Fire burns and it turns everything it touches to dust. After my four-hour fight I was left with second-degree burns on my arms and face, a good amount of my arm hairs were singed and my clothes covered in ash. Burnt life filled my lungs and I had fumed of smoke. Completely unprepared to fight a fire yesterday I now have a pair of burnt nike sneakers. The bottoms of both shoes look as though they were ready to be placed into smores.

The call came in at noon that there was a fire at the main gate, as I went to help I noticed the black and grey smoke high in the sky was coming from an area much closer than anticipated, the fire in the matter of minutes had reached the cattle grid a good half mile away from the main gate. There were five people battling it before we arrived and in the game vehicle with me two more. I noticed that all they were using was large branches.  There was only one person in the Pygmy Hippo enclosure so I jumped out and ran to a Mountain Karee tree. I stripped the biggest branch I found then tied my shirt around my face and began to beat out the fire left, right and all around me. The fire was three meters in height and a good hundred or two hundred feet wide in the enclosure. The power of the flames pushed me back every ten seconds and I pushed my self toward it forcefully, battling to fight through the cremating heat. The embers kept rising strongly and burnt my eyes, I felt the scorching heat embrace my body as the flames grew, taking all the oxygen around me to fuel it. My main concern was for the fire not to spread deeper near the tall dry reeds in the dried wetland near Stoffel and Matilda’s favorite sleeping spots, if it did. Resistance would be futile.  (Stoffel & Matilda, two Pygmy Hippos).

Luckily Earnest had two fire extinguishers with him and it mitigated the spread of the fire in the hippo camp. A large patch of bamboo was up in flames and it was impossible to come close to it or to beat it out with a branch, so I began to stomp out the small embers that were spreading and heading to the dry bead of spear grass. Ernest ran towards the bamboo patch with the extinguisher and as he sprayed the living hell out of that fire, he yelled with pent up anger. The fire extinguishers were used up in a matter of seconds and the camp was saved, the embers dwindled down and the patch of burning bamboo smoked to an end.

I ran to the opposite side of the camp into the reserve where the fire had begun to grow and creep up close to the lodge. As I ran I stepped on an Acacia branch and a three-inch thorn went through my melted sneaker into the bottom of my foot. I stopped to take off my shoe and remove the thorn, happy to have pulled it out without a break that could have left the tip wedged in the ball of my foot. When I looked up I found myself surrounded by the fire on three sides and at this point I knew that if I did not leave that immediate area I would be caught in the last hardest place I would find myself in. Thick patches of dried grass, dead Acacias and heaps of antelope species shit all caught fire. The screaming and popping of the dead plants deafened me; the burnt remnants of the all that was living rose into the air as ash and spread across the sky and settled on everything near. My lungs felt heavy and my eyes were scorched from the heat of the flames and the glare of the sun.

I continued to beat out flaming bush by bush, being careful to throw my branch in the opposite direction of the wind battling to contain the fire and not spread it to all the dead tall grass and piles of shit. Help was need! It was me and some staff from the kitchen, house keeping, and a handful of men from the farm. Stoffel our farmer had given most of his men the day-off; they are usually the experienced men for this type of job and would have added at least several more people. But those of use who battled did so profoundly and made sure that this fire was controlled and stopped before it reached anywhere near the lodge. Glenis, our general manager was trying to encourage us by telling us yesterday that a near by lodge was burnt to the ground, we continued fighting with all we had. She was then nice enough to bring us water. But never once did she probably think to get out of the game vehicle and help us fight the fire.

Stoffel finally came back with his truck that had in its bed a generator filled with water, an African fire-fighting machine. Nothing more than a hose but damn was I happy to see it. One of the farm workers was in the back of the truck with the hose. He was spraying the grass separating us from the fire, wetting it to make sure that it would not catch a blaze.  All that could be seen after were small embers in burnt up patches on the black land all around. Heaps of broken branches and tall grass beds were burnt to a crisp and left a bone colored impression of incinerated life on a black canvas.

The fire had damaged fence lines, many young trees, a roadside, and my skin. No animals were harmed; in the process of fighting Hades. I was most afraid of a snake coming around me trying to escape a wall of fire. I think its safe to say that most of them are still underground. Approximately 4 to 5 hectares had burnt, most of the land belong part to a scattered highveld forest savannah and the Hippo camp had less than a couple hundred feet of damage. A dead tree now cremated flakes away and the patch of bamboo looks rustic with burnt lines branded deep into the wood.