“Judging by the footprint, I’d say the rhino passed this way half an hour after sunrise.”
I was surprised by the certainty in the ranger’s voice until—playing Sherlock to my Watson—he patiently explained his deduction: “These faint lines that were interrupted by the rhino’s tracks were made by grasshoppers,” he said, “and grasshoppers don’t start moving until the sun has had a chance to warm them a little.”
The Southern African safari industry is home to some of the world’s finest trackers. It’s an ancient skill that’s been honed over countless generations, though in recent decades, it has not always been used for noble purposes. This time, however, wildlife guide Christiaan Swanepoel’s unexpectedly precise estimate was being put to good use in a region that has recently become a byword for conservation.
To the average South African, the Karoo—a vast semi-arid region in South Africa’s Eastern Cape—is known chiefly for particularly delicious roast lamb and man-made boreholes driven by picturesquely rickety windmills. But back in 1997, enterprising English physicist Mark Tompkins and his South African wife, Sarah, took on the herculean task of re-wilding a patchwork of sheep farms sprawled across sweeping plains and a range of dramatic hills. During the last three decades, the project spawned Samara Karoo, the biggest privately owned reserve in the Eastern Cape. The 27,000-hectare Samara Karoo Reserve is home to a growing roll-call of iconic species and a varied habitat that features five of South Africa’s nine recognized biomes.
Black rhinos, like the one that Swanepoel and his fellow tracker Henrico Thys were trailing, had been locally extinct until they were reintroduced into this area in 2013. It was a similar story for lions, buffalo and elephants, but far more than these iconic creatures—even more than its celebrated cheetah population—it’s the resident rhinos (both black and white species) that warrant the efforts of an entire team of conservationists and, in particular, the heavily armed anti-poaching rangers.
It was a sobering thought that a rhino bull with the temperament of a Sherman tank with a permanently short fuse had passed this spot about 45 minutes ago. The 3,000-pound rhino’s one-pound brain had little room for gratitude, however, so Swanepoel wisely kept his rifle leveled as we stepped into the thicket.
While our own brains were focused on the rhino, it wasn’t lost on any of us that since we left the vehicle we’d also come across fresh lion tracks, as well as the frying-pan sized prints of a herd of four elephants, all heading in this same direction.
Then Thys pointed out fresh buffalo spoor at the thicket’s edge, and the realization dawned that four of the infamous Big Five (Africa’s most dangerous large animals—lions, leopards, rhinos, elephants and buffalo) might very likely be crammed into this same spiny tangle of sweet thorn acacia. Being on foot among wild animals that are both unpredictable and potentially dangerous has an invigorating way of concentration the senses. After all, there are numerous good reasons why Africa’s trackers refer to the sort of waist-length grass we were now wading through as “adrenaline grass.”
For Swanepoel and Thys, this was just another morning at the office. For the eight visitors tagging along, it was an unexpected masterclass in paying very, very close attention to every crackling twig; every erratically twitching leaf. Conversation—which had competed even with the throaty roar of the V8 Land Cruiser game-driving vehicle as we set out from Samara Plains Camp that morning—suddenly dropped to what might be aptly described as a deafening silence.
Nerve-wracking as it is, the experience is a refreshingly powerful antidote to the routine of modern life. It’s a hackle-raising reminder of what life might have felt like when humans were merely another link in the food chain.
All of the animals we were searching for had been entirely absent from this area for well over a century. Samara Karoo is famous for its walking safaris, in particular, among the resident cheetahs that were released here in 2004—125 years after the last wild Eastern Cape cheetah was shot.
The previous morning, we’d woken in luxurious, Hemingwayesque safari tents to the distant calls of hunting lions, and before breakfast, Swanepoel had guided us on a short hike to within 50 feet of a pair of male cheetahs. The elegant cats, nonchalantly grooming one another, were so well habituated that they ignored our presence entirely, seeming to stare almost through us as they scanned the vast herd of springbok that grazed across the plains.
In 1823, Cape Town traveler George Thompson wrote of “flocks of trekbokken, or migratory springboks, that occasionally inundate the northern parts of the Colony.” A combination of stock fences and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of springbok in 1896 and 1897 brought the migrations to a permanent end.
We never did catch up with the black rhino among the sweet thorn…and it is perhaps fortunate, too, that the lion evaded us in the adrenaline grass. We did, however, come within about 30 feet of the elephants. It’s always humbling to realize how a creature that weighs several tons can move through a dense thicket with the silence of a drifting cloud. Only a particularly skilled tracker like Swanepoel could approach such a herd from downwind to lead eight stumbling visitors to within such a short distance, and then depart without the matriarch even having been aware of our presence.
It was with a collective sigh of relief that we returned to the game-driving vehicle and set off to explore a high plateau that has been nicknamed Samara Mara for its resemblance to Kenya’s Masai Mara. Within a short time, we spotted three lions sprawled contentedly beside the remains of a spectacularly immense eland bull.
Our own breakfast was an even more leisurely affair. Under a shady Samara Mara acacia, we sipped bubbly while we watched a white rhino grazing along the skyline, yet another unwitting pioneer in a landscape that is slowly reclaiming its natural heritage. Within a radius of 70 miles from our breakfast table lay Camdeboo National Park, Mountain Zebra National Park and the famous Addo Elephant National Park. The team of conservationists at Samara hopes that the day will come when the remaining fences between them come down, and wildlife corridors open right across this part of the Karoo.
If the land is allowed to reclaim its rhythm, then perhaps, one day, future generations will once again witness the breathtaking spectacle of great trekbokken migrations sweeping across these plains and ridges.
