Stuffing Ducks...

I'm currently embroiled in one of mankind's least pleasurable tasks: house-cleaning. Yesterday all was going according to plan—I was working just hard enough that my husband wouldn't notice how little I was doing when I accidentally bumped into “The Priceless Treasure Of My Youth”

The  crash which I tried to muffle with a scuffle of feet, a coughing fit and, embarrassingly, a bout of hysterical hiccups was met by a snorting scream emanating from our living room. Instantly and uncannily, the man knew precisely what had happened.

Terrified by the possibility that my blundering about had caused serious injury to “TPTOMY” he ran into the study. I was frozen to the spot. Never mind looking at the destruction I had wrought, I couldn’t even look at him.

"Oh my gosh! " I said. "I knocked your duck onto the floor and I think its head fell off. I can't look."

I had intended  to be more lyrical – with a few choice expletives thrown in for good measure. But the whimsical seemed to be what fell out of my mouth. The look on the man’s face suggested I had committed the ultimate sin.

He just stood there. With that look on his face.

That’s when it all started coming apart for me. I looked onto the floor and started laughing.

"Well, good news," I said. "That duck’s head is fine, but I think I knocked its butt off."

Apparently I wasn’t funny.

Never mind that the stupid duck was poorly mounted by an youthful and aspiring taxidermist, (my husband  - way back when. When he was young and flexible and wasn’t married to a Sinner such as I) and it isn't in prime plumage – I had damaged the damn thing.

Let me tell you something  here. Alpha males, especially White South African ones, are easily enraged. They have been bumped from their slot at the top of the food chain and are struggling to adapt to their new position.

In many instances, they can be calmed down with offers of raw meat and brandy. There is nothing a WAM likes more than a chunk of charred meat and a bottle of cheap liquor. If he has just eaten and is already drunk, he might show no interest in your offer. This is when he is at his most dangerous.

WAMs, like white sharks, are one of the most misunderstood animals on the planet.  They feel things like the separation of butt from body of their favourite bloody stuffed duck. It threatens them somewhere deep down inside of themselves. Down there where their Natural Hunter lurks…then they will go on the attack…

The best way to ward this off is to threaten him with charges of things like: Sweeeeeet!  I can see your Metro-sexual Man peeking through!  He will retreat faster than a vampire being sprayed with holy water.

That gives you a fairly good idea of what these white alpha males don't like. In the interests of fostering better relations (and relationships) let's take a look at some of the things they do like.

Sea views
These guys have such a yearning for sea views you could be forgiven for thinking that if some of them were a bit brighter, they could be related to dolphins. But with burglaries,rates and taxes and squatters on the increase, second homes at the coast are becoming, much like the South African passport: a crushing liability.

4x4s
Now that sjambokking the staff is frowned upon, they have to get their jollies elsewhere. Riding roughshod over the environment is the new urban aphrodisiac. Don't bother asking for a lift. There is never room because the back seat is for the Rottweilers. You would be missing the point if you mentioned that the dogs aren't even in the car.

Weather
You might think they would be used to it by now, but these guys spend much of their time talking about it. Being born in Africa with European genes plays havoc with their internal barometers. Deeply conflicted, they complain endlessly about the heat, the cold, the wet and the dry.

His Stuff
Not to be confused with His Tackle. Which is also priceless beyond compare and is given a name that can be trotted out at dinner parties: Excuse me, I am just off to shake The Mighty Anaconda. The kind of guy who says he is off to talk to a man about a dog clearly doesn’t rate His Tackle highly enough.

His Stuff, though, is all the things he has been collecting since the year Dot and that his mother couldn’t wait to give you when he finally moved out of her home and into yours when you got married. This will include Old Yearbooks, medals, several pairs of favourite socks hoarded since Grade 3, photos of his first girlfriend, the packet of his first condom and at least 42 pairs of underpants in ever-increasing stages of HOLE. And a bloody stuffed duck. His Stuff is not, under any circumstances, to be touched or moved. It shouldn’t even be breathed in the general direction of. Unless in emergency. Like when he is at the pub or on the golf course and there is a fire. In which case you should abandon all else and make sure those underpants etc  get rescued first. This is an imperative.

It’s right up there with not trashing TPTOMY.

