of an African Legend, a former white hunter who had turned rabid conservationist and grand old man. I was given a letter of introduction and recommended to give it a try. Still uncertain of why, I drove on.
I reached the Mchindeni Valley a couple of weeks before the dry season, also known as the tourist season, or sometimes just as The Season, officially began. The camp operators were setting up for six months of beasts and tourists. I found my way to Mukango Lodge: this was the first tourist operation that had been established in the Valley. Pocock still ran it. I sought him out, and dealt him my letter of introduction. This seemed to go all right. He gave me a beer, talked about zebras and the research centre. He was not hiring staff himself, but I had timed this visit well: it turned out that he was holding a party that night for all the tourist operators in the Valley, a traditional pre-season ritual. I was invited to the do, and offered a bed for a few nights, until I had found a job. Philip Pocock was a crusty and difficult man, but always very kind to me.
The gathering that evening was large, and somewhat overwhelming. I knocked back several beers as a defensive measure, erected my academic status as a wall. I had expected the gathering to be all male, but there was a fair number of women as well. Most camps, I learned, employed a European woman as caterer; after a year on a research centre, each one seemed a dazzling nymph. Most of the people were white, but there was a small number of Africans among them. One of these, who worked as a safari guide with Philip, discoursed learnedly with me on zebras. I met a short but terribly wide man with a penetrating Afrikaner accent, who talked solid business at me. ‘The logistics of running a business on a six-month operation are frightening, man. You’ve got to be good to survive out here, man.’ I met an intense English birding type called Lloyd, who confused me mightily with his talk about red-billed and Cape and Hottentot teal. He told me more than once that he had seen a palmnut vulture that day. ‘A crippler,’ he said. ‘An absolute bloody crippler.’ I was familiar enough with birding slang to follow him. He introduced me to his camp’s caterer, whose beauty caused me to freeze instantly, like an alarmed impala. However, she treated me with impenetrable English snootiness, and when she heard I was looking for a job, she looked me up and down, and laughed. I decided that I hated her. Her freckled, sun-bleached appearance had rendered me more or less incapable of speech, but more attractive still was the thought of throwing her into the Mchindeni River to take her chances among the hippo. Not my type at all: she looked like the sort of owner who every week announced she would take her bloody horse elsewhere. Focken take him. He’ll not win nothing without a rocket up his arse.
I moved on, finding myself in conversation with a clownish individual in baggy shorts: shorts, I couldn’t help noticing, that had a kind of open-work crochet pattern around the crotch, a pattern created, presumably, by tumbling shards of cigarette. He looked like the party bore, and my first thought was to wonder how to escape. He was lanky without being in the least bit tall; he had a haircut of grey stubble that appeared self-administered, or rather, self-inflicted. I was struck by the almost cosmic filthiness of his clothes. He seemed utterly out of place in this pleasant, civilised gathering. He asked, in an unexpectedly mellow tone, what I had been doing.
I told him, in a rather superior fashion, about friendship in zebras, for I was a field scientist, no mere safari guide. ‘How terribly interesting, I’ve always wondered about doing another study, perhaps of a herbivore, though I’d never thought about zebras, confusing things, after my stuff with, well, those lion, you know.’ For this, of course, was George Sorensen, the George Sorensen, African legend, co-author of Lions of the Plains. I was instantly ashamed, instantly impressed. I noticed that his glasses had been fixed across the bridge with Elastoplast. (In fact, I was to notice that George changed this bridge far more often than any other of his garments, Elastoplast replaced by Sellotape, replaced by masking tape.)
I also had the weird impression that the cigarette he was smoking was made from newspaper. This turned out to be the case. ‘The Guardian Weekly,’ he explained. ‘Airmail edition. Best for cigarettes. May I roll you one?’ I accepted. The tobacco, thick, coarse and crackly, delivered a powerful and pungent smoke. We discussed the usual problems of field work, and he asked with great attention about my zebras. The key to ethology is the recognising of individuals: no, I had not used coloured ear-tags, or anything of the kind. ‘Well, I have read that every zebra has a distinct stripe pattern, of course,’ George said. ‘But then I have also read that every snowflake is unique. It has always seemed an impossible business to me.’
‘It’s just a matter of getting your eye in,’ I said. ‘Same with all animals. A racehorse trainer can recognise every horse in his string. Zebras are easy – easier than lion, I would have thought.’
‘I’ve always found zebras exasperating. I can’t even tell males from females half the time, not without a long hard look.’
‘Well, I will take a bet that I can tell the dominant stallion from any breeding herd of zebra within, say, five seconds of seeing the herd, and I’d be right seven times out of ten. I’d bet better than even money. These cigarettes are good.’
‘Aren’t they? I get the tobacco in the village just down the road from here. How can you pick out the stallion so fast? Without peering at the undercarriage for half an hour?’
‘Body language. And the position he takes up relative to the herd. And especially the way the herd responds to him. Once you’ve got the hang of it, it’s amazingly straightforward.’
‘How terribly terribly interesting,’ George said, without a shred of irony. ‘Do you think you could show me? Perhaps we could take a drive tomorrow? I assume you’re staying here. I could pick you up after breakfast.’
‘Why not?’ I wonder now how many hundred times I have asked this same non-question of George. Why not, indeed.
I suppose it does sound rather melodramatic, but all the same I don’t suppose I ever will forget the sight or vision that greeted us as George, Helen and I turned into Mchindeni Airport. George, eschewing the tarred road, had taken an intriguing and bouncing short cut across open country – ‘I think a spot of bundu-bashing is in order’ – crunching and pitching through the scrub. Negligently wiping out a small bush, he jumped the vehicle heroically back onto the road, pounding up to the front of the airport building, eyes skyward as he remarked, ‘Wire-tailed swallows’ above the engine’s roar, and made, passengers listing crazily forward, his trademark crash-halt.
There, watching every yard of our arrival, was the sight or vision, and it affected my pulse rate as dramatically as the morning’s lion. This was Mrs van der Aardvark, no less, or to be formal, Caroline Sandford, caterer and deputy manager of Impala Lodge, mistress to Leon Schuyler, who, behind his extremely wide back, was nicknamed van der Aardvark. He was the owner and manager of Impala Lodge, the grandiosely named camp that lay across the river from our own.
She was dressed in khaki shorts and a singlet in umbrella-thorn green and gave an impression of arachnoid limbs. Her straggle of leucistic hair was worn in a style that looked self-administered or self-inflicted, perhaps with wire-cutters. Arms, shoulders, neck, face, legs: all copiously freckled: endless constellations, galaxies and nebulae of freckles, freckles that caused me to wonder, but not for the first time, with the curiosity that is at the base of the erotic impulse, exactly how far, and in what form, those freckles extended.
She was laughing as we pulled up, absolutely roaring with laughter. She was also apparently talking, which was not unusual, but inaudibly. George switched off the engine, and it was as if her personal volume had been switched on. ‘It’s like the clown’s car arriving at the circus, I keep expecting it to explode and all four wheels to fall off. Really, George, where did you learn to drive?’ She turned to
