Horn

I’ve been travelling the same route down to the bush, several times a year, for more than three decades. I could have given you directions when I was 12; Pretoria. Bronkhorstspruit. Witbank. Belfast. Dullstroom. Lydenburg. Ohrigstad, Hoedspruit. Then we’d head out for Bushbuckridge and turn left into the bush. Halfway down the road the tar would run out and it was an hour of bone-shaking corrugations before we pulled up at the gate of our place.

Things have changed over the years. Witbank is now Emalahleni. Lydenburg is now Mashishing. The road through the charming little town of Dullstroom has been turned into a strip mall where Jo’burg day trippers in Land Cruisers and Porche Cayennes can buy rustic pancakes and designer trout-killing gear. The even littler and far less charming Hoedspruit has grown bigger and more charming.

But it’s the road into the bush that has changed the most. It used to rattle along between two lines of game fence, often bent flat by the elephants that churlishly ignored the boundaries we tried so hard to impose on them. Then, as the 80’s drew to a close, the fences along the road came down, as did the fence around the Kruger Park. The elephants could do as they pleased, as could everything else. The road was tarred and a toll gate was set up to collect money to pay for its upkeep.

It’s actually quite a sophisticated operation.

And then the controls came. Another gate was set up, with retractable spikes and a uniformed guard. And the toll gate turned into something like the entrance to the villain’s lair in a Bond movie, complete with a security force in camo fatigues, with sniffer dogs and assault rifles.

The place names changed because of politics. Hoedspruit and Dullstroom grew because of tourism. The tarred road was about progress, I suppose.

And the heavily armed security force? That’s all about rhinos.

There’s something prehistoric about rhinos. They’re huge, relics of a time when the Earth was crowded with giants like mammoths and glyptodons and giant ground sloths. White rhinos are the third largest land animal after elephants, with the males weighing in at over 2 tons, while the black rhinos can get up to a ton and a half.

Black

White

Apart from their size, the easiest way to tell the difference between the two is by looking at their colour. White rhinos are grey while black rhinos are a distinct grey colour. Yup. There’s no difference. No one really knows why they’re called that. The most commonly floated answer is that the white of the white rhino is a corruption of the Dutch word “wijd”, meaning wide, in reference to the shape of their mouths. Which, like most folk etymology, sounds perfectly reasonable. The only problem is that there is absolutely no historical evidence for it. And it doesn’t really explain why the other guys are called black.

Confronted by this curious state of affairs, the clever people decided it was far more sensible to call the white rhino the square lipped rhino and the black rhino the hook lipped rhino, because that really is a significant difference between the two. Square lipped rhinos eat grass. They carry their heads low to the ground and have wide, squared off mouths like lawnmowers. Hook lipped rhinos are browsers, and have sharp, turtle beak shaped mouths like garden clippers for picking out the tastiest twigs and leaves.

Mower

Clipper. If you squint. And have had enough vodka.

Happily, we stupid people looked at this idea, found it all far too sensible, and cheerfully carried on calling them white and black for absolutely no reason at all. We’ve done the same with wild dogs, which the clever people wanted us to call painted dogs.

Us stupid people know a painted do when we see one.

There are a couple of other differences. Black rhino calves travel behind their mothers, while white rhino calves follow their mothers from in front. Don’t ask me how they do this; no one has ever bothered to explain it to me. Maybe their mothers are whistling at them subsonically, like deep voiced versions of shepherds whistling at their dogs.

White rhinos look noticeably more prehistoric, with huge, elongated heads and massive humped shoulders. Black rhinos are more tidily put together.

White rhinos live out on more or less open grassland, while black rhinos live in thick bush.

White rhinos have a reputation for being grumpy and dangerous. Black rhinos are grumpier and dangerouser.

There’s a reason for this. Rhinos have very bad eyes.

All animals have a series of imaginary circles around them. The outer circle is one in which the animal is aware of an intruder (we’ll call the intruder “you” because I don’t want to type out “intruder” 17 times), but essentially doesn’t care. Then there’s another, smaller circle within which the animal will start paying attention to you. It might just stop and watch you, it might move off, or it might send a half-hearted threat your way, but it will give you some sort of response. Then there’s the final, inner circle. That’s where stuff gets real, because that’s the circle within which you trigger the animal’s flight or fight response.

The size of those circles varies, depending on the temperament of the animal, its mood, who approached whom, and so on. So here’s me and my son chilling with an elephant. Everyone is relaxed. He knew we were there and approached us, so even though he’s close enough to spit on, we’re outside that inner circle.

And he’s outside ours because us men of the wild know that elephants suck at jumping

And here’s another elephant going on a vicious and terrifying rampage after we surprised him by stepping out of the door inside his inner circle (we didn’t know he was there. Elephants are small and unobtrusive and easy to miss).

It’s a miracle we made it out alive. I still can’t wear those pants without breaking down in tears.

Now imagine an animal that can’t see very well. If the wind is right, and you move quietly, you can get within 15 metres of white rhinos on foot without their even being aware of you. Which is nice, right up ‘til the moment that the wind turns or you step on a branch and the rhino suddenly becomes aware of a bunch of people standing well within it inner circle. That’s when you remember that the buggers weigh over 2 tons and can run at over 50 km/h (just for reference, Usain Bolt can only do 44 km/h). If the rhino decides to fight, you’re in very real trouble, but even if it decides on flight, you’re not safe. People have been badly injured just by happening to be in the direction they are fleeing in.

I don’t think this one is fleeing so much as offering a measured critique of that paint job

That’s white rhinos. Black rhinos are even more dangerous. Not only are they grumpier, they also live in thick bush, so you can stumble over them without even knowing they’re there. And vice versa. That whole “them approaching you” thing only counts if they know you’re there.

But that’s all just the stuff about rhinos themselves. The bigger story is about what’s happening to them. We’re killing them all. Again. For the bundles of hair they have stupidly decided to carry around on their noses. I won’t go into too much detail about rhino poaching, because you could fill a whole book, and I don’t know enough to avoid the pitfalls of misinformation that surround the subject. I’ll just rush through it and then tell you a bit about how the rhino crisis affects our little corner of the bush.

When I was younger, the story was simple. Rhinos were poached because the horns were used for making dagger handles in Yemen and aphrodisiacs in China. It was all so obvious. Swallowing bits of a big, stiff horn would surely give you the same. It was also wrong. Rhino horn was never used as an aphrodisiac. It was used in traditional Asian medicine to treat fevers, headaches, and other minor maladies. Of late it’s also being touted as a cure for cancer.

Luckily scientists have recently discovered an artificial substitute for rhino horn

It doesn’t work. At all. But before you get all judgey about the naivety of other people far away, pop into your local crystal shop and ask them if they have anything that will help with your headache. They won’t laugh at you. They’ll sell you a stone. And then they’ll sell you another one to help you align your chakras.

The truth is that it doesn’t really matter what people think it does. A vast criminal network spanning continents and generating millions of dollars doesn’t exist because someone in Vietnam has a headache. To understand what is happening with rhino horn, it helps to understand these;

That’s a Rolex Daytona. You can pick up a new one for half a million Rand. If you’re feeling flush can pick up a slightly fancier one for FIVE MILLION RAND!!!

Whatever you may think when glancing at one, a Rolex Daytona is not a watch. A watch is something you use to tell the time. This is a watch.

It costs R500, and is handy for checking the date as well as the time.

Of course a Rolex Daytona tells the time, too. It even does so quite deep underwater. But no one is spending FIVE MILLION RAND!!! to avoid being late for meetings. No. A Rolex Daytona is a machine for showing people how rich you are. It’s a shot of adrenaline for the sort of people who get a kick out of having things. A Rolex is not a watch, beluga caviar is not salty fish eggs, and a Louis Vuitton bag is not a handy place to keep five almost finished-lipsticks, an expired parking card, and a crumbly handful of those sweets they give you with the bill at restaurants. What these things are is status symbols

And rhino horn isn’t being used to treat fevers. It’s become a status symbol too. Rhino horn is worth more than its weight in gold. China and Vietnam have both seen a rapid growth in the number of rich people. People who suddenly feel a keen desire to tell the time quite deep underwater. People who need somewhere breathtakingly expensive to keep their individually wrapped peppermints. People who want to show the world that they’ve made it.

Ah, the sweet smell of success.

And that’s all I have to say about that. Except for this. It’s kinda hard to stop someone willing to spend FIVE MILLION RAND!!! on a watch.

So what does this all mean for our little corner of the world? It doesn’t stop with the sniffer dogs at the control gate. When I was younger, you often used to see workers walking up and down that corrugated dirt road, heading out to work or visiting friends on neighbouring farms. You still see people walking, though. Armed anti-poaching units, complete with weapons and tracker dogs. They are essentially soldiers, complete with paramilitary training. There’s a private army out there, fighting a little talked about war in the place where the rest of us go on holiday. And it really is a war; their opposition are, by their very nature, armed. There are casualties. A couple of years ago, the remains of a poacher were found on the farm next door to us. He’d been killed and eaten by lions.

