Wild Compass

Home Blog Contact

Walking With a Ranger in Big Five Country

My last opportunity walking out free in the wild with a ranger as a guide was with a group learning tracking from the guides. They were on a course, working towards a certification, while I tagged along at the lucky invitation from a friend.

The group was tasked not only with tracking animals but also trees – more than once the guide preened when no one in the group was able to guess a tree’s species. The tracking was set aside for the highlight of the trip – a walk with the guides out into the game park, with only the two guides and their rifles between us and any animal who might attack.

The rules are simple: stay together, be quiet and listen to the guides’ every command. Strangely, this proved to be difficult to do – staying together when faced with open, open space, being quiet when all in the group were enthralled with a blooming flower, a radiant beetle or a startled antelope leaping. The guides were patient, clear and immensely capable. I found out later that the lead ranger could boast of never having had to shoot an animal to protect his charges in a career as a guide spanning more than 20 years. His specialty was reading elephant behaviour correctly and being able to safely brow-beat them with a revving motor when they blocked his safari’s path. A recent fatal tourist trampling in another camp in the park not far away underlined how dangerous it could be to get it wrong.

At various intervals whispered conversations were had with the members of the group as new and exciting discoveries were made and pointed out. At each one, members of the group were called forward and allowed the chance to guess the event that caused the “spoor” or tracks. A pile of whitened insect shells, prints near a pool, a tunneled out termite mound, broken foliage, a build up of mud 12 feet up a tree. At one point the mood became very, very serious and we had a whispered briefing while the other ranger stood guard. We had moved into a riverine area and we were told to definitely stay together – more people are killed by hippopotamus attacks than by sharks. The feeling of being out in the bush, vulnerable and subject to the laws of the wild was overwhelming. It blended thrilling exhilaration and the sobering realities of bush survival. This was raw nature and the remains of successful hunts and the tracks of the hunters and the hunted were revealed to us almost at every turn. Tracking gave us all a window into a world that was an inexorable juggernaut of eating and the eaten, the web of life showing us its story on every clear patch of sand, in mud, on leaves and under trees.

The rangers were full of small anecdotes and immense wells of knowledge about all the animals and plants of the area. I enjoyed the camp fire conversations and the twinkly-eyed banter and verbal jousting almost as much as the walking out through the bush. We heard about the habits of the various antelope, the predators and their killing methods, which tracks were most often mistaken for others, all the while enjoying a barbecued meal and sitting in a bush camp invisible more than 50 feet out.

Going on ranger-guided bush walks is not for the faint-hearted or anyone not capable of running or climbing or anyone not deemed suitable by the ranger. When an unpredictable wild animal attacks, the rangers must make difficult, split-second decisions to kill it. Any diversions to this task unnecessarily endanger the whole group. It is camping at its stripped-down best – no deodorant, no unnecessary junk can be carried, there is no space for socializing, and personal comfort is completely discarded. There can be very fearful moments and long stretches of very boring walking. The rhythm is a group rhythm, dictated by the surroundings as much as by the rangers themselves. There is a chance that the lovely, cuddly wildlife in the television documentaries can get very, very ugly indeed. Swift death and injury are probable. Treasured moments and memories of a lifetime are also to be had, and so the guided walks will always be amongst my most fiercely enjoyed outdoors activities.