Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  There is a great difference in the posture and expressions of mildly curious lions and those bent on destruction. The Blue Pride was keyed up, their ears perked forward, bodies held low, tails thrashing. I had seldom seen them in such a mood—a mixture of curiosity and playful rambunctiousness, with perhaps more than a dash of predatory urge thrown in. They had probably come from hunting along the riverbed.

  They had visited us on numerous other occasions in the previous rainy season, and each time had grown less and less afraid of us and the camp’s surroundings. Each time it had become more difficult to convince them to leave without damaging anything important. The first time or two I had only to start the truck’s motor, raise my voice, or wave my arms slowly to start them moving away. But since then, progressively stronger action had been required.

  Now they stared directly at me as they came. It would take more than the usual amount of persuasion to turn them out of camp before they began to ransack it. If they discovered how flimsy the tents were and how much fun to bat around, they might break them down and shred them to pieces.

  Sassy, Spicy, and Gypsy were about six feet away. “Okay, that’s far enough!” I said in a loud, shaky voice. At the same time I stepped forward and swung the lantern within a foot of their noses. I had used this deterrence successfully before, but this time they quickly dropped to a crouch, their tails whipping up puffs of dust in the path. The other two groups were advancing from each side of me and were now less than twelve feet away.

  Unnerved, I took a few steps backward. Then I noticed an aluminum tent pole propped against a tree next to one of the water drums. Confident that this would do the trick, I swung it hard against the empty drum. Wang! Once again they all just crouched.

  When they started toward me again, I grabbed a stick of heavy firewood lying near the footpath. Against my better judgment, but seeing no other option, I drew back and threw the block of wood toward Sassy, ten feet in front of me. Turning once in the air before it reached her, it would have struck her cleanly across the snout had it not been for the big paw she raised like a catcher’s mitt at the last instant. With astonishing speed she deftly blocked the missile with the flat of her pad and grounded it at her feet. She then looked at me for a second before seizing the chunk of wood in her jaws and strutting out of camp. It was as if my rash action had broken the tension; the rest of the lions sprinted after her.

  Swinging the lantern from side to side, trying to see in the underbrush along the path, I made my way quickly back to the tent, where Delia was waiting anxiously. As I pulled back the flap to step inside, the lantern reflected the amber eyes of lions standing all around the Land Rover, which was parked just off the back corner of the tent.

  “These lions are in a hell of a funny mood,” I whispered. “We’d better get into the truck. I don’t know exactly how we’re going to do it, though.”

  Delia pulled on jeans and a shirt while I watched the big cats playing around the Land Rover. One was chewing a tire. Bones stood near the left front fender, his head taller than the hood, and as he turned to the side, I could see the heavy scar over his right hind knee.

  We waited, crouching near the corner of the tent; some of the lions were now lying around the truck. Meanwhile, one of the others stole the spade from near the campfire, and another romped out of the reed kitchen with a large tin of powdered milk.

  About half an hour later, Bones began roaring, and the entire pride joined in the chorus. Continuing to bellow, the two near the door on the driver’s side of the truck moved to the rear. We crawled along the wall of the tent and slipped quietly into the cab.

  When the morning sun crested East Dune, I sat dozing with my forehead against the steering wheel and Delia was slumped against my side, her coat pulled up snug around her neck. The dull thonk of rubber in trouble and a movement of the steering wheel brought my head up sharply. I leaned out the window to see Sassy lying on her side next to the front wheel, her long canines poking into the tire. Having spent themselves during the raid on camp, Gypsy, Liesa, Spicy, Spooky, Blue, Chary, Rascal, Hombre, and Bones lay sprawled in the pool of warm sun around our truck. The Blue Pride had come back to Deception Valley.

  Rascal and Hombre had grown up considerably, despite the rigors of the long dry season, and each sported a fringe of patchy, untidy mane. The young females had lost most of their adolescent spots and their forelegs, chests, and necks had thickened. They were adults now, but obviously still youngsters at heart.

  It was urgent that we learn as much about the Blue Pride as we could during the short rainy season: the size of their territory; what prey they ate, how much, and how often; how their kills influenced the movements and feeding habits of the brown hyenas. We were also interested in finding out how their social system compared with that of lions in the more moderate climate of the Serengeti Plains. Within two to four months, depending on how long the rains lasted and how late the large antelope prey stayed in the valley, the lions would migrate away again.

  But even when the lions were near Deception Valley, they spent most of their time in duneslope woodlands and bush habitats, where it was very hard to follow and observe them, especially at night, when they were most active. Unless we stumbled onto them while following brown hyenas, homing on their roars was our only way of finding them.

  Typically, we would have just gone to sleep after hours of night work, and then hearing a lion’s bellow, we would jump out of bed swearing and fumbling for the flashlight. Whoever found it first dashed for the truck to take a compass bearing on the sound. We had no more than about forty seconds before the first series of roars died away. If we didn’t get a fix then, invariably, it seemed, the lion would not call again. We would be left standing nude in the dark, often with skinned or rope-burned shins and toes from running the gauntlet of thorns, sharp tent stakes, and tie-down lines that lay along the path out of the trees to the truck. As soon as we would crawl back under the covers, another bellow would echo through the valley.

