Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  In the early evening I was stirring my supper over the fire when seven lions came padding directly toward camp. My heart began doing flip-flops, and I quickly put the pot of stew on top of the hyena table and hurried deeper into the tree island. Peering through the branches, I could see the long, low forms gliding silently toward me, just 100 yards away. It was the same lionesses and their adolescent young we had often seen. But on the other occasions when they had visited camp, the truck had always been nearby; now I felt as vulnerable as a turtle without a shell. I tried to reason with myself: What difference would the truck or Mark have made, the lions weren’t likely to do anything, anyway. Still, I felt trapped. Crouching low, I crept inside the tent and peeped through the window.

  When they reached the edge of camp the lions began to play like giant kittens, romping and chasing one another over the woodpile and through the kitchen. Even when they were behind the bushes, I could tell by their sounds what they were doing. Then a pot hit the ground, and everything went quiet. They had probably found my stew.

  It soon grew dark and for a while I could neither see nor hear them. Where were they? What were they up to? Suddenly their heavy thuds sounded on the ground just outside the tent. I sat back onto our bed, my thoughts racing. When we had last been in Maun one of the hunters had told of Kalahari lions flattening three of his tents one night while he and his clients huddled in the truck. I had thought the story an exaggeration; now I was sure that it was true.

  I had to make a plan. My eye caught the tin clothes trunk. Moving very quietly, I opened it and piled its contents on the bed. If the lions began playing with the tent, I would get inside and close the lid. I sat in total darkness on the edge of the bed, one hand on the open trunk, and listened to the slaps, grunts, and pounding feet outside. Suddenly there was utter silence again. For minutes not a sound came from outside. They had to be there. I would have heard them move away. Huddled on the bed beside the trunk, I visualized all seven of them lying in a semicircle around the tent door.

  Ages passed and still no sounds. Could they smell me? Should I get into the trunk or sit still? A twig snapped. The side of the tent began to balloon slightly. Then a rope sang out with a twang. Through the window I could see one of the lionesses pulling a guy line with her teeth. Soft footsteps in the leaves and loud sniffing noises: They were smelling along the base of the tent only inches from where I knelt.

  Then there was a deep droning far away. The truck? God, let it be the truck! On quiet, damp nights I could sometimes hear it for three-quarters of an hour before it reached camp; then there would be long silences as it descended between dunes.

  Once more all was quiet. Maybe I had imagined the sound. Soft footfalls moved along the side of the tent toward the door. I wondered what would happen if I stood up and screamed “Shoo—get out!” But I didn’t budge. I was so much more brave when Mark was around.

  Again the motor sounded from the distance—it had to be Mark. After an eternity the pitch changed completely, and the truck turned onto the riverbed and headed directly toward camp.

  A noise just outside made me jump—a long brushing motion against the canvas side.

  As Mark rounded Acacia Point he was surprised to see that no fire was blazing, no lanterns were lit; camp was completely dark. He switched on the spotlight and immediately saw the seven lions prowling around the tent. He drove quickly into camp, switched off the truck, and called out the window, “Delia . . . Delia, you okay!?”

  “Yeah—yeah—I’m—I’m all right,” I stammered. “Thank God you’re back.”

  Mark’s arrival having spoiled their fun, the lions left camp and filed slowly southward down the riverbed. I jumped up to give Mark a grand welcome, but then I remembered the pile of clothes on the bed, so I stopped to stuff them into the trunk. After all, there was no reason to tell him of my plan, which now seemed rather ridiculous.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Marie met me on the tent stoop and hugged me.

  “Yes—now that you’re here. And what about you? You must be starving.”

  We unloaded the truck and cooked a feast with the supplies he had brought from Maun. We ate goat meat, fried potatoes, and onions, and I chattered nonstop about the previous four days. Marie patiently let me talk myself out, and then he told me all the news from Maun as we snuggled by the firelight. A long while later, when we went to bed, I found a bar of chocolate under my pillow.

  7

  Maun: The African Frontier

  Mark

  Quick, ere the gift escape us!

