Everyday magic

From the aloe garden, he stares and stares

Girl fairy helper is blowing out the candles on her birthday cake – she is four – when she spots him. “Buck,” she says.

Buck (antelope), indeed. He is the big male bushbuck, who tends to be quite furtive: the females (his harem, I suppose) are the ones that we see more often. He walks swiftly and decisively, and stops in the aloe garden. Trying to hide behind the garden shed, I manage to take a few pics on my phone.

But he knows I am there, and he stares me down. After a few minutes, I scuttle off to eat cake with smarties and pink icing.

Later, perhaps an hour later, boy fairy helper – he’s still six – is shadowing me, as he does, and chattering nonstop, as he does, while I clatter at the sink outside the kitchen door. Seeing that we live half in the bush, we wash our pots and pans here, not in the kitchen. When it rains, we don’t wash the pots. Simple.

Huge

He wins the staring contest

Suddenly, there is a movement, and there he is, under the milkwood trees. The ram is huge. I am almost 6 feet tall, and I swear that if you include his horns, he is at least as tall as me. Boy fairy helper (bless him) draws in his breath, and we are both as quiet as mice. 

The ram does not bullet away in fear; he gives us a rather bored look and saunters off. He was surely snacking on my garden while I was eating cake.

My uncle Aub, a farmer and a true man of this soil, sees the photos and he is quite excited. Do you think he is the only male around here? I ask. It’s possible, Uncle Aub says patiently, that there are other males in the area, but this must be the senior buck. Only the senior would be brave enough to come so close to us.

Alpha male

Gathering on the field behind the house

Wow! The alpha male. I am feeling suitably thrilled and privileged until I remember that I have seen this ram up close before – in Kathy’s garden on the other side of the village. Or maybe there’s another ram on that side? Anyway, he eats her herbs and vegetables. Oh, and her pelargoniums, all of them. She waves her arms at him – much as I do to the damn monkeys – and threatens to turn him into biltong.

A view from my office

Privilege

But the fact that we are so blasé about something so magical shows that we are very privileged indeed. We see these beautiful, graceful creatures – usually the babies and the females, but sometimes also the males from a distance – almost every day.

There are also some blue duiker, the cutest little things, but they are far more skittish than the bushbuck. They scurry out of the bush to grab fruit that has fallen to the ground.

Poaching has been a real problem in this reserve (and elsewhere), and the ranger talks of a pack of dogs from a nearby farm that have run wild here and killed some of the buck. The duiker remain terrified of humans, and sadly, that’s the way it should be.