Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  On our return to camp, we were no more than a mile from the borehole when a tremendous screeching came from behind the truck. The Grey Goose lurched forward and slid to a stop. One of the drums had fallen through the floor of the trailer, wedging itself against the wheel. We heaved it up, placed bits of spare planking over the holes in the trailer bed, and roped the barrel in position before setting off again.

  Two miles farther down the track, the second drum broke through. We blocked and secured it as best we could with fragments of the frayed rope and slogged on, now at a snail’s pace.

  We had gone perhaps another four or five miles when the truck staggered to one side, drums clamoring from behind. We ran to the trailer and found its tow-bar bent into an S shape. It had dropped to the ground and plowed a furrow through the sand when all three drums had tumbled forward.

  Covered with dust, grass seed, and sweat, we had taken four hours to cover eight miles in the 120-degree heat. Exhausted and weakened from our illness, we sank to the sand in the shade of the boiling truck, our throbbing heads resting on our knees. I didn’t see how we could go on. His jaw rigid, Mark stared silently across the savanna. The Kalahari would not give an inch—she never let anything come easily.

  After a few moments, Mark pulled himself up and gave me a hand. Placing the highlift jack under the arms of the tow-bar, and with the trailer still hooked to the Land Rover, he jacked them until they were nearly straight. Then he fashioned a splint for the broken hitch with the Land Rover crank handle and small logs cut from a nearby stand of trees. We reorganized the drums and started off again.

  At the end of nearly every mile, we had to stop and cool the Goose. While Mark poured water over the top of the radiator, I used a hairbrush to clean away the thick carpet of grass seed that blocked the air flow. By removing a spark plug, putting a hose to the opened cylinder, and racing the engine, we blew out the clogged grill. Before starting up again, Mark crawled under the Land Rover and, using a long screwdriver, cleaned away the charred straw that was smoldering on the undercarriage. Trucks in the bush often burn up when grass on the exhaust ignites.

  Creeping along again, we suddenly smelled smoke. Mark slammed on the brakes and we jumped out. It was impossible to keep the overheated exhaust pipe clean for long, and now it had caught fire. Thick white smoke was pouring from underneath the truck. Mark grabbed the hose and a wrench, vaulted into the back of the Land Rover, and quickly opened a drum. Flames began to sneak through, showing orange against the billowing white. He sucked on the end of the hose, got the siphon going, and sprayed water onto the undercarriage. The smoke turned black, and a roil of steam and ash hissed back at him as the fire died.

  Five hours and three flat tires later, we staggered into camp and collapsed onto our foam rubber pads under the stars.

  The next day a freak storm appeared from nowhere and rained buckets of water all around us. We didn’t even have an extra canteen to fill, and the Kalahari drank it all.

  Though I was completely isolated from humans those four days Mark was in Maun, I was by no means alone. Late on the first afternoon, I put away our field notes, cut myself a slice of freshly baked caraway bread, and sat in our tea room, the alcove under the weeping branches of the ziziphus tree. In an instant, flocks of chippering birds crowded around. “Chief,” a yellow-billed hornbill with a mischievous eye, watched from the acacia tree across the path. Then he fell from his perch, spread his wings, and swooped to a landing on my head, his wings fluttering around my ears. Two others sat on my shoulders, and the four in my lap pecked at my hands and nibbled my fingers. Another hovered in midair until he managed to bite off a chunk of crust. I divided the rest of the bread among them.

  One of the first things we had done in our tree island camp was put out bread scraps and a small dish of water. Soon scores of birds—violet-eared waxbills, scaly-feathered finches, crimson-breasted shrikes, tit-babblers, Marico flycatchers—were twittering and preening in the trees. In the early morning, striped mice, shrews, and ground squirrels scurried around our feet to compete with the birds for food. But the hornbills were always our favorites.

  The yellow-billed hornbill is an odd assemblage of parts: a hooked yellow bill that seems too large for his scrawny black-and-white body, a long black tail that looks like an afterthought, and seductive eyelashes that flutter over foxy eyes—a most beguiling companion. We could recognize forty of them by their natural markings or by dabs of black paint I applied to their bills while they were taking bread from my fingers.

