5. Scientist
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw,
Oh, hear the call! - Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!
R. Kipling. Night-Song in the Jungle
The next morning brought a lot of surprises.
First, caracal tracks appeared again around the house. I decided to put a few frozen chicken on my porch every evening - may be I'd be able to see the cats. Second, I was promoted to assistant scientist. The salary was purely symbolic: I could expect to make barely enough to fly home by the next April. Third, Shlomi went on vacation, so I was to assist Ivi with large predators. Also, Toni informed us that a professional wildlife photographer was about to visit from France, and asked me to show him some interesting places in Southern Israel.
"Nu, let's see," said Ivi as we were pushing a trolley full of meat to the predators' cages. "You were making fun of me because I didn't risk entering the cages. Now you do it."
The first animal was a fennec fox - a tiny white creature with huge ears and inquisitive black eyes. Anyone who would enter his cage instantly became his friend for life. Then we delivered chickens, eggs and meat to other foxes - red, sand and Blanford's, as well as to African wild and sand cats. Now we had to feed the large ones: caracals, wolves and hyenas.
It seemed obvious that no beast would dare attack such a highly qualified zoologist, but the first time I had to enter the cages I was a little nervous. I had to do it alone: Ivi refused to enter any cages after being attacked by a female wolf when he tried to measure her newborn cubs.
It wasn't as bad as I expected. The caracals were hissing and scratching the mesh, but they were just trying to get to the chickens we brought. Wolves seemed very peaceful and even scared of me as they were running back and forth along the opposite side of the enclosure.
I'd never considered striped hyenas dangerous, although they do snatch children from villages occasionally. But the pair we had in Hai Bar had a long criminal record. As I entered the cage, they pretended to ignore me, sunbathing. When they were just brought to the zoo, Moni, who was the director at the time, decided they were really tame, and entered the enclosure without a stick. The moment he turned his back on them, one hyena jumped on his shoulders. He was saved by Shlomi, who happened to be driving by and rammed the fence with his jeep. The fence held, but the animals were scared by the sound of crash and gave Moni a second to get out. He had to be rushed to a hospital by an Army helicopter.
When Toni became a director, he issued an order banning anyone from entering the hyenas' enclosure alone. The order was soon forgotten, and the next victim - a Canadian volunteer - was literally torn to pieces. The story really hit the fan, and the poor "stripies" barely escaped being shot.
Beni almost became their third victim. He was cleaning the enclosure, and for a split second gave them a reason to think that he wasn't watching them. He doesn't remember what happened next, but according to Ivi, who was watching from the outside, Beni simply walked up the vertical fence fifteen feet high, and jumped over the top.
Now the hyenas were lying on their backs, letting the sun warm up their round bellies. But they couldn't fool me. I'd already seen them catch birds that way: pretend to be sleeping and then snatch them in a lightning-fast leap. Holding a shovel so that they would see it all the time, I quickly cleaned the enclosure, gave them some meat, and got out. Ivi congratulated me happily.
The last two enclosures were occupied by an old female leopard with a tail broken by a bullet. In her five years in the zoo, nobody had ever risked going inside. She had to be lured with meat to the other cage so that the first one could be cleaned. In Ein Gedi, where she was from, local people still remembered her, while her offspring was keeping them entertained.
In other parts of the Middle East, wolves, caracals and leopards now survive only in remote areas. But in Israel, thanks to highly effective legal protection of wildlife, they are relatively common. Unfortunately, even the best things can be turned into absurd, as I was about to witness.
When Ivi and I got back to the office, all others were standing in silence around a body of a young addax.
"Wolves," told me David. "They dig under the fence and visit the reserve as if it was a food store. They come here to feed from Egypt and Jordan, too."
"We can attach a spotlight to a rifle..." I started.
"Are you crazy? We'll put the body back where we found it, and set a leg trap nearby."
"That's cruel. Why not just shoot?"
"You don't understand. It's a rubber-jaw trap. Toni will take the wolf to the North and release."
"But it's only 300 kilometers! It will be back here in a week!"
"Usually five to six days," said David.
"And?"
"It will kill another animal, and we'll set the trap again."
"And how long will it go on like this?" I asked.