Our behaviour has been affected, too. Up at the ranger station on our place there’s a sighting book and a map full of colour co-ordinated pins where we can all share our sightings. Red for lions, green for leopards, blue for elephants, and so on. There are no pins for rhinos, though, and we aren’t allowed to write them up in the book. The wrong person might be watching. Our rhinos are a secret.

One should always dress appropriately for rhino watching

It doesn’t end there. All of us have CB’s in our vehicles. It’s not really my thing, but lots of people have great fun with them, calling out to the rest of us about fresh lion tracks or leopard kills or hyena dens. No calls about rhinos, though. The wrong person might be listening. It’s quite fun listening to people trying to get around this. People will call their friends out at arbitrary times to meet for drinks in arbitrary places or radio in sightings of other animals with secret code-words worked into the announcements.

It wasn’t always like this. When we were kids, people never used to call in about rhinos for a very different reason. There were no pins for rhinos back then, either. Because there weren’t any rhinos.

That’s the greatest tragedy lurking behind all of this. Rhinos are actually a fantastic conservation success story. Halfway through the last century, there were no rhinos left in the Lowveld. None. In the case of the white rhinos, there were hardly any of them left on the planet.

A rare photograph of all the rhinos in the Lowveld, circa 1950

By the 1950’s, there were only about a hundred of them left in the country. A bunch of conservationists in Hluhluwe–iMfolozi Park in Kwazulu Natal decided they weren’t giving up without a fight, and protected the hell out of their rhinos. The rhinos did so well that soon they were able to start translocating surplus animals to other reserves and selling them to private landowners. In the 60’s, white rhinos were reintroduced to the Lowveld, followed by black rhinos in the 70’s.

It turns out that when we stop killing them all the time, rhinos actually do pretty well for themselves. By 2010, we had 17 000 white rhinos and 5000 black rhinos in the country.

We watched it happen. As I said, when we first started going down to the bush there were no rhinos on our little patch. There hadn’t been for a hundred years. Then, while the fences were up along that corrugated dirt road, we started to spot the odd one brought in by private landowners on our way down to our place. Then the fences came down. We began to come across the odd track while out driving.

An odd track.

Occasionally, someone would catch a glimpse of one. Occasionally turned to regularly. Four years ago, while sleeping out on the caged in stoep down at our place, I was woken up by a weird thumping noise. I sat up and glanced across the dry river bed in front of our house. Less than 50 metres away was a tiny white rhino calf, prancing around his mother like an excited Labrador puppy. The rhinos were well and truly back.

Now all we have to do is stop them from going away again.

Some smaller families.

The spiral horned buck are far and away the largest family down I the Lowveld, but there are others.

The Hottie and the Nottie.

I will apologise now for using such an awkward sounding subheader. It’s just that I feel that not nearly enough attention is paid to the artistic endeavours of Paris Hilton, and her 2007 movie The Hottie and the Nottie should, by rights, be a modern classic. I’m doing what I can to thrust it back to the forefront of your minds, where it belongs. It’s also an appropriate way to describe the next family of buck we’re going to look at. The hippotragini.

I’ll start with the Sable, because I’ve already mentioned them. And because damn!

Just damn!

They really are a joy to behold; powerful, well-muscled bodies, rapier-sharp horns sweeping back over the shoulders, faces boldly marked in black and white. And their outfits don’t hurt the whole picture either, all sleek black satin shining in the sun, contrasting boldly with the white of their stomachs.

The females aren’t quite in the same league. Their coats are brown, and while they, unlike most of the buck down in the bush, do have horns, they are far shorter. They are still very attractive animals. It’s just that nature is never fair when handing out the looks. Just ask a peahen.

The sad thing about beholding a sable is that you probably aren’t going to do it. They used to be far more common, but these days they’re pretty rare. And they seem to be getting rarer. Like their cousins. Which are properly rare.

Less damn!

The roan antelope seem to have lost some sort of genetic lottery. The family name, hippotragini, means horse goats. The sable seems to have got all of the horse parts. The roan was left with the goaty bits. I vaguely remember a sitcom from the 90’s in which there was a running joke in which the main character met up for a weekly poker game with Swayze, Travolta, and Stallone. That would be Don, Joey and Frank, as opposed to Patrick, John, and Sylvester.

The least damn.

 There was something weird about seeing them. They were, objectively, all good looking guys, and were instantly recognisable as the brothers of their more famous siblings, but despite their having all the same parts, they just hadn’t been put together quite as well. They looked odd because their siblings looked so good. And so it is with the roan. They are big, handsome buck, but their movie star cousins leave them looking just ever so slightly off.

It’s the ears. They’re too big. And they do a strange turny-downy thing at the ends that makes them look like depressed bunnies or idealistic teenagers who’ve just discovered that their idols are into a particularly nasty brand of niche porn. And if you think I’m being unfair to the noble roan, here’s a picture of their other movie star cousin, the gemsbok, from the other side of the country.

We’re up to full damn! again.

 But we are not here to judge the creatures of the wild by their looks or their unsavoury internet histories. They serve a far more important purpose. They show us quite how bad we are at playing god.

If you are unlikely to behold a sable, you are pretty much guaranteed not to behold a roan. It’s our fault. And not because their horns are worth their weight in gold or because we turned their homes into golf estates. No. the roan is very nearly locally extinct, and the sable is going the same way. Because we tried to help.

It goes like this; roan and sable have always, at least in South Africa, been uncommon. They are specialist grazers, and lived basically by finding good patches of grass in areas with poor soil and little surface water, where the grazing was mostly bad. This meant they it wasn’t just that they were uncommon in the areas where they lived, all big herbivores were. And because the herbivores were uncommon, so were the large predators. And then we came along and fixed everything.

We set up artificial water points all over the place. And lo and behold, the numbers of large herbivores increased because more water-dependent animals like zebras and buffalos and wildebeest moved in. and roan and sable numbers began to decline.

Leaving this barren wasteland, bereft of all life.

The decline was noticed. But not that easily understood. It was thought, at various times, to be the result of drought, diseases like anthrax, and perhaps most obviously, competition with other large herbivores. In the end, it seems to have been more complicated than that. It was all of those things, and none of them.

The greatest cause of the decline in roan and sable numbers seems to be this; their best defence against large predators was being in places where large predators weren’t, because there weren’t enough large herbivores to support them. When the large herbivores moved in, so did the lions and the hyenas. And they started to kill off the roan and the sable in higher numbers than they could cope with.

Luckily, we realised this, and began to remove the artificial water sources. Unluckily, it turns out that playing god is best left to the gods, and fixing the damage we have done is as easy as unbaking a cake. The large herbivores did indeed begin to move out of the haunts of the roan and the sable. Thing is, though, that large predators are territorial. Lions and hyenas can’t just move to other spots, because those spots are already filled by other lions and hyenas which will try to kill them. So turning off the water hasn’t brought back the roan and the sable.

Which is all a little depressing. All we can do now is wait to see if things even out over time.

Meh.

My mother is as passionate about the bush as anyone I have ever met. Except for rhinos. “Rhinos,” she tells us “leave me stone cold.”

I get it. Not because rhinos leave me stone cold, but because there are some other animals that do. And so on to the reduncini.

There are three members of the family down in the Lowveld; two types of reedbuck (the common and the mountain) and the waterbuck.

And it is the reedbuck that leave me stone cold. They live in small groups (mountain reedbuck) or pairs (common reedbuck) in tall grass on floodplains (common reedbuck) or on high slopes (mountain reedbuck). You hardly ever see them, and when you do, they tend to whistle at you and run away. And that’s all I have to say about that. Losers.

I don’t even know which one this is.

Luckily, the waterbuck is far more interesting.

They’re big, with males weighing in at over 250kg, and females at 200, and have bizarrely shaggy coats for an animal that lives in a place that can regularly reach 45° C. And as the name implies, they live close to water. They have to. They are prone to dehydration, another weird characteristic in a place as dry and hot as the Lowveld. They will flee into the water to escape predators, but can’t spend too much time in it because crocodiles.

The Sable and the gemsbok are pushing to have the waterbuck replace the roan at family gatherings.

Like hippos, the lives of waterbuck are governed by the access to water in a pretty dry place, and the way they manage their lives is pretty similar. Dominant males are territorial, and they share their territories with loose herds of females and with bachelor herds which are tolerated as long as they behave. Challenges for territories can get nasty and occasionally result in deaths.

Waterbuck stink. Their skin secretes a greasy, musky substance that smells so bad that it was common knowledge when I was a child that this was a way of deterring predators. The only problem with this tidy little piece of trivia is that no-one told the predators, which cheerfully went about eating them anyway. It does have other uses, though. It waterproofs their coats, which is handy for an animal that spends its life around water. It seems to serve some sort of sexual function. And last, but not least, it seems to ward off parasites. People have been putting waterbuck-grease infused collars on their cows to stave off tsetse flies, and they seem to be working.

