The Life of a Doctor and a Game Ranger

By Christo Hanekom

This book is about a medical doctor, his medical training, his practicing in Namibia and South Africa while at the same time becoming deeply involved with wildlife. The author and his family enjoyed many years experiencing the ups and downs of medical life, wildlife management, and the full beauty of the African bush.

The book is suitable for readers from the age of sixteen to a hundred years of age, male and female.

PS: The author is also an artist, and therefore the reader will discover in the book his drawings of many fascinating species of African wildlife.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Apr 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524561567

Christo Hanekom

Christo Hanekom was born in South Africa and spent most of his life in Southern Africa as a Medical Practitioner, combining it with his love for the Bush and the Wildlife of Southern Africa. He with his family, now resides in the country town of Cootamundra, New South Wales, Australia.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 by Christo Hanekom.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2017903994

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-5245-6158-1

                 Softcover         978-1-5245-6157-4

                 eBook               978-1-5245-6156-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/28/2017

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.Xlibris.com.au

724115

CONTENTS

I. Early Beginning

II. Doctor

III. Game Ranger

IV. Finally

A wise man once said

Man should do three things and can then die happily. A man must marry a good wife, raise a child, and write a book.

I have now started with the last part.

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my wife Mariette for praying, helping, and enduring in times of wildly conflicting scenes—doctor to game ranger and then even beyond. Without her support, this book would have only stayed a dream.

Also dedicated to my sons—Toby and Crause. May my memories be with you and your offspring forever.

A special expression of gratitude

towards the van Zyl family in South Africa for granting us these special moments in our lives.

Those two hours before a new dawn and the first hesitant light heralding the start of a new day and night slowly fading away.

It is terrifying really—you know you have to get up and get on with it—and looking at your watch every so often would not help much. I do cherish those precious few moments just lying there and thinking about the coming of a new day.

Yesterday I finished with the surgery rotation and today will see me starting with obstetrics . . .

I

EARLY BEGINNING

Life really started for me at the very tender age of three. I remember the welts on my back inflicted to a young boy crying too much during too long and dark and lonely nights.

I don’t remember the time before or when admitted to the orphanage. I was still too young to take it all in, but now as an adult, I fully appreciate and begin to understand what that haven really meant to me, back then and for my future.

I then remember soft, black fabric tassels on a black handbag and how this fascinated and kept me captured with wonder of things strange and new to me—I was adopted that day and cannot remember much else about the day my life really got off on a good footing.

Early memories of my new family were vague but always spiced with things like newly found love and caring and always the trying to heal and soothe terrible old wounds. They gently taught me how to forget—not how to forgive for I was way too young to understand the basics of forgiveness or resentment, but they rather steered me into new and exciting directions and just how to live a good life.

After several months I managed to start calling my new parents Mum and Dad—not an easy thing to do when not born and brought up with the meaning of such words, but made easier by my innocence and a burning desire to please—for I was now experiencing my first ever taste of happiness, a sort of close warmness like a soft and well-used blanket with smells and feelings all interwoven into a soft thing called love.

I was, I suppose, born a loner or maybe grew up one and grew up happy to spend hours doing my own things without the need to fret about things like friends or how I looked or the newest fashion and film, music, and such like that.

And so I suppose that the result of me being a lonely soul—and happy with it all—was to end up being much more comfortable and at ease with the four-footed than with the two-footed animals I crossed my paths with—the four-footed variety just that much easier to please and no emotional strings really needed—a relationship probably smoother and easier on a soul hurt already.

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Christo with baby sister Erna-Michelle

I always had a special affinity or a feeling or touch of togetherness with animals and always seemed to seek them out in preference to human companionship.

My early schooldays were not good. As a born loner I constantly strove to defend my own territory and had to learn to fight to keep it all to myself. Many were the days when getting back home my poor mother had one look at my bloodstained clothes and almost collapsed. I fought a lot at school and was punished heavily for it but gradually I was left more and more alone to enjoy my lone territory and maybe so became even more lonely. The fighting got worse when my young beloved sister joined me at primary school. She, as a silly little girl getting into all sorts of trouble and knowing that her brother would gallantly bail her out, only delighted in all of this—my punishment back home of course only getting worse by the day.

The defending of territories went a bit too far one day when a senior boy told me that he could easily break my neck—I believed him and tried my best to save myself by picking up a small rock and throwing it so well that it hit him squarely between his eyes. It was of course an ambulance job then and I ended up in front of the principal.

