Mountain Zebra National Park

Listen for a moment. The Karoo wind moves through dry grass with a soft, steady hiss. Somewhere a bird calls from a thorn bush. The air smells of dust and crushed herbs, sharp and almost medicinal. Under your feet the ground is hard and stony, scattered with flat red rock. Around you, the slopes rise in tiers of dark dolerite and pale grass. This is Mountain Zebra National Park, in the high country of South Africa's Eastern Cape.

The park lies a short drive from the farming town of Cradock, in the mountains known as the Bankberg. It sits where two worlds meet. To one side runs the dry, open scrubland of the Karoo, the great semi-desert of South Africa's interior. Higher up, the land turns to grassland, cooler and greener after rain. That mix of habitats is part of why so many animals can live here side by side.

But this park was created for one animal above all — the one in its name. The Cape mountain zebra is a smaller cousin of the zebra most people picture from the savanna. By the early twentieth century, hunting and fencing had pushed it close to extinction. Only a handful of animals survived on scattered farms in this region. In 1937 the government set aside this land to protect them.

The early years were not a clear success. The herd on the original property stayed tiny, and at one point the outlook was very bleak. Then the park grew. Neighbouring farmland was added, and local farmers who still had a few zebra on their land helped bring them in. Slowly, the numbers began to climb. It was patient work, measured in single animals and small herds over many decades.

Today the story looks very different. Cape mountain zebra now number in the thousands, spread across many parks and reserves. Many of those animals carry bloodlines that passed through these hills. So when you watch a small family group here, you are looking at one of South Africa's quieter conservation victories. Most visitors do not realise how close this animal came to vanishing for good.

So how do you tell this zebra apart from the more familiar kind? Look first at the throat. The Cape mountain zebra has a small fold of loose skin hanging below the neck, called a dewlap. Then look at the rump. Just above the tail, the stripes form a neat pattern of short bars, like the lines of a grill. The belly is white, and the stripes are narrow and crisp, with no faint brown shadow stripes between them.

These zebra are built for this terrain. They are sure-footed on steep, rocky slopes, and their hooves are hard and well suited to stony ground. They usually live in small groups — a single stallion with a few mares and their young. You will often see them grazing on the open plateaus, or standing together in the shade of a rocky ridge in the heat of the day.

One of the best places to look is the Rooiplaat plateau, a high, open grassland reached by a loop road. Up here the views open wide in every direction. Zebra graze in the open, and so do springbok, black wildebeest and red hartebeest. The black wildebeest is worth a second look. With its white tail flicking and its odd, bucking runs, it is one of the stranger antelope you will ever see.

The park holds more than grazers. Cheetahs have been brought back to these plains, and lions have been reintroduced in more recent years. Buffalo move through the valleys, and black rhino live here too, though they are shy and hard to find. Smaller hunters, like the caracal — a sleek wild cat with tufted black ears — move quietly through the rocks. Seeing any of them is a matter of time, patience and luck.

Look down, as well as out. The slopes are covered in low Karoo bushes, many of them aromatic. Rub a leaf between your fingers and you may catch that sharp herbal scent again. After good rains, small flowers appear among the stones. Lizards warm themselves on the rocks, and in the evenings the hills fill with the calls of birds settling for the night.

The landscape itself carries deep time. The dark caps on the hills are dolerite, a hard volcanic rock that resists the wind and rain. Softer layers below have worn away, leaving the flat-topped hills that shape the Karoo skyline. People have lived in these mountains for thousands of years, long before farms and fences. The quiet you hear now is old, but it was never empty.

The nearby town of Cradock has its own literary link. The writer Olive Schreiner, author of The Story of an African Farm, is buried on a mountain top not far from the town. Her novel captured the loneliness and beauty of the Karoo better than almost any book before it. Standing here, with the wide, silent land around you, it is easy to understand what she was writing about.

Before you move on, pause and look across the slopes once more. Notice how the light changes the colours — gold grass, grey-green bushes, dark rock against a pale sky. Somewhere out there, a small group of zebra may be grazing, their stripes almost hidden against the broken ground. As you drive away, keep your eyes on the hillsides. The animal this park was built to save may be watching you leave.