Eating out
WAM’s go to restaurants even when there is food in the house. This is because entire generations of white mothers have failed to teach their daughters to cook. The daughters don't see this as a failure. They see it as a step towards the total emancipation of women: You won't cook and you want to be free? Fine. See ya. Have a nice life.
Hello, Mr Delivery?

Aaaaaaanyway…..
Understanding the likes of my particular WAM I knew, instantly, that trashing that duck was tantamount to suggesting he go and live in Soweto. Or Bloubok Rand. Or Springs.

And it didn’t help that I then said: I’ll get you another duck. This one is now, most definitively, dead.

Guess who’s cooking tonight?

Anyone for duck?

Dead, Cold & Stuffed...

There is something sufficiently peculiar about the lifelike posturing of animal skins that draws me. I don't love taxidermy. I don't collect it. But I do find it irresistible.

It’s a sort of unsettling fascination.

Like a moth irresistibly drawn towards a naked bulb, I am all-consumed. Some might say obsessed. I visit natural history museums and stare at collections adorning the living room walls of private homes. I've seen the beautiful, the devastating and the repugnant. I have seen haunting works of contemporary art and ancient animal remains lost in almost-forgotten museums. I’ve seen all sorts, met all sorts (One person admitted he had smoked the ashes of his dead cat), all because of the unnerving charisma of long dead animals. A thing can only fascinate for as long as it retains its inexplicable magnetism. And the cold, dead and stuffed do hold a bizarre, unavoidable attraction.

We've all had an encounter with taxidermy, whether a museum specimen, a hunting trophy, or a piece of contemporary art. Give the animal more than a passing glance and instantly one knows something of taxidermy's uncanny mesmeric presence, the way it draws the eyes and demands attention. One can't ignore a stuffed parrot on the mantelpiece with the casual ease one might overlook a ceramic vase, and my fascination with taxidermy is really an obsessive quest to explain why.

Why does the artistic recreation of an animal using the animal's own skin create such eerie animal-things?

I'm a meat-eater,wear leather shoes and carry my life in leather pouches. Like most of us, I use all sorts of animal product in my daily life, but  taxidermy strikes me as something completely "other," something stranger, darker, more provocatively intimate and alluring than anything I have ever encountered. Taxidermy captivates me against my will, and I can’t look away until I know its secrets.

And this is all I know: all taxidermy is an unnerving and unknowable thing.

Although requiring death, it is not motivated by brutality but a longing to capture animal beauty. It is motivated by the desire to tell ourselves stories about who we are and our place within the larger social and natural world. It is driven by what lies beneath animal form, by the metaphors and allegories we use to make our world make sense.

Taxidermy is gesture of remembrance: the beast is no more....

(to be continued)

Bunduki’s Lament

Bunduki (n) (b –oo / n – doo / kee) Swahili: firearm or rifle

Nyati (n) (N-yah-tee) – Swahili: buffalo

Mbogo (n) (M-boh-ghoh) – Swahili: enraged buffalo

Simba (n) (S-im-bah) – Swahili: lion

Moran (n) – Swahili: Warrior, as in Maasai Moran

Chui (n) (Chew-ee) – Swahili: Leopard

Duma (n) (Doo-mah) – Swahili: Cheetah

PH (n) – Professional Hunter

Dear Reader – that you better understand my story: this is my lament – the story of my revenge. A proud. 450 Watts BRNO, of converted Eastern Bloc extraction, I have been the devoted hunting companion of my PH Mark Radloff for many, many years. I have loved him. Countless are the buffalo we have shot together, many the elephant faced, lions rolled, leopards taken from the branches of trees. I have been faithful. Faithful! Then he went and left me in the dark of a safe for a time whilst he made use of that other weapon, a showy girl. He left me. This is the story of my revenge, then – of the time he took me out for an airing and fired me like in the “old days” before his infidelity. I had to return the favour…


The sun is not yet behind the horizon. Reeds stand tall: pointed, male, arrogant, between Nyati and my love and I. His hand rests on me, idly stroking where it used to hold tight in the days long ago when he took me out more often than he has these days. I feel dry under his hand, my sights a little jaded, faded from lack of attention. There were those days when, something like this one, we would have been together all day from the hour before the sun to the time when the sky seems to melt into the earth in the evening. All day he would have carried me tenderly, caressing me, carefully tending me. Minding my shine and my actions, he would have taken better care of me then. These days, I have been passed over, in most part, for a ostentatious double model and the knowledge hurts me even as he does not seem to notice the wound of his infidelity.