"Five times is the current record. Last year we lost half of the gazelles, an onager and almost all baby addaxes. There's nothing we can do. Getting a shooting permit from the Department takes eight months."
"All you have to do to keep them out is shoot one pair per year."
"You think I don't know it? Beni and I have talked to everybody in the Department. They just don't get it. Well, don't be too upset. We have good news: an African wild ass is pregnant."
"Wow! It's a pity Beni is not here."
In the evening, Shlomi and I fixed the fence, put the dead addax in place, and set a few traps.
When Russian hunters try to trap a wolf, they cover their smell by smoking the trap, sweep away their footprints, avoid touching the bait, put on clean clothes... Here, we just left the traps on the ground. The Middle East has been inhabited by humans for so long that local animals are not too afraid of people. They just despise us a bit, like feral dogs do. No wonder so many species have been first domesticated in that region.
We returned before dawn. Herds of antelopes were watching us as we drove by, their eyes reflecting our headlights. Hares and sand foxes were crossing the tracks. A large yellowish-gray wolf was in one of the traps. We threw an old blanket over his head, tied him up, took to the office and put a tag in his ear. Toni loaded him in his truck, and drove off.
The same morning Etienne, the French photographer, arrived in a rental car. He was a blonde guy in his late teens, with a huge suitcase of photo equipment. I offered him to share my cabin. He spent the next few days in the savanna, watching the oryxes. Their mating season was just beginning, and he needed shots of fighting males for his agency. He was remarkably persistent, and survived three full days in a sun-heated car among sleepy antelopes. Every evening he returned in a state of heat stroke, but didn't even think about giving up.
"It's too early," I told him, "shoot other fauna first."
He spent two more days chasing other Hai Bar inhabitants, as well as employees. He got some remarkable shots: the famous biologist Vladimir L. Dinets observing animals he was in charge of; great veterinarians Vladimir and Toni removing a tin can from an ostrich's stomach; fearless naturalist Vovi catching an escaped dune viper. Soon we ran out of ideas, but the oryxes were only beginning to fence with their horns, lazily testing their strength.
"Let's go to the Dead Sea," I suggested. "They'll get more serious about it by the time we get back."
"Good idea," he said, shaking his slipper to remove our neighbor, a spiny mouse who was the cabin's original tenant. "By the way, what's for dinner today?"
We opened the refrigerator. It was empty.
"What about omelet?" I asked.
"Omelet? You said you didn't speak French..."
"Never mind. We'll have a superomelet. Let's go find an ostrich egg!"
We spent half an hour driving around the savanna, but couldn't find any. Somehow I completely forgot that they begin laying in May. Suddenly we saw a dozen melon-size eggs on the road shoulder. The father, who was supposed to guard the clutch, was nowhere to be seen.
Triumphant, we brought one egg to the cabin, cracked it open with an ax, and found it filled with strange gray powder. We had to drive to kibbutz Yotvata to get some yogurts.
Next morning, feeling very guilty, I found Aila, who was in charge of ostriches, and said:
"Aila, I don't know how to put it... We accidentally broke one egg - there's a clutch near the road. We are so sorry..."
"Never mind," she laughed. "We placed them there last spring for the tourists to see."
In silence, Etienne and I got in his car and drove north along Arava.
Highways are good in Negev, but to prevent drivers from falling asleep, speed bumps are installed approximately every 25 km. Someone miscalculated their height, so cars occasionally fly off the road.
Pink surface of the brine lined with white shores, yellow mountains, green spots of oases... Dead Sea is not the most beautiful place in Israel, but it has a certain charm. Etienne was there for the first time, so he spent meters of film shooting rocks, crooked trees, huge "mushrooms" of salt on lake shallows, and the famous salt pillar near Sdom Mountains - according to the Bible, the unfortunate wife of Lot.
We spent a day exploring narrow canyons of Ein Gedi, among bubbling creeks, waterfalls, caves, tame Nubian ibexes and hundreds of rock hyraxes. All life was clinging to the bottoms of the canyons, surrounded by frighteningly high rock walls, almost devoid of any vegetation.
"What is up there?" asked Etienne.