  Whenever I cooked, the “billies” crowded around the kitchen, perching on my head and shoulders, and even on the frying pan, picking up first one foot, then the other, fixing me with rude glares, as though they somehow knew it was my fault the pan was getting too hot. They found our leftover oatmeal and rice, stored in pots, by prying off the lids with their crescent bills. And when we sat down to eat under the ziziphus tree, we guarded our plates carefully lest our food disappear in a cloud of feathers. They also spoiled many a cup of tea by dropping their whitewash with uncanny aim from overhead branches.

  One day while we sat writing under the trees, a small pearl-spotted owl dove from his perch and captured a scaly-feathered finch, a tiny bird with a distinctive black goatee. AH the birds in camp, not just the finches, immediately rushed to the scene, bobbing up and down on the outer branches, giving their alarm calls. The captive finch screeched and flapped its wings wildly as it struggled in the clutches of the owl. Then one of the hornbills, hopping onto a branch just under the owl, reached up and snatched away the finch, who escaped to safety. It is impossible to say whether the hornbill was attempting to rescue the finch or to get an easy meal for himself; I prefer the former but believe the latter.

  Another permanent companion in camp was Laramie the lizard, who nested every night in an empty Di-Gel box on the orange crate-bedside table. He was especially welcome because of his voracious appetite for the flies that invaded our tent. With never-ending patience and acute skill he tracked them down one by one, smacking loudly as he chewed them up. But termites were Laramie’s favorite food, and I often fed them to him with a pair of forceps while he perched on the old tin clothes trunk next to our bed.

  Since zippers on tents are notoriously short-lived, we rarely had a tent in which the doors and windows closed securely. Thus, mice were common visitors to our bedroom at night, and they often found their way into bed with us, especially in the cold-dry season. Feeling a slight pressure roaming between the blankets, we would bolt out of bed and trip around in the dark, waving dim flashlights and shaking out the blankets. When the mouse finally shot out from between the bed covers, we would throw shoes, flashlights, and books in every direction until he escaped.

  We were quite accustomed to these intrusions, but one dawn I was half awakened by a very heavy pressure moving around over my legs. I imagined the world’s largest rat crawling on our bed, and I began kicking with a frenzy. I sat up just in time to see a slender mongoose leap for the tent door. He paused for a few seconds, looking back, and we stared into each other’s startled eyes. That was our introduction to “Moose.”

  Moose became the camp clown. He always remained aloof, maybe because I’d kicked him out of my bed. He would never accept a handout, but he was not above stealing everything in sight. One morning when we sat drinking tea under the ziziphus tree, Moose came sidling down the footpath, our pot of leftover oatmeal clattering behind him. Without so much as a glance in our direction, his head high and the handle in his mouth, he scraped his pot of porridge past us and straight out of camp, where he ate his breakfast in the morning sun.

  Because the ever-present mice were always chewing their way into our food containers, we set traps in the kitchen area nightly. We did this reluctantly because there was always the possibility of killing some creature other than a mouse. Sure enough, when Mark and I neared the kitchen one dawn, I heard a loud snap and looked up to see a Marico flycatcher flopping about with the trap closed on his skull.
Marie immediately freed the small bird, who stumbled about in ever-widening circles. I suggested that we should put him out of his misery, but Mark insisted that we wait to see what happened.

  The flycatcher eventually stopped walking in circles and flew to a rather clumsy landing on a low acacia branch. From that moment on, Marique continued the normal life of a Marico flycatcher, except for three things: He was blind in the left eye, he lost all fear of human beings, and he took up the habit of “begging” from us by flapping his wings like a fledgling. Tamer than most parakeets, Marique would land on our heads, our plates, our books. He would stand on the path in front of us and shake his wings vigorously to demand food; we could almost imagine his hands on his hips and his little foot stomping. Probably because of our guilt over the accident, we always fed him, even if it meant dropping whatever we were doing to make a special trip to the kitchen.