A week, maybe two weeks ago, perhaps in guilt, perhaps in fond memory and longing for a good hunt, he slid me out of my cover and lifted me to his shoulder. It was an easy action, born of long practice. Born out of the hours, the days we used to spend together. Days when he slid me across his chest and into his arms with a simple reverence. A week, maybe two, he took me out of the dark, gave me an airing. In his hands, resting against his shoulder I wondered where that showy new love might be. In what place in his tent does she lie? Has she even been brought on this trip with us? Has he oiled her well, caressed her lately? Or is she in the dark now, covered, in favour of me, his old love, his faithful love? 


He thinks he can get away with forgetting me. He thinks he can leave me alone, lying forgotten in a corner whilst he tends his new girl. Slides her home, sights along her clean line, nestles her into his shoulder. He thinks this. As he holds me in his dry familiar hands and pulls me into his shoulder, clasps me hard and gazes at my length and loveliness, he thinks he can forget me and then, in whatever whim plays in him, take me out again and expect me to be grateful. Expect me to be forgiving. For a smart man, this hunter mine clearly has no real understanding of the nature of jilted love and it’s a lesson he will have to learn. 


The sun is not yet on the horizon and the reeds stand tall before us. In a tree a bird calls: a hoopoe, little harbinger of ill fortune. He calls and from another branch his mate answers. Echoes of ill fortune. We have long to wait for things to be right. We wait until the sun begins to slip like a segment of orange down along the distant hills, into the waiting arms of the trees and ahead of us, lying here, the herd stamps and frets. Overhead a Marshall eagle shrieks.


It’s late afternoon and we have not yet killed so we must be very careful with that herd. They are grazing close to the shade. The only way we could get close was to slide in the dust and grass on our bellies, as silent as Chui, the leopard; just a single snap of a twig could make the whole herd raise dust. My love scoops a handful of the dust and grass and lets it run through his fingers to see which way the wind is blowing. It is almost right. Earlier, we had run like Duma to the other side of the buffalo herd until one of the men had given a sign that all were in place. It was then that he slung me across his shoulders and began his slide through the 
powdered earth towards the herd. I felt that bump along his body like an old ache. It has been such a long time since he has taken me out into the African sun and slid with me balanced on him to a place from where he can cradle me, stare along my body and, slipping a finger into me, slowly coax a shot out of me. We used to hunt together a great deal, my hunter and I. And then he went and found himself a new love and left me, sulking, in the dark. And now, here in the late sun, waiting for the perfect chance, he expects me to be forgiving?


Long we all lie in the heat with the cry of the Marshall eagle overhead and a treacherous little Loerie calling his warnings from the trees. The men with my hunter all lie low, waiting for the wind to be just right. Ahead, through the reeds, the herd shuffles and chews. Little shifts of wind blow at them, not enough to give us away, but enough to keep them on edge. Long we have waited for the killing time to be right and long do I lie with my hunter as we did in the hunting days before he thought to usurp me with that flashy mistress. In muted voices the men talk and, from time to time, my hunter runs his hand along me as if to make sure I am still with him. Does he think these caresses; this attention will make right my abandonment?


There is grass on the hill where we lie and scattered bushes and there is also forestation down in the V of the small hills. I hear the men talking, saying how they must stop Nyati from making it down to the thicket if he starts to run. If he runs in there, we will have lost him for sure in the Miombo forest, thick and green. White egrets follow in the footsteps of the buffalo, eating the insects that they unearth with each step of their hooves. From a far-off hill, Simba grunts – perhaps he too has waited long for a kill and is growing edgy. We all wait in the heat of the afternoon and none waits more anxiously than I for the perfect moment.


The trackers lie quietly, talking amongst themselves in voices scarcely above a whisper and they ask one another riddles to pass the time: What do the Moran resemble when they stand on one leg? And another will answer The Euphorbia trees. Yet another speaks What are the two skins I possess, the one I lie upon and the one that covers me? A moment of still passes before Chilemba, my love’s favourite tracker replies One is the earth and the other is the sky. Small smiles play on all their faces in acknowledgement of his clever answer. We wait. We all wait in the heat for the killing moment to be right. For the big bull, for big Nyati to stand just right for his killing.


