A far from average Monday

So, a normal Monday rolls in, my eyes crack open to the glorious sound of the lions roaring and I slowly squirm out of bed, hating that it’s still -3C outside (and inside). The set task for the day, to help Vickie (researcher) and Patrick to clean out the Wild Dog enclosure and repair the fence around where they have tried to dig their way out. Goody. The dogs are no-where in sight so the eight of us soon have the job done when a call from Frekkie comes through on the two way radio.

For most of the morning we have been aware of a column of smoke coming from the neighbouring farm about 20km away, but we all assumed they were performing burn backs on the thorn trees to clear their land. Frekkie reports that the wind had changed and these burn backs have gotten out of control and he rapidly requires all available hands to return to the farm house. We all rush back to the truck and head straight for the house. We grab what equipment we will need and pile in all the volunteers that are within reach and race off to the next farm. Mind you, most of us don’t really know what’s going on as Frekkie has drilled into us that when he wants us to do something, we do it without question and as fast as possible (even when it comes to the simple task of opening a gate for a car to pass through).

So, there we are, about half the volunteers crammed into various trucks and a number of staff from the farm. Our truck is one of the first to arrive and we come to an area that is low density flame but spreading rapidly. We all jump out, grab spades and ‘thumpers’ (strips of black rubber attached to sticks to beat out the flames), and spread along the line of burning shrub, burying and beating out the fire as we go. Singeing arm hair and burning exposed hands and arms to intense heat. Having controlled our small area, we jump back in the truck to meet up with the others. Along the way we beat several more of these small pockets of flame into submission.

Finding the others, things are a little chaotic. They’re all doing their bit but none of those in charge have let slip how bad the situation really is and what it is exactly we are trying to achieve. It’s about midday and we have all been working against the blazing fire for several hours. It’s hot and we’re all thirsty with only minimal water available as we all just hopped on the trucks and went. Our faces are streaked with ash and dust, small rivulets of blood covering most arms and legs where the ever clawing thorn trees have left their tender scratches.

In our less than glamorous state, about 10 of the volunteers pile into the back of Frekkie’s truck. In other words, we cram ourselves into the cage built into the tray of the 4x4 used for transporting the lions about. A cage in which we cannot open from the inside.

The truck is the third in the convoy with Vickie bringing up the rear in his red Toyota with the trailer bearing the water tank and fire hose. We’re racing along the dirt track with a fence to our right and the raging bush fire spreading rapidly towards us on the left. The flames are getting closer and closer to the road but being in the cage, none of us has any control over what is to happen and we have put our whole safety into the hands of Frekkie. To say we were a little worried is a colossal understatement.

The flames are a motley swirl of intense autumn colours that are flicking menacingly towards us. A wall of heat and fire about 10m high, engulfing vegetation in the blink of an eye and leaving plumes of smoke to darken the bright azure sky. The fire is encroaching rapidly towards the line of cars and their 30 or more occupants. We are somewhat recklessly speeding along in the loose sand of the track and all vehicles bar Vickie make it past safely. We slow down and all look back at the red Toyota which is more than four car lengths behind us. Without warning, the wind picks up and hurls the flames at the road. There is still a small gap between raging inferno and track and Vickie guns it, back wheels spinning in the soft sand and fish tailing the rear of the truck and trailer. Everyone starts screaming, “Don’t do it Vickie!!”, “It’s too close!!”… “ESBEN!!!”

Wait! What?!! Esben?? Where??

What everyone else has seen but I have completely missed is the fact that Esben was clinging to the outside of Vickie’s truck… on the side facing the fire… As Vickie attempts to outrun the blaze, twice it beats down against the car, directly where Esben… had been. That’s right. One second he was there and the next, he’d disappeared behind the heat wave and a thick blanket of smoke. The screaming from the others intensifies as we watch, horror struck as Esben vanishes and Vickie’s car is engulfed by flame.

Somehow, the seconds pass achingly slow. We continue to stare, smoke and soot falling all around us, making it hard to breath. Miraculously Vickie makes it through, the rear of his truck ablaze. Having made it passed, he rushes out of the car and beats the flames out. We wait, and wait, beating on the truck for Frekkie to get back in the truck and move us out of the choking smoke. We feel so helpless. Esben has vanished and we are stuck in the cage without any choice but to sit and wait for Frekkie.

To our relief, an ash covered form emerges from the brush on our right. Stumbling slightly we all exclaim in relief, “Esben!!!”

He’d seen the flames and at the last moment jumped from the car and run behind the trailer and into the relative safety of the bush. Somehow he’d made his way through, but in the process he had severely burnt his back and arm. The skin blistering in two softball sized patches, one of which is clearly visible through his burnt shirt. He’s ushered into one of the cars and we finally move further down the road towards clearer air. We breathe it in and try and make sense of what has just happened. We bump along in the cage in silence, too stunned to say anything.

