We figured if she’d been someone’s pet, there was a chance she had been dumped or lost. Even though she wasn’t interested in coming to us, we knew again that we couldn’t leave her there. She was in a completely inhospitable section of bush, in a gully with cliff face and hectares of national park on one side, and a scrubby, rocky, unscaleable bank up to a busy road on the other. There were also no houses within at least a 5 km radius, and no obvious way for her to make her own way out of the gully. We saw her podgy little rump disappear into the lantana, giving us no other option than to wade in after her. Because the scrub was so thick we lost sight of her. Occasionally we could hear her bashing her way up the bank, and eventually we spotted her around 10 meters up, laying low in the thick undergrowth. We approached from 3 sides, to try to keep her from escaping again. When we crept up to her hiding spot, we saw that she’d made herself a little dugout in the bank, and she’d even made a tunnel through the lantana, down to the waterhole.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18