I was staying with Susan on her sheep farm near Carnarvon, Northern Cape, when she told me over an arrival sundowner that she had had her first success in catching a lamb-killing caracal the previous day. For months she had placed cage traps in different locations on her 8 000 ha property without success. All the baits had been scavenged by mice and other small creatures but now she felt she had the right formula; lynx tracks in a rocky kloof and a tin foil attractor, or a hanging CD, as bait. And a little caracal urine. Unlike jackals, caracal are curious and will enter the cage to inspect the reflecting foil. She was hopeful of more success.
What really got my attention was that there had been a knock on the kitchen door early that previous evening with an urgent request for naeltjies (cloves) from Martie, her house maid and cook. The farm workers were cooking the young rooikat that they had caught in the morning, and cloves were an essential ingredient in their recipe! (They swear that rooikat tastes like chicken, which might be true when you consider how tough the roosters scratching the hard dry cold wind swept farm yard might be.)
Susan occasionally hires the services of professional jackal hunters for predator control but the main form of defence for the lambs is an anti-jackal scent that is sprayed onto the ewes and lambs; in other words, good flock and veld management, and not only predator destruction, are the key to better lamb survival rates.
Dorper lambs being sprayed with jackal repellant.
This lamb has lost its mother and will be bottle fed.
The next day I was dropped off in the veld for a springbok hunt and when the truck returned I saw that they had caught another much larger rooikat. We also had a few springbok and so there was joy all round. This caracal would hang for a few days before going into the pot. The skins were in salt, and when there were enough, they would be made into a kaross for a king-size bed! Nothing goes to waste in this harsh land.
Susan and Dirk inspect the lynx trap.
The trap.
A little lynx urine helps.
Early one morning I interrogated the senior farm hand, Isak, about their recipe for rooikat sop, while he was refilling the 2 m long kitchen stove, an Esse, with coal. I still didn't really believe that they ate these animals so my question was rather tongue in cheek but he didn't see it that way and gave me a matter of fact, serious reply. "We cook the meat until it is soft, take it off all the bones, grind it fine, and cook it with onions and cloves...." There you have it. I did not try it but might bring a leg home next time for Connie to try.
Susan and I, with the help of farm hands Isak, Dirk and Arrie, had a very special springbok hunt on the last afternoon. Now, Susan does not fit the image of your average Karoo sheep farmer, and she turns heads whenever she goes to town, and also in Cape Town and Germany where she lives for a short period of the year. She is tall, dark and shapely and has lived for 30 years as a model and mother in Europe but has now returned to the farm where she grew up, to personally take charge of the sheep farming and renew the whole operation after the retirement of her father. I did not realise that between boarding school in Cape Town, university in Stellenbosch and living in Europe that she had never shot a springbok, any buck. Only farm yard mossies (sparrows). I had assumed, when she put two shots with my .308 Win into the bull of the target that I had set up against the dam wall, that she was an old hand.
Her staff laughed loudly (behind her back as she was inside) when I told them, as they sat on the back of the truck, that she would get a springbok that afternoon. They had no idea that she had been practising on a range near her home in Germany in preparation for buying a .243 Win in South Africa.
We set out to spray the last of the lambs for the week and I then dropped Susan and Isak off to try and intercept a springbok herd on foot while I drove the truck keeping the buck on the move. The camps are huge, kilometres across, and it is easy for the buck to disappear out of sight; and they seldom come closer than 300 m. I had given up all hope of success, as the sun had just set and all the buck had evaporated, when I was told that a shot had been heard. A while later I saw through the gloom with my binoculars a springbok being hoisted onto the shoulders.
Isak was particularly pleased as it had been a clean shoulder shot, taken from my shooting sticks, with minimum meat damage. Susan pulled this off with no PH or guiding help to advise her on the shot! It was her hunting instinct and practise on the range.
I hastily took a photograph in the fast darkening gloom. The result is an unposed, dishevelled and happy huntress caught completely in the moment of the action of a first time experience. It was only after taking this picture that she said that this was her first buck. And it shows!
Susan with her first buck. Vaalkop camp, Witgras, 31 July 2014.
We celebrated that night! And so ended an exceptionally enjoyable Karoo trip.
shf 3/8/14
