Dedication

Dedication 

It was while looking down into the clarity of a nameless waterway in the Okavango Delta that ourselves and a friend came to talking about fish.  He told us then that no great white shark had ever successfully been kept in captivity. Their demise was due not to disease or lack of food or the neglect of their custodians, but a great withering of spirit.  For all its formidable bearing, defiant disposition and fierce and singular nature, when a great white shark is removed from the freedom of the open sea it is deprived of an ingredient so vital to its being that there occurs within it a spiritual death which the flesh is helpless but to follow. Despite all efforts, there has never been an exception.

We came across an elephant once that had been spared during a cull; it had chains on its legs. It knew sunshine and rain, green trees, mud holes and the company of other elephants, and yet it was but a shadow of an elephant. It was possessed of a great weariness and its grey, heavy skin hung as parchment on its gaunt frame. Its melancholy was so tangible that we could not come before it, or think of it, without sadness, for it was plain that without freedom its spirit had withered to the point where it longed for death.

We have met, too, men and women who have lived by their own rules in the wild places of this earth. In the face of hardship and adversity, the only defeat we have seen them suffer is the curtailment of their freedom by advancing civilization and conformity.

One day we will have driven back all the frontiers of this earth and, with it, all the wild creatures that lived with the freedoms that they offered. Perhaps only then will we realize that the victory of progress will be as nothing, for you cannot conquer what you have killed.

It is therefore to the great white shark and all creatures, both man and beast, to whom a wild freedom is as necessary as the air they breathe, that this book is dedicated.

Peter and Beverly Pickford

August 1998

The Miracle Rivers - The Okavango and Chobe of Botswana