And that would be all if the Afrikaners weren’t so good at naming things. We call them waterbuck, because they live near water. In Afrikaans, they are called the kringgatbok. Which means, I kid you not, the “circle butthole buck”. Because of these.

The noble “ring arsed antelope”.

It’s a beautiful language.

Oddballs

I’m unlikely ever to see a moose, especially now that the world has closed down, but I would dearly love to. Not because they are huge and stately and noble, although I am sure they are all those things. No. I’d love to see a moose because anything that goofy looking should be treasured and celebrated.

His nose appears to be melting off the end of his skull.

We don’t have anything quite so silly looking around here, although warthogs run pretty close. We do, however, have the alcelaphini, an entire family that specialises in looking a little off, a little funny, like that guy everybody knows who seems to have sold his chin in order to buy his ears and Adam’s apple from a much larger person.

Lichtenstein’s Hartebeest

Lichtenstein’s Hartebeest are prime examples of the family. They have high, rounded shoulders and sloping backs. Their faces are just a little bit too long, and their horns look, from the side, as if they’ve been caught in a high wind.

And that’s all you need to know about them, I’m afraid. Because you’re very unlikely to see them. We shot them all.

We needed something to stick up on our walls to hang our hats on.

Lichtenstein’s hartebeest were hunted into local extinction over a hundred years ago. We had to bring some in from Malawi to try and bring them back, but right now there are only about 50 of them in South Africa, and there hasn’t been a meteoric rise in their numbers.

Wow. A quiet little post about some buck is turning out to be a little depressing. Brace yourselves. Things aren’t about to get any better.

Tsessebe

Sometimes, very occasionally, the world can give you huge ears and a giant Adam’s apple and throw them together in a way that somehow manages to be pleasing. On paper, Adam Driver should not be setting anyone’s heart racing.

And yet somehow I’m finding it hard to breathe.

And so it is with the tsessebe. The have typical high-shouldered slope-backed bodies of their tribe. Their faces are as long and narrow as the hartebeest’s. Their horns, while not as comically swept back as their cousin’s, are by no means impressive. And yet somehow it all comes together to make for a handsome and well put-together animal.

It’s all about posture.

Sad, then, that they fall into the same category as the roan and the sable- rare, and getting rarer, as a result of our interference. They, too are specialist grass feeders, picking out nutritious tufts of grass from amongst bad grass. They, too, are affected by the placement of artificial water points. And on top of that, they live on open grassy plains, and those are disappearing.

Tsessebe serve well to explain the ungainly, awkward-looking bodies of the alcelaphini. They’re not ungainly and awkward at all. Those bodies are built for speed, and tsessebe are blindingly fast, steaming along at close to 90 km/h. That puts them in cheetah territory, but with more stamina.

You’d think that this would make them invulnerable, but it doesn’t. For a start, the big cats are ambush predators. They hunt by taking their prey by surprise, not by outrunning it. But that’s not all. Tsessebe are particularly vulnerable to one particular predator. Us.

Tsessebe are cocky. They run really fast, but they don’t run really far. They tend to stop after a short distance to check things out, relying on their superior speed to keep them safe. It doesn’t keep them safe from the sort of people whose response to nature is to shoot it and stick it on a wall. Hunters love Tsessebe because their tendency to stop makes them really easy to shoot.

 Wildebeest.

If the tsessebe got all the looks in the family, they took them directly from the wildebeest. They are the kings of looking goofy. They have the high shoulders and low hindquarters of the family, huge, smoothly curved heads like Texan oil derricks, wide, vacuum cleaner mouths, floppy, listless manes, and scraggly, wispy beards like live action role players who are trying to hide the space where their chins should be. To top it all off, their horns look like someone took the horns off a buffalo and turned them into a half-sized novelty buffalo hat at a wildlife based theme park. They are beautiful.

As is this herd of derricks.

And they’re doing a hell of a lot better than anything else in this post. There are about 10 000 of them in the Kruger park alone. Don’t get too cheerful, though. Better is not the same as good.

Wildebeests are deigned to be nomads. They, like their companions the zebras, are bulk grazers. They follow the smell of distant rain and the sound of thunder to find fresh grazing, doing a little amateur landscaping as they go. They stir up the soil by trampling it up, spread a load of fresh manure about the place, push back any bushes and trees invading the grassland, actually boost the growth of healthy grassland by cropping it down to lawn height, and then head on out to fresh green pastures, leaving it all to recover in their wake. The Lowveld was never the Serengeti, but it had its own mosaic of mini migrations, which basically saw the wildebeest and zebra heading out into the vast open grasslands to take advantage of the flush of growth that came with the coming of the rains, and then heading back to the floodplains around the permanent rivers when the temporary pans and waterholes dried up in the dry season.

Had. This whole post is turning out to be a bit depressing. 10 000 seems like a nice big number. But it used to be 30 000. And it’s all our fault. Again. First, we threw up a bunch of fences to contain and protect the wildlife, which was nice of us, except that it cut off a number of old migration routes. Then we threw up a bunch of artificial water points to make up for the loss of those routes and give the game access to huge areas of virgin bush too far from permanent water to support a lot of game.

Which you would think would be a good thing. Not in this post it won’t. This whole thing seems to be morphing into a praise poem to the gods of unintended consequences. Sorry.

Permanent water tethered the great migratory herds to that previously virgin bush. Permanently. Where they used to do a bit of landscaping and move on to let the bush recover, they now stuck around, over trampling and overgrazing, and the soil ever got chance to recover.

At the same time, for reasons far too complicated to go into here, bushes and trees started to encroach on what was once grassland.

Wildebeests are designed to live on open plains. They don’t do so well in thicker bush. They’re around, but not like they used to be.

Before

After

Alrighty then. That was fun. I promise next time I’ll do something a bit more uplifting. Like rhinos.

Stretch

Our place down in the bush is on what used to be a cattle farm. The old farmhouse stands on a rocky ridge overlooking a wide floodplain that must at one stage have been cleared to grow crops. Without the constant attention of tractors and chainsaws, the bush has spent the last few decades slowly reclaiming it. It’s not completely free of management, though. It looks like somebody is turning all the knobthorns trying to invade it into topiaries.

They’re doing a pretty shoddy job, if truth be told.

The younger knobthorns have a pleasing, rounded, bushy shape. As they get bigger, and wider, they take on a cone shape, like scrappy Christmas trees.

Then, they go through a bit of an untidy phase where one of two leggy branches break free right at the top of the cone and make a break for the sky. If they succeed, the knobthorns will then take on an hourglass shape before eventually becoming what are, for the bush, fairly substantial trees.

It’s not somebody. It’s something. Giraffes. Female giraffes.  Knobthorns start as bushes. When the giraffes can reach all parts of them, the bushes are rounded. As the bushes begin to spread, the giraffes can’t reach the middle any more. That’s where the cone shape comes in. When the branches in the centre make their break for the sky, the tree starts to spread again, and the giraffes trim the bottom of this new growth into the hourglass shape.

Yup. We’re doing giraffes. Which are famous for one thing, and one thing only. Being tall.

But not tall enough.

Which comes with some issues. When I was a boy, we used to play a rather stupid game. Truth be told, we used to play a lot of stupid games, but right now, you just need to know about the comb game. What you would do was you would take the toothed side of a comb and hit yourself sharply on the back of your hand, leaving a row of angry red marks stitched across your skin. It hurt like hell, but the bravado of it all was part of the fun.

Then the real fun started. You would swing your arm around like Asterix winding up to punch a Roman, five, six, seven times, and then stop to check out your handiwork. Out of the centre of each of the red marks would be flowing a thin but gratifying streak of blood. I did say it was a stupid game.

Stupid games are the best games.

It was all about pressure. The comb didn’t break the skin, but it weakened it enough to let the blood leak through when the pressure from the arm-swinging pushed all our arm blood out to our hands. Giraffes are all about pressure.

Giraffes can be nearly six metres tall. This gives rise to a couple of issues. First of all, there’s the sheer gravitational pressure of the blood at the bottom of their legs. Then there’s the small matter of pumping blood 1,8 metres up the neck to the head. Trickiest of all, the head, in its traditional position at the top of the giraffe, usually has the lowest blood pressure. Until the giraffe decides to take a drink. And the head rather suddenly becomes the lowest part of the giraffe and should, by rights, explode, or at the very least started spraying blood all over the place should anyone have been unkind enough to hit it with a comb.

Clearly, the giraffe has found a way to deal with these issues. First, there’s the special tight skin around the legs to keep all the blood in. Then there’s the 10kg heart to pump the blood all the way up that neck. Finally, there’s a complex system of valves and contracting arteries to stop, rather disappointingly, the whole exploding head thing.

So successful is the giraffe at overcoming these obstacles that scientists are looking to them for inspiration when it comes to designing the G-suits that allow fighter pilots to cope with the gravitational forces involved in turning a fighter jet around at 2000 km/h.

Fighter pilots make everything look cool.

