An athletic-looking dog that was once abused and has been in and out of the SPCA now guides hikers up a prominent mountain in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.
Some people still ask whether lean-looking Bella is properly fed, said owner Lyn Clelland, who manages the Everglades Hotel at the foot of 1 976m iNhlosane peak in the Dargle range.
“She has food available 24-7 but she won’t pick up weight.”
That’s no doubt because she runs 30km a day and, being a greyhound cross pointer, is an “absolute hunter”, said Clelland.
“She kills bunnies, monkeys, hadedas, eagles… one even had a mouse in its claw. She is an absolute hunter.”
Clelland said earlier in her life she had been tied up by one owner, and had been kept on a small property within a golf estate by another and kept getting out to chase players’ golf balls.
“This kind of dog needs a lot of space.”
Bella runs ahead of hikers, showing them which pathways to take to reach the top of the iNhlosane, first through a patch of plantation and then between rocks and cliffs on the steep slopes. Often she waits for the groups of people standing on a rock, like a statue on a plinth.
It is said that on an exceptionally clear day one can see the ocean from the top.
On New Year’s Day the 360º view offered the Wartburg area on one side and the southern Drakensberg on the other.
Among the hikers who accompanied Bella were the Davis family, from Johannesburg. The parents, Mike and Kelly, were on their way to the top to show their children Kennedy (10), Dean (5) and Weston (8) the spot where they had got engaged on New Year’s Eve, back in 2001.
Down in Merrivale, somewhere in the vast view from the summit, Jim and Liz Taylor recalled climbing the iNhlosane on a moonlit New Year’s Eve 10 years after the Davis’s engagement climb, watching New Year fireworks in Merrivale and Howick and a ferocious thunderstorm over Pietermaritzburg and Durban.
“We had been up for a day walk just before Christmas when it was stinking hot,” said Liz. “I said to Jim – would it not be nice at night?
“Back home I looked at the calendar and noticed it would be full moon over New Year and we decided to do New Year’s Eve up the iNhlosane.”
A storm disturbed the Taylors’ plans and they ended up at a party at the Lion’s River Country Club.
“As we left at about 10.30pm the sky had cleared.”
So, they returned to their Plan A.
“We had left it so late we could not reach the top by midnight. We sat on a rock.
“Down below we could pick out the fireworks in Howick, Howick West and in Merrivale,” Liz recalled.
“By then the storm had moved to Durban. We could see the lightening and clouds at the coast and we could work out that the storm was over Durban. It was an absolute panorama.”
Back to the present, the intense greenery of the Midlands may have something to do with the iNhlosane.
A high school journalism club in Mpophomeni township, beside Midmar Dam, late last year reported on a group of gogos climbing the iNhlosane to pray for rain.
It sure bucketed down in the months that followed.
The mountain is visible from many places – Midmar Dam, much of the Midlands stretch of the N3, Wartburg, Hilton College, Hilton village and along the R617 to Underberg.
The Dargle Local Website reported: “Apparently, during the Bambatha Rebellion in 1906, war cries chanted on the peak echoed for miles across the valley, curdling the blood of white settlers, no doubt. In 1945, a bonfire was lit on top of the mountain to celebrate the end of World War II.”
It added: “A stone wall runs along part of the ridge – we did wonder why it was built. By the Italian prisoners of war who built the other dry stone walls that criss-cross the Dargle hills? Or perhaps it was much earlier?”
A reader replied: “It would appear that most of them were built by British troops stationed in the area towards the end of the Anglo Boer War. The troops were awaiting their demobilisation after the war and they were put to work in this way to keep them busy until they were sent home.
“So they stand as sentinels of an era which truly changed SA and have endured for over 100 years now.
“As some of the troops were not farmers, some of the walls were not as well built as others and have almost disappeared back into the surrounding landscape. It is really a testament to those British farming stock soldiers that some of the walls are still extant today.”
Italian prisoners of war left other marks in the Dargle. They shaped steel poles into delicately-crafted lamp holders, depicting leaves, which now decorate the nearby Lythwood Lodge, setting of the teacher’s office in the film, Spud, shot mostly at Michaelhouse.
It’s a tradition for boys from the school, in the valley below the iNhlosane, to climb it in their first year.
Steven Clowes, last year’s dux at Michaelhouse, also did one leg of the trek in his final year when he was a prefect in charge of younger boys, and walked barefoot, something he was used to as an Underberg farm kid.
Recalling his Grade 8 experience, Clowes said it co-incided with the first frost of the year.
“I remember walking with the prefects, laughing. On the way there it was so cold we had to stop under some trees and wait for the sun to come up.”
Next was a series of hills called the Seven Sisters, better known to the schoolboys as the Seven Bitches.
Clowes preferred walking in darkness when he couldn’t see the destination looming ahead, far away. Navigation was important, he recalled.
Going astray would mean adding to the 50km return trip hopefully not encountering a half-human, half-baboon creature, which legend has it, roams the hills around the iNhlosane looking for its soul mate.
It could be a challenge for canine Bella, the “absolute hunter”, should she and the strange creature cross paths.
* One can use resorts below the iNhlosane as a base: Everglades
Sunday Tribune