  When Marique took a mate, she also became very tame, though she did not beg. But when they reared their second brood (the first was lost in a storm), the babes soon picked up their father’s habit of begging from us. And so the behavior was passed on, and for the rest of our years in the Kalahari, Marico flycatchers in camp would land at our feet and shake their wings for food. We could never refuse them.

  Having wild creatures around us was one of our greatest pleasures, yet at times it was a mixed blessing. Early one morning, still groggy from sleep, I threw back the cover from the dilapidated tea crate. When I reached inside, looking for a tin of oatmeal, my breath caught. The long grey body of a banded cobra was coiled on the cans, inches from my hand. I’m not usually intimidated by snakes, but this time I snatched my hand back and let out a respectable howl. Fortunately, the cobra must have been as intimidated as I was because he did not strike, but instead slithered down among the tins. Mark appeared an instant later with the .410 shotgun. So far we had killed only a few of the most poisonous snakes that had visited us and those only because they insisted on living in camp. This one would be a real danger if allowed to stay. Mark aimed the gun into the box, and I imagined losing a month’s supply of food along with the snake. But when we turned the crate on its side to remove the dead cobra, we found only one irreparably damaged tin—unfortunately, it was fruit cocktail.

  Boomslangs, puff adders, black mambas, and other poisonous snakes frequently appeared in camp. That we had not been bitten was due mostly to our own private warning system. Whenever the birds spotted a snake they all landed on the branches above it, chirping, clucking, and twittering in loud alarm. Since there were sometimes as many as 200 birds in camp, the racket they made always tipped us off that a snake was on the prowl. The only problem was that they also mobbed owls, mongooses, and hawks, and once even a homing pigeon, complete with leg band, who had miraculously found his way to our camp. Sometimes they would keep it up for hours, or for several days, as in the case of the pigeon, and we would begin to prefer the quiet snakes to the noisy birds.

  Small animals were not the only ones who made themselves at home in camp. Walking down the path to the kitchen at dawn, we often surprised two or three jackals who had slipped under the flap into the little mess tent. On hearing our footsteps they would ricochet around inside, searching for a way out, the tent walls billowing, until suddenly they would squirt out from under the tent door, ears back and tails bouncing.

  Lions, leopards, brown hyenas, or jackals would wander into camp almost every night of the rainy season. After we bought a small mess tent, we tried to protect it, and the kitchen, with a barricade made of drums, thorn branches, spare tires, and the fire grate. Even so, we often got up several times a night to usher animals out of camp. Walking slowly toward them while talking to them quietly always worked with the hyenas and jackals, but sometimes the lions and leopards were less willing to leave.

  One night we drove into camp and a leopard stepped out of the shadows in front of our headlights. Mark jammed on the brakes just as the cat gracefully sidestepped the truck. Totally unperturbed, he sauntered to the middle of camp and, with a single silent motion, jumped onto the water drums. He walked from one to the other, smelling the water inside until, apparently convinced that he could not get to it, he jumped down. Next he climbed swiftly up the acacia tree that slanted against the flimsy reed structure we had made for dry-season shade. There, as he slowly stepped onto the roof, his front paw caved through the reeds with a loud splintering noise. Lifting his feet high, as if walking in tar, and with his tail lashing about for balance, he continued across, stabbing through the ceiling with every step. Finally, gripping the tree with his hind feet, he managed to extricate his legs from the now sagging and tattered roof. He then jumped from the tree and walked to our tent, and after a good look around inside, climbed to a limb that hung over the door and settled comfortably in its crook. He closed his eyes and began casually licking his forepaw with a long pink tongue; obviously he intended to stay awhile. All of this was very entertaining, but it was now 2:45 A.M. and we needed to get to bed. Mark drove the Land Rover a bit closer, thinking that the leopard would leave, but he just peered down at us benignly, his tail and legs dangling down from his perch over the door.

