The Piet My Vrou is back. That insistent three-note Whip Poor Will call started tapping at my waking brain around 5 this morning, and hasn’t let up. But a variety of more liquid warbles is also starting to cascade into the still wet and grey dawn air. Lovely rain again last night. The swimming pool is almost full to the brim.
Also around are the red duikers, returning for regular grazing visits around the back gate and fence over the last few days, for the first time in two years or more. They have been wandering about Nomsa’s and Lucky’s garden for a few weeks, and we attracted them closer by strewing guava peels and old bits over the fence, as we used to do in our first seasons here, following the Nussey’s practice. That was until Leigh and Harry Voigt up the hill warned us that this was spreading alien guava trees in the indigenous bush via seeds in the droppings (“it’s called seed dispersal Granny,” said a knowing Lucy, when Eve tried to explain it to her). Also, the duiker had started to arrive promptly at five in the afternoon and lie down by the back gate, waiting for feeding time, and were being accompanied by their friends the monkeys, to join in the pickings.
Now it’s one thing, and cute as hell, to overcome duiker shyness by letting them know whose is the hand that feeds them. But the moment the vervet monkeys – let alone the baboons – pick up the slightest clue that you’re the soft touch, they will soon become mad, bad and dangerous to know. And it’s the feeders’ fault that they may eventually have to be killed. Many is the Lowveld resort and the Nelspruit suburb plagued by monkeys – as are Cape Peninsula householders near the fynbos, and the park visitors, terrified by baboons which know how to slide open doors, prise down windows, open gloveboxes and rummage through everything and everybody still left in the vehicle.
Even here at Matumi, about a year ago the monkeys began to raid our kitchen, quite unlured – we think it was just one or two daring young males, who didn’t share the secret of the treasure trove with their troupe. Twice in the afternoon, I caught one trying to squeeze through the half open window above the sink. And once, as I was washing up, my back to the rest of the kitchen, I turned around to see a monkey sitting calmly on the back shelf beside the big fruit basket, one leg stretched out like a sunbather, chewing a pear. When I bellowed, he leapt into the courtyard and up the wall. In that same period a visiting friend noticed a trail of muddy paws going over a back wall and up to the fruit basket; and nearby on the floor was a neatly abandoned apple core.
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I turned around to see a monkey sitting calmly on the back shelf beside the big fruit basket, one leg stretched out like a sunbather, chewing a pear.
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That’s when I went to an Indian shop in town and bought boxes of firecrackers, like big matches that you strike and throw, to make a noise like a gun. It makes them think they are being shot at if they get too close. But we are glad that they haven’t been frightened away from the compost heap beyond the cottage, where they get second bite of the breakfast fruit leavings. And they still take first choice of the ripening mulberries, and the strawberries. In the flowerbeds, monkeys are delicate weeders, picking at the clovers without touching the flowers. Unlike the bushbuck and the duikers – show them an open gate and they are straight in, to top every Barberton daisy, gezania and rose they can reach, not to mention herbs – they are not afraid to try foreign flavours.
Three hours later today, sure enough, Eve spotted one standing up and picking mulberries. Three scampered out of the tree as we walked down and we were free to have our turn, spotting the occasional dark blue one among the clusters of still red, reaching up and walking comfortably in the lovely bower we made of the tree on our pruning in July.
Speaking of duikers, we recently noticed a very small one near the bottom gate. Harry also saw it and thinks it may be a suni, which is a very small version of a duiker, and much rarer even than the red. This may be vindication for Doreen Nussey who, said Harry, was scoffed at when she said she’d seen one, some years ago. She was likewise scorned when she thought she saw or heard a leopard. But Pieter Malan the Houtbosloper is sure there are leopards around our valley.
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She was likewise scorned when she thought she saw or heard a leopard. But Pieter Malan the Houtbosloper is sure there are leopards around our valley.
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Other recent unusual visitors were a party of banded mongoose/mongeese, twice the size of our usual dwarf ones, and with white stripes ringing their rears and bushy tails. They scampered, about ten of them, around the back lawn area, foraging and peering for a few days. They seemed to share human tastes. We watched from the kitchen as one put its head into a glass on the lawn, and drained off the last of some coke. Another dived into the fern bed and came out chewing on a green leaf. It was a piece of lettuce, thrown there from a salad bowl on the sleeper table.
Mongeese? So, you have snakes… No, we have mongeese.
Snakes we do have, of course. But the only one I have ever really seen properly, for more than a moment, on our own land, was a 3-metre/10-foot python. Eve spotted it about 3 weeks ago, when we were driving past a pile of old leaves just before you come to the river crossing to Little Serengeti. It was slow enough for us to cop a very good look, and take fuzzy photos. It was very thin for a python, had an almost fin-like middle section, as if waiting to be filled and rounded out. We guessed it was coming out of hibernation, and therefore hungry, and quite dangerous to smaller beings.
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It was very thin for a python, had an almost fin-like middle section, as if waiting to be filled and rounded out.
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Our neighbour Bruce told us of a friend who recently was standing fishing, ankle-deep in a river in Botswana, alongside his 8-year-old daughter. She gave a shout and they looked down and there was a python, which had already done two or three winds around his daughter’s leg. It would only let go after dad and friends punched it on the nose, hard, and it went off to find another small animal to satisfy its post-hibernation hunger.
