Cry of the Kalahari Page 22

  “Let’s make our project succeed, that’s the best thing we can do.” I whispered.

  When I was finally strong enough to go into the village to see the doctor, he warned that I had not only malaria, but also hepatitis, mononucleosis, and anemia. “You must not try to go back to the Kalahari for at least a month,” he said sternly in a thick Swedish accent, as he peered over his spectacles. “You must rest, or run the risk of a relapse. If that happened out there, you would be in serious trouble.”

  But I could rest in camp just as easily as in the dank hut at the river, and we had to do as much research as possible before our money was gone. So I didn’t pass on the doctor’s comments to Mark and, instead, pretended to be feeling better than I really did. Three days later we were ready to leave for Deception.

  On our way out of the village, our friends at Safari South, always ready to help in one way or another, loaned us a high-frequency, long-range radio. This meant that at noon every day, at least during the safari season, we could be in contact with the hunters in the field, or with someone in their Maun office. For the first time since our project began, we would be able to reach the outside world. But unless we received a grant soon, this would be our last trip to the Kalahari.

  Back at camp we rationed our gasoline, food, and water more strictly than ever. Using only one point three gallons of gas each time we followed hyenas at night, and one gallon of water per day, we could last three months. By then we should have received word from our new grant applications. In the meantime we would get some solid data on lions and brown hyenas. At first I was too weak to stand the pounding in the truck, so I rested in camp while Mark followed the hyenas or lions by himself. But I slowly recovered, and for eight exhausting weeks we worked with mad enthusiasm, knowing we would soon have to leave Deception Valley.

  “Zero, zero, nine, do you read me?” came the garbled voice of Phyllis Palmer on the radio.

  “Roger, Phyllis, go ahead.”

  “Delia, Hans Veit, the director of the Okavango Wildlife Society, is in Maun. He would like to meet with you to discuss a possible grant for your project. Can you come in? Over.”

  We looked at each other and rolled our eyes. It might turn out to be another van der Westhuizen story, but what choice did we have? “Roger, Phil. We’ll be in touch as soon as we get in. Thanks.”

  In Maun, two days later, we were relieved to find that Hans Veit really was the director of the Okavango Wildlife Society and that a grant for our research was very likely. But we would have to go to Johannesburg for further discussions with the society’s Research Committee before a final decision could be made.

  Once in the city, we negotiated a grant with the society for two years of research in the Kalahari. The funds would allow us to get a better second-hand truck, a tent, and, most important, to make a round trip to the United States to see our families, consult with American researchers, and buy much-needed radio-tracking gear for the lions and brown hyenas. To be able to follow the predators consistently in the long dry season would mark a major turning point in our project.

  But the first thing we did in Johannesburg was to walk to a bakery. Standing in front of glass cases filled with small pink and yellow iced cakes, chocolates bulging with nuts, cookies covered with cherries, and puffy cream pastries, Mark and I ordered two of everything in the shop. Carrying our stack of neat white boxes tied up with string, we walked to a green park and sat in the sun. After inhaling the sweet, warm aroma of the freshly baked goods, we took a bite from every one and finished off our favorites. Laughing and talking, our lips covered with powdered sugar, we lay on our backs to rest our aching stomachs.

  12

  Return to Deception

  Mark

  Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,

  Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,

  While round in our Sieve we spin.

  —Edward Lear

  IN OCTOBER 1976, we flew back from New York to Johannesburg and found the city buzzing with ugly reports of the terrorist war in Rhodesia. The conflict was spilling across the Botswana border near Francistown. Farther south, along the only main road to the east and north, terrorists were beating and shooting travelers at roadblocks set up along the 500-mile route to Maun.

  It had been four hectic weeks since we had left Deception Valley, and we were anxious to get back and to begin radio-tracking lions and hyenas. But it would be risky to try to enter Botswana at this time. The Soweto riots had still been smoldering when we had left Johannesburg for the United States, and now there was the threat of total anarchy to the north, perhaps all over southern Africa.

