Cry of the Kalahari Page 4

  Different zones of vegetation lay like tiers of a cake between the riverbed grasslands and the dune crest woodlands, and each community had something special to offer the various birds and animals there: Various species of plains antelope, mostly springbok and gemsbok, grazed short, nutritious grasses on the riverbed. Steenbok, duiker, hartebeest, and eland fed on taller, more fibrous grasses and leaves along the duneslope. Farther upslope, near the dune top, giraffe and greater kudu browsed on the leaves and fruits of the woodlands. Surely the concentration of antelope in our small area would attract predators such as lions, leopards, cheetahs, jackals, and spotted hyenas.

  On our first drive, we began to name some of the landmarks that would help us pinpoint important observations and determine the ranges of the animals we would be studying. Clumps of acacia and ziziphus trees looked like small, round islands in the river of grass, and soon we knew them by such names as Eagle Island, Tree Island, Bush Island, and Lion Island. A bush-covered sand tongue protruding into the riverbed became Acacia Point; a bush where a family of bat-eared foxes slept became Bat Bush. Eventually each promiment feature had a name, for orientation and for easy reference.

  Deception Valley seemed the perfect place to launch our predator research. Unlike the Makgadikgadi, the fossil river habitat provided a specific focus for the antelope prey populations, enabling us to locate our predator subjects consistently for observation.

  The difficulties and dangers of operating in such an isolated area were obvious. Unlike research projects in most other parts of Africa, there was no nearby place to get water and food, and there were no dwellings, no contact with other humans, and no one to rescue us in an emergency. In fact, if we died, it was unlikely that anyone would realize it for months. Although we did not consider this remoteness a disadvantage, we would have to deal with some serious logistical problems: We faced an expensive 140-mile round trip to the Boteti River when the water in our drum ran out. Despite our efforts to ration ourselves to a gallon each a day since leaving Maun, we had finished half of the water in the Land Rover’s inboard tank and much of that in our jerricans. I was glad we had another full drum. Especially after our Makgadikgadi experiences, we were very aware that the two absolute essentials for survival in the Kalahari were water and the truck.

  In spite of these difficulties, we were certain that our predator research, along with an ecological analysis of soils, plant communities, and seasonal rainfall and humidity patterns, would reveal the dynamic workings of the entire fossil river system. Such a broad approach was necessary because no one had ever done research in this area and there was no background information available. We felt privileged to be breaking this new ground, but it would involve a lot of hard work apart from watching predators.

  Considering our critical shortage of operating money, our primary subject would have to be a species that was fairly easy to observe, so we wouldn’t have to go chasing all over the countryside, burning up precious gasoline to find it. It should also be an animal about which little was known, which would help to make our research more attractive to potential sponsors.

  For days, in the mornings and afternoons, we sat on top of the Land Rover watching the antelope herds at various points on the riverbed, waiting for signs of a predator. Though we saw lions, jackals, cheetahs, and wild dogs, for one reason or another none of these would do. Since they all had been studied in other parts of Africa, we worried that we would be unable to attract a grant by researching them. Both wild dogs and cheetahs were rare and highly mobile in the Kalahari; they would be difficult to find and observe regularly. Furthermore, the cheetahs we saw were very wary—apparently with good reason. We heard later that Bushmen often chase them off their kills and appropriate the carcasses for themselves.

  To help us decide which predator we should study, we took notes on any that we could find. In the process, we came to realize something that set the direction of our research for years to come: Night belongs to the carnivores of the Kalahari.

  Purple-black and darker than the night, the supple dunes slept beside the ancient river. The sky sparkled with points of starlight and meteors streaked through the atmosphere. Below, the grasses, dry and tan before the dry season, reflected the celestial light, as if the river moved again.

  I switched off the motor and the spotlight stabbed into the darkness. Eyes, thousands of them, shone like globes of phosphor. Behind the eyes the springbok herd rested, the vague curves of their horns and the bold white stripes on their faces showing above the grass. Some began to stand, nervously raising and lowering their heads. I swung the light away to a tree. Another eye, a larger one, stared down like a shiny maible from the treetop. A giraffe was browsing on, acacia leaves.

  We soon learned to recognize the various animals at night by the color and movements of their eye reflections, and by their height above the grass. A jackal’s reflected yellow and jogged along just above the grass-heads. A lion’s eyes were also yellow, but larger and higher above the ground, and they swung from side to side slightly as the animal walked.

  We were driving back from making observations one night, watching along the spotlight’s beam and trying to make out the dim forms of our camp trees. Suddenly, eyes that we had never before seen were reflected in the light; they were emerald-green and wide-set. A dark, bearlike form covered with long, flowing hair moved through the outer reaches of the light. It stood quite tall at the shoulder and had a large, squarish head, but its hindquarters were dwarfed, as if stunted, and it had a long bushy tail. It was walking quickly away from us. I eased my foot down on the accelerator pedal, and we strained through the cracked and yellowed windshield to hold it in sight. Moving faster, it seemed to glide across the savanna like some dark, shaggy ghost. Then it was gone.