It’s not just the blood that needs to cope with all that pressure. Giraffe bones are incredibly dense and heavy. And while we’re talking about bones, the next time people are throwing around random bits of trivia, you can mention that giraffes only have seven cervical vertebrae, or neck bones. Just like we do. Theirs are a little longer than ours, though. And giraffes are ruminants, which means they chew the cud. Once you get past the mechanics of it all, try to imagine how it feels to do a 1,8 metre vomit several times a day.

Their height makes it quite difficult for ethologists (animal behaviourologists) to fully understand the giraffe’s social structure, because they may well be in constant visual contact with other giraffes that us lowly ground level creatures just can’t see. And they don’t bunch together like most herd animals. They spread out. This makes spotting giraffes quite fun. If you see one, stop for a while and take a look around. More often than not, you’ll soon see another one. And another one. And another one. And even if you don’t, you can be fairly certain that the giraffe does.

We have to assume that a lot of giraffe communication is visual, because being able to see over the top of everything has to come with some advantages, but there is another intriguing possibility.

Giraffes have always been famously silent. They do snort and cough and hiss, but those are sounds that don’t require vocal chords. It was assumed that something about that long neck made having a voice impossible. Then, a few decades ago, it was discovered that elephants were communicating with infrasound; sounds too low for human ears to hear, and people began to explore whether giraffes did the same.

Maybe they were too polite to speak with their mouths full.

It seems that they do. But while checking this all out scientists discovered that giraffes had been making audible sounds all along. Giraffes hum at each other at night. We just never noticed. Which, when you think of how many zoos, circuses and travelling shows have giraffes in them, is pretty lax of us. And no, we don’t know why they do it. It’s probably some sort of contact call, to keep track of each other in the dark. Maybe they’re just content.

I mentioned knobthorns earlier. Knobthorns are a kind of acacia, and giraffes love acacias. There are lots of different types of acacia, and all have thorns, from short, viciously hooked ones to long, straight, needle-sharp ones. Giraffes have specially toughened lips, mouths and tongues to cope with them. And what tongues they have! They’re about 45cm long, and prehensile enough to feel their way between the thorns and pull off the leaves. They’re even black to protect against sunburn.

They have other uses, too.

 While we’re talking about eating, I mentioned that the knobthorns were shaped by female giraffes. That’s because the sexes feed differently, with the males feeding higher up than the females. This isn’t just because the males are taller; females will bend down slightly to eat, and males will stretch upward. This is all very sensible, especially when times are tough.

Being so famous for being tall has had a curious effect on how we approach giraffes. For some reason, it has made us think of them as stretched-out versions of Bambi, harmless and cute and ready at the drop of a hat to burst into a duet with their forest friends the bluebird and the bunny. And so you find giraffes in places unexpected places, like small reserves where people hike and ride bikes, or holiday resorts where they wander around among the bungalows where children play and grownups lounge around the pool. People set up raised platforms so you can pay R10 to feed them out of a cup.

It’s bizarre. Because giraffes are freaking massive. Not just tall; huge. They’re about the same size as black rhinos. And you wouldn’t scatter any of those around your local mountain biking trail. BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO BIG. Not giraffes, though.  They’re fine. Stretchy Bambis with long-lashed, dreamy eyes.

Communing with nature, South African style.

All of this has a curious outcome. Giraffes keep killing people, and we keep ignoring it. They crack the news, but not the front page, and we all just carry on like taking a weekend stroll with 5.5m tall, 1200 kg lion killer is a normal thing to do.

Yes. Giraffes are bad-asses. They can kill lions. They chop at them with their gigantic, sharp-edged hoofs. Full grown giraffes, like the other giant animals like hippos, rhinos and elephants, are pretty much invulnerable to predators. I say pretty much because there are circumstances in which lions can take down adults. Lions charge at giraffes, hoping that they will stumble and lose their footing as they flee. And giraffes are vulnerable when they bend down to drink. And if a lion ever caught one lying down, I imagine it would be in with a chance. Fun fact; giraffes sleep lying down. And humming.

In keeping with their “how dare you call me stretchy-Bambi” vibe, giraffes regularly eat bones that they find lying around. For a bad-ass reason. Not only do they need the calcium to strengthen those load bearing bone, the males need it because their heads never stop growing. If you see the skull of a young male, it looks kinda like you would expect; eye sockets, nasal cavity, two bony “horns” at the top. The skulls of old males look very different. They seem to be growing a third horn on their foreheads, the skull is much thicker, and is cover in bumps and growths of bone. The whole thing looks like the head of an ogre’s club from a children’s book about giants.

Depending on what your children are into…

This is because they use their skulls like ogres clubs from children’s books about giants. Giraffes fight by trying to beat each other into submission with their heads. This is usually done purely to establish dominance, but they can seriously injure each other by breaking each other’s legs or necks. The whole process actually looks fairly sedate. They stand next to each other and take turns swinging their heads and necks at each other, with long pauses in between. It’s not sedate. Imagine two men fighting with sledgehammers. They won’t be moving blindingly fast or anything, but if anyone lands a blow properly, the consequences will be dire.

Running giraffes look sedate, too. They’re the only animals I know that look like they are moving in slow motion. Again, sedate is the wrong word to use. They’re actually rattling along at 60km/h, which is not bad for an animal weighing in at over a ton.

So that’s that for giraffes then. Now that you know them a little better, you can pop down to the nearest reserve to spend some time with them. Remember to take your bike.

Midlife Crisis

This morning I woke up to find that I had been invaded. Violated. I turned on my tablet to be greeted by a cheerful message informing me that my blog was doing rather nicely. This seemed a little strange, since I haven’t been a particularly diligent blogger of late. I logged on to see what was up. This. This was up.

  

I had apparently posted it yesterday. Twice. Which would have been a curious thing to do. If you had to ask someone who knows me to sum me up as quickly and efficiently as possible, they would show you that image and say “Do you see this? He is the exact opposite of every single thing you can see right here.”

So what was it doing there? Twice? Well, thereby hangs a tale. Let’s start with lions, shall we…

If you spend any time out in the African bush, or with bushy people, you will be confronted with an interesting little piece of advice. Don’t run. It’s pretty simple. If you find yourself out in the bush on foot, and something is running towards you, don’t run away. Whatever it is will be faster than you and stronger than you. Run, and you will die.

It is advice that holds true for most, but not all animals. But most of all, it is given about lions. They are cats. And if you run from them, you become a mouse. Cats chase mice even when they aren’t hungry.

It’s a pretty gnarly piece of advice, though. This is a lion walking past my sister and her family earlier this year. I posted it in a couple of weeks ago in a very different context. But it’s pretty big. Pushing 200 kg.

And my sister and her family aren’t looking at it. They’re looking at its brother. This guy.

He is not, you will note, the MGM lion. He is not pretty. His mane is not brushed. His face is battle-scarred and broken. He is a pride male, which means he has defeated, and quite possibly killed, the previous pride males in a hostile takeover. The night before, he and his brother had taken down a buffalo, 600 kg of battle hardened muscle with some sharp bits at the one end. And some friends. He is, in other words, brutal. He is power, and strength, and fearlessness. He is, in every sense, the bogey-man from our deep past. He is death incarnate.

So could you do it? Knowing that running would be the end of you, could you stand? If that lion launched himself at you at 80 odd km an hour, tail flicking and a choking growl in his throat, would your nerve hold? Could you stand, all thin-skinned and naked and defenceless, as he skidded to a halt just a few short feet away from you, and spat, and snarled, and batted up clouds of dust at you?

Me? I don’t know. Never done it before. But I think now, maybe, that I could. Though I’d be a little freaked out afterwards.

I have, you see, just had a mid-life crisis. You know the one. I’m 43. Halfway through. Have I done enough? Achieved enough? Do I need to buy a Harley and get a tattoo? Organise an attempt on the north face of K2? Am I happy with who I am, and what I’ve done, and whom I am with?

Bob. Bob is a chartered accountant from New Jersey.

This is not an unusual thing. Everyone has one, to some degree or other. What is a little unusual is that mine took about an hour.

I work late on Thursday evenings. Not too late: I get home at about eight thirty. I have got into the habit of bringing home a bottle of wine and sharing a glass with Mrs. 23thorns out in the carport next to our kitchen. Which is a curious thing to do. We have a large, beautiful garden with comfortable furniture on the other side of the house. But on Thursdays, we sit on an old wooden stool and a broken wicker armchair in a dusty little carport next to the bonnet of Mrs. 23thorns’ car. It’s nice.

And so we sat and chatted. Until Mrs. 23thorns suddenly looked up at me with a strange look in her eye, and said “Oh Schwei” (for that is what she calls me).

Now Mrs. 23thorns looks at me strangely all the time. This is the natural result of her being a little strange. But this was different. I stood. And the world changed. Because I was not standing alone. There was a man standing with me, one hand gripped tightly to the back of my belt and another pressing the short, ugly barrel of a 9mm pistol to my temple while another man did the same to Mrs. 23thorns.

Yup. One of those.

