Rogue Lion Safaris. Simon Barnes

rhythm. In the last race my father had bet on, his horse had won.

      A week later I was richer by several thousand pounds. I did not tell any of the solicitors. My father had bet cunningly and well, placing a great deal of money with a wide selection of bookmakers. He had bet at odds from thirty-three to one down to fives. This was, I had no doubt, intended as a desperate coup to save the yard from extinction. Alas, victory had not been enough: the yard and he were gone. But I collected the money on his behalf. All the bookies paid up. There was no legal obligation for them to do so, but they did, some with good humour, some with resignation. One or two were reluctant, but I browbeat them with threats of the dreadful publicity that would follow any meanness. Popular Trainer’s Son Left Destitute by Heartless Bookie. Popularity: that was the trump card. Everyone had liked my father; many would be furious if he was cheated, as it were, beyond the grave. One of the Great Characters of Racing, said the obituaries, and the bookies, sensitive flowers when it comes to bad publicity, decided it was better to cough. And they coughed and they coughed. For the last time in that house, pockets and carrier bags overflowed with my father’s tenners.

      In the final analysis, then, my legacy was this: one pair of binoculars from Leitz of Germany; one racing trilby from Bates of Jermyn Street; and vast wads of tenners. Make a life from that. All right, I will. The madness of grief is much like the madness of love, and so madly I rose to the challenge offered by this legacy. I had no close relatives, no close friends, nowhere to go. I had to vacate the house within six weeks. The logical course was to find a job as assistant trainer somewhere; and it wouldn’t have been hard. But I couldn’t face the idea. I was used to our yard, our system, our horses: my horses. I worked with my father, the idea of working for someone was impossible to contemplate. Just about everything was impossible to contemplate. And so, distracted by grief and overcome with bewilderment, I coldly and deliberately permitted myself a season of insanity. It was intended to be no more than that: a season of madness to be followed by a return to my sort of life, my type of people.

      After the funeral, massively attended, and the boozy party paid for by my father’s last wager, I returned to the university. A mixture of compassion and respectable work over three years had secured me a respectable degree. They had no objection to my doing an MSc, once I had told them I could pay my own way. It would be research-based. Subjects for this were discussed, methods suggested, many useful contacts were provided. I spent money on telexes and telephones. Within a fortnight it was all fixed. I was going to turn myself for a season into one of the heroes of my childhood.

      I flew on a single ticket to Cape Town, and there I bought a beaten-up but still effective Land-Rover. It was a Series One, a model much treasured by Land-Rover enthusiasts. The metal shelf can be used for opening beer bottles; the headlights are placed close together, giving the vehicle a slightly cross-eyed look. Subsequent models had the headlights conventionally placed: ‘No good,’ George was to say later. ‘Can’t hit trees.’ I drove north into Zimbabwe, and there I took up residence in a centre for field research in one of the national parks. I stayed there for just under a year, living in a bunk in a sort of long house for field scientists. I did not abandon horses, not exactly: in fact, for the first time, the two halves of my childhood were in unity. I produced a fat thesis on the subject of friendship in zebras. I did not dare to call it ‘friendship’, of course: in ethology, which is the study of animal behaviour, anthropomorphism is considered the sin of witchcraft. My paper was entitled A Record of the Interactions and Associations between Non-related Animals in Three Breeding Groups of Equus Burchelli Plains Zebra.

      I collected enormous quantities of information: how long unrelated females stayed in each other’s company, and what they did together. I noted a thousand nuances of horsy behaviour, and, deep in Africa, I felt profoundly at home. For each gesture, each shared behaviour, was something I had witnessed at home, when my father and I had turned the mares out into the big field ‘for a buck and a kick and a pick of focken grass’. I made hundreds of graphs and pie charts and bar charts. It was all rather like making up an owner’s bill. Don’t give them a focken great big figure and let them boggle at it: give them lots of small amounts instead. God dwells in the details.

      I was given enormous help by Dr Jessica Salmon, who was doing a colossal piece of research for one of the international wildlife organisations. She had done her doctorate at my university, hence the contact, and she was now researching every imaginable aspect of zebra ecology. Her project, lavishly funded, had involved the blood-typing of a large number of animals; thanks to her, the non-kinship of my chosen zebras was an established fact. Her groundwork gave my research its validity. She was planning a popular book to follow her research: ‘I want to do for zebras what George Sorensen and Peter Norrie did for lion all those years ago,’ she said. I was delighted that she used some of my own observations in her final, massively authoritative work, all properly, generously acknowledged, and a grand piece of work it turned out to be as well. But that is by the way.

      My own paper was finished after a year or so, and so was my money. I got the work typed up in Harare, and posted it – two copies under separate cover, naturally – back to England. I had always thought that I would then post myself, but I did no such thing. I resolved to try my luck, to try ‘one more year’ in Africa.

      I met someone who had worked in tourism, in South Mchindeni National Park, further north. He had worked as a safari guide for Philip Pocock. I was suitably impressed: Pocock was something 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