The Impossible Five. Justin Fox
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through, filling my shoes with mud. By now, every animal in the valley knew about Spot, and the alarm calls of a grey rhebok ahead of us were picked up by a troop of baboons. The kloof was a natural amphitheatre, and the sounds echoed around us, backed by a chorus of birdsong. I was thrilled. It was just like being David Attenborough in the climactic scene of a BBC doccie.
We scaled the western slope and veered along a contour towards the likely boulder. My two companions had changed from giraffes to klipspringers, their cloven hoofs gripping the rocks as they gambolled ahead. I slipped, grazing a knee. The telemetry, pinging like sonar, told us Spot hadn’t moved far, and Quinton motioned us to continue in complete silence.
We came to an outcrop, took off our packs and scrambled up to a ledge. My shoe sent a pebble clip-clopping down the valley. Quinton looked back at me with a severe frown. Poking our heads over the lip, we scanned the area where Spot should have been. The telemetry told us she was less than fifty metres away, but we just couldn’t see her. The dassies on a nearby boulder were going ballistic with their alarm calls. They’d certainly seen her. All we could do was wait for Spot to show herself.
This waiting and staring and telemetrying and looking at each other with quizzical looks went on for about twenty minutes. Then Quinton edged off to the left and we followed, trying not to dislodge any more stones or breathe too loudly.
‘She’s on the move,’ whispered Quinton. ‘You two wait here. I’ll try to flush her out.’
He scrambled down the rock face, angling to the right to force her up the valley into open ground. His telemetry aerial swung back and forth above his head, making him look like Robotman. We scanned the scrub, triangulating our gaze with the direction of Quinton’s aerial. How could a big cat vanish into such meagre cover, right under our noses, and wearing a telemetry collar to boot?
After half an hour, Quinton returned, looking dejected. We found some shade and ate our sandwiches. ‘As you can see, this is a very, very frustrating game,’ he said, staring across the valley to where the baboon troop barked lustily, marking Spot’s progress somewhere along the opposite slope.
My time was up. I drove out of the enchanted valley, over Uitkyk Pass, and down the winding gravel road to Algeria. My thoughts turned to how, up there in the mountains, the future of leopards was relatively secure. For now, at least. The region had once endured the greatest predator-farmer conflict in the Cape, with up to seventeen leopards killed annually. But in 2007, an area of 1 710 square kilometres had been set aside as the Cederberg Conservancy. With Quinton’s help, the entire farming community had agreed to ban gin traps. Livestock farming with sheep, goats and cattle had then been the predominant land use; now wine production, olive trees and citrus predominated. Leopards are not vegetarians … and they’re teetotallers.
And what of Spot? Had I seen her, or hadn’t I? My imagination certainly produced a vision of sorts. Spot was there on the rock, bathed in sunshine, her back arched. She stared up at the great bird falling towards her. Her whiskers bristled as she bared her fangs. Those golden eyes, their pupils narrowed to tiny slits, measured the approach of the eagle, readying herself to strike. A flicking tail, claws anchoring her to the rock, a sinuous body pressed low. I could even hear the soft growl coming from deep inside her, like the sound of distant thunder.
Had I really seen her? Quinton certainly had. Elizabeth might have caught a glimpse. I was less sure. Did the fact that one person in the group achieved a sighting mean that, technically, the group as a whole had seen a leopard? Are one’s own pair of flawed, short-sighted eyes that important in the bigger scheme of ‘the sighting’?
And maybe I had, actually, seen a fleeting shape. A half-sighting or perhaps a ‘sort of’ sighting. Did a half-sighting count as a sighting? If one rounded up the half to a whole, which even the most fastidious accountants permit, then I’d definitely spotted Spot. I had seen a Cape mountain leopard! Sort of.
* Adapted from Erik Bindervoet’s Dutch translation of ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake.
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