s, several giraffes and scores of nyalas, impalas, zebras, warthogs, duikers and wildebeests--all from only yards away.

One male giraffe had amused us for a quarter hour by playing with a piece of bone he had picked up off the ground. He worked it and worked it in his mouth, his elastic lips contorting sideways, then up and down, his face scrunching like a hand puppet. He looked like a scrawny-necked, big-eared kid trying to choke down an outsized jawbreaker, and his expression--the giraffe never took his eyes off us--seemed to ask, What are you looking at?

Phinda is a good-news story in wildlife conservation. And it isn't the only one in South Africa, a country that, despite its sorry history of apartheid, has for the past 30 or so years made the most successful wildlife conservation and restocking effor ts on the African continent. White rhinos, whose number in southern Africa had dipped to fewer than 50 in 1898, the year the immense Kruger National Park was created in Transvaal province, have staged a huge comeback. There are now more than 7,000 of them , despite continued pressure by poachers who shoot them for their horns, which are ground up and sold to Asians as aphrodisiacs. "They might as well use old toenail clippings," Bruce told us. "The horns are made of the same stuff."

The white rhino population is now stable enough for South Africa to export a few of these animals each year to other countries. Meanwhile, the beleaguered black rhino has been on the decline everywhere except in South Africa, where antipoaching efforts have stabilized the population at 600 to 700. Still, the number is perilously low.

Elephants, lions, zebras and various species of antelope, which by the 1870s had been virtually eradicated from South Africa by agrarian European settlers, have been reestablished in hundreds of locations throughout South Africa's nine provinces. Kruge r National Park, Hluhluwe Game Reserve and Umfolozi Game Reserve are the best-known public parks for viewing animals, but much of South Africa's success in wildlife conservation and management is attributable to the restocking efforts of private reserves such as Phinda, of which there are at least 350.

The name Phinda--pronounced PIN-da--is taken from the Zulu phrase phinda izilwane, which means "return of the animals." Six years ago the 42,000 acres in Natal province that make up Phinda were a hodgepodge of farms, most of which raised cattle. The Johannesburg-based Conservation Corporation, a private company operating luxurious for-profit game lodges, purchased the farmland and began reclaiming it, tearing down fences, removing 175 tons of scrap metal that was scattered about and clearing the acacia thorn bushes that had covered the savanna during decades of overgrazing. The entire property was then fenced, and wildlife was reintroduced. More than 1,000 animals were moved to Phinda, including cheetahs, elephants, lions and white rhinos. The p rocess continues. Last year a herd of Cape buffalo was purchased for Phinda's stocks. Total investment in the property and its animals exceeds $25 million.

Guests at Phinda have their choice of two spectacular places in which to stay. The Nyala Lodge, which opened in 1991, overlooks a vast hillside of umbrella acacias and the distant Ubombo Mountains. The Forest Lodge, which opened in 1993, is tucked in a lowland sand forest of Lebombo wattles and giant torchwoods. Between them the lodges can sleep 72 guests, who are catered to by a staff of more than 300, most of whom are Zulu. That makes Phinda a far more significant contributor to the local economy tha n the farms it replaced.

Conservation Corporation officials hope that in the near future the fences will come down, and the private land of Phinda and public land of the 84,000-acre Mkuzi Game Reserve will become open range. The animals of each park would then roam freely back and forth, as wildlife does along the 21-mile fenceless border between Kruger National Park and the private Sabi Sand Game Reserve. Ultimately the dream is to see the fences in the entire eastern part of Natal torn down, so Phinda might become one small portion of something called the Greater St. Lucia Wetlands Biosphere: a tract of 741,000 acres that would stretch from Umfolozi east to the Indian Ocean and north into Mozambique's Maputo Elephant Park. Wild animals would be free to migrate among a half-d ozen public and private reserves that now operate independently.

Even if the grand plan fails to come to fruition, Phinda stands beautifully on its own. Any notion I had that the property was little more than a large, expensive zoo was dispelled when I learned that in 1993 a lion had killed one of Phinda's guests an d mauled her husband. The woman was returning to her bungalow after dark for a pair of sneakers. Lions have superior night vision and become emboldened after sundown. As a consequence, anytime we ventured outside after dark at Phinda, we were escorted by guards carrying flashlights and two-way radios. I had assumed that they carried guns, too, but Bruce set me straight on my third and last night there. "They're just supposed to keep you from running," Bruce explained. "Then they'll radio for help."