He pushed me down to my knees, leaned forward, and said, quietly, for the first time that night, but not the last, “Don’t look at me. I’ll fucken kill you.”

Well, that, as they say in the movies, escalated quickly! Sorry. This is not the sort of thing most people come here for. But it happened, and I’m going to write about it.

There’s something to get out of the way, first, though. This is all going to mean different things to different people. If you are from somewhere like New Zealand or the UK, your immediate response will likely be best summed up by the phrase “Holy shit!!!” If you’re from the USA, you might be thinking “Wow! 23thorns cracked the front page of the local news!”

And if, like half the people who read this blog, you’re from South Africa, you’re probably thinking “Oh, god, not this again”.

Yup. Sorry. This again.

If you’re from New Zealand, and you are wondering what the hell I’m on about, let me try to explain:

New Zealanders have their own, unique problems to deal with.

While this was happening to us, it was happening to two eighteen year old girls one block away from us in our quiet little suburb. On Easter Sunday, we went for lunch at my sister’s house. There were two other families there. This had happened to one of them.

On Tuesday, I went back to work. I saw five people over the course of the week. This had happened to three of them. It happened to Mrs. 23thorns’ cousin. It killed her uncle, and a woman we knew from work, and a guy I saw every year on holidays down in the bush when we were kids. It happened to the family next door to us and to a colleague I spoke to on the phone and to the man who runs our local nursery and to the teacher who looks after our kids at aftercare.

It happens so often, in other words, that it doesn’t crack the front page of the local news. It has lost its “Wow”. Even when people die.

So what am I getting at? Just this. I’m not writing this down to shock anyone or to impress anyone or to try and steal any “Wows”. If you are reading this and feel impressed or shocked, bear in mind that where I come from it is neither impressive nor shocking, just ugly and sad, and that there will be a whole bunch of people reading it whose main response will not be “Wow”, but rather “Oh, god. I remember how that feels.” You’ll probably meet one or two of them in the comments section.

If you’re one of those people, I’m sorry if I awaken any beasts that you thought you’d put to bed.

So why am I writing it at all? Just for me this time. And for Mrs. 23thorns. I went for trauma counselling the other day and was rather profoundly underwhelmed. So I’m putting my own beasts to bed.

You’re welcome to come along for the ride, but I’m not sure if it will be worth your while. I don’t know how to frame all of this, so buckle up, it might get a bit messy. And long. So very, very long. And the story gets longer every day. Let’s get the details out the way first. Then we can move onto the stuff that frightens me more than guns, like feelings.

Aaaaargh!

Right. So where were we? Oh, yes. “I’ll fucken kill you”. This should be a blast…

I was hauled up onto my feet and Mrs. 23thorns and I were driven inside like confused sheep, steered from side to side by a tug on the belt. The questions started. “Where is the gun?” “How many people in the house?” Each question was punctuated by a slight increase in pressure from the gun barrel at my temple. I tried my best to answer. “No gun. Just us and two children. Tell us what you want and, we will do everything we can to give it to you. Just stay calm. We aren’t going to fight.”

That was the moment that Mrs. 23thorns chose to remind me why I love her so desperately. “Do you guys”, she asked in a calm and measured voice, “have a bank account? If you give me the details, I can make a direct deposit.” The woman is a god-damned lunatic. I know no-one else whose opening gambit in a home invasion would be to try and get the invaders’ personal banking details. “Do you have a home address? Our camera is being repaired right now, but I’ll come ‘round and drop it off when they’re done…”

Crimefighting, Mrs.23thorns style.

That was the first time I dared to believe we would make it through all this. People like that are an asset to the world and should not, on some cosmic level, be allowed to be harmed.

As charming as I found Mrs.23thorns attempt at identity theft, I did find her timing a little worrying. “Mrs. 23thorns,” I said, in a calm and measured voice of my own, “You need to stop talking now.” And she did, mostly.

And so we move on to the parts where my heart stopped beating.

They led us to the door of the room where the kids were sleeping. “What’s in here?” A sharp thrust from the gun barrel. “The children. Our children are in there. They’re small. They are sleeping. Please. Let them sleep.”

A hand reached out and opened the door. I stopped breathing. A face appeared at my shoulder and took a slow, careful look around. The door was pulled shut. And my heart started beating again.

Since I’m not looking for any “Wows” here, let’s cut out the drama as we find it. The opening and closing of the door didn’t wake the kids. But they lurked at the backs of our minds for the rest of the ordeal, springing to the front with every raised voice or bump of furniture. “Don’tWakeUp!Don’tWakeUp!Don’tWakeUp!” They didn’t. The door stayed closed throughout.

And then it was time for my heart to stop beating again. I was led through into the lounge. Mrs23thorns was led off into the bedroom. Yup. That thing. That fear. The one with bad men with guns and defenceless women and bedrooms and the need to exert power and to hurt and to damage and to take everything, everything, and me with my hands behind my back and a gun against my head and “I’ll fucken kill you” in my ear and a noiseless, godless prayer for Mrs 23thorns that just went “Don’t!Don’t!Don’t!Don’t!Don’t!Don’t!”

Crimefighting, Mr 23thorns style.

And they didn’t. Not then or any time later. But the fear lay there for the rest of our ordeal, closed away but ready to burst open like the children’s door. “Don’t!” And they didn’t. All they did was pistol-whip her. And jump on her head. Ineptly. Small mercies, then.

Well this is fun. What next?

Shoelaces.

Mrs 23thorns and I were reunited in the foyer, forced down onto our stomachs on the hard wooden floor, and then lay there listening to a weird zipping noise behind us. Shoelaces. They were unthreading the shoelaces from my shoes, and used them to truss us up like turkeys, hands behind our backs and feet bound tightly together. And then they told us to sleep, which is shorthand for “Stop talking, stop moving, and stop looking at us.”

This is now a deeply disturbing image to me.

Things should have quietened down a little, then. They didn’t. There was an awful lot of shouting and pushing of guns into heads. “WHERE’S THE SAFE? WHERE’S THE GUN? DON’T LOOK AT ME! WHERE’S THE JEWELLERY? I’LL FUCKEN KILL YOU! SLEEP”

What can you do in a situation like that? What can you say? “I don’t have a safe.” “I don’t have a gun.” “We’ll take you to the jewellery.” “Fucken kill me if you must, just stop acting so damn jumpy about it. You’re an armed robber! Pull yourself towards yourself and start acting like you’re in charge here!”

OK, so I didn’t say all of those things. Just some of them. But I meant them all. Because as time went by, we slowly became aware that our captors were neither as smart nor as in control as they thought they were. Which was not a good thing.

It started with my feet. I had tried my best to keep my hands and feet braced to give me a little wiggle room. Not to escape- there was no thought of that. But I did want to be able to free myself once it was all over without waking our kids and confronting them with the uglier side of the world. And to be honest, I’ve seen them try to untie their shoelaces, and didn’t think they’d be up to the tangles on our wrists. But it didn’t come to that.

“Just start at one end and work your way through. We’re not busy with anything else…”

Pretty much as soon as they had tied up my feet, they demanded that I take them through and show them where we kept the jewellery.

We all have our own essential natures. Myself, I’ve always been a smug, sarcastic bastard. It’s kinda hard to turn that stuff off.

So when two armed men truss you up like a turkey and then demand that you take a little stroll with them, it’s not that easy to frame a response that doesn’t include an implicit “but you’ve just tied my feet together, you stupid tit!” Even when one of the men is trying to drag you up by the collar and the other one is trying to push you up with the barrel of a 9mm pistol.

Luckily, they worked it out for themselves before I got myself into any trouble, and cut my feet loose. And then the trouble with being 23thorns suddenly came to the fore. Nobody would describe me as well organised. I don’t even know where my car keys are kept. My day starts, every day, with a brief but frantic search for them. Followed by a similar search for my wallet. I don’t know anything about my immediate environment. It’s like being a high-functioning goldfish.

“Where,” demanded the barrel pusher behind me, “do you keep the jewellery?” Well. Goldfish. I had no freaking idea. I had no choice but to turn to Mrs. 23thorns. “Where,” I asked, as calmly and as quietly as I could, “do we keep the jewellery?”

I got a dodgy look or two from my 9mm wielding friend, but Mrs. 23thorns explained equally calmly and quietly that it was in the cupboard next to our bed.

Off we went. And straightaway got into trouble with the sarcasm thing again. Mr 9mm threw me down on the bed. “Sleep!”

He immediately set to work rifling through the drawer full of nail polish and dental floss and spent pens next to the bed. He swung on me and thrust the barrel of his gun into the back of my neck. “THE JEWELLERY!” He snarled. “WHERE IS THE JEWELLERY? I’LL FUCKEN KILL YOU!”

How do you say “That’s a drawer, not a cupboard” without an implicit “You stupid tit!” at the end?

A stupid tit, just in case you thought I was being rude.

I pointed with my chin. As unsarcastically as I could. He found the jewellery. I was reunited with Mrs 23thorns on the foyer floor again. And then things got curiously dull.

