Here Comes Treble: Musical Trunks
...For a while we sat watching a cheetah prowling in the thin shade of a thorn-tree. Later and a few kilometres further on, two rhinos lumbered slowly to a dam where they bent to drink from their reflections, while a pair of hippo yawned widely a few feet away from them, open mouths glowing red in the setting sun...
Isabel Bradley vividly conveys the wonders of the African bush.
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Marion, Roland and I sat in the back of the Landrover, carefully driven through the African bush by our ranger, guide and friend, Daniel. At the end of winter, the bush was as dry as tinder, trees displayed bare branches and twigs, bushes were naked and the grass was beige and crisp to the touch. The air was perfumed and hazed with golden dust.
For a while we sat watching a cheetah prowling in the thin shade of a thorn-tree. Later and a few kilometres further on, two rhinos lumbered slowly to a dam where they bent to drink from their reflections, while a pair of hippo yawned widely a few feet away from them, open mouths glowing red in the setting sun. One of the hippos opened its mouth so wide that it lost its balance and rolled over with a mighty splash, fat feet waving in the air for an amusing moment before it righted itself. If a hippo could look sheepish, that was definitely a candidate.
In the dark we tracked a lioness, a ‘teenaged’ male lion and two cubs. The male lay down for a while and the cubs rubbed their heads under his chin and purred and prowled around him. They ambled down to the ford where the river crossed the road and hunkered down to drink before moving away into the bush, vanishing like pale shadows in the moonlit grasses.
There were beautiful antelope: kudus with lovely, translucent pink ears and majestic spiral horns, water-buck with white-painted derričres which seemed to have sat on white toilet-seats and dainty little klipspringers that bounded on tip-toes from rock to rock on the mountain-sides. There were black-backed jackal that melted into the bush at the sound of our vehicle. A one-tusked warthog, beautiful only to his mother, posed in front of a small cave for us to photograph him.
On this trip we saw no giraffe, or, surprisingly elephant. The last four or five times we’ve visited our home in the bush, we’ve seen copious herds of elephant, sometimes almost too many, particularly when they’ve been browsing comfortably between us and the lodge, keeping us away from our own supper for an hour or more.
Unfortunately, elephant populations in all of the game reserves in South Africa are growing to unsustainable numbers. As a result, young elephants can’t be sold to other reserves, culling is discouraged and it seems there is no way to curb their enthusiastic breeding. Management at the private game reserve where we hold a small share decided they would sterilise the elephant cows and a week before we arrived, rangers had been rounding up the elephants with the aid of a helicopter. By the time we arrived at the reserve, all the elephants were traumatised by the sound of engines, and were hiding in the deep forest regions of the reserve.
While we missed the elephants, that didn’t stop us from talking about them. “Their trunks are the most amazingly sensitive and useful body parts!” Roland exclaimed. “When we were in India, I was standing with a group of friends, wearing a garland of flowers. Imagine how startled I was when this trunk appeared over my shoulder and gently plucked a flower from the garland, then conveyed it to its mouth. It ate every flower, plucking each one with the most amazing delicacy. It was soft to touch, but muscular, and the amount of control the elephant had over it was amazing. The trunk has protuberances at its end which behave a bit like fingers.”
Roland and Marion are both wonderful musicians. Roland plays three instruments, unfortunately not all at once: the French horn, the clarinet and the bassoon. Marion is an acomplished pianist. In this context, Roland continued, “Wouldn’t it be useful if all musicians were born with trunks… maybe not as long as elephants’ trunks, perhaps – but imagine if they were long enough to turn pages when you’re playing music?” We had a good chuckle.
A few days later, back home in the city, we put our suggestion of trunks for musicians to the other members of our wind quintet. Jack was most enthusiastic and thought of another use: “We could use it as a sort of descant trumpet to play duets with ourselves.”
Oh, if only the elephants knew their possibilities as musicians…
Until next time…. ‘here comes Treble!’
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by Isabel Bradley