  For some months Botswana had resisted getting embroiled in the conflicts on her borders. But now it was rumored that terrorist training camps had been established near Francistown and the village of Selebi Phikwe. In the past months, Angolan refugees had begun to appear in Maun, many of them suspected terrorists, and the mood of the native people in the village had begun to sour toward whites. On one tense occasion, Delia had been heckled by a group of men while shopping at the Ngamiland Trading Center. Such a thing would have been unheard of even two years before. An atmosphere of fear and suspicion had begun to drift through the settlement, like smoke from the evening cooking fires. Remote as it was, Maun had become tainted by world politics.

  In response to the conceived threat from Rhodesia, Botswana had hurriedly formed the Botswana Defense Force, or BDF. Together with mobile police units, this ill-equipped instant army was to roam the countryside seeking out the insurgents who were supposedly infiltrating from Rhodesia and South Africa. We had heard a number of reports about innocent people having been injured or killed either by terrorists, the BDF, or the mobile police—no one seemed to know for sure who was responsible.

  We had promised ourselves and our families that if the political turmoil became too threatening, we would delay our departure for the desert, or even leave the country altogether. But as we packed our gear, we rationalized that we might wait forever and never hear more than rumors, and that we would be safe once we got to our remote Kalahari camp. The worst terrorist incidents were mostly confined to Francistown, on the border with Rhodesia, but when we passed through there on our way north to Maun, we planned to make it during midday hours, when we thought it least likely there would be trouble. We bought a second-hand Toyota Land Cruiser, loaded it with a ton of supplies, and began the long trip north.

  Early in the afternoon of the first day we reached the Botswana border, where the road abruptly changed from macadam to gravel, with the usual corrugations and deep ruts. Other traffic disappeared. We drove on alone, a dust trail rising behind us. Our tires crunching on loose stone, we hurried past meager mealie patches and occasional mud huts enclosed by bomas of thornbush. No one waved, and if they looked at us at all, they seemed to scowl.

  On a lonely curve in the road, a wooden pole, freshly cut and still covered with bark, blocked the way. Ten or fifteen black men stood to one side—were these police, terrorists, or soldiers? No uniforms; but that didn’t mean much. Several of them carried stubby olive-green submachine guns slung at waist level; others held rifles. My skin prickled with fear and my hands wrung the steering wheel. I wanted to keep going, but they strolled across the road and stood facing us, their weapons ready. We had no choice but to stop.

  We locked the doors and I rolled down my window, leaving the Land Cruiser in gear, and its motor running, my feet poised on the clutch and accelerator. I would break through the roadblock if they ordered us to get out. A young black with blood-shot eyes strolled up unsteadily, his machine gun leveled at the door. He pushed his face to the open window, and I could smell bujalwa, the native beer, on his breath. The others peered into the back, lifting the canvas, pointing to the cases of canned food, the new tent, and the other supplies, while they chattered among themselves. The youth at my window began firing questions at me, his finger on the trigger: Who were we? Where were we going? Why? Whose truck was this? W
hy was it registered in South Africa? How could just the two of us need so many cans of powdered milk and so many bags of sugar?

  After a while, the men at the back started conferring at the side of the road, talking quickly in a language we didn’t understand, and the youth joined them. I stifled an urge to let out the clutch and make a run for it. They had no obvious vehicles and could not pursue us, but I was afraid they would open fire.

  “Don’t get out of the truck . . . Get down on the floor if I tell you to!” I whispered to Delia.

  The men looked our way as the hard-eyed teen-ager strutted toward the truck, his gun still leveled at my door. He leaned through the window glaring at me, silent. My stomach turned over as I remembered one of the stories we had heard in Johannesburg. A young teacher from Europe, on his way to a school in northern Botswana, had been dragged from a bus and savagely beaten in the face with rifle butts—they hadn’t liked his beard. Before we had left the city, Delia had pleaded with me to shave mine off. “They’re just rumors,” I had tried to console her. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “You—go.” The words came thick and slow. I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.