Our heads were covered with a blanket, and our new friends set to work ransacking the house and disconnecting all our electronics. They were joined by two other men whom we never saw. The base of my nose started to itch. I have a pretty big nose, so there was no way to scratch it. I tried rubbing it on the floor, as slowly and carefully as possible, but I couldn’t reach the spot. The itch receded. I wondered if it would be rude to have a nap.

This might seem like a weird thing to want to do, but one of the first things Mrs 23thorns mentioned once it was all over was that she, too, had been tempted to catch up on a little sleep. Maybe it’s a response to stress. Maybe our captors were just dull. Who knows?

Mr. and Mrs. 23thorns dealing with a crisis.

I thought, then, that we were in the clear. Not so much. Out of the blue, one of our new friends whipped the duvet off my head and thrust the barrel of the gun into my forehead. “I’m counting to five.” He announced. “Where is the gun? Where is the safe? If I get to five, I fucken shoot you!”

What do you say? “Look at the house. Look at our things. We aren’t rich enough for a safe. I don’t have a gun.” And then I just waited. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

He didn’t shoot me. He dropped his gun onto the floor instead. “Oh, shit!”, he said. Oh, shit indeed. We were being robbed by Inspector Clouseau.

“Merde!”

He wasn’t done, though. He stepped over me. Straight onto Mrs. 23thorns’ face. He tried, not hugely effectively, to grind it down into the floor. Then he stepped off again, and went about his business. It was an odd, seemingly random thing to do; a last, mad desperate attempt to get us to reveal our well-disguised riches.

They went back to work again, rifling through cupboards and tipping out drawers.

Then things got dodgy again. The blanket was whipped off my head. “Where,” demanded the gun-waver, “are the car keys?” Goldfish. Oh shit…

Luckily, Mrs 23thorns knows me pretty well. Calm, quiet voice. “They’re on a hook next to the door.” Ah. Her car keys. That would have been a better idea.

But it wasn’t over yet. Mr. 9mm strolled over. He thrust the keys into my face. “Is this,” he asked, “the remote for the gate?” Oh shit. Again. I didn’t know. It’s a new car. I never drive it. “I don’t know.” I said quietly. The consequences for getting it wrong would have been too much. “I don’t know.”

It was time for my new friend to get his own back. “Do you,” he asked, in a voice dripping with some sarcasm of his own, “even live here?” Which was a little unkind.

“It’s the remote for the gate.” Piped up Mrs. 23thorns from under her blanket. And that was that.

They packed up all their stuff, paused quietly at the door for long enough to say, one final time, “I’m still here. Don’t move. I’ll fucken kill you.”

And then they were gone.

I sprang into action. I leapt to my feet (inasmuch as one can leap to one’s feet with one’s hands behind one’s back) and strode manfully into the kitchen, wrestled the knife drawer (not cupboard) open, and whipped out a knife. Unfortunately it was an ornamental cheese knife, which was slightly less manful.

Maybe it would help if I called it a “Cheese scimitar”. Or maybe not…

I twisted it through what I thought were my bonds, and with a triumphant “HAH!” cut off one of my bracelets, scattering round wooden beads around the kitchen. With a slightly less triumphant “OK”, I freed myself. And Mrs. 23thorns. And it was over.

So how does it feel? What was it like, having those men in our house, having guns shoved in our faces, having our children threatened? Pretty complicated, actually. And what happens afterwards? Quite a lot.

But I’m done for now. I’ll tell you all that stuff tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year.

But for now, we are fine. We faced down our lion, and we stood. We stood, all thin-skinned and naked and defenceless, as the bad people skidded to a halt just a few short feet from us, and spat, and growled, and batted up clouds of dust at us. And we held. We are fine.

Apart from the odd little flashback…

Or at least we will be. It might just take a little time…

See you tomorrow. Or next week. Or next year. Don’t worry. There won’t be any soft-focus purple motivational posters involved.

Hacked!

Wow. I woke up this morning to find that someone has posted a positive and encouraging message on my blog. Complete with soft focus purple flowers and equally purple prose. Thing is, they didn’t post it as a comment. They posted it as me. Twice.

If you read this blog regularly, and took some comfort from the post(s), I am glad of that, but I myself am neither positive nor encouraging. Nor, for what it’s worth, am I religious.

This is all rather a lot more sinister than it would appear.  It’s a long story, and one I will tell soon, but but to cut that long story short, someone else has my laptop. And not someone I would expect to be putting up this sort of thing…

So. If you are someone who knows me, don’t worry.  I haven’t gone off the deep end. And if you’re someone who enjoys and follows this blog, don’t worry. It’s not going to suddenly shift its focus to posting different versions of “Footprints in the Sand” and pictures of cats.

Strange days indeed…

The Cabinet of Curiosities (part 1)

(the part with no cabinet of curiosities in it)

Should you ever visit the 23thorns household, please be careful about what you touch. Not that your touching our stuff would bother us; we gave up any rights to possessions of our own the day nature started using bits of Mrs 23thorns and me to form smaller, less co-ordinated versions of ourselves with poor impulse control and a complete absence of common sense.

Nope. We are not worried about our stuff. We are worried about your peace of mind.

It’s all Mrs 23thorn’s fault.

Mrs 23 thorns, you see, has a “more is more” approach to interior decorating. Our bed currently has forty eight pillows on it. We lost the girl child in it one Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, and only found her on Sunday morning, by following the trail of dry chocolate cereal she had cleverly left under the duvet.

It once took us three weeks to realise the bed had been stolen.

But it is not pillows that concern us now. It’s little boxy things. Little antiquey boxy things, made of china, or silver, or pewter, with hallmarks or pottery marks or porcelain marks on the bottom, and blackened, creaky hinges, and strange, ancient residues lurking in hard-to-reach corners. Mrs 23thorns tells me they are pill boxes. She tells me she is collecting them because they are beautiful and bring a small part of history alive.

This is a lie.

She is using them to spite me because I can’t get into the habit of using a coaster. Her plan is a simple one; she has covered every square centimetre of every surface of our house with Victorian pill boxes. I haven’t been able to put a glass down in our house for seven years. If I want something to drink these days, I have to tie it around my neck with a leather cord and sip it through a straw. Or I have to wear my special hat. The children have taken to drinking their own bath-water to stay hydrated.

It’s best to give me a 2 metre “circle of avoidance” when I’m wearing my special hat.

So what has any of this got to do with your peace of mind? Well, every single one of those boxes has something inside it. There are rusted old keys that belong to long forgotten locks; there are brightly coloured little elastic bands; shells; obscure coins from countries none of us have visited. There are acacia thorns and chewed-up chewing gum (boy children are gross). There are buttons, and beads, and curtain hooks, and spent watch batteries.

As of last week, about seven of them were filled with home-made “lip balm” brewed up by Mrs 23thorns and Miss 23thorns. They claim it is made out of coconut oil and lavender essence. I think it is made of lard. So does the dog. You can spot the lip balm pill boxes because they have tooth marks all over them and smell of dog-breath.

In one of the most enticing boxes, a flashy little porcelain number with a pheasant on top, there is a dead toad. A very, very dead toad.

Upside down, he is exquisite; a thing of surpassing beauty. I found him in our borehole pumphouse under an old bag of cement. He must have died there quite some time ago, out of reach of anything large enough to crush his delicate bones or drag bits of him off to gnaw at in hidden corners. He was cleaned by ants, busy little surgeons with a touch so delicate that even the toes, as fine and as fragile as needles of glass, are still in place. To turn him over and examine him is to view a museum specimen.

As long as you’re not too discerning about which museums you visit.

You won’t be turning him over, though. You will be meandering around my house trying to find a place where you can put your glass down when your attention will be attracted by a little porcelain pill box with a pheasant on it. You will open it. He will be in there. And he won’t be upside down. Right way up, he looks like he has come for a small piece of your soul.

BRAAAIIINS!!!!

I am not suggesting, for even half a second, that you are the sort to be frightened by dead amphibians, though. Nope. The workings of the 23thorns household are more insidious than that. You would already have been thrown off balance by your inability to put down your glass, and if we did not immediately take to you, we would have put you to the test by bringing you another two drinks without taking any of your empty glasses away.

Pretty soon, you would start to worry. Not about dead toads, but about people. The sort of people would keep dead toads in pillboxes sitting on the table in their foyer.

This process would be helped along by the eleven-year-old boy in the corner with the vacant stare who kept twitching and grunting while making vague intentional movements with his arms, and the six-year-old girl who kept grinning at you without blinking. That’s when we would tell you about the dead cow’s head we had buried in the flowerbed.

Don’t worry about the kids. The boy is merely busy fighting off a marauding band of orcs in an unseen corner of his imagination, while the girl-child is waiting for you to say something about her freshly missing front teeth. And the cow’s head? Don’t worry about that either. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, too.

It was a gift from a friend.

Yup. Some people get flowers. I got the head of a freshly-killed cow that had apparently been slaughtered with a sledgehammer. It was handed over to me in a plastic shopping bag in a busy shopping mall.