My hunter sleeps a little in the sun, but even in his rest he is aware, like Chui, of the sound of the wind in the branches, or the distant trumpeting of an elephant, even in his sleep his chest vibrates when Simba roars on the far hill and he is alert to the restlessness of Nyati. The cantankerous, irritable stamp of his hooves and the shake of his huge boss. Even in his sleep, my hunter knows Nyati is preparing to run and he wakens, primed, knowing the hunting moment has come. Nyati turns to trot down the hill towards a clump of bushes and my hunter tells the younger man with us to shoot. Shoot now! Shoot now before Nyati gets too far, once he is in that thicket we will have a devil’s job finding him again! And the younger man levels his puny .375 and shoots, but the lesser calibre of his girl only wounds, it does not have the impressive stopping power that I, proud .450 Watts that I am, have. 


Nyati roars, wounded but slightly and unsure what he has heard, perhaps a tree falling, a branch snapping. The wind does not give us way so Nyati cannot know for sure what he has heard but he grows irritated by the small pain of his wound; he grows furious and he rattles his brains around in his great head as he shakes his horns this way and that. My hunter, thinking to prove his love for me, like in those old days before the new love, before he left me alone for the allure of that brassy .500 double N.E., thinking to prove his love for me all over again, raises me to his shoulder as he lifts to his feet and begins to run after angry Mbogo-who-was-Nyati. The other men rise too, seizing their guns and their shooting sticks and giving chase but my hunter is still as swift as the cheetah and even more graceful as he runs ahead raising me to his shoulder, holding me tightly in his hands, sighting along my body, drawing breath as he tucks his finger around my trigger and eases me into shot. Ah! The precise killing moment for him! I have waited such a long time for this. For such a perfect moment.


His finger is slow; a slight loss of sensation from an old stabbing wound in the elbow of his shooting arm, as it slides into me. He must have forgotten all these months past how I laboured with him after that wounding, toiled to get that lazy finger working again; how we learned to work together using the other arm, the other shoulder, the other hand. Together we achieved this so that he could work with me using either of his hands efficiently. But now,
unfaithful creature that he has been, he slides his slow finger into me and expects me to 
remember it all for him as I recoil, loud and furious, into him. Mbogo-who-was-Nyati doesn’t even break his stride and under my thunder, under my lamenting howl I hear the crack of my hunter’s finger against my trigger guard and I smile. 


My love tries to shoot again; he tries to slip that old finger into me again but there is nothing there to slip with. The finger-bone is broken in two and has curled up on itself and there is no love and no forgiveness that will make it straight again. 


As yet unclear why there is no response in his shooting finger, he tucks me under his arm; not aware of what I have done, for he has yet to register pain, and he runs still towards Mbogo. With his other hand he pulls at his wounded finger, trying to hold it into place as he calls to the younger man to shoot again and this time that lesser rifle does what she should have done the first time. Mbogo falls heavily, his rage and his breath whispering out. And as the men all cluster around his great fallen form, my hunter looks down and sees, for the first time, the extent of the damage I have wrought. And then he feels the agony and I can only trust it matches that which I have felt.


When it draws near the hour of dusk the sun disintegrates into the sky and dusts the earth with a film of gold and I lie beside my hunter as he tries to sleep, doped against his pain, his snapped and swollen finger held straight with a twig torn from a tree and a tie of cloth. I lie beside him, smirking, for there is still some hunting to be done and his broken finger will swell even more and it will ache against that twig till the tears fall and I? - I will have taught my love a lesson he will not forget as easily as he forgot me. 


He will have to suffer for three full days, waiting to get into a town at the end of this hunt before he can have attention for that finger and he will find, in colossal pain, that he will not forget me again. I lie couched warm in my rightful place besides him and perhaps now, considering the hunt, dead Nyati and the shattered finger-bone of my hunter, perhaps I am a little more willing to be forgiving. Perhaps now, too, as he suffers, he will understand that I am not to be replaced with that strumpet again.