  “Go siami—okay?” I asked. Saying nothing, he stood back from the truck. Without taking my eyes off him, I slowly let out the clutch. The other men stared at us as we began to pull away. I pushed the gas pedal flat to the floor, accelerating as fast as I could. In the rearview mirror I could see them watching us, and the skin on my back crawled. A young girl had been shot in the back just days before as she and her parents were driving away from a similar roadblock. “Keep down!” I shouted to Delia and hunched forward over the wheel, urging the truck toward a bend in the road.

  Several miles later I pulled over and held Delia close for a moment. We were both wrung out from the encounter. When we had regained some composure I unfolded a map of Botswana. “We’ve got to get off the main road as soon as we can,” I said, looking at the great white void that was the Kalahari, in the middle of the chart. “There has to be another way to get there, even if we have to cut cross-country.” But from that point it was more than 200 miles overland to Deception Valley. Even with the extra fifty gallons of fuel in our new reserve tank and the ten gallons of water in our jerricans, I didn’t see how we could make it.

  “Mark, what about the old spoor Bergie mentioned that time, the one that comes up from the southeast?”

  “That’s an idea . . . If we can find it, we’ll take it.”

  We drove off the road and about 200 yards into the bushes, where we slept the night fitfully, rolled up in our new yellow tent, afraid it would be seen from the road if we set it up. The next day, in a small village on the edge of the Kalahari, we crossed a shoal of white calcrete and drove through a kraal and around the corner of a trading store. Suddenly we found ourselves heading into the desert on what looked like a cattle trail. It worried its way in several different directions around dry washouts and pans, but according to our compass, we were headed in the general direction of Deception Valley, still 190 miles away across the desert.

  By nightfall we were miles from the last road, the last village, the last contact with humans. From here on we would reckon distance in time, and time by the positions of the sun, moon, and stars in the sky. I slipped off my watch and laid it in the ashtray; it spoke the language of another world.

  No longer afraid to be seen, we built a fire that night and sat talking quietly about how good it was to be back. A lion roared from the west, close. Slowly the tightness drained from my chest, and I relaxed again for the first time in weeks. The trappings and anxieties of man’s artificial world—the airport crowds, the city traffic, the wars and Watergates—were behind us. Primitive, unscarred Africa embraced us again. As we settled into our bedrolls, we wondered whether any rain had fallen in the valley, and how Mox had handled village life while we were gone.

  Thick thornscrub, hot, heavy sand—the going was tough beneath a broiling midmorning sun the next day. We drove farther and farther into the desert, and the track began to lose itself in the grass and thornbush. Would it disappear altogether? Giddy from the 120-degree heat, we wiped our faces and necks with a damp rag whenever we stopped to cool the steaming radiator. Delia rode with her feet on a cardboard box; we could have fried a steak on the metal flooring.

  “I smell gas!” I jammed on the brakes, but by the time we jumped out, gasoline was pouring into the sand from every corner of the truck bed. The big auxiliary tank had shifted, snapping off its out-flow line. The precious fuel that we needed to get us to camp was quickly running away.

  “Hurry! Get something to catch it in!” We both ran to the back of the truck and began rummaging through the load. But nothing would hold more than a gallon. I dove under the Toyota and rammed my finger into the hole I had drilled to bring the fuel line through the truck bed. But the tank outlet had moved away from it and had come down flat against the steel; there was no way to reach the broken nipple to plug it.

  I grabbed a packet of putty from the tool kit in the cab, and sprawling in the sand again, my shirt and shorts soaked with drizzling gasoline, I frantically tried to force a gob into the small space. But I couldn’t get to the break, and the putty wouldn’t have sealed it if I had—not with gasoline spraying out.

  The tank was bolted to the bed of the truck, with the fuel line beneath; above were the truck’s iron gate and a ton of supplies. In a fit of panic, we began throwing cases of tinned food, jerricans of water, tools, and other equipment from the back, while our gasoline continued to stream away. I grabbed a wrench from the toolbox, and while Delia hurled things off the truck, I sat astride the tank, working with clumsy, frenzied movements to unbolt the iron gate and steel straps that held it to the truck bed.

