walking the veld of the great karoo

PRAISE SONGS OF THE GREAT KAROO – WALKING THE VELD – October 2010

Easy walking today – mostly farm roads and not through rough and tough, scratchy, veld. But long – perhaps a three-hour ramble.
Backpack does a walker’s duty with water, hat, camera, apple, pencil and paper. Two sheepdogs companioned me yesterday – today I sneak out without them. Gives me more freedom. Don’t want them disturbing sheep during lambing, chasing buck, dassies, meerkats
Feet greet the earth road at a half past seven of a crisp morning. The old windmill is quiet behind the Great House – no wind yet. A single car passes me on the main road to Hantam Trust School – inmates look puzzled to view this elderly female foreigner traveling on two feet to goodness knows where. I wave. They stare.
Onto the Poortje road and along the river. Old, old willow trees, tall, spring-green and weeping, grow on the banks of the river which sometimes flows, sometimes dries up leaving hosts of fish heads and bones in the dry watercourse. Tamarisks are pink-tinged and feathery. It is October and new reeds are emerging green.
The road is straight. A clapper lark whirs up and dives down – again and again in mating call. A korhaan crackles. I search the wide flat landscape for yesterdays’ twin blue cranes, but they have stepped majestically on. The pair of springbok though, suddenly appear in my line of sight, bounding through the fence and across the road to disappear camouflaged in the dry grassland. I’m told that the white tail opened in pronking releases a sweet honey fragrance that San hunters could smell from far, far away – a sure guide for their days-long hunting.
Porcupine quills scattered roadside – looks as if this quill-shooting party came worse off in the encounter. I gather a good fifty, hide them in a bush to retrieve on my way back home. Veld becomes stonier, the grass drier, giving a lovely soft, low, all-over shading for miles of flatland. Kopjes and mountains in ranges in all directions. Chippings of ironstone strewn along my way.
Over the randje a young lamb rests in the road, mother sheep nibbling nearby. Lifting her head, she suddenly sees me, summons the young one and they trot determinedly away.
Through the first farm gate, an intricate undoing of chains and wire netting. Old iron and metal lies around in the veld for decades – no fear of rusting in this dry world. Near the sinkdam is a willow – there must have been water around here at some time. Under its shade, I perch on a fallen willow trunk, sip healthy Karoo water, and rest, gazing around in the cool morning and ever within the Karoo’s awesome hum of silence. Tiny unnameable l.b.j’s flit from bush to bush. A couple of bright yellow masked weavers are landing and taking off in the branches above me.
Not sight, sound or smell of humans for miles around.- I exist in the awesome spaciousness, richness and peace of the Karoo’s emptiness.
Six kudu have been sighted in these hills, arriving from who knows where – fences mean naught to these antelope-athletes. Nor to the dozen springbok just sprinting across the veld. Will I be the lucky one to catch sight of them?
On my right, the fence separating sheep off the hills dotted with green besem-bossies – an indication of the presence of tiny brown paralytic ticks which can kill stock within days. Paralysed, they simply cannot get up and so die. Farmers can dose against the tick – but that kills the dung beetles so necessary for good veld management. So, when resident ‘vermin’ – jackals mainly – who naturally limit their kills to a sustainable-only basis, are killed or poisoned, the roaming rogue jackals passing or testing their luck through a farm, will massacre sheep indiscriminately. Farmers must make these choices.
Accounts of yesterdays’ farm activities sit with me – the highs and lows – all happening in the peace and tranquility of wild places. First up was news of a porcupine which bit through buried black plastic pipes to drink at the water – and all the water from the dam to the flock of sheep and lambs, runs out. Good fortune: the men on horseback checking the camps spotted the dampness and a strong young previously unemployed Stanley has several months work picking up stones from the veld to cover all exposed pipes. A new role for low stone wall creations. Six dams cover the camps, filled by 12 windmill pumps, allowing long flexible pipes to snake kilometers far to the stock. Pure survival.
Lambing date for hundreds of pregnant ewes is precise – 20 September. Yet this year the ewes drop on their young on the 8th and all other planned farm work must be adapted to see to the newborns and their mamas.
Three men on three horses round up 500 woolly mouflons in Potbergg camp. Separate moms from lambkins. Separate skips – those who have missed the ram. Separate still-suckling moms with milk-filled udders. Mark each ewe with red or blue on the forehead to indicate age and status. Count each group. Three men on three horses saddle up and herd the bleating stock into the next camp. All in a morning’s work.
On my left now as I tramp the dusty road, stand fulsome green bushes, sign of a very old watercourse fed by a spring ahead at the boundary of three farms. Which sometimes fountains and sometimes not. Today is a not. At the gap between two ranges of hills, is the spring itself. An old pear tree and several willows announce its headwaters. Sam, now in his 90s, who worked on this farm all his life, from his young years, remembers there was a shepherd living there – which would be around 1910 – and had been before his time. Low stone kraal walls are still there. Possibly graves.
Climbing through the fence with its beautiful scarified sneezewood posts, I go to pay respects to the magnificent pear tree of old and tall stature. And am rewarded by chancing upon not only old stone kraal walls, but the largest piece of old willow-pattern china I’ve yet found – six centimeters in diameter – lying exposed between thorn bushes. I wonder about the shepherds who lived isolated here in the veld so long ago .
Also at the head of the spring in the gap between the hills, is where the old trek road passed. In a direct line from hills to the south, farmers, wagons and stock carved their ponderous way northwards to freedom.
I cut across country now to my destination – the new dam atop the hill which gives me good elevation to capture on camera the vast expanses of Karoo veld – range beyond range of hills fading to a hazy purple, jutting up into the vastness of this entirely blue sky. Three sixty degrees semi-desert uninhabited ( by human) nirvana.
A drink of sweet water, purest of the purest, from the water trough, and I pick my way carefully down the hill. There’s the pipeline to follow – carrying water with the natural fall of the land, to sheep and cattle miles and miles away. There’s also a dry stream bed for easy walking. I look carefully as this is the kind of shale where fish fossils millions of years old have been found. Not today. Not by me.
What a world this is. Saturated with past and present, history and geology, family and veld – for one who loves it.
And now the dusty homeward meander, retrieving porcupine quills en route – in time for a feet-washed, feet-up lunch. Four hours after hitting the morning road.