Gunship Over Angola

Using the strong nylon stringers from the chute, tied to the two panels, we each fashioned a crude hammock between adjoining trees. Then we cut pine branches and large-leafed ferns, which were stacked in an A-frame structure around each hammock to keep the rain out. It is worth noting that these A-frame, tent-like structures worked superbly until it actually began to rain, which it did on the third day and hardly let up for the rest of the week.

Early the next morning, after an uncomfortable first night in the Knysna Forest, six of us descended the steep path down to the rocky Kranshoek beach, hoping to find something edible to quell the hunger pangs that were already being keenly felt. Together with the money I had managed to smuggle past the DSs in the heel of my boot, I had also managed to conceal a length of fishing line, some hooks and a sinker in the recesses of my overall.

Upon reaching the beach, I identified a promising-looking gulley, eased some shellfish off the rocks, baited a hook and launched the business end into the water of the gulley. Within a few minutes, I had landed three very, very nice blacktail (dassies) fish, which we cooked on a little fire and ate right there and then.

With our bellies somewhat satiated from this sumptuous meal, we all stripped naked and spent the rest of that pleasant sunny day swimming and exploring the secluded area at the base of the Kranshoek cliffs in our birthday suits. While frolicking in the raw in the heart of nature is a pleasant and liberating pursuit, overstaying one’s welcome in direct sunlight on a cloudless African day will most definitely have undesirable consequences. None of us were to escape paying Mother Nature’s toll for the privilege of cavorting nude in such a special place, and blisters formed in places that didn’t normally see direct sunlight. The next few days were a constant and painful reminder as to why our human ancestors had invented clothing.

Just before leaving, one of our crew suggested that I might want to try to catch something to eat for the other starving syndicate members. A few minutes later, another three plump blacktail had ended their crustacean-crunching lives.

^{I caught a number of blacktail that kept us fed – and were used also as part of a ruse.}

As we were leaving the beach at the base of the cliffs, we saw another group of our colleagues, four or five of them from one of the other syndicates, at the closed end of the beach, where they had chanced upon a fairly large snake. In the classroom, our survival lecturers had impressed upon us the palatability of catching and cooking suitably sized herpetological creatures.

The one being targeted by this group of intrepid hunters, all of whom had large stones in their hands, measured at least a metre in length and had some good meat on it. We were positioned about 50 metres from them, so our little group had a clear view of events as the hunters approached the snake.

The group was completely focused and intent on shepherding the snake into a corner with the intention of killing, skinning, cooking and eating it. Now, a metre-long snake, weighing a maximum of 1.5 kilograms, poisonous or not, should not have been a contest for five starving pupil pilots armed with human-head-sized boulders.

And no contest it proved to be.

At the last possible moment, the serpent realised that it was cornered and heading for disaster. The next moment the snake suddenly turned, reared up, hissed once and moved, quite quickly I admit, towards the group of brave marauding hunters.

Shrieks and screams, the volume and shrillness of which I could never have imagined, rent the air. In the blink of an eye the well-organised hunters were fleeing headlong down the rock-strewn beach, weapons and poise discarded, pursued, but for only a short while, by the pissed-off serpent before it spotted a gap in the thick coastal bush and slithered quickly away to safety.

‘I wasn’t really that flipping hungry!’ I heard one guy say, and his mates all nodded sagely in agreement.

After that undoubted highlight of the first, full Kranshoek day, the five of us trudged slowly up the steep path and back to our survivors’ campsite. On the way, we happened to pass a middle-aged civilian couple who had just finished enjoying a late afternoon braai at the Kranshoek picnic site at the top of the cliffs.

Acting like malnourished vagrants, which we probably resembled, three of our group launched themselves into a bush after we saw one of the picnickers throw a well-chewed lamb cutlet bone into it.

‘Bliksem, vrou,’ said the middle-aged man to his rotund wife, ‘wie is die donders wat so bleddie honger voorkom?’ (Good gracious, dear, who are these hooligans that look so hungry?)