After primary school I more or less settled down and started to learn the basics of human behaviour and not to retaliate to the slightest provocation. I even started to share the space around me and learnt about such things as friendship, companionship, and even eventually, how to fall in love.

School in general was easy for me. I was moderately intelligent and was good with most of the sports, especially rugby, but I never was a good student as such and school always seemed to me to be the ideal opportunity to sharpen up my fishing skills, and so, slipping away during school for a few hours of good fishing along the Orange riverbank always seemed to be a pretty good idea. We were caught out, of course, but not too many times and so some of my fondest memories of high school were always those lazy days beside a riverbank waiting for the big one to strike.

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Christo with his carp, caught in the Orange River, Upington

High school also meant the introduction to us of things called girls. Girls to our minds were for watching secretly from a safe distance and never to be seen speaking to them face-to-face. We had these school dances and attended them when we could no longer avoid them and had to attend in some sort of grace—so we would go in pairs—two boys together at the back and the two girls leading—not nice but probably necessary, and our bruised self-esteem usually survived this vivacious onslaught on our tender and newly emerging manhoods—we very slowly came to grips that girls were part of our lives—like it or not—and some sort of space needed to be set apart just for them.

Jana was my first real girlfriend—meaning that we kissed and held hands and that I tried my very best to endure being seen with her in open places where my friends could see us—hard, but possible. She was blonde and lovely and had a special way to deal with my shyness and self-inflicted loneness. We would spend many hours walking around and talking about nothing and get everything, and because of all that, Jana was my girl when I joined the army and she promised to write letters and so did I.

Army then was compulsory and maybe a good thing too—for I had no idea what to do with myself next after school.

The army was good to me and I enjoyed myself so much that after the first compulsory year I opted to go on for another year. The first year was a bit boring, teaching us how to stand to attention, how to drill, how to salute, and how to clean our rifles, how make our bunks up to the specified standards, and how to stay clean under all circumstances. That first year saw us leopard-crawling amongst empty fields, shooting our first rounds and standing guard duty, and also about inter-barrack fighting and rivalry—but probably most how to make a decent bed, how to iron your clothes, and how to really long for a weekend out.

The army made me—actually, forced me—to forget about my own boundaries and to accept that there were boundaries and other feelings beyond and past my own. I actually started to become part, first, of a group and then larger groups—the army tamed me and turned me around into some sort of a socialized beast.

The second year was much more interesting and really got me involved into important things like leadership and how to care for troops placed under your own personal care—in other words, how to start taking responsibility. A major word in the life of a young man—responsibility.

We were also made adept in the ways of using explosives to bring down a bridge or finely setting a block of plastic explosive so that it could slice through a railroad track to set a booby trap with awful consequence to the unwary.

We learnt about firing mortars, heavy machine guns, and even medium artillery like the 106-millimetre recoilless gun—a South African invention. Also how to ‘down talk’ aircraft fire down onto a specific position.

The army taught me how to walk and run a five-day, ninety-kilometre survival course of absolute hell over the mountains and down to the sea in blizzards so strong you needed to crawl over the summit of each hill and mountain or be blown away. During this march we had to find our own food, water, and shelter and check in at certain points within a set time frame. At the end of this course—down by a beautiful beach at Glentana—we all spent a weekend again finding our own fresh water and food from the ocean. Then we were all transported back to base camp in trucks.

Army taught me more about myself than a lifetime on the streets—adding to me a confidence that would last for the rest of my life and far beyond. I was now finally growing up—and in a good way too.

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Christo in the Army 1976 and 1977

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Christo in the Army, Oudtshoorn

With army now over and done with, I still was pretty unsure what to do next—almost twenty and knowing that the best part of my life were yet to be born—I now only had to wait for a while, do some more exploring and some more major living of a young man’s life.

The University of Bloemfontein offered me a place in their Science and Biology Department. I then duly settled down into university life expecting only the best that life could offer and maybe more—the ‘more’ part was soon delivered.

Bloemfontein and the campus would always stand out in my mind for the happening of the two most momentous things to happen in my as yet totally unshaped life.

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Christo and Mariette at formal university (UOFS) dinner

It was there that on one special Wednesday morning whilst under duress from senior students, I had to run over to the nearest girls’ dormitory, find and bring back a girl willing to dance with me in front of the seniors in front of our own place of residence while all the time singing our own sort of tune—humiliation at its worst. I then duly dragged this young and totally innocent girl—as totally confused as I was—to the street and started dancing. Embarrassment, for both of us, was not the word—rather the world’s end must have been near… So I met Mariette, and after a roller coaster of romance and breaking up and making up again, we finally managed to get married—but much later.

