Our ever-inventive criminals

There’s a new modus operandi in Hoedspruit this holiday season. Criminals are waiting for people to go out on game drives, then raiding their lodges. People generally don’t lock their doors, and even if they do it’s easy pickings, especially if you know they’re likely to be gone for two hours minimum to look up some lion’s bum.

It’s quite ingenious really. It also suggests, incidentally, that electric fences and the various dangerous species of African wildlife that live behind them bodily are no deterrent at all.

Yesterday evening the warden came around to tell us that our neighbours down the river had been hit. We’d seen them earlier, sitting on their Land Rover watching a pride of 16 lions (including a white lioness — you can see a photo of her here), all of us blissfully unaware that people were emerging from their hiding places in the riverine bush to help themselves to a few Blackberrys and wallets.

“This is what Hoedspruit criminals are doing now unfortunately,” said the warden — a skinny, unassuming man with a heavy Afrikaans accent. He sounded weary. He added that they were not armed and dangerous; “subsistence crime” he called it. (I thought back to last time I was here, when we met the reserve ecologist. He’d come to deal with a problem baboon that had broken into our kitchen and run off with the avocados. “This guy is a criminal,” he told us. “And you know how we deal with criminals here.” He gestured meaningfully with his rifle.)

The neighbours were targeted by the same group that had earlier broken into a camp on a neighbouring farm and stocked up on alcohol, that holiday essential; the same modus operandi as last year, said the assistant warden. This year they were clearly expanding their repertoire. They’d cased out our camp, too; our game guard Philimon had found their spoor earlier and, with his usual exquisite timing, pointed it out to us as we were leaving on a game drive. (As usual, everyone except me was all very casual, leaving wallets lying around and laptops for anyone to tuck under their arm. We left anyway, reasoning that the presence of Philimon’s wife would deter any passing thieves. In all the years we have been coming here, we have never locked anything except our bedroom doors at night, and that’s just to keep out the lions.)

I was the only one who had taken the precaution of locking my valuables away in a cupboard and bringing the key along with me; a form of risk management I’ve implemented for the past couple of years. I keep it on a lanyard along with a USB back-up of the novel I’m working on and my car keys. All of Land Rover’s vehicles are equipped with tracking devices, but the Mozambique border is not that far away and I’d really rather not have to confess that the thieves had taken the keys out of a house that is never locked when we are there.

The warden told us that the thieves had cut the fence at the Klaserie River and walked from there. Now, this part of the river is full of hippo right now. There’s that pride of 16 lion, a breeding herd of about 200 buffalo, several groups of bad-tempered buffalo bulls, itinerant elephant, leopards, hyena and who knows how many black mambas and cobras in that bush. The game drive thieves have evidently encountered none of these, despite walking through thousands of hectares, mostly at night. I’d be petrified of venturing 100 metres out of the camp in the dark, and they’re doing it without GPS or spotlights or, it would appear, a moment’s angst.

So much for the Big Five.