By Catherine Marshall
AS NIGHT begins to fall, the elephants gather in great big herds and start the slow march towards the edge of South Luangwa National Park. They return at first light, as weak rays of morning sun break through the fog that’s settled upon the bush like a blanket. They tramp silently though the forest, just the occasional crunch of leaves heard beneath their feet; their stomachs don’t growl, either, for they’re filled with mangoes stolen from villagers’ orchards on the park’s unfenced perimeter.
Such is life in this Zambian valley, where lives and livelihoods are juggled in an intricate, daily dance. In the early morning, as we cross the Luangwa River, we spy a group of children setting up their fishing rods. Danger lurks all around them: crocodiles are already staking their claim on wedges of sunwarmed riverbank; hippo pods are so plentiful we can barely see the water for their bulbous, pinkbrown flanks. Further along, village women disappear into the forest, risking encounters with lions and buffalos and elephants as they search for firewood.
We’re about to face this exhilarating wilderness from ground level ourselves. My Robin Pope Safaris guide, Jacob Shawa, parks below a wild mango tree. The river lies below us: hippos wallow, birds swoop, the jaws of a crocodile appear on the surface, snapping a bream. We’re on a morning game walk, accompanied by a guard dressed in camouflage and armed with a powerful rifle: a reminder that while Africa’s wildlife is magnificent to behold, its strength and unpredictability should never be underestimated.
We’re not the only humans encroaching on the animals’ habitat: smoke rises from a fisherman’s camp on an islet in the middle of the river, and the fisherman himself sits beside the water – so vulnerable to crocodiles, to hippos! – gutting fish. He’s been up all night, Shawa tells me, laying his nets, collecting the fish trapped within them. A friend will take his catch to the market, and he will retreat to his makeshift tent to sleep.
Shawa leads me along the river with its crumbling, pocked banks. A malachite – royal blue feathers, ruby red beak – perches almost indiscernible on a log down by the river.
“He’s a little jewel,” Shawa says. A cloud of Lilian’s love birds rises and falls in a perfectly-timed dance, their orange faces and green wings blurring into a bright, feathery mirage. Nearby, in a whirl of turquoise and red and rust, carmine beeeaters dart in and out of the nests they’ve carved into the riverbank. Tucked inside are eggs that haven’t yet hatched; when the chicks are strong enough, these inter-African migrants will depart for more enticing climes: South Africa, Zimbabwe, elsewhere in Zambia.
It’s hard to imagine they might discover a place quite as tranquil, as soul-stirring as this. But the quiet is misleading: beyond the river, clues alert us to other creatures that live here, to the activities they engage in while we’re asleep. Shawa points to the bruised bark of a rain tree, where some animal has rubbed itself in hope of accessing the antibiotic properties contained within.
“I wonder how animals have evolved to know what use plants have?” he asks rhetorically. As we walk through the thickets, our footprints soft and considered, we pass tamarind trees curling from the top of abandoned termite mounds. Who knows what lurks inside these embankments? Genets, mongooses, snakes – they all make their homes in structures such as these.
A noise startles us; we stand rigid, our blood freezing at the thought it might be a lion, or one of those mammoth elephants we’ve seen lumbering homewards in the morning fog. But relief: it’s a herd of zebra, grazing in a clearing. We know too well that life and death are closely entwined in this wild and magnificent place. As if to reinforce this fact, Shawa picks up the bleached jawbone of a hippo, and points out its extraordinarily large and dangerous teeth. Alive, he was something to fear; dead, he is a harmless fossil we can hold in our hands.
We return to Robin Pope’s Safari’s Nkwali Camp, an oasis of thatched chalets centred on an ebony tree, tucked away from the wildness fanning out all around it. But as I approach the dining pavilion I see something that reinforces what the people of the Luangwa Valley have known for eons: though the camp sits in a clearing, it is still the animals’ domain. For right there, so close I could almost touch it, is a magnificent elephant, wading through a lagoon, eating watergrass as it goes, disappearing into the enfolding bush as though it were never here.
