After years of guiding at Londolozi, I no longer need a map to navigate the reserve as I did when I was a trainee ranger. I have it all mapped out in my head. I know which game paths lead to the sandy riverbeds, which drainage lines disappear into thick vegetation and which crests offer views across the landscape. I know the trees that stand beside certain corners and the places where animals seem to favour crossing the road.
A lone elephant bull peacefully feeding on the lush grass after the rains.
But somewhere along the way, something else happened.
The reserve became a memory palace. Almost every corner has a memory attached to it.
Sometimes it is an obvious one. There is a particular stretch of road where I remember finding The Nkoveni female with her tiny cubs. Another corner reminds me of a morning spent watching lions stalk a herd of impala. There are places where I can still picture wild dogs disappearing into the bushes where I couldn’t keep up or elephants standing quietly beneath a large mahogany tree on a hot summers day. Sometimes those aren’t necessarily the memories that come back first.
Sometimes it is something much smaller.
I remember stopping on a crest one afternoon and watching termite alates pour from a mound. Thousands of tiny winged termites emerged into the evening sky, while behind them the sun was dropping towards the Drakensberg mountains. Another place reminds me of an adult Burchell’s Starling feeding a young Great-spotted Cuckoo. It was a small moment, easily overlooked amongst the excitement of a game drive, but I remember it because of what I was watching. A bird had successfully raised a young cuckoo, despite the fact that the cuckoo had been raised in its nest.
Then some memories are impossible to forget. There is a particular area where I once got a flat tyre in the middle of a herd of more than a thousand buffalo. At the time, changing a tyre probably wasn’t quite as enjoyable as it sounds now. But years later, that road still carries the memory.
A spectacular sighting of a herd of Buffalo approaching a Waterhole at sunset.
This is what happens when you spend enough time in one wilderness. The landscape starts to become more than a collection of roads and landmarks. It becomes a map of experiences.
A fallen tree might remind me of a leopard sighting from five years ago. A bend in the road might take me back to a spectacular thunderstorm. A particular termite mound might remind me of an evening spent watching a pangolin moving through the grass. And sometimes I don’t even realise I am remembering something until I am back in that exact place.
That is one of the things I love about guiding. Every game drive is full of possibility. I can leave camp having no idea what the next few hours will bring. A leopard might be around the next corner. A herd of elephants could appear from the bush. We might follow tracks that lead nowhere. Or we might discover something completely unexpected.
But every drive is also a journey through everything that has happened here before. The reserve is constantly writing new stories over the old ones.
A place where I once watched a lioness with cubs might now be where I would go to find a family of dwarf mongooses. A tree that once held a leopard might now be fallen. An area that was quiet for years might suddenly become the centre of attention.
The landscape changes, and so do the characters within it. But the memories remain.
Perhaps that is why, after all these years, I still get excited when I turn a familiar corner. I know what has happened there before. But I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen there today.
And that is the wonderful contradiction of being a ranger or a tracker. Each game drive is both a trip into the unknown and a journey down memory lane.
You never know what each new day will bring.
This patch of wilderness has become an endless story that I get to return to every day. The animals stop becoming just sightings. They become the characters. And every road, riverbed, tree and rocky outcrop becomes another page of the story.
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on The Memory Palace of the Wild