None of the guards looked big enough to keep me from running from a lion, but it was instructive to know how I was supposed to behave as an item on the buffet table of life. Do not run or otherwise call attention to your freshness. For someone w hose boyish features make him look about 16, Bruce is a pretty handy guy to have looking after you in the wild. He served on a crack antipoaching patrol in Umfolozi as a teenager but joined Phinda when he heard about the grandiose biosphere plans. Committ ed, idealistic, knowledgeable, he speaks with missionary zeal about the project. Bruce is also something of a hero at Phinda, having saved a celebrity from a lion a few months before our visit.

Dan Aykroyd's wife, actress Donna Dixon, and her friend Elana Ryan had been watching the stars one evening after a game drive with Bruce. They were lying on blankets a few yards from their Land Rover when Elana heard something coming toward them throug h the grass: pum-pum, pum-pum, pum-pum. Elana looked up and saw an animal silhouetted against the night sky. She thought it was a wildebeest. What Donna remembers is the animal's distinctive odor. "I'll never forget that smell," she says. "It was s o pungent. Then suddenly there was total chaos, and Bruce was yelling, 'Get back in the Rover! Get back in the Rover!'"

Bruce had heard a noise, too, and he'd hopped onto the hood of the vehicle to shine his spotlight into the darkness. A few feet away from the two women, crouched low in the grass, was a male lion. The light froze him. "I got up on all fours," Donna rec alls, "and three arm's lengths ahead of me, looking at me eye-to-eye, was this lion. He, too, was rising up. It was like looking into the mirror."

Donna and Elana took two long strides and leaped into the Land Rover, which Bruce jammed into gear and promptly drove straight into a ditch. But the lion, after pausing to look down on them, turned and disappeared into the night. "Bruce definitely save d our lives," Donna says.

On our second evening at Phinda we had an encounter with that same lion. A giraffe had died of natural causes on the property a few days before we arrived. The carcass hadn't yet been scavenged, but it was smelling pretty ripe, and the rangers checked now and again to see if hyenas or lions had found it. When we drove up to the dead giraffe that evening, the lion that had given such a fright to Donna and Elana was asleep in the road, a hundred yards away. It was the dominant male on the property, a sev en-year-old that weighed some 400 pounds and had a beautiful tawny mane. The sound of our approach woke him up, and he eyed us sleepily, without rising. Our ranger on that ride, 24-year-old Andrew Ewing, turned off the engine so we could watch without dis turbing him. As long as we stayed in the vehicle and remained quiet, Andrew assured us, the lion wouldn't recognize us as human. We were no more threatening (or appetizing) than a large, smelly hunk of metal.

A gentle rain was falling, and the lion shook its mane. We were so close we could see the droplets fly off in an arc. When the lion sneezed, we saw the spray. Still waking up, the lion yawned once, twice, each time displaying a fearsome set of canines. To my astonishment, Peter and his wife, Diana, yawned back in sympathy. Traveling with those two was like traveling with a couple of chimps.

The lion seemed oblivious to our presence. He rose, stretched and then ambled toward the carcass of the giraffe. I was struck by how big the lion was--his head stood at least four feet off the ground--but how narrow he appeared from behind. Muscle and bone. His paws were huge, "like pudding plates," as Bruce later described them. When the lion neared the giraffe, he sniffed, but instead of feeding he began to mark his territory by spraying several surrounding bushes with urine. He circled the carcass, then returned in our direction and marked a bush within eight yards of the Land Rover. Then he plopped back down in the road.

The lion might have stayed there until dark. He looked very settled. But when we began snapping pictures, something, perhaps the motor drives of the cameras, irritated him. He rose and, as if taking note of us for the first time, came toward the vehicl e. I avoided making eye contact, remembering that some animals--gorillas and dogs are two--consider eye contact a direct challenge. The lion was standing in front of the Land Rover, looking in. Andrew's rifle was still in its case--no good to anyone. Then Diana did a peculiar thing. She snorted.

She later claimed she was paralyzed with fear and was merely trying to get oxygen to her lungs. Some people whimper when they're afraid. Others cry. Diana snorts. The problem is adenoidal. But the resulting noise is a nearly perfect imitation of a wart hog, which happens to be one of the lion's favorite meals. We froze, not breathing, as the lion circled within five feet of Diana. Her face had lost all color.

