Wild horses in the Namib Desert, by Mannfred Goldbeck and Telané Greyling

Wild horses in the Namib Desert, by Mannfred Goldbeck and Telané Greyling.

This is a comprehensive book on the wild horses living in the Namib Desert in south-western Namibia by Mannfred Goldbeck and Telané Greyling.

Telané Greyling  

This is me ... There's nowhere else on Earth I'd rather be. It's a new day. A scattering of stones extends into an expansive desert landscape of gravel plains streaked with short yellow grass tufts, dotted with clumps of hardy blue-green shrubs and edged with inselbergs and purple-blue mountains. The soft golds and pinks of the dawn clear to bleached yellow as the summer sun rises and begins its onslaught onto the morning land. Jackal calls sound through the air and then recede with the darkness of the retreating night. We are one of the first groups of horses to arrive at the Garub water troughs as the day focuses into its crisp contours. I drink with my mares and foals and then we move off to the side as other horse groups appear in the distance, trotting in with sand clouds rising from their hooves - manes and tails flying, youngsters bucking and kicking, or walking in sedately to the troughs. We move in a wave, an organic flow, a continuum of those arriving and disappearing over the horizon. Horses whinny, roll in the sand encircled by dust haloes and streaked with the ephemeral morning light, lie on the ground or stand statue-like under the merciless sun. Oryx with their sceptre-like horns approach the water troughs to drink, a springbok delicately makes its way on the rocky soil, Namaqua sandgrouse fly over and call in their distinctive lilting cadence and pied crows perch menacingly on the roof of the viewing hide waiting for opportune moments. The blue of the sky has already set the colours for the day when a trail of dust heralds the arrival of a tourist vehicle to the viewpoint. My black mane is hot against my neck and the warmth of the day is spreading its fiery tendrils up through the ground. A family alights from the vehicle and takes cover in the shade of the hide, unaccustomed to the harshness of the Namibian climate. They admire our wild beauty, our bay and chestnut colours, shining as if burnished by the sun. Looking around at the seemingly barren land before them and feeling the heaviness of the day already beginning to burn, they wonder aloud if there is sufficient food for us to eat.

I listen to the strange bubbling words of the people as I look out onto the gravel plains and my home, the Namib Desert. We have adapted over a period of a hundred years from the time of our domesticated ancestors to this terrain that appears unforgiving yet offers us life and a home. We have formed family groups and bonds as Equus groups naturally do. There is an adequate supply of food. The dry years come in cycles, regulating our numbers. This is what we Namib horses know. This is who we are. We have no knowledge offences and stables and the ways of man, or the lonely life away from our family groups. We know the summer heat, the winter cold, the powerful easterly winds that blow unwaveringly through the plains. We are accustomed to the oryx and ostrich, wary of the hyaena, and we know the grasses to eat and the place of water. We are at home, wild and free, under the blue African sky and scintillating stars of the Namib Desert.

This is an excerpt fromn the book: Wild horses in the Namib Desert, by Mannfred Goldbeck and Telané Greyling.

Title: Wild horses in the Namib Desert
Subtitle: A equine Biography
Authors: Mannfred Goldbeck; Telané Greyling
Publisher: Friends of the Wild Horses
Windhoek, Namibia 2011
ISBN 978-99945-72-52-6
Softcover, 17x24 cm, 100 pages, many colour Fotos