a leopard in Londolozi. There’s nothing quite like that primal fear.’
I imagined a writhing, spitting ball of teeth and claws at the end of a wire, and agreed that it would probably be best if I came later with the vets and their darting rifles. Preferably a hundred metres behind them.
For the rest of my time at Driehoek, I stayed close to the receiver. I took the occasional stroll around the farm or along the lower slopes of Corridor Peak behind the homestead, but felt responsible for the traps. I didn’t want a leopard to spend any longer than was necessary with its paw in a noose. However, all frequencies continued to bleat a negative. I set my alarm clock to sound at intervals through the night. Each time I woke to check the receiver, there’d be a thrill of expectation. It was like spinning a roulette wheel: this time I’d strike it lucky.
Days dragged by, and I began to worry I might sit in that hut for weeks with no reward. Besides, the city had begun to assert itself. First the odd sms, then phone calls: bills, the plumber, a body-corporate meeting. Eventually, I had no choice but to pack for home.
On my last day in the mountains, Quinton and Elizabeth arrived to take me on a concerted hunt for Spot, the female that frequented our area. It was a final roll of the dice.
Driving up Uilsgat Kloof, we picked up a strong telemetry signal. She was definitely in the valley. But where? Her echo bounced off the rocky walls, making accurate bearings difficult. We parked and got out.
‘I’m getting a fairly good signal from the other side of the kloof, half way up Mied se Berg,’ said Quinton. ‘You okay for a bit of a hike?’
‘Sure,’ I said unconvincingly. By now, I knew what ‘a bit of a hike’ meant.
As we prepared our packs with water, food, cameras, binoculars and telemetry equipment, Elizabeth glanced at the cliff and exclaimed: ‘Look at those black eagles! They’re attacking something!’
‘My God, I’ll bet you it’s Spot,’ said Quinton, grabbing his binoculars.
We watched the two great birds making an attack run. They approached in a parabolic swoop, then folded their wings and dropped out of the sky in a near-vertical dive. As they plummeted, each bird let out a scream that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. The Stuka dive-bombers of the berg. At the last moment, when it seemed inevitable they’d smash themselves against the cliff in an explosion of feathers, the birds flared their enormous wings, talons extended, almost brushing the rock as they soared back into the blue.
‘There, on that big boulder, she’s cowering!’ shouted Quinton.
I trained my binoculars in the direction he was pointing. Nothing. Or perhaps a glimpse of movement?
‘Where exactly?’ I asked.
‘The big round rock, above the diagonal one.’
I looked again, willing the leopard to show itself. Which round rock, which diagonal one? They were all round or diagonal. There! Had I seen something? Maybe just the hint of cat, a vague feline suggestion? Maybe not.
‘She must have slipped behind the rock,’ said Quinton. ‘Let’s move. Fast. If we angle to the left, we can herd her up the valley towards our traps and maybe get a sighting into the bargain.’
‘Herding cats,’ I muttered under my breath as we set off across the valley floor at an unsustainable pace. Quinton and Elizabeth took giraffe strides; mine were more suburban. We came to a stream and my two companions stepped over it without breaking stride. I sloshed through, filling my shoes with mud. By now, every animal in the valley knew about Spot, and the alarm calls of a grey rhebok ahead of us were picked up by a troop of baboons. The kloof was a natural amphitheatre, and the sounds echoed around us, backed by a chorus of birdsong. I was thrilled. It was just like being David Attenborough in the climactic scene of a BBC doccie.
We scaled the western slope and veered along a contour towards the likely boulder. My two companions had changed from giraffes to klipspringers, their cloven hoofs gripping the rocks as they gambolled ahead. I slipped, grazing a knee. The telemetry, pinging like sonar, told us Spot hadn’t moved far, and Quinton motioned us to continue in complete silence.
We came to an outcrop, took off our packs and scrambled up to a ledge. My shoe sent a pebble clip-clopping down the valley. Quinton looked back at me with a severe frown. Poking our heads over the lip, we scanned the area where Spot should have been. The telemetry told us she was less than fifty metres away, but we just couldn’t see her. The dassies on a nearby boulder were going ballistic with their alarm calls. They’d certainly seen her. All we could do was wait for Spot to show herself.
This waiting and staring and telemetrying and looking at each other with quizzical looks went on for about twenty minutes. Then Quinton edged off to the left and we followed, trying not to dislodge any more stones or breathe too loudly.
‘She’s on the move,’ whispered Quinton. ‘You two wait here. I’ll try to flush her out.’
He scrambled down the rock face, angling to the right to force her up the valley into open ground. His telemetry aerial swung back and forth above his head, making him look like Robotman. We scanned the scrub, triangulating our gaze with the direction of Quinton’s aerial. How could a big cat vanish into such meagre cover, right under our noses, and wearing a telemetry collar to boot?
After half an hour, Quinton returned, looking dejected. We found some shade and ate our sandwiches. ‘As you can see, this is a very, very frustrating game,’ he said, staring across the valley to where the baboon troop barked lustily, marking Spot’s progress somewhere along the opposite slope.
My time was up. I drove out of the enchanted valley, over Uitkyk Pass, and down the winding gravel road to Algeria. My thoughts turned to how, up there in the mountains, the future of leopards was relatively secure. For now, at least. The region had once endured the greatest predator-farmer conflict in the Cape, with up to seventeen leopards killed annually. But in 2007, an area of 1 710 square kilometres had been set aside as the Cederberg Conservancy. With Quinton’s help, the entire farming community had agreed to ban gin traps. Livestock farming with sheep, goats and cattle had then been the predominant land use; now wine production, olive trees and citrus predominated. Leopards are not vegetarians … and they’re teetotallers.
And what of Spot? Had I seen her, or hadn’t I? My imagination certainly produced a vision of sorts. Spot was there on the rock, bathed in sunshine, her back arched. She stared up at the great bird falling towards her. Her whiskers bristled as she bared her fangs. Those golden eyes, their pupils narrowed to tiny slits, measured the approach of the eagle, readying herself to strike. A flicking tail, claws anchoring her to the rock, a sinuous body pressed low. I could even hear the soft growl coming from deep inside her, like the sound of distant thunder.
Had I really seen her? Quinton certainly had. Elizabeth might have caught a glimpse. I was less sure. Did the fact that one person in the group achieved a sighting mean that, technically, the group as a whole had seen a leopard? Are one’s own pair of flawed, short-sighted eyes that important in the bigger scheme of ‘the sighting’?
And maybe I had, actually, seen a fleeting shape. A half-sighting or perhaps a ‘sort of’ sighting. Did a half-sighting count as a sighting? If one rounded up the half to a whole, which even the most fastidious accountants permit, then I’d definitely spotted Spot. I had seen a Cape mountain leopard! Sort of.
* Adapted from Erik Bindervoet’s