  If we managed to get a bearing, we would pull on our clothes and climb into the truck. Then Delia would hold the compass on her lap, directing me as we drove along. We were able to find the lion about half the time, unless it was moving when it bellowed, as lions often do. Crude as this technique was, we began to get good rainy-season information on the Blue Pride’s movements in the valley and what antelope they were eating.

  Nearly even evening, the roars of the Blue Pride were answered by lions farther south in Deception Valley. We grew more and more curious about these neighbors, especially since observations on only one pride would never give us a reliable picture of Kalahari lion ecology. We would have to head south to locate and observe as many of the other valley prides as we could.

  The idea was a little intimidating at first, since it was an expedition that we had never made and for which we were not equipped. We would have to find our way deeper into the Kalahari along the shallow, meandering riverbed, which would be totally obliterated in places, blocked with sand dunes. Alone in our battered old truck, without a back-up vehicle or any radio communication, and with only the food and water we could carry, we might lose the river course and wander around for days trying to find our camp again.

  Nevertheless, we decided to do it. We packed the Land Rover with water, cooking pots, fuel, spare parts, and essential food and bedding. I wrapped our only tube of tire patch solution in a piece of plastic fertilizer bag to keep it from evaporating and from being punctured in the toolbox. The thornbush would be heavy in places and a flat tire or two was inevitable. The plastic fertilizer bag would seal small leaks in the radiator if stuffed into the grill and then set alight—according to an old Bushman tracker who didn’t know much except how to come back from the Kalahari.

  Early one morning, we set off south along the riverbed. We left Mox standing at the edge of camp, a piece of paper in his hand. Our note read:

  To Whom It May Concern:

  On April 6, 1976, we left camp to explore Decept
ion Valley south from this point. If it has been more than two weeks since our departure when you read this, please go to Maun and ask someone to send a search plane out to fly along the valley.

  Thank you,

  Mark and Delia Owens

  It was highly unlikely that anyone other than Mox would ever see our scrawl, but we felt better having left it just the same. Mox had instructions to walk along our truck spoor, east out of the reserve, to a cattle post if we were not back after the sun had risen and set fourteen times.

  As we drove south, the familiar line of West Dune with its picturesque acacia woodlands followed us for a mile, and then fell easily behind. A stranger took its place: The riverbed grew narrow and tentative, less distinct. Soon all that was familiar about the Kalahari disappeared, and we were headed toward a flat horizon of thornscrub, grass, and sand.

  Several miles later a bottleneck in the riverbed spilled out into a generous open plain, or pan, where hundreds of gemsbok and hartebeest and thousands of springbok grazed on lush grasses. “Springbok Pan,” we wrote in our log for the first time. Other antelope sipped at shallow water holes a few feet across, where hottentot teals dabbled in the mud. White storks, migrants from chimneys in Europe, and their white-bellied cousins from North Africa strolled along picking up grasshoppers. Black-shouldered and yellow-billed kites, tawny eagles, lappet-faced vultures, and kestrels hovered and turned through the sky, while jackals and bat-eared foxes trotted over the savanna pouncing on mice and snatching grasshoppers from grass stems.

  We drove slowly through the herds and across the pans, then found our way back into the narrow part of the rivercourse. Giraffes craned their necks curiously at us from low, shrub-covered dunes, close along either side. Never had we seen so many antelope—herd after herd cantered aside as we passed.

  Later we rounded a bend, and a large conical sand dune with a lopsided cap of woodland loomed ahead, blocking the river channel; there seemed no way around. We drove straight up the side to the top and stood there in the wind, feeling minute against the endless savanna. The river channel beyond splayed in several directions, like the unbraided ends of a rope; it was not altogether obvious which tributary we should take.

  From the truck’s storage box I pulled out a tattered photograph, a composite of tiny aerial pictures taken by the British Royal Air Force years ago. In printing this collage of photos, the geographic features along the edges of the smaller prints had not been carefully matched up by technicians in the Department of Surveys and Lands: they were scattered about like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. As a navigational tool, this enlarged mosaic was fuzzy and inaccurate, but it was all we had. From the picture it looked as if the middle fork was the channel most likely to be the continuation of Deception Valley, so we set course along that one, stopping to look for lion tracks in the mud at water holes, to collect scats from tree islands, and to study old kill sites.

  We tried to keep track of our position, but in many places the old channel was shallow and covered with the same vegetation found in the bordering sandveld. Every now and then we would stop, worried because we had lost touch with Deception. Then, by standing on top of the Land Rover to get above the flat terrain, we would find the narrow trough again, faintly visible as it wandered away to the north or south of us through the waving grass-heads. At each temporary campsite I took star shots with an old Royal Air Force bubble sextant from a World War II bomber. But it wasn’t much help without an accurate map.

  Looking back, those nights far from base camp seem as if they were of another world. We lay on our backs beneath stars and planets set like diamonds in the inky black of space and undimmed by any lights of human civilization. Meteors left blue-white trails across the sky, and manmade satellites hurried along on their journeys through space. No one on earth knew where we were; we barely knew ourselves.

