Capture Game

We roll up on a carnival atmosphere. A handful of cooking fires smolder around a big water jo-jo. Hands in boxy green fatigues lounge in the shortening shade against semi-truck trailers drawn up in a half circle. Some smoke or play stones. A few nap. Tinny phone music crackles. Occasional bursts of laughter interrupt a lazy stillness.
Good thing we rushed here from camp, hoping to make it on time.
Hurry up and wait is a leitmotif here.
Dust puffs up underfoot like a splash of rainwater. It practically ripples, and the dry season has only just begun. Time to sell some game, or there won't be enough graze and browse for anyone. Thin the herds before nature does it first. The reservoir dams are already shrunken to shallow ponds.
The auction is days away. Farm life has woven itself around the weft of game capture. Anything not directly related has been postponed or foisted off short-straw style. By the time it's over, a couple-hundred wild but deeded animals will be captured, transported, and sold, transported to other reserves with smaller game populations or lusher groves. Or faster hunters. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud: a whole province of wilderness preserves, with rough-plaid patterns of two-tracks for hunters to quarter an area and walk in on quarry. The reality is, hunting has the interest and the money to keep the natural world alive, so it can kill its proud, aging individuals. Idealism just has volunteers.
A big semi trailer with window slits stands drawn up right to the boma ramp, ready to receive the animals.  Heavy green canvas sails angle off into the bush, half-again the height of the tallest worker inside. The setup is eerily similar to the opening scene of Jurassic Park. Good thing it's daytime.
We climb up one of the slatted semi trailers to get a view. Stamped bits of straw and manure line the sun-dappled wooden floor inside. Down on the ground, beyond the ramp, the rest of the boma sprawls like an arena inside thick green walls held taught with cables. More of the green-clad workers bask in the sun or repose in the narrow shade. Each sail stretches on for 300 meters, a giant funnel billowing faintly in the breeze, leading inexorably up the ramp into the long sturdy trailer.
One of the Hanley foremen stands near us, murmuring Afrikaans into a walkie-talkie and chuckling through big front teeth angled welcomingly like sideways dutch doors. The faint whup-whup of a helicopter approaches from the hill, chasing a herd of wildebeest our way. There's a crosswind. It's okay, but not ideal, he tells us. Yus, but it's better by far than a back wind, hey?
The workers inside rush to their stations. The helicopter roars into view, climbing and dipping, sideslipping back and forth like a gunship in a video game. The tail swings wide, skidding a semicircle. Suddenly a dozen wildebeest barrel through the bush along the canvas barriers. Men shout. Curtains clatter closed with a hiss along the funnel, and the animals' choices get narrower and narrower, until the boks crowd at the ramp entrance, jostling and bumping, puffing and blowing. Green sheets flap. Sweating workers bark and shout. The wildebeest bumble up the chute and bang into the trailer. The gate closes behind.
We blink.
A worker near us leans into the trapdoors in the trailer roof with a long cattle prod and separates the bulls from the babies and cows, poking them toward separate compartments. Workers outside slide bulkheads open and shut, cordoning the animals neatly and quickly. Kneeling next to the zapper, the farm owner leans in with a spring-loaded hypodermic spear with calming drugs. They barely jerk at the puncture. He scratches horns with the needletip to mark dosed animals.
Fresh dung on the floor. Hiss of frightened breath. Shit-smeared tails. Eyes wide with fear, scrambling away from the zap, blowing with relief when the doors slam shut, and nothing further happens. Breathing slows. Anxiety dims. One male shifts about in exasperation, flailing curved horns at the others' flanks and snorting madly. Before he can be sedated and separated, he starts tossing, hooking his horns at his companions. Lifts one frightened calf off his forefeet. We find out later the horntip pierced the little one through the heart. Collateral.
The trailer unhooks itself from the boma chute, and we all exhale with laughter as it rumbles off. Everyone settles into another interim rest period, and we move down toward the green canvas, limboing under taut cables and wandering into the funnel.
Prince meets us at the junction of one of the curtains. He's a young buck with smooth dark skin and a gleaming smile, fresh green fatigues rolled up at the sleeves. A red cowboy neckerchief nestles behind his lapels, and a crisp camo cap with a flat brim leans back casually on his head. He offers to teach us venda, watching us with bright eyes and tugging at one thick leather gardening glove. The foreman chuckles and rolls his r's at us. "Worry about your curtain, Prince. Then we'll see about teaching somefink."
Prince nods and backs up into his curtain, pulling the dusty thing around himself like a soft old cloak, winking and flashing a smile when the foreman wanders off. Then he cocks an ear toward the sky. The helicopter is airborne and approaching.
Prince explains that we must wrap ourselves in the curtain as the animals come through, so they don't see anything but plain green stretching forever into the chute. We must not make noise, or move around. Then, once they're past our station, we'll run with the rough curtain until it's shut, blocking the animals' escape to the rear. The whole funnel is sectioned off thus, with five parallel sets of bulkheads sliding along binding-wire rings on steel cables, meeting in the middle. All the way down the line, guys hide in their curtains. Bush-quiet settles. Behind us is a softly rustling dusty curtain. To our left a canvas wall disappears into the bush. Across the way another green barricade. Like being in a maze.
Enter the Minotaur.
A siren sounds overhead. The helicopter announcing its approach. More of the fancy sideways flying. Wrangling, rallying the beasts. The tail swings wide, and it completes an arc, darting forward and dipping low, swinging around again. Rotors a sharp blur above like a cowboy's lariat.
