Tales from a Young Vet: Mad cows, crazy kittens, and all creatures big and small. Jo Hardy

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ we had a lot of fun.

      When I got back home I missed South Africa, so when Jacques got in touch a couple of weeks later to say that he and his friend Daniel were taking a trip up to Kruger National Park and would I like to come along, I didn’t hesitate. I blew my savings on a ticket and six weeks later I returned. One of the other volunteers, an American girl called Abby, had been travelling round Europe and Jacques invited her, too.

      South Africa is enormous, many times bigger than the UK, and people there drive huge distances without even thinking about it. Johannesburg is a fifteen-hour drive from the reserve where Jacques was living. He and Daniel drove up to meet us at the airport and then we drove for another four or five hours up to Kruger National Park in the north east. One of the largest game reserves in Africa, Kruger covers over 7,500 square miles. Abby and I had the perfect companions as Jacques and Daniel were both qualified guides, and we spent two weeks watching the game and the extraordinary landscape. We ate rusks and drank coffee for breakfast, drove all day and set up camp at night, sitting round the fire barbecuing steak and drinking shots of Jägermeister that Jacques kept in a freezer in the back of his car.

      One night we heard something banging about among our pots and pans. Jacques unzipped the tent, saw a hyena a few feet away, rapidly zipped it back up and told us what was going on. I was so glad we all slept in one big tent – on my own I’d have been terrified. As it was I was still pretty nervous. Hyenas are large, carnivorous and have incredibly powerful jaws that could chew your arm off without much trouble.

      ‘I’m going to stay here in the middle of the tent away from the sides, OK?’ I said nervously, looking at Jacques who was reaching for the zip again. ‘Maybe you should come away from the door.’

      Jacques laughed. ‘Don’t be a wimp. It’s not going to get in the tent. I’ll scare it off.’

      ‘What?! No, don’t …’ but it was too late. Jacques had stuck his head out of the tent and was shouting and waving at the hyena, which after turning to snarl at him, ran off across the campsite.

      ‘You’re crazy!’

      ‘That hyena knew it couldn’t take me on,’ he said with a wink. I shook my head and went back to bed. Jacques really was a man of the bush and completely fearless.

      After the camping trip I stayed in Jacques’ staff house back at the game reserve. He went back to working with volunteers and I got a voluntary job with a local company breeding horses and running horse trails. I helped with breaking in some of the sturdy young Arab horses and led groups of tourists on trails along the stunning sand dunes and wide, sandy beaches of the Eastern Cape.

      One afternoon I was asked to ride one of the newer horses, a stallion, to help one of the trail leaders take a group of people out. The horse I was on kept acting strangely, shaking its head and hesitating. As we went to descend a large sand dune the horse lost its footing and fell, trapping my leg under it. We slid down the sandy bank until we hit a tree, at which point my left leg was trapped between the horse and the tree. I tried to get the horse to move, but it was unresponsive. I had to wait until the group leader, Jono, came back to find me and got the horse to its feet, freeing my leg.

      By the next day my leg was black and I couldn’t feel much below my knee. I saw a doctor, but there wasn’t a lot to be done. I had severe soft-tissue bruising and nerve damage, and it would take time to recover. I would just have to wait and see if the sensation in my leg returned.

      After a few days the bruising was healing and some of the feeling had returned, though my leg never completely recovered. Bored with being stuck in the house, I went back to work, where I discovered that the horse I had been riding was going blind. No one had realised until our accident.

      A couple of weeks later I began to feel feverish and nauseous, and I ached all over. Another trip to the doctor confirmed that I had tick bite fever, caused by a bite from the tiny pepper tick. They’re so small that you don’t even realise you have one on you. The bite looks like a mosquito bite, and that’s what I thought the innocent-looking mark on my hip was, until after a few days it had developed a brownish-black ulcerated scab that looked anything but innocent.

      I felt so ill I thought I was dying but Jacques was relaxed about it. He’d had it several times and he knew the drill – antibiotics, lots of rest, fluids and time do the trick. He looked after me and reassured me that the first time you get it is the worst.

      I looked at him in horror. I couldn’t imagine having to go through it all over again.

      I stayed for two months, working, lazing in the sun and spending time with Jacques. He was an Afrikaner and Afrikaans was his first language, though he spoke perfect English. He was into hiking and camping, cricket and rugby, and he cooked up a mean braai (Afrikaans for barbecue). But he was also thoughtful, concerned about animals and conservation, and bright; he was about to start a Masters degree in Environmental Management. Like me, he loved books, but while I enjoyed a good novel, Jacques preferred to spend hours poring over books on geology, the environment and wildlife. He had a thirst for knowledge and a passion for animals, and I really liked that about him.

      I knew I couldn’t possibly get involved with someone so far from home, especially not when I was just about to go to vet college and start a whole new phase of my life. So we became great friends and spent our evenings talking under the stars. Romance didn’t happen until a year later, when I went back to do a work placement with Jono’s horse trails company at the end of my first year of college. We were expected to get in some work experience every summer, so it was the perfect excuse to head back to South Africa.

      Jacques invited me to stay with him again and one weekend, when he took the gap-year volunteers camping, I went along. We camped by a river and swam under the full moon. It was wonderfully romantic until Jacques insisted I stopped being a wimp about cold water, and picked me up and threw me into the deeper water. As I came up from under the water I glared at him, but he was just laughing, and I couldn’t help laughing, too.

      The next evening we all gathered for drinks in a tree-house that hung suspended in a huge tree in between Jacques’ house and the house where the volunteers stayed. As everyone drifted off to bed Jacques and I were the only two left listening to the sound of the cicadas and the distant grunts of a lion. And that’s when we looked at one another and realised that, no matter what the obstacles might be, we were kidding ourselves thinking that nothing could ever happen over long distance. We were perfect for each other and crazy about each other.

      Four years on we were still together. In fact, I couldn’t imagine wanting to be with anyone else. Jacques was studying for his Masters alongside work, he’d got the university job and I was on the last leg of my training. Between us we had criss-crossed the world many times, visiting one another, meeting each other’s families and getting to know our very different cultures.

      As soon as I got back home after each visit I started saving for my next air ticket and planning my next trip. But inevitably it could only be a handful of times a year and there were key moments in each other’s lives that we missed.

      This time I was combining my visit to Jacques for a short holiday with a work placement. College always encouraged us to get experience abroad and they were very happy to let me do some of my extra-mural weeks in South Africa.

      I had been taken on by Thys, an old Afrikaner vet, deeply tanned with a white beard and an accent so strong I couldn’t always understand him. I had first contacted him the previous year, when I’d emailed several vets working in the area where Jacques lived, but only Thys replied, warmly inviting me to go and work with him. That summer I flew out to see Jacques and met up with Thys, who immediately took me under his wing and treated me like a daughter. He called me Jo the Englishman, СКАЧАТЬ