  Minutes passed; the sound of the gasoline dripping into the sand was maddening. Working feverishly over the tank, I kept saying to myself, There must be something I’ve overlooked . . . think!

  Finally the tank was free, but no matter how hard I strained, with my hands around its wet, slippery bottom, I could not lift it. I jammed the spade under it and tried to lever it upward—still it wouldn’t budge. My tennis shoes were soaked with gasoline, and for the first time the thought of an explosion and fire shot through me.

  I finally got control of myself, stopped fighting with the tank and began to think more clearly.

  “Pour the water out of one of the jerricans—we’ll have to fill it with gas!” I shouted.

  I grabbed a roll of siphon hose from behind the front seat, rammed one end into the tank, and sucked on the other. Gasoline gushed into my mouth. Choking and spitting, I stuffed the hose into the jerrican. After we had filled the second can, I hopped into the truck, seized one end of the long tank, and heaved. Now that it was lighter, we finally managed to pick it up and stand it on end. The fuel ran away from the broken line and, after it had dried, we plugged the hole with putty. The rest of our gas was secure.

  We sat on the truck bed sick with exhaustion, our mouths like cotton, and I was still trying to spit out the raw taste of gasoline. Then I noticed that the lids were off both jerricans. In the confusion to rescue our fuel, we had poured out all of our water.

  Even so, I wasn’t sure we had managed to save enough gas to take us to Deception Valley. We had no way of knowing how deep the sand ahead would be, no way to predict how fast the truck would use fuel. If we ran out of gasoline, we would have to walk, and even if we moved only at night, when it was cool, we wouldn’t get much farther than about twenty miles on foot without water. I ran my hand up and down the side of the tank, trying to feel the coolness that would indicate the level of the liquid inside. If we could at least be sure we were on the right track . . .

  We sat in the shade of the truck and pushed our bare feet deep into the cool sand below the surface. Our choice was to go ahead with no water and limited gasoline or to turn back and travel the main road through Francistown, risking confrontation with terrorists or the military. Suddenly Delia hurried
over to the cab and tilted the front seat forward. She had filled an extra two-quart water bottle and put it there before leaving Johannesburg. Small consolation—except for a sip or two, it would have to be saved for the radiator.

  While we were picking up our scattered tins of fruit, I thought of the syrup in the cans; we could drink it on our way to Deception Valley. So, having decided to go on, we tied the upended auxiliary tank onto the bed of the truck, reloaded our supplies, and sat in the shade waiting for nightfall and coolness. At sunset we stashed some cans of fruit behind the front seat, and I poked small holes in the tops of two others with my pocket knife. We set off through the desert evening, sipping the cloyingly sweet juice to quench our thirst.

  For hours we followed the yellow patch of our headlights, mesmerized by the continuous sea of grass that swept toward us. Finally, nodding and too sleepy to go on, we stopped. We stood beside the track and breathed deeply of the cool night air. The sweet smell of the grasses and the bush was refreshing. Checking our course again and again with the compass, we drove until sunrise and then slept in the tire tracks beneath the truck, until the heat of the day grew intolerable.

  The next night, each time we stopped to siphon more gasoline from the reserve tank to the main tank, I grew more worried. By morning its level was very low.

  At sunrise we pushed on, and as I drove, I thought about trying to collect water that night by spreading our canvas on the ground to catch condensed moisture. If worse came to worse, we had a mirror to use for signaling an airplane—should one fly over—and food in the back of the Toyota. But the going was slower than ever, and without a detailed map, we could not be sure how much farther it was to Deception.

  Midafternoon on a late November day, we finally sat on the crest of East Dune, shading our eyes against the sun and squinting down at Deception Valley. We should have been elated, but we had been through too much, and we were stunned by what we saw. Below us, shrouded in heat haze, the ancient river sprawled between the shimmering dunes. Not an ant, not a blade of grass, not a living thing graced its bleak and scorching surface—a slab of grey earth with bleached bones and bits of white calcrete scattered about.