Conversation With a Jackal
From a South African bush camp
The Jackal’s call strikes. Outside my bush tent a. Crack. Of bones shattered by scavengers and my vagabond voice pines for past conversations. Stars, I cannot see through my tent, burn like a million fireflies. Again, the Jackal sunders the shadowy silence. A female. Only kin will answer her call. I thirst for rejoining the Jackal’s call. To rummage the underbrush like the rebels outside my tent, as my lonely voice rattles my skull’s iron bars under the firefly stars. The Jackal calls in solacing sound waves. I will answer you! The trapped voice finally escapes my mouth like a million fireflies.
The jackal in the picture is a Black-backed jackal, which is spread across southern and eastern Africa. Last Summer I stayed in a bush camp on Dabchick reserve for an anti-poaching course with the reserve-owner Les Brett. The camp was not fenced — at night animals roamed in and out. We were the visitors to their territory, not they to “ours”. One night I heard a few scavengers —probably hyenas — right outside my bush tent. They were cracking bones and feasting on some leftover prey.
At night, the sky lit up with a sea of stars as far as the eye could reach. The bonfire’s sparks soared off into the darkness. It seemed as if each of those sparks turned into a star in the sky. That’s when the jackals started calling. Every night, like a reassuring lullaby. Their call is a solitary call and is easily distinguishable by fellow jackals — it is only answered by the jackal’s mate or kin. During the time in the bush, I needed somebody to talk to, but there was nobody. This flash fiction piece captures that sense of loneliness and the need to merge with nature, to converse with it.
“The bonfire. That’s my TV. And when the animals start calling. That’s my harp.” — Les Brett
It’s the wild — not the city — that we are made for.
