NOT THE BIG FIVE
Like most children, I grew up with stories of animals. Fairy-tale animals, dream animals, intelligent domestic animals and dangerous, toothy, wild animals. Members of my family took turns reading me to sleep at night. There were the Barbar the Elephant books and Dr Seuss's Cat in the Hat tales, Richard Scarry's heroic characters epitomised by the intrepid Lowly Worm, Beatrix Potter's world of erudite rabbits, books of African folktales and Kipling's Animal Stories. Winnie the Pooh and his coterie were favourite bedtime companions, and today I'm still able to recite whole chunks of A. A. Milne. Who can forget Piglet meeting a Heffalump, Eeyore losing his tail or Pooh getting his head stuck in a honey jar? These are indelible moments in my literary upbringing. I remember odd but important details, like the fact that Tigger had trouble climbing down from trees because his tail kept getting in the way. For years, I wondered if real tigers experienced the same difficulty.
Perhaps the book that most captured my imagination was Alice in Wonderland. The story of her adventures down the rabbit hole seemed to my young mind completely believable. Lewis Carroll's characters-the March Hare, Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit-inhabited my suburban playground as much as they did that enchanted college garden in Oxford, the setting for his famous book, written in the 1860s. Wonderland could be discovered anywhere. I eventually arrived in Oxford to study English many years later, and was thrilled to finally set foot in that charmed Christ Church garden.
When I was big enough to read for myself, weightier tomes such as Watership Down, Jock of the Bushveld and Gerald Durrell's animal escapades took over. I also began reading African tales of myth and legend, where I was never exactly sure whether the white lions, giant snakes and talking apes I read about were fictional characters or adaptions of flesh-and-blood animals. Real creatures and imaginary ones morphed into one. It was probably impossible to meet a real Pooh bear, but probably just as impossible to meet such a creature as an aardvark. Or was it?
Growing up in the city, my contact with animals was mostly domestic. We had two dogs and a cat, as well as a parade of smaller fry that passed through the house, or hid in the attic, or flew away, or floated belly-up in a bowl. I loved my cat Ling best of all. He was an intelligent and indulgent Burmese of impeccable breeding, who played games with me every day after school and slept on my bed each night.
Human children are, in a way, imprinted by their pets. That languid, cat-walk stride, the bored, eyes-half-closed, don't-bother-me-I'm-thinking-about-Nietzsche look-I grew to know such things in Ling intimately. I realise now that my love for Ling led me to an understanding, an affection even, of his movements and moods; the way he purred, or stretched after a snooze, or stalked a bird with his slow-motion gait. And so it was that when I eventually met bigger cats in the wild, there was an immediate, electric recognition. The love was already there.
When I was old enough for malaria tablets and able to sit still for longish periods without making a fuss, my parents started taking winter holidays in the game reserves, in particular the Kruger, South Africa's biggest national park on the border with Mozambique. Whenever we set out, the excitement was unbearable. This was a real-life, adult Wonderland, just as alluring and outlandish as Alice's. A hundred kilometres before arriving, I'd already have unpacked the binoculars, Roberts bird book and foolscap pad with three columns marked mammals, birds, reptiles.
The challenge was always to find the Big Five. On most Kruger holidays, we managed the first four: elephant, rhino, buffalo and lion. It was always the leopard that eluded us. After countless unsuccessful attempts, finding the spotted cat became something of an obsession for me. It was not until adulthood that I saw my first wild leopard, iconically draped on the branch of a leadwood tree beside the Sabie River. There was a jolt of recognition... and elation. It felt like a benediction. Ling had long since passed into the forests of the night sky by then, but I knew the set of those limbs, those steady golden eyes, the sinuous beauty as if they belonged to a long-lost friend.