  Out of the darkness reach

  For a handful of week-old papers

  And a mouthful of human speech.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  THE SUN was high over the river when the truck crossed the last sand ridge. Grey with dust and fatigue, we drove into the Boteti, opened the doors, and fell sizzling into the cool water. It was as if a fever had broken. Though we had been cautioned about big crocodiles and bilharzia, a debilitating parasitic disease picked up from infested rivers or lakes, nothing could have kept us from the water after the Kalahari heat. We lay with only our heads bobbing above the surface, letting the current rush over us, but we kept looking from one bank to the other for the telltale ripples of a croc.

  It was March 1975, three months since my trip alone to Maun, and low on supplies again, we had set off for the village at dawn the day before. Besides restocking, we wanted to find an assistant, someone to take care of the dozens of camp chores that were eroding our research time. While trying to keep up with our expanding research project, it had become more and more difficult to cope with vegetation transects, scat collection and analysis, cartography, truck maintenance, hauling water and firewood, boiling drinking water, cooking, mending tents, and the myriad of other tasks associated with living in such a remote area. There just wasn’t enough time or energy left for following hyenas each night, or enough hours left in the day to sleep.

  But finding a native African who would live isolated in the Kalahari with very little water, no comforts, and lions roaming the valley would not be easy, especially considering the embarrassing wage we could afford to offer him. Only a very special person would do.

  Now Maun was only thirty minutes away. We lay in the cool river, chatting about seeing friends in the village. Skeins of pygmy geese, ducks, and snow-white egrets passed low over our heads. After scrubbing our clothes and hanging them on thornbushes along the bank, we soaked in the river again, the minnows nibbling at our toes. A greyhaired old man with a poncho of tattered goatskin thrown over his shoulders walked his donkey to the water. He gave us a wide, dusty smile and then waved and shouted to us in Setswana, the local language. We shouted and waved back with such bonhomie that he must have thought he’d done us some favor. This was the first human, other than me, that Delia had seen in more than six months.

  Our clothes stiff and dry, we drove on to the village and straight for Riley’s, two buildings of concrete stucco, with scuffed white paint and green corrugated tin roofs, standing on a sand patch next to the river. Behind the hotel, bar, and bottle store, a long veranda with a red waxed floor was dwarfed by tall, spreading fig trees and the broad Thamalakane River drifting by.

  Riley’s was the first hotel on the frontier of Northern Botswana. Built as a trading post by settlers who arrived in ox wagons about the turn of the century, for decades it has been a staging point for expeditions north to the Zambesi River, west to Ghanzi, or back to Francistown, more than 300 miles east. Today it is still a popular meeting place, one of three or four in the entire territory of Ngamiland. Riley’s has cold beer, meat pies on Saturday mornings—and ice. It was the best place to start looking for an assistant and to visit with friends.

  After several months alone in the desert, we had begun to notice subtle signs that told us we needed to see other people, to be part of a social group again. It had become more and more difficult to concentrate on our research without wondering what Lionel and Phyllis were doi
ng or thinking how nice it would be to have a cold beer with someone.

  Already smiling with anticipation, we pulled up at Riley’s and parked next to a line of trucks, all with rumpled fenders, long bush scratches down the sides, and oil dripping beneath. Behind the low block wall of the veranda, safari hunters in denims and khaki tilted their chairs back from wire tables, each man facing a row of empty beer cans. Weathered ranchers with bushy eyebrows leaned their beefy brown arms on the tables, their dusty, sweat-stained hats perched on the wall beside them. A Botawana tribesman in a red-and-black tunic, wearing a tasseled hat, hurried back and forth with mugs of Lion and Castle beer.

  Dolene Paul, an attractive young woman with chopped blonde hair whom we had met on a previous trip, waved to us across the veranda. Born and raised near Maun, she was married to Simon, an Englishman recently trained as a professional hunter. As we moved toward her table, friendly jeers rose from the safari crowd: “Oh Chrrrist! Watch your beer, here come the bloody ecologists!”

  Shaking hands, I found myself holding on too long, grasping a friend’s hand or lower arm with my left while pumping away with my right. We smiled so much our cheeks ached, and greeted everyone over and over again, repeating their first names several times. Then, suddenly feeling foolish, I quickly sat down at a table and ordered a beer.