"The Judean Desert, a plateau. It is also barren, but you can see some cute wheatears and other birds there, plus lots of scorpions."
"Where does this canyon lead?"
"Nowhere. It becomes more and more shallow, and turns into an ordinary ravine. You can walk to Hebron from there."
I happened to know all this, because during my first visit to Israel I spent a week working for a Bedouin who lived in the upper part of the canyon. My job was to clear his small field of stones, and he paid me well: ten dollars for every ton of rocks. His pretty daughter Aisha, just eighteen years old, paid me a certain bonus, but old kind Hassan ibn Ali didn't know about us. He didn't seem to care, actually. Semi-nomadic Bedouins have much more liberal morals than sedentary Palestinians.
But Aisha's love was not my best prize for that work. On my last evening in the canyon, when I was walking down from Hassan's tent to the highway, I met one of the daughters of the old leopard in Hai Bar zoo. I came to a rock terrace, from which a small waterfall was flowing, and saw the cat standing calmly below. Leopards of Israel are small, but strikingly beautiful: almost white with densely scattered small spots. She noticed me, watched for a few seconds with her bright yellow eyes - I still remember this picture vividly - and continued to drink from the creek. Then she slowly went away. A month later she got killed. She was walking over parked cars at a local motel, and was shot by a soldier from some big city who happened to be passing by. For obvious reasons, soldiers in Israel usually carry their rifles loaded.
Etienne and I also explored some little-known canyons further south - no less beautiful, but without permanent water sources - and all three makhteshim. Makhteshim are huge tectonic depressions in Negev, resembling volcanic craters. The most scenic is Lesser Makhtesh, about one kilometer in depth and diameter. Geologists go crazy there. Israelis believe that the makhteshim are unique to their country, but I've seen them in other places. Yor Oilan Duz depression in Turkmenistan, for example, is a typical makhtesh.
One of the "craters" was chosen as the release site for Hai Bar onagers - the first successful reintroduction project outside the reserve. Beni was dreaming about brining African wild asses to another makhtesh, but had to get their number to at least twenty before that.
The first thing we saw back in Hai Bar was our friend the wolf. Shlomi was just giving him a second ear tag. The animal looked rested, its paws in good condition, as if it hitchhiked back instead of walking. Nearby was a dead body of a newborn oryx, its belly cut open by the wolf.
Cursing, Toni put the villain back in the trunk and drove off. I suspected that he was going to shoot him in some remote place, but underestimated his honesty.
Nights were getting colder. At dawn, clouds could be seen far to the north. Our old leopard was still calling every night, her voice growing more and more passionate. I kept putting chickens on my porch every evening, and they always disappeared by sunrise. I got very tanned and very fit from daily pitchfork exercise. At night I explored canyons above the reserve. Sand was hard enough there for my bicycle, although I had to patch tire holes every morning: too many acacia thorns. Those magic nights were full of wonderful encounters in silvery moonlight. Mating rituals of rare and mysterious Blanford's foxes, Hume's owl catching a horned viper, horrible fight of two male hyenas over a female - life and death of ghostly creatures, clinging to dry, inhospitable land of thorns and rocks.
This time it was Aila who found the next victim. She noticed red-necked ravens circling, and went to investigate. Sobbing, she carried the tiny body into the office. It was a baby gazelle, still wet after birth. Used to easy hunting, the wolf killed it for fun, but didn't eat.
"Toni," I said, "the spring is coming. This couple will have cubs. If we don't shoot the male, they'll stay here and kill all newborns."
Toni said nothing, and got the traps out of his safe.
Shlomi and I put them in the trunk and drove away. It took a while to set the traps: by the time we were driving back, the sun had already set. Suddenly we noticed a cloud of dust behind the trees. Something was moving fast across our tracks. Shlomi stepped on the gas, the jeep jumped forward, broke through some tamarisk bushes, and we saw them. A hundred meters ahead, the pregnant African wild ass mare was chased closely by two wolves.
I'm not a hunter. If you spend your life studying wild animals, killing one of them feels like shooting a friend. And I like large predators the most. But I had no choice. All three were already disappearing behind bushes. I took a rifle from the back seat, and shot the male. I was aiming at his shoulder, but the jeep bounced, and the bullet hit his neck. He rolled over his head. The female was so busy with the chase, she didn't even look back. I reloaded, but she braked, looked at us, and turned in the opposite direction.
