Picture: provided by the author
Dan Wylie writes elsewhere on Facebook:
My mother, Jill Wylie, died at 9:45 on Saturday 7 August 2021, after a long battle with an illness called Life. My morning had dawned all delicately misty, ghosting the forest below, reminding me of identical scenes from Zimbabwe’s Bvumba (“Mist”) Mountains and her sanctuary, Wildwoods, 2 000 kilometres north of me. Late winter sun burned the mist off; I seized the opportunity to do the laundry, and while I was hanging up the towels to dry, she, too, drifted away.
She was born Gillian Matthews on 6 April 1929, and was raised by Alban and Mary Mitford-Barberton on the slopes of Mt Elgon in western Kenya. Educated at mission schools, she mostly ran wild in the forests, a childhood charmingly related in her memoir, Barefoot & pawprint. After obtaining a diploma in agriculture at Boschetto College in then Natal, she met and married Ulsterman and engineer Jack Wylie. They settled in Bulawayo in then Rhodesia, where their only son, Dan, was born, and then in the Eastern Highlands. In 1971, they bought the property in the Bvumba Mountains which she transformed into her non-profit wildlife haven, Wildwoods Sanctuary. Here, and as a lifelong stalwart of the Mutare SPCA, she saved and aided the lives of hundreds of animals, and not a few human animals, too. Some of the many tales of rescue and rehabilitation are related in Wildwoods: The making of a wildlife sanctuary.
At the same time, Jill made a speciality of training a series of search dogs to track and find other lost dogs, all too often caught in wire snares laid for wild animals. The two most important of these dogs were the first, Call-of-the-Marsh, whose exploits are related in her truly classic account, Call: Life with a basenji, and his successor, Javelin, a dobermann. Javelin’s equally extraordinary life is told in Jill’s book Search (Echoing Green Press). Crucially, Javelin retained her tail, and Jill’s crusade against the horrible fashion of tail-docking was just one of many she pursued on behalf of defenceless animals.
Despite a life dogged by medical stresses, accidental injuries and dangerously hair-raising rescues, she somehow made it to 92. How she eluded being whacked on the head by a poacher, falling off a cliff when rescuing some lost puppy, wandering into a minefield left behind by the Rhodesian War, or any number of other interesting fates, is close to miraculous. Her capacity to love every life unreservedly, her determination to allow beauty to triumph, and her courage to bear so much inevitable tragedy and grief, would be intimidating were she not so self-deprecating.
Picture: provided by the author
Jill has been buried deep in the forest of her beloved sanctuary – an event she anticipated as early as 1972 in one of her many superficially simple but affecting verses:
I would put down roots here, with this forest tree;
Grow and bear my fruits here, whatever they prove to be.
For the earth is deep here, and very old.
My troubled heart may sleep here, on the sweet leaf mould.
I would spread my branches where the robin sings;
Make my leaves a shelter that little wild things
Might lean against my body, feel their pulse in me,
And find my hands a haven, my soul a sanctuary.
When I fall in this place I would buried be,
With the lourie’s crimson wings flashing over me,
And all my little orphans grown and living free
Safely in the wild woods and never far from me.
Jill really was a fine writer, lucid and economical, capable of turning you from gentle laughter to tears of tragedy in a few sentences. In addition to her four books, she somehow found time to pen letters, poems, articles and various other adventures in writing, of which there are literally hundreds. I’ve been working slowly through them, and one day will publish a selection in tribute to a brave and exemplary life.
All four books are available directly from me, Dan Wylie, should you want to know more. Contact d.wylie@ru.ac.za. Also see our website, www.netsoka.co.za, as well as the blog sites “Jill Wylie Animal Wisdoms” and “Dan Wylie Critical Diaries”, searchable via Google.