The Impossible Five. Justin Fox
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with binoculars, but saw nothing. Every bush and boulder looked vaguely feline. Every element in the landscape seemed ideal camouflage for a leopard.
‘Okay, we’re going to have to hike in after him,’ said Quinton. ‘It could get a bit rough.’
The two retirees opted out; they said they’d rather sit and watch the view. Out came folding chairs and a flask of coffee. Knowing a wild-goose chase when I saw one, I half-wanted to join them. But I’d come to the berg to bag a leopard, and this was as good a shot as any. Hats, water bottles, telemetry, binoculars – we were good to go.
Ahead of us lay difficult terrain: a salad of rocks that had been sliced and diced into uncomfortable shapes. Quinton set off at a cracking pace. He has long legs and is used to pursuing feline quarry in the mountains. I have city legs, made for strolling the promenade as far as my local coffee bar. My lack of fitness became painfully apparent about a minute into our pursuit. Quinton was like a Zen walker who never actually seemed to touch the ground. His leather Caterpillar hooves were like wings; my old veldskoens like anchors. I puffed and wheezed in his wake. Where his strides propelled him over gaps, I found myself caught between them. While his breathing remained even, I sounded like a steam engine.
He crouched behind a pile of stones up ahead. I made a last push, using all my reserves of strength to catch up. He glanced back with a frown and put a finger to his lips. I flopped down beside him, heaving like a turtle that had just lugged its body up a beach. I was as red as a tomato, and sweat was pouring off me. Quinton might have had a drop of perspiration on his brow. We had covered at least four-hundred, near-vertical metres. He poked the telemetry aerial above the ledge like a periscope. Max had to be very close.
There was no signal whatsoever, only a hissing sound. ‘Shit, the bugger’s gone over the edge,’ whispered Quinton. ‘Might have got wind of us. Come on!’
We were off again, bounding up the slope to the next ridge line. The weather had begun closing in. Low clouds scudded through gaps in the berg. The wind turned icy, and the towering Sneeuberg dissolved into white. It began to rain. Quinton was pulling ahead once more. I watched him stop and stare at the terrain, head to one side, thinking like a cat again. Which way would Max have gone? Then the half-man, half-leopard slunk over a rise and disappeared.
After thirty minutes we reached another ridge line. I collapsed next to Quinton, wheezing like a rasp. My thighs were incendiary and my right knee, the dickey one, had sort of capitulated. My vision was all spots and floaty hallucinogens. A leopard could have been standing two metres away, and I’d have dismissed it as retina malfunction.
Quinton raised his telemetry aerial. ‘I’ve got a faint signal. Could be bouncing off the cliff. Max is heading west. He’s missioning. We’ll never catch him. This is the easternmost part of his range. He could be gone for weeks now, prowling his territory along the western slopes of the berg. It’s completely inaccessible. I’m sorry.’
We headed back, making a detour to a spot where Max had recently made a kill. All that remained was a sprinkling of klipspringer fur, which had been carefully removed and discarded by the leopard, and a reeking pile of stomach contents. Everything else had been consumed.
‘From the data we got off his GPS collar, we know Max spent about twenty-four hours on this carcass,’ said Quinton. ‘When we notice a GPS cluster in one particular spot, we come and investigate. These cats are so mobile that when they’re stationary for a while, they’re usually on a kill. But we missed him by about an hour. Such a sneaky fellow is our Max.’
That evening, Quinton was due to give a talk on leopards at Mount Cedar, a popular lodge in a nearby valley. I got a lift with Garth and Lorraine to Quinton’s Matjiesrivier home, a traditional thatched cottage leased from CapeNature, where he lives with his wife Elizabeth. She’s a willowy woman with a mane of curly auburn hair and a Julia Roberts smile. Elizabeth used to be a Waldorf teacher in Stellenbosch. Now she runs environmental education and wilderness camps for children at Matjiesrivier. Their house serves as the de facto headquarters of the Cape Leopard Trust. The tall, creaky interiors are crammed with zoological books, pictures of big cats and maps of their distribution. It’s the delightfully jumbled home of working scientists.
We transferred to Quinton’s vehicle for the trip to Mount Cedar. Night was falling and the mountains were at their most seductive. As we drove, the rocks turned from gold to purple to burnished black, and stars began to prick the sky. Nearing the lodge, we breasted a rise and Quinton said: ‘This is exactly where I saw my first leopard. I’d been searching for nearly a year by then, and suddenly there it was, caught in my headlights. Just the briefest glimpse. Incredible.’
He told us about his early searches in the desolate Karoo Cederberg to the east of the road we were driving. ‘It’s the most isolated part of these mountains. No one ever goes there. That’s why I love it so much. You can walk for days and not see any sign of humans. Pure wilderness. I was in the leopards’ environment, alone, sleeping wild. Occasionally I’d be backtracking along a route I’d just walked and there’d be fresh leopard spoor across my path. They knew all about my presence. I’d often hear other animals alarm-calling. I knew the leopards were close. But never so much as a glimpse. Not seeing them made it even more special, if you get my drift. The invisible cats. Like a fairy-tale.’
We arrived at Mount Cedar for Quinton’s 6.30pm presentation to a bunch of wealthy tourists. There were possible sponsors among them, so Quinton had been persuaded by the tour leader to do his ‘song-and-dance routine’. But there was no one in the auditorium, and Mount Cedar’s dinner is served at seven o’clock sharp. Quinton has to be a patient man, content to wait months for the glimpse of a cat. Now we witnessed his less patient side. There was, in fact, smoke coming out of his ears. He’d been specially asked to come as a favour. Dinner would just have to wait, or there’d be hell to pay.
Eventually a group of well-heeled guests sauntered in, chatting and laughing among themselves. There were carefully groomed women and blustery men, loud with bravado and bonhomie. I thought Quinton might lose his temper at their tardiness, but the moment he began his talk, he was charm personified, and the audience soon warmed to him. Elizabeth turned off the lights and images flashed on a screen. He’d done the PowerPoint presentation countless times before, and was completely at ease with his material.
We learnt about how, after three-hundred-and-fifty years of farmer-predator strife, most of the Western Cape’s rich wildlife biodiversity had disappeared. The last big cats, hanging on in a few scraps of wilderness, were all that was left. When Quinton founded the Trust in 2004, an average of eight leopards were being shot in the Cederberg each year. Since 2004, only two had been killed.
He explained that the Cape leopard was an iconic ‘umbrella species’, used as an emblem for research on the entire eco-system and for environmental education. The tools of his trade were simple. Feet on the ground were the most important element, since much of the terrain was inaccessible by vehicle. Infrared-camera traps were vital, as they provided permanent eyes and could be used to identify individual leopards, their distinctive pattern of spots being the equivalent of a human fingerprint – no two exactly the same.
Quinton showed maps depicting the ranges of his cats. He’d found that in the mountains, male leopard ranges were up to two-hundred square kilometres, compared to the Karoo, where ranges were as high as 1 200 square kilometres, or the densely populated Kruger National Park, where they were as low as twenty-five square kilometres. He’d recorded how ranges changed over time as cats were forced out or died. His leopards traverse up to thirty kilometres a day, patrolling their territory, hunting and looking for mates. Only one male at a time holds any given patch, although you might find females and young cats overlapping.
Quinton pointed to bunches of dots on his maps, depicting GPS clusters, and explained that these indicated where a leopard had made a kill. By visiting these sites, an accurate picture of their diet had been put together. A pie graph showed a menu comprising forty-four percent klipspringer, thirty-four percent dassie and three percent livestock, with the balance made up of a wide range of creatures in very small quantities.
He stressed that his research had proved that farm animals