The day does not end there. Esben is sent back to the farm and with the remaining volunteers we are split in groups, each given a patch of the fire to tackle. There are six of us, including myself, who are dropped off about 5km down a side track and set the task of creating an area of burn back that will hopefully meet up with the current inferno and give it no more room to move.

We each take it in turn to collect large handfuls of dried grass, and using the grass, we carry a flame along in a line as far as possible, catching anything alight that we can, until the next person needs to take over and continues the line of fire. In this way, we covered ground fairly rapidly with our own mini inferno picking up strength behind us. With the wind in our favour it is gradually blown towards the main blaze.

Having gone as far as we can in the thickening thorn trees and waist high grass we return to the track where we are picked up again and taken over to any remaining small patches of the main fire that are still flaring up. We again get to work with our spades and ‘thumpers’ and make short work of the flames, old hands at it by now. We’re now working side by side with the bushmen that call the neighbouring farm home who seem quite impressed by the rapidity and effectiveness of our teamwork.

The last shrub is beat out and we finally look up and stretch our work-weary limbs. We’ve done it! We get a report from Frekkie that the main fire has burnt itself out against our various burn backs and the last few remaining patches of flames are being taken care of. We are giddy with relief. It’s three in the afternoon and we’ve been working non-stop for the last 5 hours, no food, all water gone. We are hot, soot covered, freed of our arm hair and very sore. We clamber back into the back of the truck (we are no longer in Frekkie’s cage) and speed our way back to the farm. We’re met half way by Vickie’s wife who has brought us bottles of water and fridge cooled apples. The sweetest and most delectable pieces of fruit I’ve ever tasted. They disappear almost as quickly as the flames had spread.

Slightly reenergised we bounce around more cheerfully in the truck till we return to the safety of the farm. Everyone is abuzz with news of the fire for the volunteers that had been unable to join us, and we were rewarded with good news about Esben and that his burns weren’t too severe.

Frekkie appears and in his magnanimity, tells us we can have the rest of the afternoon off. All three hours of it. Woo hoo!

African Wild Dogs, Hungry Lions, Scars and Paintball.

What a sense of humour the Africans have. Turns out Ashley was fine, the whole thing being some sort of twisted practical joke. To this day the African Wild Dogs still freak me out, even Tom, the pup that was being raised along with Jerry, a domestic dog puppy.

But even on discovering this fact, our days were far from dull. Every day, each of the four groups of volunteers had a set of animals that they fed and cared for while on the farm. Being a part of Group One, we had the pleasure of hand feeding the teenage lions. Our first encounter of this kind involved feeding them whole springbok heads. Delicious! Nothing like entering an enclosure with five, almost fully grown, hungry lions, carrying five meaty antelope heads. Luckily, and it was mostly luck, we only had one incident with them the entire time that I was there, where two of the lions didn’t climb on the platform to be fed, but instead chose to run at myself and another volunteer that were holding their donkey steaks for the day, ripping the meat straight from our hands. Talk about getting the heart racing! I’ve never been so close to having my hand shredded by razor sharp lion claws before. Though, in saying that, I did have one of those claws imbedded into my calf two weeks later. Was my own fault really, the lioness had become too comfortable with my petting and had stretched out her paw in pleasure. My leg happened to be in the way as she did this and I had to then retract her claw from said leg. Not too much blood and unfortunately no ‘impressive’ scar followed. Dennis on the other hand, had more intimate encounter with all five furry playmates...

Speaking of scars, I found that the majority of my injuries were inflicted, not by the animals, but by the farming equipment, fences and gates, and the many thorny acacia trees and spiny shrubbery. Though the baboons did try to even the score on more than one occasion. The holes in my shirt and the shredded pant leg of my shorts can attest to that. But what girl doesn’t enjoy a good excuse to buy new clothes? Me of course, but that’s beside the point.

Ok, the point... umm… there isn’t one so I’ll just tell you about the paintball match that we had. Using slingshots out in the ‘scrap yard’ where Klippy the giraffe called his home, a manic battled raged. The Aim: For one team to steal the tyre from the opposing team and get it back to their base. Easier said than done my friends, given that it was a tractor tyre and required three people to carry it! There were many honourable and not so honourable deaths that day, but the beauty of paintball is that given enough time to recover, you come back to life! Huzah! And after four or five rounds (about an hour) of 50 plus people yelling and screaming, rolling in the dirt and sliding behind trees to avoid those lethal balls of paint, Paul and I finally managed to carry and roll the damn tyre 100m back to our fort and finally claim an exhausting victory!! *Does a little jig*

But of course, that not nearly being enough, and having plenty of paintballs left, we pretty much had a free for all for the next hour or so, diving in and out of ditches as a blur of pink and orange orbs flew through the air, often hitting their target, whether it be foe or ally, it need not matter. Talk about an enthusiastic way of getting sand into every conceivable crevice. Not to mention the fact that we had a two story tall giraffe to contend with that was a little on the aggressive side. Running from tree to tree was your best bet given that the branches blocked his path. Feeding time however, was a different matter. He became as placid as a kitten.