Blood and small, clotted masses of brain tissue had pooled in the bottom of the bag, and were slowly starting to drip down onto the pristine white tiled floor. I felt the head through the thin plastic of the bag. It wasn’t moving right. Small bits of bone grated against each other, and when I felt the horns, they jiggled slightly, like loose teeth in a six-year-old girl. I did the only thing a man could do under such circumstances. I bought five kilograms of rock-salt and a plastic bucket, and set forth home, leaving a trail of blood and gristle behind me.

I popped the shattered head into the bucket and covered it with rock-salt, tucked it away on a shelf in an outside room and carried on with my day. And the day after that. And the day after that. Then Mrs 23thorns told me I wasn’t allowed to keep a rotting dead cow’s head in a bucket full of rock-salt in the outside room. She can be a little tricky sometimes.

I don’t wish to sound sexist, but choosing gifts for women is next to impossible.

I washed the rock-salt off the head, while demonstrating truly masterful control over my gag reflex, and buried it in the flowerbed. As one does.

Fear not, gentle reader. The 23thorns household has not begun the slow descent into serial-killerdom. We are a sensible lot, and everything we do, we do for a reason. And the reason for all this? It’s rather simple.

Termites.

We have a large, barely-controlled garden that we are trying to fill with life. Up until now, we have tolerated whatever pests have moved in in the hope that nature would sort them out in the end. So far, she has done.

But then, a couple of years ago, termites moved into the bottom edge of our lawn. And ate it.

To be fair, we might not have watered as often as we should have, either.

 

There was a simple solution. Poison.

Hah. Simple solutions are for simple people. Instead, we dug up the lawn and filled the space with a snake-mountain, the upside-down fibreglass cap of a thatched roof, and a shed filled with dead animals. Again, as one does.

I don’t feel like I’m explaining this very well. Let me start again.

A few years ago, we inherited an old and decaying plywood shed. I painted it to look like a quaint stone cottage and set it up in the darkest, most remote part of the garden for the children to play in.

We told them there was a troll living underneath to to spark their childish curiosity.

For some reason, they never used it.

This reason. Yes, those are baby spiders. And yes, that bag made of leaves and silk is where their mother lives…

Nerds. It lay fallow for years, slowly filling with broken pots, rusty old wheelbarrows, offcut pipes, unused tiles and black widows, as such places do.

It stopped being quaint after about 2 weeks and became a hideous eyesore that we simply ignored until the termites ate our lawn.

We dug up the scraggly remains of the termite-blighted lawn and piled them up on one side. That left us with a vast open patch of soil and a mound of turf. I discussed the matter with the girl-child, and we agreed that the best solution was to move the shed up to the newly denuded patch, restore it, and convert it into a man-cave for Dad.

She thought that this was a wonderful idea, and immediately set about deciding which of her Barbies would be moving into the man-cave, and what furniture they would be bringing with them.

I sat her down and explained to her as gently as I could that a man-cave was a special place that Dads built so they could hide away from people like her and Barbie for a little while each day. She explained to me as gently as she could that she knew that, and that was why she was choosing only her best seven Barbies to go and live there. Mrs 23thorns can smell blood in the water better than any shark, and came bustling through at high speed to suggest we paint the man-cave aquamarine and white, and surround it with Peonies and Nasturtiums. She looks harmless, but the woman has a mean streak.

At least she chose the manliest of flowers…

I decided that a battle deferred is a battle won, and set to work. I emptied out the broken pots, rusty old wheelbarrows, offcut pipes and unused tiles from the shed, and made a pile of them in the middle of the open patch. Then I piled the old turf on top of them, making sure to leave a couple of entrances open to the junk beneath.

I did not do this because I was too lazy to take the junk to the dump. I did it because I want snakes in my garden. These snakes.

I don’t think the person who named them knew how lips worked.

That’s a Red-Lipped Herald. A few years ago, our neighbour decided to clean up an old pile of wood at the bottom of his garden. He got a team of guys in to carry it out to the pavement one day, and when I arrived home, there it lay. On it lay five dead Red-Lipped Heralds. Which is a little upsetting. Red-Lipped Heralds are only mildly venomous, and live on frogs and toads. There is no need to kill them.

My garden is full of frogs and toads. And now that I have built them a hollow snake mountain next to my aquamarine man-cave, the Heralds are bound to move in. Me and the seven best Barbies in the family will sit among the peonies and watch them sunning themselves on sultry summer afternoons as we hide from the girls.

Or at least that’s the plan. So far I’ve just got a pile of old grass on top of a rusty old wheelbarrow and some broken pots. At least things eventually started growing on it.

That dark part at the bottom there is where the snakes are supposed to go in.

Which leads me to the upside down thatched-roof cap. The snake mountain, you see, started to reach a dangerous height long before I ran out of turf. I had to stop building it before it toppled over on one of the children and someone called family services (we wouldn’t stand a chance if they found out about the dead toad and the cow’s head).

Which left me with a large pile of turf.

I have long had a theory that Mrs 23thorns is secretly attracted to men with hernias, so I went out and collected a bunch of huge rocks. I made another tiny mountain of turf, and used the rocks to build a tiny cliff along one edge of it.

It turns out tiny cliffs look a little odd, so I decided to build a tiny lake at the bottom of it. And how do you make tiny lakes? Out of upside down fiberglass thatched roof caps, of course.

A fiberglass thatched roof cap. Or half of Madonna’s bra. Google wasn’t clear.

The tiny lake wasn’t just there to add scale to my tiny cliff. It was there to act as a breeding pond for more frogs and toads. Which would attract more Red-Lipped Heralds to the snake mountain. Which would make me and the seven best Barbies in the family happy.

I know that all you can see is a pond with some stones behind it. I see a tiny cliff and a tiny lake. Self delusion is a gift.

And then it was time to move the shed. I carried it up piece by piece (in the hopes of delighting Mrs 23thorns with a really spectacular hernia), bolted it all back together, and clad it in white and aquamarine planks.

Until I built this, I was convinced that this colour was “blue”. The girl child assures me it is “aquamarine”.

Which leads me to the title of this post. And the dead toad in the Victorian pill box.

Right from the outset, I knew in my heart of hearts that I would never get a man-cave. Me-time is not a thing in our family. The only way you get to be alone in our house is if you stop bathing, and even that doesn’t work if anyone has a cold.

I also knew that my children would not spend any significant amount of time in a shed down at the bottom of our garden. Particularly not if some fool let it slip that said shed was the centrepiece of a garden designed to attract semi-venomous snakes (In my defence, I had no idea the kids would be so underhanded as to eavesdrop on the private progress meeting I was conducting with the seven best Barbies in the family).

So what do you do with an aquamarine and white shed surrounded by peonies, tiny cliffs, nasturtiums and snake mountains? If you are married to Mrs 23thorns, you look to history.

History has some cool stuff in it, like Vikings and tarantism.

And cabinets of curiosities. Those are beyond cool. And are, traditionally, Barbie free. From the moment I first saw one, I wanted one. And now I’ve got one. Or rather I’m getting one.

Sadly mine will have slightly fewer human skulls in it.

I’ll tell you all about it when it’s ready. I have no idea when that will be. That depends on how long it takes the ants to strip the flesh from the shattered cow’s head in the flower bed. And how long it takes the enormous emerald beetle living in our TV room to die.

I’m not saying I wish he would hurry up and die, but those matches are there just in case he is into self immolation…

I found him dying in the street the other day and took him home. I popped him into an old fish tank to live out his final moments, so I could mount him and frame him and stick him up on the wall.

He is still there, feeding cheerfully off slices of apple and human fear. When he is done, my cabinet of curiosities will be done, and I’ll show it to you. And explain why I have a cow’s head in the flowerbed. And a dead toad in a pill box in the foyer.

Don’t hold your breath, though. He appears to be immortal.

Imagination Could Make a Man of You

I got myself into a little bit of trouble with Mrs. 23thorns the other day. She objects, it would seem, to having well educated children. Apparently I am not allowed to teach them anymore.

All I had done was take the kids out for a walk in the countryside. My kids are far too soft and suburban, so I had taken them out to spend some time in the open air enjoying nature. It was less fun than I had anticipated, because I happened to choose a day when the country was being blasted by a severe heat wave. We had walked for less than a kilometre when I became aware of quite how soft and suburban my children are. Their muscles seem to have atrophied completely, and I turned around to find them re-enacting one of those lost-in-the-desert cartoons, so we had to turn back. This was not necessarily a bad thing, since our water all seemed to have evaporated, and the soles of our shoes were starting to melt and stick to the stones in our path.

 

That’ll teach them to love the great outdoors!

Bieber Pants

Something most distressing happened to me the other day. I went shopping. For pants.

I don’t often go shopping for pants. Throughout most of my life, pants have just appeared out of the ether and then stuck around until they were cruelly discarded by Mrs 23thorns for developing a few minor gaping holes. But this was an emergency.