"Shoot, nu?!" shouted Shlomi in Hebrew. But I knew only the second word, and wasn't going to shoot anyway.
The male was dead, two tags still in his ear.
"We say I shot," Shlomi switched back to English. "You, they fire. Me, OK."
Everybody knew Shlomi was the driver, but nobody wanted to investigate. A few border guards had heard the shot, and arrived to check what was going on. We took them to the hole in the fence, and found the female there - she got trapped when trying to get out of the reserve. They took her to the Egyptian border and released on the other side of the wire. The male got buried in a hole that had been dug in front of the office two years earlier - nobody remembered what for.
I have to admit that killing that wolf made me feel worse than shooting a few bandits on one occasion (they attacked a truck caravan I was hitching a ride with in Inner Mongolia). Verses from The Jungle Books, that I once had a chance to translate to Russian, got stuck in my head.
What of the hunting, hunter bold?
Brother, the watch was long and cold.
What of the quarry ye went to kill?
Brother, he crops in the jungle still.
Where is the power that made you pride?
Brother, it ebbs from my flank and side.
Where is the haste that ye hurry by?
Brother, I go to my lair to die.
Only Beni's return brought me back on track. He arrived with a fresh load of news, jokes and interesting stories, and threw a party the same evening. I waited for Anka to come. She did - slim, pretty, in the same silk shirt tied in a knot over her belly, a mini skirt and a bikini top. But when I greeted her, she replied coldly, and pretended not to notice me for the rest of the evening.
Well, there are lots of girls who don't like me. I have a weird sense of humor, strange personality, and scary lifestyle. Any smart girl would be cautious with a guy like me. But such a sudden change seemed unreasonable. When the party was over, I asked Beni if he had some inside information.
"No," he said, "but what did you expect? Emigrant syndrome, the desire to make it in a new country at any cost. That's how it is usually manifested in women."
"How?" I still didn't understand.
"Anka's legs make you stupid. All immigrant women dream about local men. Some dump their husbands they'd been married to for ten years, and chase the first Israeli male within reach. What, you didn't know?"
"Of course I did, but what does it have to do with..."
"Just look at yourself! No home, no money, no paid job, face looks Arab with this tan... Naturally, she tries to stay away from you."
"But last time..."
"She was drunk. Uncontrollable secretion of vaginal lubrication, aggravated by suppression of negative reflexes..."
When Beni is a bit tipsy, he tends to explain everything in biological terms. You have to get used to it. But I have to admit, his biological explanations, no matter how cynical, are often very convincing.
Next day I was terrified to discover that I was thinking about Anka once every few minutes. I was desperate. Nothing can be worse than unilateral love, especially to someone like me - easily carried away. Soon I realized that the only way out of this situation was to get what I wanted at any cost.
Beni informed me that from that day on, I was to have lunch and dinner at his place.
"You look sad," he declared. "Chewing on year-old ostrich eggs isn't good for you."
I said nothing, but noted to myself that some Hai Bar employees had tongues longer than an ostrich's neck.
"But don't you think I'm gonna feed you for free," he warned. "You are still here? Go get some meat!"
I walked out of his kitchen, crossed the parking lot, got a few boxes of fruit and vegetables from the reserve's refrigerator, cut off a frozen gazelle's leg, and brought it all to Beni.
"That's more like it," he said. "Chin up! We're going to a kibbutz tomorrow!"
Beni's adventures in all of Arava kibbutzes were legendary in Hai Bar, so I could hardly wait for the next evening. Kibbutz Yotvata was only five kilometers from my place, or seven from Beni's. To my surprise, we were greeted not by a flock of nymphomaniacs, but by some modest-looking people. Beni's girlfriend was a cute girl from Moscow, an engineer in her past life, who now worked as a post office clerk. Two other Beni's friends, Alex and Kathy, were an unusual couple. Alex was a doctor. He emigrated from Leningrad to Texas in the 1980-s, and married a beautiful daughter of his boss, chief of a local hospital. Imagine his horror when his young wife decided she was a Zionist, and insisted that they move to a kibbutz in Negev!
