By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Find Part I, Another Day, Another Lion: On Safari in Tanzania, here.
Having pretty much lioned out, I suggested that we spend our last morning in Ruaha National Park searching for sable. No other antelope has an all black coat (sable females don't either) and I’d never seen one. My grandson was game, so to speak, and our companionable driver/guide was willing, although he had a warning. He’d encountered sable two weeks before, in the vicinity of a natural spring some distance from the camp. But sable are elusive. Did we want to spend a morning on a highly possible wild goose chase? “Egyptian geese?” I quipped, glancing at my grandson, who rolled his eyes. We’d seen them, vast flocks of them, in the Selous.
And so we drove and drove, in hopes of glimpsing the fabled sable, on bush roads largely indistinguishable from the dust-raisers we’d haunted for the past week. The impala count, as usual, was stratospheric. Although acacia trees continued to push out new green leaves, the savanna wears mostly brown during the rainless months. New Mexicans know that brown is beautiful, but what mattered that morning is this: bare branches don’t frustrate viewing as much as luxuriant foliage does. I had high hopes for that sable.
Meanwhile, there were many good encounters. Dikdiks and duikers, the midgets of the antelope family, froze long enough to be seen clearly, then skittered away from roadside where they’d been grazing. My grandson was entranced. “They’re cute,” he said “I want one.” "You don’t,” I said. “I do,” he said. We left it there.
The smallest young giraffes we saw, infants really, were still too big to qualify as cute. Giraffes, the sky scrapers of the animal world, are far from shy, unlike antelopes of any size, the herd-mentality
Military uniform designers perfecting the art of camoflage should study the giraffe’s puzzle-piece markings. Nibbling away behind a clump of flimsy tree trunks in the near distance, they’re extremely difficult to make out.
Often the best way to see animals is not to look for them. They emerge, all of a sudden, from the background. Where shadows were, there’d be a big black—and baleful, of course—Cape buffalo staring at us, at which point it was most fortunate to be in a Landrover. Lone males are known to be capricious. A stalled Landrover, however, would provide no protection from hundreds of buffalo on stampede, although stampedes are infrequent, we were told. Massing and crowding, according to buffalo experts,
That morning, for the first time, we found several jackals. Their best feature? Bushy tails, which we always saw to very good advantage, as each trotted toward deeper cover. Oddly enough, we never heard jackals in the evening, although they’re reputed to be as loquacious as their kin, the coyotes, who serenade me regularly in Santa Fe. Most park visitors wouldn’t set out expressly to find
This brings me to the first and most important rule for game drives, the rule our sable search was violating, by definition, although we were having a very good time, because we were acting as if we weren’t in violation. We liked whatever we saw.
When you meet your driver/guide, who’s hired for his pleasant personality as well as his expertise,
The prescriptive approach to wildlife-watching injects tension into a game drive, because disappointment or failure is almost inevitable. Either you don’t find the animal you demanded, or the animal doesn’t perform as depicted on the Nature Channel. No copulation. No elegant impala writhing in the jaws of a merciless lion. The first day in
the Selous we didn’t see a single elephant during our morning drive. No lions either. I was desolate. Why else had I dragged my grandson to Tanzania? The subsequent days produced both, in plenty. Yet even if you happen upon the wished for animal, it may be sleeping. The wild dogs we watched for twenty minutes were as exciting and fearsome-looking as a quartet of discarded Beanie Babies. “Oh well, check ‘em off,” I said. “Done,” said my grandson. Finally, the must-see creature may be so far away that only the guide’s experienced eye can be certain the goal’s been achieved. Hmmm.
There’s a better way to structure game rides. Tell the guide you’re interested in everything he can show you. Result: he smiles and
So, what else did we see during our sable dash? Warthogs. Nearly a dozen, though usually from so far away we could barely discern the tusks they’re famous for—and no babies scampering after their mothers with tails held high like warning flags, either. But hey! A warthog’s a warthog. Funny-looking even at a distance. "Check," said my grandson.
Eventually we caught sight of a patch of emerald green hovering on the horizon like a fairy garden in a fantasy novel. Close up the water was murky and there were no water lily pads for elves to perch on, but we had indeed reached the spring. Where were the sable?
We parked the landrover in a rare pool of deep shade. We watched. We waited. We wandered around, glad to stretch our legs. The guide brought out a folding table. He opened it up and covered it with a table cloth. He fetched a thermous of hot water, a canister of tea bags and powdered coffee, some bottles of water, a tin of cookies. My grandson and I were invited to partake. The guide said he wouldn’t. It was Ramadan. He was fasting. “Then I won’t either,” I said. “Please do,” he replied, looking very uncomfortable, since it was his job to provide a mid-morning snack. So I complied.
Meanwhile, we kept watch, all of us, for sable. This is where they’d been two weeks before, the guide insisted. They'd been spotted here many times. Careful as he'd been not to make any promises, he clearly wanted to deliver. At that point something bit my leg. I slapped at it. “Tsetse,” said the guide. The fly settled on my arm. I slapped it away. It hovered briefly, a few inches from skin, then tried for another landing. Other tsetses had discovered my grandson.
We’d been warned of tsetse flies during our “welcome to the camp” chat with the manager, who’d also assured us that the local variety weren't carriers of sleeping sickness. There was bad news, though. Deet wouldn’t repel them. Pyrethum would—and the camp, he said, had tubes of it for sale. Having experienced tsetses during my foreign service tour in Tanzania, I gladly bought a tube. Slapping at my ankle, I handed that tube to my grandson. By this time a whole squadron of tsetses had arrived.
“Sorry,” said the guide, slapping.
“Check ‘em off,” I said, as my grandson handed the tube of pyrethum to the guide. “Wildlife is wildlife.”
“Sure,” said my grandson, grinning. He’d got the joke.
So we all laughed and kept slapping, in spite of the stinky stuff in the tube.
Part III, which will be called something like Irresistible Elephants, will appear next weekend.