In March 2018, I visited South Africa for the first time, this is a story from that visit.
It’s a grey rainy morning on the savanna, shortly after 6 am.
We’re following the tracks of a water buffalo when our guide sports something else in a dried-up river bed. A boot print.
“Human tracks,” he says.
Other than park employees, our group, eight visitors and two rangers, are the only people legally in the part of the park.
The guide’s suspicions are clear: poachers.
It’s March. The month before, the trail guide tells us, Kruger National Park lost 55 rhinos to poachers. It was the worst month for rhino killing in South Africa’s largest national park in 18 months.
Officially, there could be as many as 5,000 rhinos in the park but the guide, who has been walking these trails for nearly 20 years, thinks there are probably fewer than that now.
We pick up the trail a little while later. Two people walking together. Their boots are new, the guide can tell from the tracks, the style worn by park staff. Field rangers on patrol, most likely, but that’s not a sure thing, a few months earlier, a park employee stole a box of new uniforms and sold them on the black market. Rangers have been arrested for poaching.
Sometimes the problem “is our own people,” the guide says.
The demand for rhino horn is often put down to “Traditional” Chinese Medicine. But there’s more to it than that, in Vietnam the absurd belief that rhino horn can cure hangovers is widespread. There, the horns are also seen as a status symbol and given as gifts.
There have been attempts to prevent poaching by surgically removing the horns from wild rhinos or by dying them, which makes them less attractive on the status market and robs them of their magic powers.
But these efforts have failed, the dye doesn’t stick, removed horns grow back and poachers will shoot these rhinos anyway, so they don’t waste time tracking a hornless animal again.
There is now a push to legalize the international rhino horn trade and expand the commercial farming of rhinoceros, the Kingdom of eSwatini has been a particular advocate of this approach. But there is a fear that this will increase overall demand, by making rhino horn more accessible and less illicit, and that with rising demand and a legal supply chain poached horns can be laundered into, there will be no decline in poaching.
While there would be no poaching without demand, the fact that poachers are willing to risk their lives to kill rhinos is deeply intertwined with South Africa’s twin problems of poverty and unemployment.
It is a stark reminder of the reasons why Kruger National Park was established and the challenges it still faces.
We don’t see any more signs of poachers or rangers. In fact, it will not be until the evening that we see any sign of another person, but it’s not long before we see three giraffes, a herd of zebra and a pair of hyenas.
We have come to Kruger to walk the park’s trails. In a Canadian or American national park, that may seem like the normal thing to do, but here in Kruger, home to lions, hippos, crocodiles and rhinos, visitors are required to stay in their cars, except in a few specific areas or on an organized walk with an armed ranger.
Those walks – specifically the Wilderness Trails – one of which we are walking – are one of the best ways to get deeper into the bush.
It’s a different pace than the game drives on private reserves (and in national parks in some parts of this continent), where the guides radio spottings to each other and then rush to find the animals.
There are no lines of safari cars here, even when we drive to a path, we avoid the tarred roads, when possible.
While we don’t set off in search of anything, in Kruger, so dense with wildlife, it is hard not to see something interesting.
You see fewer animals on foot. There is something about a car, it is so foreign, its scent so unfamiliar, so unlike any wild threat that most animals tend to ignore them.
10 primates walking on their hind legs, though, that’s some they they know, that’s a threat they’ve learned about and they know our smell.
We don’t talk much when we walk, you can hear things before you see them.
We stop to smell the flowers, we learn about the thorn bushes that wildebeests use to escape lions; the way elephants strip bark off the trees, opening them to insects who drill holes into the wood and eventually kill the trees; how efforts to provide animals with easier access to water disrupted migration patterns and led to overfeeding, stripping the land of grass.
On the first night, after we walk, we take a short drive to a nearby waterhole. It has rained recently and there is a fair amount of water in the park, so the animals don’t need to seek out a waterhole to drink
Nothing is happening when we arrive and then a big bull elephant comes out of the bush and begins to play in the water.
On the way back, we encounter a safari vehicle taking tourists staying at the nearby rest camp on a nighttime game drive, the guides speak quickly in a mixture of languages, African and European, the other car has seen lions.
For the first time this trip, we set out to find something. Soon we spot three big cats but these are not lions, they are cheetahs, an even rarer sight. It is late for cheetahs to be out hunting, perhaps they have finished. We watch them walk along the roadside for a few minutes before continuing on the find the lions.
And, suddenly, there they are, two lionesses and three cubs. They seem utterly undisturbed by the vehicle. The cubs play-fight rambunctiously, one of them charges its mother, she rears up and they wrestle for a minute.
There is a male lion somewhere nearby, off the road. We can hear him, we can hear the lionesses respond. Their roars are louder than I expected, deeper, earthshaking.
On the last night, we take sundowners on a large rock, the forested savannah stretches wide on all sides. It seems almost endless. Of course, it is not, there are growing cities not too far from here, tree farms and mines. But it is vast, home to great herds and populations and, at least for the moment, so many animals emblematic of this continent have found some refuge here.