Moonstruck In Mountain Zebra

There’s a large slice of mountain wilderness just outside Cradock in the Eastern Cape Karoo where night skies, wide-angle landscapes and very special zebras are the main attractions.

- Chris Marais

We’re part of a small visitor group in a game-drive vehicle led by field guides Richard Okkers and Des Naidoo, crossing the Mountain Zebra National Park in search of a collared cheetah called Mabula. He’s a large fellow for a lightweight big-cat species and has been known to pull down a fearsome black wildebeest or two in his time here.

However, I can’t keep my eyes off the blasted heath that these park lowlands have become in recent months. The crippling Karoowide drought has simply dragged on, from season to season.

But just look at these baby bokkies we pass on our hopeful way to a cheetah encounter – newly-minted red hartebeest and springbok all over the show. The local lore says buck don’t give birth for nothing. They know rain is coming. Never mind all those dodgy weather forecasts, ask the ungulates. They know what’s what.

Cheered by this, I join the Lost Patrol in its single-file march across the dry country, following a slightly eccentric, bleeping signal that should link us to Mabula somewhere down the line.

Fields of scattered ironstone shards clink tunefully like wind chimes as we trudge over them. We seem to be heading for Salpeterkop, where British soldiers once played chess by heliograph with other mad dog Englishmen ensconced in the steeple of the Cradock Moederkerk.

I just hope the cheetah isn’t parking off all the way up there, because none of us really feels like climbing in this heat. Besides, I can’t stop yawning. That’s because I’ve been up most of the night, star-struck by the skies above our mountain cottage that lies cradled deep in the dolerite bosom of the Bankberge, the spine of this great national park.