"I don't mind," he told us when Kathy went to the kitchen. "I was a doctor there, I'm a doctor here. Kathy is not a manager of a pharmaceutical factory any more, she is in charge of a cow-house here. But that's her choice. The important thing is, we still have US citizenship. If we have children, they, too, will be Citizens of the United States of America!"
It was difficult to imagine Kathy as a factory manager. She didn't look like a cow-house supervisor, either. But it was obvious she was a Texan: she was wearing a cowboy shirt and a pair of jeans, cut to shorts.
After dinner Beni and his girlfriend disappeared, leaving me to maintain an extremely interesting discussion about the differences between menstrual and estral cycles in higher primates. Suddenly Kathy got up and looked at her watch.
"OK, guys, you have to go now," she said. "Vovi, you'll have to walk five miles if you miss your bus. And Alex won't get to Jerusalem at all if he misses his."
Then, to my admiration, she put on a real cowboy hat, which looked great with her gray eyes and short chestnut hair. She took a garbage bag, and went with us to the bus stop. I remembered that my bus was to arrive twenty minutes after the one for Jerusalem, but didn't yet realize the importance of that fact. Kathy was living in a fast lane. The moment the double-decked bus carrying Alex to Jerusalem had disappeared behind a curve, she quickly looked around and hugged me.
"The bus for Eilat will be here soon," she said, "let's go home. I don't want us to be seen together."
But we didn't make it into the house. As soon as we were inside their fence, she pulled my arm, and we fell on lush grass under a palm tree.
"Wow!" I thought. "What if my child will be the Citizen of the United States of America?"
Night was a bit cool, so Kathy didn't allow me to take off her shirt, only the shorts. I didn't like it, besides, cold dates were falling on my back all the time from the palm, so eventually I carried her inside. I couldn't find the light switch and the bed in the dark, but we found the carpet and spent the night on it. Kathy's body was firm, but tender, and her tongue was agile like a little fish. She was very active, and I wasn't lazy ever, so mock fighting for the choice of position took us more time than sex itself. I especially liked stroking her short hair while she was performing a Lewinsky on me. By dawn, we reached such mutual understanding that I felt I was about to become a Zionist.
Back at work, our colleagues looked suspiciously at Beni's and my faces, but didn't say anything, at least in our presence.
Etienne left that day. I'm still waiting for him to send me a copy of a photo he got with my help: two white oryxes fencing in a cloud of dust.
When Beni and I were alone, I asked him what it was all about.
"If you could see the Moldavian girl Alex has in Jerusalem," he said, "you wouldn't be surprised he doesn't pay his wife much attention."
"But Kathy, she is so..."
"So, shmo, it's all irrelevant. He doesn't like her job. Would you like to have sex with a cow-house supervisor every day of your life?"
I was not a snob, I didn't mind. It couldn't be every day, but a few times I found Kathy's red Ford parked at my cabin. I tried to clean the room, even decorated it with Loranthus flowers and ostrich feathers, but it still wasn't a kind of place to invite a factory manager in.
However, it was perfect for sex with a cow-house supervisor.
Kathy always left before dawn. I rolled up my sleeping bag and walked to work through quiet savanna, while black eyes of gazelles were watching me from tree shadows.
Morning-Song of the Jungle
Translated from Rudyard Kipling
| One moment past our bodies cast No shadow on the plain; Now clear and black they stride our track, And we run home again. In morning-hush, each rock and bush Now horn and pelt our peoples melt Now, stark and plain, Man's oxen strain, Ho! Get to lair! The sun's aflare By day made strange, the woods we range The dew is dried that drenched our hide, The traitor dark gives up each mark |
Пока ночь темней, не видно теней Под кроной густых ветвей. Светлей каждый миг, и вот он возник - Бегущий за мной двойник. В тумане холмы, черны и немы, Скользя по земле, мы таем во мгле: А люди, пыля, выводят в поля Хо! Солнце взошло, и стало светло Подсохла роса, и птиц голоса А над головой зеленой листвой Цветы чуть шуршат, раскрыться спешат, |