Other animal encounters to make you gasp, we heard this week from Flippie Owen, the owner (yes) of Sudwala Caves, when we bumped into him at the Riverside Mall; things that happened of late to his 30-year-old son, on the game farm they have near Tzaneen. He was feeding some buffalo when one came from behind and gored into him, just below his right buttock and carried him off, impaled on the horn, until his companions could distract the beast with some feed, and pull his victim free. The flesh was so hugely parted, he had forty something stitches on the outside – and over 120 stitches on the inside.
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He was feeding some buffalo when one came from behind and gored into him, just below his right buttock and carried him off, impaled on the horn...
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Another time he was doing some drainage digging in a swampy area beside a river – on his own because other less daring, more careful people didn’t want to work among snapping crocodiles. He did it by one dig of the shovel – then one smack with the shovel on the snout of the nearest approaching croc. One dig, one smack, one dig, one smack. Until one huge beast lunged up and closed its jaws on his hand as he smacked. He would have lost his hand if the croc hadn’t found its jaws around part of the shovel as well. Still it heaved at him, enough to drag him into the deeper part of the river, where he managed just in time to drag his hand away from the jaws and teeth, leaving a huge scar from the palm along through the wrist.
Our saddest sight of the season was the jackal Gezani and Lucky found lying dead and mangled on the roadside a couple of weeks ago near the Boschkom macadamias. A wire snare, still around its neck, had cut deep into the flesh where it had torn itself away, and probably run demented into the road. That cut was somehow a more grisly sight than its grimace of death, or its crushed body.
Birds seem to have decided that our garden is actually intended as a sanctuary, free of cats or dogs for several years, rich with a blossoming sequence of aloes, coral trees, yellow and orange honeysuckle, flame creeper and wild pear. They are making free with it. We sit in the gallery, looking through our newly de-flyscreened windows, as they will be every autumn to spring from now on. From there we see such busy flitting from tree to tree they might need a traffic controller, if the air wasn’t already rich with bird calls.
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Birds seem to have decided that our garden is actually intended as a sanctuary, free of cats or dogs for several years, rich with a blossoming sequence of aloes, coral trees, yellow and orange honeysuckle, flame creeper and wild pear.
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Colour. This paradise garden is never without a speckle or a splash of it, a wash or a blaze of it, moving in a kaleidoscope from week to week through bush and tree and flowerbed.
Right now it’s the pink hibiscus, and the yellow behind it on the lawn, fuller and fairer than we’ve seen it in almost five years. (The yellow one nearer the swimming pool has still to come good, but the ancient ones up the cottage steps are spotting pink among the dark green spiky aloe leaves).
And the bougainvillea arcing in a breathtaking golden shower over the front door, the roof and the courtyard wall; supported by its cohorts by the garage, old and thin but bright in deep pink, then yellow tailing into light pink. The deep pink is strong in other places: still a blaze framing the entrance gate (and in beautiful mystery, tailing on some fronds into white). Along the cottage bank, it is a big bright wash, slightly peaked – a deep pink alongside the equally fulsome crimson bower, in a clash of colours enough to make a decorator wince. And sticklike, sparse pink ones in pots frame the guest room door.
And the stunning display of wild irises, thickly clustering by the pool table where Eve had them transplanted from the stream over two years ago, bursting into their one-day flowerings of white petals with blue centre, every three or four days, through late September and early October..
And the gezanias, our proud indigenes, multiplying beside the path through the beds we reshaped and planted two seasons ago, always closed in shadow but when the sun comes they make a daisy carpet of striped yellow and brown, striped purple and yellow. Other indigenes are surviving: the cycads aren’t exactly lush but they are sitting up and taking notice, and the impala lilies have leaves and a few tentative buds. The kudu lilies have yet to do anything beyond grow a few leaves among the thorns, but who knows. At least the strelizia at the bottom of the garden has managed three flowers – with lots of tlc it may yet one day rival our Yeoville beauty, that Miss Universe of strelizias.
The fuschia is fulsome, and fast taking over its part of the bed where we planted it from Montana three seasons ago. Its red bells are already hanging well over the lawn near the pool.
September/October is jasmine time. First to bloom and send out its scent was the hedge framing the staff gate, then the one that blooms high in the large tree beside the cottage – but somehow hardly blooms near its root below and won’t go over the trellis we put there for it, to screen the compost heap. Now the little jasmine tree in the pot in the courtyard is at its white and scented best.
There are large pink roses dotted around the bank – but only on the tall bushes. They only try to blossom above bushbuck browsing height. One of the garden’s glories, that spread of yellow flower groundcover all along the sloping bank, is out, but it looks a bit hesitant this year. Probably too early to say. The lacy white blossom on the bushy tree beside the roses is adding to the magic mix of colour and texture.
Up to a week ago the petra bush was the star, its fine-petalled blossoms sparkling blue in front of a display of colours that is one of the year’s highlights, all in peak form around the same time, all clustered along the lawn and bank below the cottage: crimson and pink bougainvilleas; then on the lawn below, the large YTT bush in full 3-colour glory (its smaller mate near the swimming pool echoing it still a bit faintly). And three bushes, very different in size, shape and foliage, but each blossoming yellow – just like the frangipani starting to show – yes - yellow petals in the background, near the stone Three Faces of Eve on its flower and slate pedestal.
Eve and Tony Hall
Matumi 2006, 6am
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