As an adult, I continued the childhood tradition of exploring game parks each winter. Then I joined a travel magazine and started visiting reserves almost every month on assignment. I began to see tourists' relentless pursuit of the Big Five as one-dimensional. There was so much more out there, unseen, waiting to be discovered. After a dozen lion sightings, coming upon an African wild dog or a honey badger held more allure. My taste broadened and my passion for the wild in all its forms deepened. I now sought rarer animals: little-brown-job birds, strange insects and shy night creatures such as bush babies, civets and genets.
Over the years, my list of new creatures to find grew longer. There was one particular animal that replaced leopards on my most-wanted list: the pangolin. I'd heard a lot about these armadillo-like, prehistoric-looking mammals, and hoped to see one for myself. Each time I visited a game reserve, I'd ask the rangers about pangolins. Invariably they'd shake their heads and tell me to give up. "Impossible," they'd say. Most rangers had never seen one themselves, even those who'd spent a lifetime in the bush. My career as a travel journalist took me to parks all over Africa, but the story was always the same.
This fruitless search for pangolins got me thinking about creating a list of the mammals I'd tried and failed to find over the years; those animals you had just about zero chance of seeing. Instead of the Big Five, I would try to find the Impossible Five. After much deliberation, I narrowed my search down to a shortlist that included such animals as the black-footed cat, Cape fox, aardwolf and Knysna elephant. The last on this list was discounted after I found out there were probably less than five left in the Garden Route forests of the southern Cape, therefore my chances of finding them were nil, and these elephants were not a subspecies or genetic variant, but simply common-or-garden Loxodonta africana. I also considered a number of smaller, critically endangered African mammals, including four species of moles and two species of bats. However, my final five were all distinctive, sexy mammals that had long frustrated me (and my friends, family and many rangers I had spoken to). My Impossible Five would be: Cape mountain leopard, aardvark, pangolin, riverine rabbit and (naturally occurring) white lion.
These animals have survived into our modern age largely due to their elusiveness. Their "impossibility" is their tenuous insurance against extinction. They are still wild and free, most of them living outside national parks, occupying the same territories they have for millennia. As such, they are symbols of the wilderness that was once everywhere, but which is now drastically curtailed and shrinking by the day. Their continued presence, even if never seen, can be a comfort, a kind of ecological money in the bank. If they disappear or are driven into contained environments, our human species will be far poorer for it. I began to think of my creatures' impossibility as their saving grace-our saving grace. In this light, it didn't matter if I found none of them and my mission was a complete failure. As long as I knew-we knew-they were still out there, that would be enough.
I laid out a large, photocopied map of South Africa on my dining-room table. With a pen and highlighters, I marked the areas that were likely to prove fruitful in my hypothetical hunt. Now that I could see the project, visualise the months of searching ahead, it began to solidify into something with proper weight. The distances were vast, the terrain difficult, the chances of finding the animals slim. And yet... and yet the idea would not let go of me. It started to eat into my sleeping hours. All five animals took up residence in the burrows and branches of my mind and would not be dislodged. I realised, quite suddenly, that I was actually going to have to do this thing. It was the notion of having a choice in the matter that had been dislodged. A whimsical idea had turned itself into an imperative, and a bullying, all-consuming one at that.
My quest, or series of journeys, was going to be a costly business. As a journalist, I'd been working in and around Africa for more than a decade and could call on some of my old contacts and squeeze the odd favour. I approached magazines and websites, as well as a vehicle manufacturer (Land Rover) and various safari lodges, to help with logistics. In return, they'd get coverage in the print media and online, and there was also the dangled carrot of a probable book with the catchy title The Impossible Five. I contacted scientists and researchers working in the field, describing my quest to them in detail, explaining how it had become an obsession and how badly I needed to find these five animals. To my astonishment, every person I contacted said they would help. I told them that I might have to come and stay with them and hang around and become a nuisance while waiting for the animals to show up. And they still said yes. As each block fell into place, my excitement grew. I set aside six months: one mammal per month, with a month to spare. In the end, this quest would take me nearly three years.
Before setting off on the first...
