Bog Myrtle & Peat

I found a book this afternoon, and the world seemed to fall upon me. It’s been seventeen years since I saw it last, and that time has not been kind to the spine and the wrinkled cover. It looks like an old thing, but I remember buying it new in a shop near Ons Hoop in the bowl of the Limpopo river. I’d been in South Africa for a month, and I wanted to learn about the game and the wildlife of the bushveldt. But I’d asked so many questions of the people around me that I exhausted them. The time had come to do some reading and find answers for myself.

It’s not a great book. The photographs are small and the descriptions are very general, but it was my compass on long days in the veldt, many of which passed in complete solitude and isolation. I’d read the book and pore over the pictures, and it’s fun to find old fingerprints on some of the busiest pages – gritty little smears of sweat and grime in the most-turned corners.

It was almost an act of muscle memory to find a particular favourite – a small and single page devoted to:

Lesser Bushbaby : Galago moholi : Total Length 40cm

There’s a nice picture to go with the words. Someone had managed to take a photograph with a flash, and the poor little brute is wincing badly. But there he is, with his tail coiled up in a spool beneath him and his lugs turned in like dishes. He’s a fine little fellow, and if the world fell upon me to find that book, then time collapsed to see his face again.

I narrow my eyes, and for a moment I’m sitting in silence in the twilight and the thorns. My little house is five miles from the nearest human habitation, and night comes to the petering hum of doves and crickets. Bush air leans upon me; the smell of cracked sap and hot sand and the stars of the Southern Cross turning out of the sky like a prickle of pins. And in a moment of deafening stillness, there are bushbabies in the trees above my head.

I can’t see their eyes or the cup of their ears in that losing light. I can’t see anything but a crisp and puckish silhouette. And they come down without fear or confusion, almost within arm’s reach to snuff with queer enthusiasm at my smell of cigarette smoke and sweat. You could say it was scary at first; to find the night sprung with tiny, silent primates. But it held no worry for me; it seemed fine that the trees had come to life and sprites moved between them.

I think I could hold a bushbaby in my hand; I think it would cling to me as if I were a branch. I tell myself I can hear them pounce and glide around me, but it’s more like the sound of my hair growing. And they creep and spring as the night deepens, chewing sap and riding like sparks in the space between the trees.

The Boers call them nagaapie, which they say as “nach-aapie” – night monkey. I told my friend about them when he came, but he laughed and said they’re not important. It was hard to explain how they were changing everything for me. It became a ritual to lie out and wait for the bushbabies, and I couldn’t settle without having seen them. Sometimes I’d lie in bed and imagine them moving in silence around the house; weird and well-met creatures in the starlight.

Now I’m home again, six thousand miles and the best part of two decades away from the nearest bushbaby. The people I worked for and knew in South Africa have gone and their businesses are finished. Three of them have died, and they’re just the ones I know about. You couldn’t find a single person there who remembers me, and I hear that South Africa is a different place these days. There’s no going back, even if I wanted to. And I wonder if this book is really mine after all. Maybe it’s on loan from somebody else.