  It was early afternoon, but no one seemed to have anywhere to go, so we all sipped cold beer and listened to hunting stories. Too anxious to join in, Delia and I made comments that seemed to bring conversation to a temporary halt, and we caught ourselves rambling on, talking much too loudly, and for too long, about subjects that must have bored everyone else. Socially, we were out of practice.

  Occasionally the conversation turned to Simon’s truck, which needed a new clutch bearing, and how sometime that afternoon they’d have to fix it. Then somebody bought another round of beer.

  Since Dolene knew most of the local Africans, we asked if she had heard of anyone who was a good worker and in need of a job, one who might be willing to live with us in Deception Valley. “Can’t think of anyone right offhand,” she said. “It’ll be tough to find a bloke who’ll stay in the bush for a long time without other Africans around. You must come round to Dad’s braii tonight. Maybe one of the other hunters or ranchers will know of someone.” A braii—or braiivlace—is a southern African barbecue, and though we’d heard of Maun’s version, we had never been to one.

  Several hours later everyone began to stand and stretch and to talk of driving on over to Dad’s. The afternoon was slipping away and nothing more was said about fixing Simon’s truck; apparently it could wait until the next day.

  Driving over to Dad’s, we analyzed the reception we had got. “How do you think Larry acted toward us? Do you think Willy was really glad to see us?” Delia even coached me: “Try not to act so excited when we see everyone at Dad’s place.”

  Dolene’s father, “Dad” Riggs, was one of the first white settlers in the area and had for years been a shopkeeper in Sehithwa, a village near Lake Ngami, before moving his family to Maun. Dolene and her brothers spoke Setswana long before they learned English at boarding school in the Republic of South Africa. In later years, Dad had been a stock-taker for the Ngamiland Trading Center, a general store and trading company in Maun.

  Dad’s place, a pale yellow adobe with a corrugated tin roof, flaking foundation, and sagging screen porch, was hidden behind the trading store. A tack shed, with saddles, blankets, and bridles thrown over a hitching rail, stood near the front corner of the house. Chickens, horses, and goats cropped the sparse grass in the sandy yard while several black children tended the stock. A splintered reed fence enclosed the yard where four or five hunters, ranchers, and their wives lounged next to the front porch on stained mattresses with stuffing peeking through. Dad Riggs strode across the yard to meet us, his weathered face creased with a grin. His wiry blond hair, flecked with grey, curled like wood shavings, and a clipped moustache was crimped over the firm line of his mouth. When Dolene introduced us, he lay a heavy arm around Delia’s shoulder and wagged the stump of an index finger, lopped to keep the venom of a snakebite from spreading. “Make no mistake,” he said, “anybody who lives in the Kalahari is always welcome at my place. Make no mistake.”

  Dad drew us into his circle of friends, and before we could take our places on one of the mattresses, Cecil, his son, a hard-riding, hard-drinking cowboy, pressed cold beer into our hands. Delia sat stroking a goat with long white hair and nervous yellow eyes that was tethered to a water spigot. We listened to more stories of lion, elephant, and buffalo hunts; of clients who’d never held a rifle before coming on safari, about the wounded buffalo that had gored Tony, about the biggest lion, the biggest elephant, and the biggest rifle, the four-five-eight. There was talk of cattle buying and cattle selling, the Rhodesian war, and how Roger had clobbered Richard with a Mopane pole for fooling around with his wife . . . gales of laughter and more beer. Donkeys brayed, dogs barked, and gumba music played from the native huts in the village beyond.

  The rusty wire gate squawked and Lionel Palmer and Eustice Wright, magistrate-cum-rancher, strutted into the yard. Eustice’s corpulent belly strained at a gap where buttons were missing on his shirt, and he wore great baggy shorts that waddled above legs like knotted walking sticks. His face florid from heat and exertion, he flopped onto a mattress next to Lionel, lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. “I knew you bloody bastards would be drinking a peasant’s brew,” he croaked, pouring himself half a water glass of Bell’s Scotch whisky from a bottle tucked under his arm. He couldn’t understand why he had consented to join such riffraff . . .“the bloody flotsam and jetsam of Maun!” He downed a generous gulp of whisky, then belched, “Chrrrist! What the bloody hell am I doing here anyway!” Everyone cheered.