And then, that university break so many years ago, possibly the catalyst to the rest of my seemingly unconnected life—a life struggling to get to some sort of balance between that of doctor and game ranger.

Dad organized everything for me to spend the summer holidays to work in the Etosha Game Reserve in the far northern part of Namibia—then known as South-West Africa. The aim of this exercise of course was to teach me to be more self-resilient or how to earn my own pocket money, and only much later did I realize that this sort of life—earning money—was life at its very best. Etosha was heaven in my small and as yet undiscovered earth.

Etosha is a wild, wide, and wonderful place teeming with wildlife of all sorts and it was here at this strange and exciting place where I was to be taught the very basics of game ranging. It was here—in this place of brilliant early risings of the sun and down to the very last drop of a purpled cloaked setting of a sun, lazy and slow to set—where I found again that ultimately I would just have to, some way or another, come back to earth to find and then follow the ways of nature . . .

One of my duties at Etosha was to participate in a twenty-four-hour game count. This was done once a month—we had to sit tight and still at a previously agreed waterhole to keep tally of all the game which passed through our arc of observation.

The heat was the first battle to be won and then boredom, for we had to sit still for many hours and just observe the comings and goings of the wild at a pace of their own. I had a pure Kalahari Bushman with me—small and wiry in built and with grey peppercorn hair—a walking book covering every animal or bush or happening in that domain of his. And between us we would share a water bottle, a tin of condensed milk, or a tin of baked beans.

We were hidden so well and were so quiet and part of the landscape that we could observe animals slowly approaching the waterhole, totally unsuspecting and at such close range that we could note down the species, sex, age, and other closely related things of each visiting individual.

We became so absolutely part of our surroundings that an inquisitive young giraffe slowly came up and almost put its head into my lap.

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Giraffe sketch

It was quite odd during the dead of night observing through binoculars the coming and going of all the night-loving creatures—hyenas, jackals, and even the odd leopard. Most exciting of them all were the dark and slow-moving but menacing masses of elephants or rhinos, moving so quietly but with an inborn assurance that the bush was there for their own pleasure—no creature on this earth cared to hunt for them . . .

All of these happenings were sure to keep us awake to keep jotting down notes. We were asked to keep special notes on rhinos—especially about their ears and horn shapes—as these were very characteristic and so individual in nature that a single animal could be identified by careful notes alone. This was doubly important in this age of poaching to try to keep track of Etosha’s rhinos.

But mostly it was boredom and heat and thirst and then boredom again. Even the most passive of all beautiful natures can become boring, more so when you are young and have energy to spend somewhere else. And yet this boredom to beat all boredom taught me patience.

I was never a good horse rider and certainly was not too keen on going out on horse patrols and in general I thought horses too wild and too hard in the mouth and just too attractive as lion bait.

We had to go out on an extended horse patrol—far out and meant to stay in the bush for a week—and so were complemented with horse trailer, water trailer, fodder trailer, and the odd collection of Bushmen just to spice it all.

My horse, kindly lent to me, was a mottle-coloured kind of wild beast, and so I was assured—meek as a lamb.

Off we went on this patrol and the first thing to go wrong was the sudden and totally unexpected loosing of a wheel at full speed, racing across the flat salt pan, from the rear of the horse trailer. We all braked slowly and watched in amazement the lost wheel going flat out across the pan and no one was going to stop it.

Apart from the wheel, everything else went off more or less OK.

The main aim of this patrol was to do fence-patrolling checking waterholes and to look for signs of everlasting poaching. And for me—at this tender stage of my life—how to stay alive.

Off we were one fine, sparkling morning with cotton-white clouds dotting an otherwise clear and so far away sky, so typical of this part of Africa.

Our mission on this patrol was to look around and to just get the horses settled down into a new environment and then to go afterwards for some serious patrolling.

Everything went down just swell and I started telling myself that this blotch-coloured horse was really not so bad after all.

We were riding along slowly through some dry and broken country and coming up to the edge of a large salt pan when disaster struck. A lion charged us and off we went. This horse went wild and let go at full pace across this salt pan and all of my steering and swearing and even standing upright in the stirrups were of no use—this horse-like animal had a mind of its own, and it was thus charging along when the left-hand stirrup strap broke and I went flying off the animal at full speed to collide with the salt pan.

At the time I did not worry too much about the lion anymore because my newest worry now was that the whole left side of me was raw and impregnated with fine crystals of salt. My