OUR nights were anything but quiet. On the second night hyena relieved us of both our new cold boxes, a plastic water bottle and a length of hosepipe.
We found one cold box and the chewed-up remains of the water bottle about a 100 metres away in the morning.
To save it from suffering the same fate again, I put the one remaining cold box two metres up a tree on the third night. About two o’clock in the morning, I heard a hyena knock it down and start to carry it away.
I shook Corrie. When he said:“Ssshhh. Hold it.” I assumed that he was making a tape recording. I listened to our box of beers clanking off into the bush and then discovered that the tape recorder hadn’t been switched on and that Corrie was still snoring.
We found the box next morning, slightly chewed round the edges, but still usable.
Don’t believe the text books which tell you that hyena eat only carrion. In two nights this one ate a pot of chicken curry, a wooden spoon, a cold box, a litre of tomato sauce, six cans of beer, a length of plastic piping and a reel of exposed film. After that lot, it stopped laughing and just howled.
For our daytime forays into the bush, we once again had Big Boy as a guide. He was a good tracker and we saw plenty of just about every variety of game. But there was one breed of animal of which we saw far too many.
Vervet monkeys are cute-looking little things and, at times, their antics are hilarious, but when they invade a camp they become a perfect pest.
We arrived back from a game-spotting trip one morning, to find a horrible mess, for which the recipe might read as follows: “Take 1kg rice, 1kg sugar, 500g Kalahari sand, 1 litre sour milk and two packets of peppermints. Employ a troup of vervet monkeys to stir up all the ingredients in the back of the trailer. Put the resulting dough in plastic bags and dump it in the rubbish pit.”
Jacquie was detailed to carry out the last instruction. Unfortunately she forgot to let go of the bags and had to be hauled up from the bottom of a two-metre hole. We asked her to repeat the performance for the cine camera, but she declined!
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