  The roll of RAF photographs fluttered in the wind as I tried to flatten them on the hood of the truck. Squinting in the bright sun, Delia and I studied a large lightly shaded area that appeared to be about fifteen miles south of our position.

  “It’s huge! It must be several miles across.” In the aerial photo the pans looked much larger than any others we had seen in the Kalahari.

  “There must be stacks of game there.” Delia added. “Hyenas, too—and lions.”

  Because of our limited food, water, and gasoline, we were hesitant to leave the riverbed in search of the pans; it was our only landmark and navigational aid. But we needed to know to what extent the wildlife was using the pans, and if we drove due south and recorded mileage readings from the odometer as we went, it should be easy to find our way back—especially since we could follow our truck tracks through the grass. After double-checking our supplies, we turned straight south, toward the center of the big circular depressions we had seen on the map.

  It was slow going. The ground was studded with grass clumps, pocked with holes, and spiked with dry bushes. Pitching and rolling in the truck, we could manage only two to three miles per hour. Every few hundred yards I stood in front of the truck and sighted along the compass to pick a tree, dune, or some other feature in the distance to aim for as we drove. We slowly made headway, but, battling the soft sand and tough thornscrub, the Rover had begun to use much more gasoline. Travel on the hard-packed soil and through the shorter grasses of the riverbed had been much faster. Even more worrisome was our water consumption; we had to stop every quarter of a mile or so to clean grass seed out of the radiator and pour several cups of water over it to cool the motor. As we churned along I was hoping that the pans would be where they were shown on the aerial photo. I was beginning to have doubts about having left the river channel.

  Hours later, we stopped—hot, irritable, itching from the grass seed and dust. The spot where the large pan should have been had come and gone. After another look at the photos we drove farther south, then east, then west, getting more and more confused about where we were, relative to the pans. And by now we had lost our north-south spoor from the riverbed. I clawed my way to the top of a thorn tree; swaying in the wind and straining through the binoculars, I could see nothing but rolling sandveld in every direction. Every ridge, every stand of trees or clump of bushes, looked bewilderingly familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

  I climbed down, my legs and arms scratched and bleeding, my clothes tom. We glared once more at the RAF photographs, and I finally noticed that the edges of the pan were fuzzy and unclear, unlike the sharply defined features of those familiar to us near camp. I tried to think what had gone wrong.

  “Unbelievable . . . Unbelievable!” I moaned. “You know what this is? It’s a piece of dust! We’ve been driving for hours toward a piece of damned dust!”

  Decades before, an RAF aerial reconnaissance crew had become careless, and a fleck of dust, charged with static electricity, had invaded their camera and left an impression of itself on the film. Enlargement had made the impression much bigger, so that it looked almost identical to the images of Kalahari pans. We had been searching for a phantom.

  Going back was not just a simple matter of heading north for the riverbed. The valley was so indistinct in many places that, unless we found our tire tracks, we could easily drive right across Deception without ever knowing it. During all the driving, we had stopped keeping notes on mileages and directions; neither of us could remember whether we had last driven east of our spoor or west. In fact, we had not seen our north-south tracks in the four- or five-square mile area we had searched.

  With Delia perched on the hood of the truck, I began driving slowly west, searching for the tire tracks that would take us safely back to Deception Valley. But after a few minutes of staring at the sea of waving grasses, our vision began to swim so much that we probably wouldn’t have seen the spoor to the north if we had parked right across it. Forty minutes and two miles later, we turned back east, still looking. But it was hopeless and we were using too much precious gasoline and water. We turned and headed north toward Deception Vall
ey.

  Delia rode in the spare tire on the roof, where she should be able to see the channel of the riverbed. She had to see it. Bits of chaff, grass straw, and grasshoppers drifted into my lap from the windows and vents. My mouth was dry from the heat of the motor and the desert. I reached around behind the seat, had a swig of hot water from the plastic bottle, and passed it up to Delia.

  I couldn’t help wondering just how far a person could walk from where we were—wherever that was. Lionel Palmer had been hunting lions near the border of the game reserve one day when he and his native tracker saw ahead of them what appeared to be a man’s head set down upon the sand. What they found was a fourteen-year-old native boy near death. After they had revived him with water, they learned that it was the morning of the third day since he had set off on foot from one cattle post to another. He had lost his way and had soon drunk all the water he carried in his goatskin. He walked only at night, covering himself with sand during the day in order to stay cool and help his body hold moisture. After two nights he had buried himself for what would have been the last time had Lionel not come along. I doubted that we could last for more than two days, either.

  We passed through several shallow depressions ringed with catophractes, the brittle silver-leafed bush that fringes Kalahari pans and fossil rivercourses. We hoped the shrub was a sign that we had found the channel. I stopped and we both got up on the roof. Shielding our eyes from the glare, we tried to follow the nuances of the slopes around the shallow bowl; but none of them ran into the flat, open channel of the wandering riverbed.