  We didn’t want to frighten him away, and we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to walk directly under him to get into the tent, so, leaning sleepily against the truck, we watched for about fifty minutes while he napped. Eventually he yawned, stretched, climbed down, and padded out of camp, his long tail trailing easily behind him. Stiff and tired, we began brushing our teeth next to the tent.

  “Look who’s back,” Mark whispered several minutes later. I whirled around to see the leopard standing at the back of the Land Rover, his muzzle raised and his amber eyes staring. He apparently meant us no harm, so we finished brushing our teeth while he sat fifteen feet away, his head cocked to one side. We went into the tent, closed the flap as well as we could, and crawled into our bed on the floor. A few minutes later we could hear the soft top-top-top of leopard pads on the plastic ground sheet, and then a sigh as he settled down for a cat nap, just outside the door.

  I was always very conscious of the fact that besides being a coworker, I was also a wife. In spite of all the dirt and grime and my ragged cut-off jeans, I tried to stay as feminine as possible. I usually put on a little make-up every day, and on our nights off, when we relaxed by the fire, I wore a blouse and a skirt of African printed cotton. On one occasion Marie had gone by himself to collect firewood, and since we did not plan to follow hyenas that night, I decided to fix myself up. I dug bright yellow curlers from the bottom of my trunk, washed my hair, and put it up in rollers.

  As I walked through camp toward the kitchen, the hornbills swooped down into the branches just above my head, clucking loudly. I recognized it as their alarm call, and stopping short, I began to look around me. But I couldn’t find a snake or anything else that could have alarmed the billies. I walked warily back to the tent to get the shotgun, and as soon as I was inside, the mobbing stopped. When I stepped out again, the racket began once more, as if on cue. While I searched for the snake, gun in hand, the hornbills repeatedly dive-bombed my head. With a pang of humiliation I suddenly realized the problem. I never did understand why, but from then on, whenever I curled my hair, I would either have to stay inside the tent or put up with the noisy objections of the hornbills.

  Just before sunset on my first day alone in Deception, I filled a bowl with bean stew and sat down on the flat riverbed outside camp to eat my supper. The hornbills sailed over my head on their way to roost for the night in the dune woodlands. Soon afterward two nightjars flitted across the fading day and landed a few feet away. They waddled about, making low purring sounds as they searched for insects. The sky deepened. I lay back in the straw-colored grass, and pressing my fingers into the rough surface of the riverbed, as I had so many times before, I wondered how long the Kalahari would belong to the wild.

  I sat up. Thirty springbok had wandered to within fifty yards of me while I was hidden in the grass. The male wh
istled alarm, and they all looked at me with tails twitching and necks stiffly arched. I stood, and they relaxed when the odd, hunched shape in the grass, which could have been a predator, turned into my familiar form. They resumed their grazing, but drifted away from me at an almost imperceptible pace, just the same. They could not know that I was here for them, and they disappeared over the dune.

  I walked down the track from camp speaking softly to myself as the last traces of that day vanished altogether. There may not be a fine line between dusk and darkness to the eye, but there is to the mind. When I was half a mile from camp, I felt the night settling on my shoulders and along my spine. I began snatching quick glances behind me, and, like any good primate, I returned to my trees.

  Over the next three days, while Marie was in Maun, I finished our backlog of paper work and fed nearly half of the bread to the hornbills. I was still enjoying being alone in the wilderness, but more and more often I stopped my work and ran out of the tent, thinking that I had heard the truck. I stood listening for the distant drone of the engine over the eastern dunes, but there was only the wind. Mark would probably be back soon, so I baked him a lop-sided, eggless spice cake in the bucket oven.

  The notes all neatly transcribed, I spent the fourth day cleaning camp. But I was losing interest in really accomplishing anything, and I sat with the hornbills for a long time, talked to myself a lot, and walked from camp again and again to listen for the truck. Maybe Mark would bring me something special—some chocolate from Riley’s perhaps, or the mail, with a package from my mother. When he wasn’t back by 5 P.M., I felt very let down.