SO, YOU WANT TO BE A GAME RANGER?

Iwas lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the bush when I was a kid. For a few years in the mid-’70s, my folks had the occasional use — a kind of early timeshare — of a pondok on a game farm in the Tuli Block in southern Botswana. A few times a year, we would make the long trek by road to the border post at Pontdrif, where we would leave the old car and cross the Limpopo River on a hand-cranked cable car. A ranger would meet us in the farm’s Land Rover and, perched on the roofrack like sparrows, we would ride off into the wilderness.

Tuli, then and now, was famous for its huge elephant herds. One of the sounds I remember most clearly from those visits is the snap and crack of a herd moving slowly through the riverine forest on the banks of the Shashe

River. I also remember the profound silence at midday when the only sounds might be a distant dove call or the murmur of desultory conversation. The hiss of a gas lamp and the smell of mopane-wood smoke transports me instantly back to when I was 10 years old.

The strange thing is that I didn’t appreciate it then — I was already a city kid with city interests. Time passed and I grew up and got a city job and got swallowed by the cracks, as the hit song goes.

Every time I go back to the bush, I realise that what we have lost is a connection to the natural world which our distant ancestors once inhabited like a fish in the sea. That loss can never be filled by more money or a bigger car or a new smartphone. It can only be filled by nature itself. I hope to see you in the wilderness, then.