Ok, so I’ve successfully brought you up to speed on the third day of my stay, only 25 days to go!

Day Four: The battle of the raging bush fire…

First day...

It’s interesting to go back through my diary entries to see what I wrote about my experiences at Harnas. My first night staying in the volunteer village I noted that I came across two oryx in the dark, standing only a few meters away, their eyes spookily reflecting in my torch light. I remember how both freaked out and excited I was by this encounter. It’s strange that by the end of my four weeks on the farm, an oryx was no more exciting then coming across a roo in the bush.

The volunteer village itself was about a kilometre from the farm central and was located in an area that had hundreds of antelope, meercats, ostrich, warthogs and giraffe roaming about. We were kind of in the buffer zone between the farm with the smaller animals (eg, vervets, teenage lions, baby baboons, jackals and bat-eared foxes) and the ‘Lifeline’. An area used as a temporary release site for some of the other animals, including hyenas and a single cheetah called Pride. Beyond the volunteer village and the guest challets were several massive enclosures that held numerous adult male lions (close enough that their roars coaxed us to sleep every night, and were the first thing to be heard as the sun rose every morning), 50 or more cheetahs, hundreds of baboons, wild African dogs, hyenas, and vervet monkeys. The farm was huge to say the least, but not nearly big enough given the large number of animals they cared for and the many new arrivals they took in every few weeks. At any given moment they could receive a call to go and pick up anything from abandoned cheetah cubs, to a lion harassing livestock. There was never a dull moment.

For us new arrivals, our first day involved an obligatory induction lecture about the farm, the animals, and it’s ethos about educating the volunteers in more than just wildlife husbandry, but also self-exploration and discovery based on the companionship that we would soon develop with the animals and with each other (there were about 40 volunteers from around the world staying on the farm). This highly inspirational talk was soon interrupted though when Frekkie (the volunteer coordinator) received a call over the two way radio asking if he’d seen a particular volunteer who hadn’t shown up yet for the morning chores.  He said that he had sent her to the wild dog enclosure to check on them.

‘On her own?!’ the response came.
‘Yeah’, Frekkie nonchalantly replied. ‘Has she not returned yet?’
‘She doesn’t know that she’s not supposed to go in there on her own!’
Exasperated Frekkie replies, ‘I didn’t ask her to go in there. She was just supposed to check on them.’

Meanwhile we the newbys are all looking back and forth between each other, wondering if this was really happening.

‘We’ll send Esben (student doing an internship on the farm) to check on her’
‘Right-o, let me know if you find her’

Frekkie tries to return to the induction and discussing the importance of communication as if nothing has happened. We’re all sitting around seriously questioning whether this guy is for real. Static soon blares out of the radio with Patrick (another coordinator) shouting that they’ve found her. She was in the enclosure and it doesn’t look good.

‘Should we radio for the medi-copter?’ the barely concealed paniced voice asks.
‘Get the stretcher and bring her to the farm house’ Frekkie calmly responds. ‘We’ll decide from there’.

Frekkie ushers all of the new volunteers out of the open bar area and onto the grass in front of the building. He wanted us to see what happens to volunteers that don’t follow instructions. We’re all seriously freaked out and wondering what the hell was going on, this guy was acting far too cooly for what has blatantly just happened. Then, there they were, four guys running across the grass towards the house, a limp, blood streaked body lying in the stretcher between them, an IV hanging from her arm…

…Oh… my... god!!!

My brain stands still for several heart beats, before I realise that Frekkie is herding us back into the bar area, saying something about Ashley (the limp body)… that she should have known better and that this should all be a lesson to us to never go inside the wild dog enclosure on our own. Was he for real? The life of a volunteer hangs in the balance and he’s claiming it was her own fault? I was struck mute while a few of the others around me were whispering furiously to each other… Was this what we had signed up for? To be led by a guy that was clearly out of his mind?

The radio crackles again with Patrick’s relieved voice coming through, ‘She’s come to. We’ve managed to stop the worst of the bleeding. It looks like she’ll be ok.’
‘Good. Now send a few of the others to make sure that the dog pack is ok.’ Is Frekkie’s curt response.
‘Roger’

And so, as if he has been informed of nothing more than what’s on the menu for lunch, Frekkie continues with the induction seminar. Most of what he says passes straight through me as an irrevocable fear of the African wild dogs blossoms within me.  I have to survive four weeks of this people. FOUR… WEEKS!