THERE was surprisingly little game on the Savuti Marsh, but we did get one shot of a pair of rhinoceros which really thrilled us. Taking a film of rhino may not sound particularly exciting, but this had to be something in the nature of a ‘scoop’.
Hundreds of years ago, rhino had roamed freely over the whole of northern Botswana, but they suffered so badly at the hands of the hunters, that they were finally declared extinct over the whole area.
A few years earlier, 30 specimens had been imported from South Africa and released along the banks of the Chobe River. And that was where they stayed, slowly, but steadily, increasing their numbers. None had ever been known to stray far from the river. Now here we were, with a 150km of waterless bush between us and the Chobe and here were two white rhinos, peacefully doing their own thing, on the banks of the Savuti Channel.
No visitor, courier or game warden we spoke to was aware of their presence. Were they descended from the ‘extinct’ rhinos of Botswana, or had they crossed the arid waste from the Chobe? Of course, there was a logical explanation, which we only found out much later.
The Okavango Wildlife Society, which had been responsible, in conjunction with Ian Player’s Operation Rhino in South Africa, for the earlier translocation of the Chobe rhino, had started a programme of repopulating the Savuti area and we had seen the first pair which had been brought in from Natal.
No sooner had the programme started than the Savuti Channel, cut off from the Zambezi by the closing of the Selinda Spillway by a minor earthquake, began to dry up and the rest of the rhino were taken to Moremi instead. The Savuti pair disappeared and were ‘missing, presumed dead’ for the next seven years.
So I think we were reasonably justified in believing that we had the first and, for many years possibly the only, movie film taken of rhinoceros at Savuti. (It was swept away in the 2000 flood of the Fafa River, along with all the rest of our films.)
But our good luck with our filming didn’t mean that we had said goodbye to the Calamity Bug. As we had not been troubled by animals in the camp on the first night, we didn’t worry too much about securing things on the second.
The following morning I was looking for some oranges and found that John’s cold bag was missing. Karen was looking for somewhere to sit down and found that a mattress was missing. Corrie was looking for some socks and found that our entire case of clothes was missing. With our experience, we should have known better.
Corrie tracked the hyena across the camp, finding John’s torn-up bag and a badly-mauled mattress, but he had to give up the search for our clothes when he found a herd of buffalo blocking his path.
Luckily, I had been very lazy on the previous day and done no washing. The contents of the laundry bag yielded enough to keep us decently covered, but I spent the rest of the trip in my pyjamas.
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