  Lionel and Eustice, the top two social figures in the village, triggered stories of old Maun. “Were you here, Simon, when Lionel and Kenny, here, stole the cash register from Riley’s? Yessus, but Ronnie wasn’t happy that week.”

  It was Maun’s very first cash register and Ronnie Kays, the bartender at Riley’s, was very proud of it. While his brother Kenny chatted him up one day, Lionel, Cecil, and Dougie Wright, all professional hunters, grabbed the register, ran to Lionel’s truck, threw it in the back and drove away. Ronnie was not amused; when it was finally returned he bolted it to the bar top. Several days later, Lionel and the others walked calmly into Riley’s with a winch cable hidden behind them. When Ronnie’s back was turned, they threw a loop around the cash register and signaled to someone waiting in the truck beyond the veranda. The cable snapped tight, and the register leaped from the bar top and bounced out the door. It was considered very poor sportmanship when Ronnie reported the theft to the district commissioner of police.

  “I remember one night when Dad got pissed as a lord at Palmer’s,” Simon led in with his clipped British accent.

  “Nothing unusual about that,” Cecil laughed.

  “Except we took him home and put him to bed with a donkey foal we picked up in front of the butchery.”

  “He thought it was bloody Christine!” Everybody roared, and slapped Dad on the back.

  When I could get Eustice aside, I asked him if he knew of anyone who might work for us. “Who the bloody hell would want to stay in the middle of the bloody Kalahari?” he laughed. “He’d have to be bloody bonkers.”

  “What about it? Can you help us find someone?” I asked.

  “’ell, Marie, that’s a tough order. These blokes don’t like to be by themselves, you know, and especially not when there are lions crawling about.” He took a heavy drag on his cigarette. “Wait a minute, there’s a bloke everybody calls Mox—I practically raised him; worked for me for bloody years. A quiet sort, unless he’s drinking. Then he terrorizes the whole village. Chr-r-i-i-ist! The guy’s a regular Attila the Hun, a real piss-cat. He’s got a hell of a reputation with the women . . . they aren’t safe from the bugger when he’s on a toot. Started getting pis
sed on buljalwa every day, so I sent him to the cattle post to work with Willy. He might go with you, and out there where he couldn’t get ahold of any booze he might work out all right. Stop by my place noonish tomorrow, I’ll send for him and you can see if you want to take him with . . . and if he’ll go.”

  Dad pushed himself to his feet and announced, to no one in particular, that it was time to get on with the business of the braii. He grabbed the goat by its horns, dragged it to the center of the yard, and slit its throat with a sweep of his knife. It gave a short bleat and sank to its knees spewing blood. I swallowed hard, and glanced at Delia’s startled face.

  Using a block and tackle hanging from a tree limb, Dad and the Africans hauled the carcass up by its feet, and put half a truck tire beneath its head to catch the drizzling blood. “Gotsa molelo!” Dad bellowed, as he knelt rinsing his knife and hands under the faucet. The Africans lit a large pile of mopane logs. The men all gathered round, sawing at the carcass with knives until the goat was quickly reduced to apileof meat, its skinned head with its bulging eyes perched on top.

  Evening shadows grew as tall as the tales, and beer after beer followed yarn after yam around the bonfire. Daisy, Eustice’s Botswana wife, raked coals out of the fire and set a heavy iron pot of water on them. Orange sparks showered into the night. When the water was boiling she stirred in handfuls of mealie-meal with a large wooden spoon. Meanwhile Dad and Cecil shoveled out more coals and laid a big square rack of goat meat over them. By the time the mealie-meal had cooked down to a thick paste, called “pop,” the meat was brown and sizzling. We gathered around to eat. Everyone gnawed on goat chops in the firelight, and the grease ran down chins and dripped from glistening fingers.