No matter how many times you are assured that a lion will not attack you in a Land Rover, it's a difficult notion to accept. It's still a lion. You're helplessly exposed. If, just this once, the lion decided to smack that large, loud, smelly hunk of me tal, particularly now that it had snorted, who could blame him? Andrew made one move toward his rifle case but gave up the effort as hopeless. It was the lion's call. He sniffed in the direction of Diana, then ambled back down the road. At the nearest tre e he stood upright and began to scratch the trunk, nine feet off the ground, to clean or sharpen his claws. Finally he trotted out of sight. We had just begun to breathe again when the lion began to roar--12 to 15 deep, savage blasts that raised the hair on the back of my neck.

It was great stuff. Curiously, that lion never returned to feed on the giraffe. Nor did any of the other lions in the reserve, or even the hyenas. The best guess any of the rangers could make was that the giraffe had been diseased, and the animals coul d tell. That didn't stop the white-backed vultures, though. On our last morning at Phinda, a hundred or more of them descended on the carcass. Scrabbling and fighting grotesquely among themselves, they picked it clean.

We also had a bit of an adventure with three bull elephants. Phinda's elephants--there are 58 of them--have all been moved in from Kruger National Park and from Zimbabwe within the last four years, and they're still unsettled. The adage that an elephan t never forgets apparently is true, because of all the animals at Phinda, the elephants, Bruce explained, display the most obvious signs of homesickness. At night we could hear them bugling forlornly, presumably for lost relatives. All the elephants were skittish around the vehicles. They were difficult to find, choosing the most wooded areas of the reserve in which to hang out--and, when spotted, they were difficult to keep in sight. It is amazing how quickly a grown elephant can make itself vanish in a forest of moderate density.

Still, Bruce took us into an area where three bulls were known to be feeding. We'd driven for a half hour on a little-used road, nearly washed out in places, across a rugged hill that was overgrown with acacias. Bruce turned off the engine and waited. After a few minutes I saw a distant tree start to shake. The gray of one bull elephant's head came into view; then, much closer, a second head appeared, and, farther away, a third. The nearest elephant was browsing in our direction, feeding on a tree that shielded us from his vision. His trunk, amazingly dextrous, curled around the top of a 15-foot acacia and bent the branches into its mouth. The elephant was eating the tree from the top down, as a child would a popsicle. After a few minutes he moved past the tree, coming still closer. He yanked a branch off another acacia. Bruce explained that as each tree was browsed, it secreted a tannin that was bitter to the elephant. But the secretions took about five minutes to kick in. It was nature's way of preve nting the elephants from destroying a primary food source.

The nearest bull was no more than 30 yards away when he spotted us. He continued feeding for a minute, then stopped. Bruce started the engine. The elephant, unhappy that we were directly in his path, put his ears out from his head and made a mock charg e. Bruce revved the engine and kicked the metal door on his side of the vehicle, making a racket but holding our ground. The elephant pulled up short, 15 feet from the front of the Land Rover, his long white tusks bobbing up and down in some sort of displ ay. Moments later he moved off to browse in a different direction.

The other two bulls behaved in exactly the same manner. Each one, when it spotted the Land Rover, came closer, surveyed the situation and made a mock charge. Bruce had anticipated this hostile reception. He was far more nervous around these elephants t han Andrew had been around the lion. Elephants are less predictable than lions, and one helluva lot bigger. Elephants have been known, at other South African reserves, to tip over Land Rovers and even stomp on them.

It was with the greatest care that Bruce followed the three bulls as they retreated through the woodland, and his caution proved well founded. The largest elephant, fed up with our intrusions, turned and charged us with ears flapping, closing from a di stance of 75 yards to 10. At that point Bruce had one hand on his rifle, the other pounding on the side of the door, while his foot revved the accelerator until it screamed. The ruckus finally persuaded the bull to pull up, and he turned away with a menac ing wave of his trunk. But this had been an impressive display. My photographs of the episode are wildly blurred--evidence that the elephant had me convinced of his bad intentions. But Bruce later told us that as long as the bull's ears were out, away fro m his head, the charge was a bluff. When an elephant really means business, its ears lie flat against its skull, and its trunk is curled beneath its body, so only its tusks protrude.