I had to go through to our head office to do vaguely serious and important things, and so I had put on some vaguely serious and important clothes. It was all going fairly well. I was feeling vaguely serious and important. Then I dropped the girl-child off at pre-school. As I got out of the car to walk her in, I was alerted by both a chilly breeze in an untoward place and a high-pitched shriek from behind me that all was not right in the world.

“DADDY! I CAN SEE YOUR UNDIES!”

And indeed she could. As could the rest of the parking lot. Fortunately, a few short months ago the girl-child helped Mrs 23thorns flash the same parking lot by attempting to climb the hem of her tube-top dress, so I get to hang onto my title as the dignified one in the family. In the land of the blind…

Mrs 23thorns is a bit of a liability at weddings…

Weeping Song

Nick Cave is one of those rare artists who can make his teenage fans feel like they are deep and tortured and special, while also being great for a jolly good sing-along. But it has to be the right sort of sing-along.

You cannot sing Nick Cave songs while clapping your hands around a campfire with a bunch of boy-scouts. In fact you shouldn’t be hanging around with boy-scouts at all. I have never quite been able to put my finger on why, but there is something dodgy about boy-scouts. It’s just unnatural for kids that age to be that focussed on complicated knots and waffle-top socks.

 

He looks nice. Let’s send our kids out into the woods with him for the weekend.

No. Nick Cave sing-alongs are reserved for the end of parties when a few die-hards refuse to go home and everyone is three or four glasses beyond any sensible measure of “enough to drink”. You have to be young enough to feel the echo of teenage angst and old enough to realise that Nick Cave, being Australian, has always had his tongue at least partially in his cheek.

Nick Cave, you see, is a master droner. This is by no means a criticism. It is high praise, a title he shares with deep and meaningful gods like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. And it is a happy coincidence that once all the sensible people have gone home, the die-hards left sitting around on the kitchen floor and staring off into the middle distance are droners too. It’s just a thing that happens. Give Enrico Caruso two packets of cigarettes and a bottle of Old Brown Sherry and he would be rasping out “Suzanne takes you down, to her place on the river…” with the best of them.

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about this song, kinda;

The Weeping Song. When I was young enough to feel the echo of teenage angst and old enough to find myself staring into the middle distance on people’s kitchen floors at two in the morning, it formed a very clear image in my mind. Of Gypsies.

Maybe it was the clapping, but whenever I heard the Weeping Song, I pictured wild eyed, raven haired beauties and hatchet-faced, snake-hipped men with roses clenched between their teeth whirling and stamping around bonfires encircled by painted wooden caravans. The Weeping Song was a ritual; an aching, arcane ceremony in which all of the sadness and isolation and unbelonging of a homeless and unwanted tribe was poured out in a throat-tearing orgy of wailing. A cultural catharsis. An annual cleansing of the stain of unhappiness to fortify the people for another year of alienation and mistrust.

 

The rest of the year is one huge party, apart from the prejudice, poverty and pogroms.

I’m older now. If I find myself on the kitchen floor at 2 am I’m generally cleaning up dog vomit, and my angst is reserved for serious issues like balding. I know the truth. The Weeping Song is not about Gypsies. It’s a parenting song.

It’s one of the many aspects of parenting that none of the books warns you about, but should you choose to bring another person or two into the world, prepare yourself for the fact that, at round about five years old, they are going to spend a year or so being bloody miserable. That old “Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going to go eat worms” song is not a fun little comedic ditty. It is a piercing insight into the psyche of your child.

Since no-one bothers to warn you about this, when your fist child starts to do this, you are going to be rather alarmed. “I”, said our sweet little boy about five years ago, looking up at us through piercing blue eyes limpid with tears, “don’t want to live anymore. I just want to be dead. I am going to kill myself”. Jesus! That’s a bit rough for a five-year-old, even if he hadn’t been allowed to stay up late and watch Scooby Doo!

 

Nobody feels my pain. It was the ghost pirate episode!

Mrs 23thorns and I stayed up deep into the night, earnestly discussing how sensitive the boy was, and how it might be time to find him a decent therapist and start him off on a course of bubblegum flavoured anti-depressants.

And then he woke up the next morning as happy as Larry, and went skipping off to school for all the world like a small person without a death wish. It was the beginning of a rather long year. Sometimes, the boy was very, very sad, crying himself to sleep and clinging to the will to live by the thinnest of threads. Sometimes. The rest of the time he was as sunny and cheerful as he’d always been.

It didn’t take us very long to work out what was going on. Have you ever seen a fledgling bird learning to use its wings for the first time? They don’t just leap into the air and soar off into the heavens. They sit on the edge of the nest flapping their wings awkwardly, learning how the wind flows over their feathers and how tiny changes of angle and pitch can shift their balance. But they are not flying. One wrong step and their soaring will be both limited in time and downward in direction.

 

I believe I can flyyyyy!

Small children do the same thing. Emotions don’t just arrive fully formed. Five-year-olds need to practice using their emotions properly so that they are fully prepared for the all-important teenage years. And practice they do. We soon learned that the boy-child was suffering from very selective form of depression. If he was thwarted, or thought he might be in trouble, he would launch into a protracted and oddly poetic monologue.

“I”, he would announce between sobs, “am very sad” Mrs 23thorns and I would brace ourselves. “I don’t know how I can feel this way. Sometimes I think that you don’t love me, and that you wish I was dead”.

“That”, we would reply, “is just not true. We love you very much. Why don’t you come over here and get a nice big hug. After you take those chocolate biscuits back to the kitchen. The ones we said you couldn’t have any more of”.

Then it was on. “YOU JUST WAN’T ME TO DIE SO YOU CAN HAVE ALL OF THE CHOCOLATE BISCUITS! YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME AT ALL!”

 

He’s on to me. Perceptive little bugger…

It was, as I said, a rather long year. But, like all phases, it passed. After flapping his emotions around like untested wings for twelve months, the boy took flight. He was done with his Weeping Song. A new person emerged. One who had been through a rite of passage and learned his first grownup secret. Emotions are better wielded as a scalpel than they are as a sledgehammer.

This doesn’t mean that he has stopped trying to manipulate us. He is both smart and incredibly sensitive to the emotions of people around him. But these days, managing the boy is more like playing chess with a grand master than it is like entering the ring with a heavyweight boxer. Not that this affects the outcome much. The little bugger still manages to get all the chocolate biscuits.

The boy might be done with his Weeping Song, but Mrs 23thorns and I are not yet in the clear.

“I”, announced the girl-child a month or two ago, looking up at us through enormous blue eyes limpid with tears, “am going to go and live in Zambia. Sob. You don’t want me here anymore!”

 

A wise choice. The views are just spectacular.

Bugger. Both Mrs 23thorns and I are now old enough and wise enough to recognise a Weeping Song when we see one. Oh, well. At least we knew what we were dealing with this time.

“I am very, very sorry to hear that, Mouse. Do you need our help with your packing?”

“What?”

“Packing. You can’t just go to live in Zambia like that. You’ll need some spare clothes. And a toothbrush. It’s absolutely vital that you brush twice a day. And floss. I don’t think there are any good dentists in Zambia.”

 

Zambian dogs. I didn’t have the heart to post a picture of the people.

“YOU SEE! I TOLD YOU YOU DIDN’T WANT ME HERE!”

“But of course we do, Mouse. We love you and want you to stay with us. Moving to Zambia was your idea. Now, I believe that it’s quite warm in Zambia, but I still think you should take along a jacket of some sort. And a raincoat. What about your bumblebee one?”

“AAAARGH”

It was, I suppose, a little unfair of us. We knew the rules of the game and she didn’t. We had a year of experience; she thought she’d just invented the game. We needn’t have feared. Her brother might be the sensitive one, but she is every bit as smart. She went off to restrategise.

 

My children frighten me.

“You”, she said a few days later, fixing me with an imperious stare, “don’t care about my feelings. You are going to live in Zambia”

“Don’t you mean you are going to go and live in Zambia?”

“No. I like it here with Mommy and the dogs. My brother can stay too. You can’t. You don’t care about me so you have to go to Zambia.”

Oh, well. At least it’s something new. We’ve done our year of self-pity, and now we get to play a different game with different rules. She’s rewritten the song; “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I’m gonna make the soulless bastards go and eat worms.”

So far I’ve been threatened with both deportation and death, and had the heat in my room cut off while being told that both Mrs 23thorns and I would only be allowed to wear short sleeves in winter. At least she’s being creative, I suppose.

 

It’s going to be a long, hard winter.

We know, this time round, that this will pass. And we know something else, too. You see they aren’t really weeping, these peculiar small people. They’re learning. Nick Cave said it better than I could;

“Father, why are all the children weeping?

They are merely crying son

O, are they merely crying, father?

Yes, true weeping is yet to come.”

So there you have it. If you are busy slowly putting together your own first small person, and are watching in horror as they suddenly turn into the world’s unhappiest angry people, relax. They are merely crying. True weeping, as the good Mr Cave points out, is yet to come. They’re going to be teenagers one day. Brace yourselves.

God help us!