From farther up the funnel come shouts and whistles. Vala! vala! vala! in the distance. The helicopter swings away. Whistling, sharp slap of sticks on canvas, hoarse cries in the bush, raw adrenal fear channeled toward dauntless ferocity. Vala! vala! vala! closer. Dust roiling, wheet! wheet! Movement through the dust, scrambling men, whistles, shouts. A crowd of wildebeest, confused, scared, looking desperately for outs. Lurching, stamping, eyes wide to the whites, spittle flecked around mouths. We, wrapped in curtains, scrutinized by a gang of wild beasts. Wild eyes, whipping branches, yelling, banging our curtain. Prince bails. We shriek and holler, as they look at us, move closer, still confused. We clap our hands, slap our canvas, cowboy whoop hiiyah! They think better of it and curve through the opening a hairsbreadth from our ruddy cheeks. Vala! vala! vala! Run yank curtain closed, companions across the way sprinting toward us, meeting in the middle; slipping through, chasing them down the funnel yelling whistling beating branches down the narrowing aperture, past the next curtain—yanked closed—next one—vala!—rattling up the ramp into the trucks.
A restful sag in the adrenal aftermath, nice and easy while the workers tease Prince for fleeing. Younger and smaller than the rest, he takes it ruefully but in good humor. The others tell us he's just returned from a few months recovery time after an incident. We can only imagine. The trailer unhitches and moves away. In the shade of a boma wall, Andres sparks a spliff. I take a puff. He calls it swaz because supposedly it comes from Swaziland. The Afrikaaners call it daga, which seems about right since it rhymes with caca. Prince rolls one with a scrap of newspaper. I don't bother.
The sun shines bright overhead, pleasant against the winter breeze. It's a fleece-tossup sort of day. The excitement keeps us warm; the inactivity sends shivers and goosebumps.
Next up are gemsbok. If wildebeest are the defensive linemen of antelope, gemsbok are the crazy middle linebackers, with long straight horns as sharp and accurate as rapiers. They come in small groups or one at a time, not in easy big herds like the wildebeest. More angry; less nervous. Stories circulate about gemsbok stabbing shadows on the wall, goring workers standing outside the boma.
Next to the ramp is a small fire and a tall bundle of black pneumatic tubing cut to meter lengths. Once corralled in the ramp, the gemsbok will start getting violent. Each fatal accident costs tens of thousands. To prevent it, the hands will heat an end of the tube and tap it down over the deadly horns with a mallet, before hustling the antelope all the way on board. That means one will have to lean over the barricade and grab the evil-looking keratin lances one at a time. We shudder.
But we're not about to leave the fray.
A siren whoop! signals ready. Pre-game tension crackles through the boma. Everyone wraps up tight and peers into the bush. A pair of gemsbok dash out of nowhere, racing toward the chute. Vala! vala! vala! We run the curtain closed. Look around.
Easy.
But then, vula! vula! vula! Close? We did! No—vula! vula! Open! open! open! There's still one more gemsbok in the funnel.
Everyone scrambles.
Then nothing.
Turns out he's stuck at the apex of Curtain One, his back to the wall, unwilling to move. The hands throw rocks and sticks, beat at the canvas, shout, and don't come closer than five meters from the gemsbok. He stands calm, head on a swivel, gently tossing his head as if keeping his sword arms warm and loose.
Someone barks an order.
After a while two guys appear from the bush, carrying a heavy steel door with two shield handles. At the sight of the pushboard, the gemsbok trots casually away down the funnel calm-as-you-please. The vala! cries down the line are a bit bemused this time, not as frantic, though still cautious and quick.
From atop sturdy trees, we watch the gemsbok stop still again just a meter from where we had been standing with our curtain. Looking around, daring someone to come for him. We don't have the experience to help with this part. We've been banished to the best seats in the house. The pushboard appears again, and one of the hands gets behind it, stepping it closer and closer to the gemsbok. It makes gentle contact. The bok tenses. The hand shifts the board again. The animal clacks it experimentally with a horn. The man shifts again. The bok is tired, tongue lolling, lactic acid burning. He clacks the shield, harder. Another hand joins the pushboard. The first reaches over gingerly until he gets a hand on a horn. Two hands. The bok tenses to strike. The hand shrieks hoarsely in venda, staccato barks that could only mean, Get the fuck over here now! now! now! now! now! to his colleagues standing nearby watching. Three men join him on the horns. The fifth leans on the pushboard. The bok settles, panting, to his knees. He jerks his head, resisting, but only nominally. He's resting. Waiting.
The four men get to their feet, tugging at the horns. The bok resists. They pull. Muscles taut like ropes. He stands. Tongue hanging. Ribs a bellows. Snorting, mouth foaming. Rapid communication, hauling centimeter by centimeter toward the next curtain. Sweat glitters in the sun. Pushboard behind. Panting. Dust. They get him past the curtain, and the harsh chatter increases in tone and speed, five voices rasping to a crescendo, and they gingerly but quickly let go the horns and start slapping, kicking the snapped-shut canvas, renewed yelling, whistling madness. More hands inside slap and prod with thorny sticks, and the gemsbok finally clatters down the chute and up the ramp, where a pair of tubes are thrust onto his horns and pounded home. The fire-warmed plastic cools and shrinks around the horns, and the antelope is in the trailer amid his comrades. They stand relatively calmly in a warm bovine odor of farmland, frontier, and wild.
Another period of calm settles over, as the implacable sun makes its way toward the northwest horizon. Just another day of work in the bushveld.