A much calmer, more peaceful sight awaited us that evening when we went out in search of a leopard that had been spotted earlier in the day. Leopards are shy, solitary animals. This one, a female, had been discovered when a ranger followed the markings of a fresh kill she had dragged through the grass to her den; otherwise we might not have run across her in a million years. She had two young cubs, and her den was in a dense thicket well away from any trail. We wove our way through the bushveld in the Land Rover, arriving at the thicket at dusk, but we could get no closer to the animals than 40 yards. The mother leopard was so well camouflaged that even with binoculars she was difficult to see. Finally a paw took form. Then a tail. Then her majestic he ad. The cubs remained hidden from view, but their mother was placid and seemingly unconcerned with us. She eventually got up and moved, literally disappearing without a sound. Later, after dark, we could hear the eerie sounds of the family chewing on the bones of the kill.

It was the black rhino, however, that I most wanted to see. I was infatuated with its rarity. Had I ever seen a creature of which just 2,200 remained? I doubted it. But I was also intrigued by the process of following this animal on foot: examining the ground for tracks, looking for fresh signs of browsing, staying downwind, moving quietly through the veld. Then, if one were lucky, scrambling for safety in a tree. We rose at 4:45 a.m. on our last full day, and by 8 o'clock we had already given up on th at first rhino, the male we had tracked for an hour. Now Joseph directed us back into the Land Rover and took us to another location. He knew rhinos frequented it because of a dung pit he'd found. Ten minutes later Bruce pointed toward an open area on our right. "White rhino," he said, nodding toward a cow and a calf grazing in the middle of a clearing.

We'd seen a number of white rhinos already. The name does not refer to the animal's color, which is light gray. Rather, it is a bastardization of the Afrikaans word wyd, which means "wide" and refers to the rhino's flat, square upper lip. By con trast a black rhino, which is smaller than its cousin and sometimes appears darker, has a hooked, almost triangulated upper lip.

"Stop," Joseph told Bruce in Zulu. Bruce pulled over, and Joseph picked up the binoculars and zeroed in on the feeding cow and calf. "No--black rhino," he said excitedly in English. "Black rhino! Black, black, black." He was beaming, his entire face alive. He could not believe our luck.

We climbed out of the vehicle as quietly as possible, but the mother rhino, grazing about a hundred yards away, had heard the engine and was looking our way. She had a huge front horn, with a defined point, and ugly hooded eyes. The calf was half her s ize and less than a year old. The mother knew something was up, and she didn't like it. She began moving away from us, the calf at her heels.

Joseph signaled for us to crouch lower. There was a patch of woods to our right, and he quickly led us in that direction so the trees would hide our approach. The wind was right, and the cow and calf, still wonderfully exposed in the clearing, stopped their retreat. The cow raised her head and sniffed. Her ears, one of which was missing a chunk, were pricked forward. Hearing nothing, she resumed grazing.

We kept slipping closer, stepping slowly to avoid breaking dry branches. Five minutes later we had reached the edge of the wood. The rhinos were still grazing, no more than 50 yards away. Joseph tugged on my arm and pointed to a six-foot-long and three -foot-deep depression at the edge of the field. It was teeming with huge beetles, and it smelled powerfully. "It's called a midden," Bruce whispered. "It's a dung pit. It's almost like a daily newspaper for the rhinoceros. Whenever one comes along, he use s it, so the next rhino knows who else is in the area."

One small acacia stood between us and the two black rhinos. Bruce asked us to climb into a nearby tree, a smooth-barked marula, which bears a figlike fruit from which South Africans make a liqueur called Amarula. Five of us scrambled up quietly. But ph otographer Bill Frakes wanted to sneak closer. So he, Bruce and Joseph, creeping low, moved into the field, toward that lone acacia, keeping the tree between themselves and the rhinos. When they reached it, they were no more than 40 yards from the cow and her calf.

When Bill started taking pictures, however, the mother rhino turned, her ears alert, and without further warning started her charge, keeping her head high in the air. Joseph cocked his gun--ker-chuck--while Bruce tried to give Bill a hand into t he acacia. But the first branch Bill grabbed on to broke with a loud crack, and the rhino stopped dead in her tracks. She looked around, found the calf and then wheeled and started running in the other direction.

Joseph jumped into the open and put his hand to his mouth. He gave a high-pitched, mournful cry--"Cawwww ... awww"--which, he later told us, was the distress call of a rhino calf. The mother slowed when she heard it, but when she saw her calf cl ose to her flanks, she continued with purpose. The last we saw of them--and may God grant them speed in fleeing all poachers--they were loping into the bush, their tails straight up, their long, curved horns in the air.