  Back at camp, we thumbed through our guidebook to the larger animals of Africa. Aardwolf? Spotted hyena? Aardvark? It certainly hadn’t been a cat. None of the descriptions or pictures seemed to fit. We hadn’t had a good view of it, but whatever the animal was, it was not common. Sitting cross-legged on our bedrolls in the back of the Land Rover, we paged through the book and back again, a flickering kerosene lantern hanging between us. Smaller than a spotted hyena, larger than an aardwolf, the wrong range for a striped hyena—but from its proportions, it definitely was a hyena. We finally decided it could only have been Hyaena brunnea, a brown hyena, one of the rarest and least-known large carnivores on earth.

  What a stroke of luck! Here was an endangered species that had never before been studied in the wild and about which practically nothing was known. Anything we learned would be a contribution to science and important in the conservation of rare and endangered species. It seemed the perfect animal on which to focus our research.

  Though they were entirely nocturnal, and secretive, we continued to see the brown hyenas, if only for fleeting seconds, when we jolted along over the riverbed. Their habits would make them difficult to study, but we grew more and more curious about them. Every night, beginning at dusk, we combed the riverbed with the truck and spotlight, looking for them. Left—right, right—left, I swung the light for hours as we drove slowly along. It was a frustrating business. Jackals, bateared foxes, korhaans, plovers, and wild cats were everywhere in the thick grass. Occasionally we did pick up those wide-set emerald eyes, but they were always at the outer limits of the spotlight, moving quickly away into the darkness.

  Early one morning near the end of May, after a long disappointing night searching for hyenas, we reached camp stiff and sore, aching for sleep. Next to the fireplace stood a jackal, his feet planted solidly apart, his muzzle buried deep in our black iron stewing pot. Daring yellow eyes peered over the rim at us; gravy dripped from his whiskers. He finished licking the pot clean, cocked his leg, peed on it, and trotted casually out of camp. As he disappeared into the night, we recognized, from his black, anchor-shaped tail patch, the jackal we had named “Captain,” a big, broad-chested male whom we saw often. He had a saddle of jet-black hair spiked wit
h silver and a full, bushy tail.

  Several nights later we sat watching a gemsbok carcass that had been abandoned by lions after they had eaten their fill. We were hoping a brown hyena would come by to scavenge. By 3:30 A.M., no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stay awake. Leaving Delia to watch for hyenas, I quietly unrolled my sleeping bag on the ground beside the Land Rover. After setting my shoes in the grass next to me, I slipped into the bag and bunched my shirt up to form a pillow.

  I had just dropped into a sound sleep when my head suddenly bounced on the hard ground. I sat up and fumbled for my flashlight. Five yards away a jackal was in high-speed reverse, dragging away the shirt he had yanked from beneath my head. “Hey! Drop that!” I was half amused, half annoyed, and still half asleep. I struggled out of my sleeping bag, scolding myself for having raised my voice; I might have frightened off a hyena. Then I began looking in the grass for my shoes. They, too, were gone.

  This was more serious, because I didn’t have another pair. I hobbled after the jackal, the sharp stubble spiking my bare feet. In the beam of my flashlight I could see his beady eyes fixed on me as he hauled my shirt away through the grass. My feet nicked and stinging, I finally gave up the chase and huddled in the Land Rover until dawn, when I recovered the slobbered toe of one shoe and the tattered remains of my shirt. Captain, the pirate jackal, had struck again. Later that day I spent several hours sewing a pair of moccasins from two pieces of faded canvas.

  At breakfast that morning the same thought struck Delia and me at the same time. While driving around the riverbed for hours each night, waiting for these timid brown hyenas to get used to us, why not find out what we could about jackals? They had never been studied in an area like the Kalahari, so anything we learned about them would be new.

  Every sunset, we began parking the truck on Cheetah Hill, a bush-covered bulge of sand that intruded onto the riverbed north of camp. With field glasses, notebooks, and a tin of corned beef, we would sit, each cradled in a spare tire atop the roofrack, watching the nightlife begin in Deception Valley.

  Sometime before dusk Captain would usually stand from his favorite resting place near North Tree, point his muzzle to the sky, and call to his jackal neighbors. Then, his ears cocked, he would listen to the high-pitched wavering cries that answered from up and down the valley. He would scratch and shake his thick coat, the silver hairs along his black saddle shimmering in the fading twilight. After a deep stretch, he would be off, his keen muzzle spearing through the grasses as he jogged along hunting for mice. From Cheetah Hill we would note his direction, then move to intercept and follow him.

  Steering and changing gears with my left hand, holding the light out the window with my right, I would try to keep pace and contact with Captain, staying from fifteen to twenty-five yards behind him. If we followed any closer, he would look back at us, obviously disturbed; any farther away and we would lose him in the grasses. Meanwhile, Delia, holding a flashlight over a notebook and compass on her lap, made notes on his behavior, the directions in which he traveled, the distances, and habitat types. The binoculars lay on the seat between us so that either of us could grab them and describe what was happening. With some practice, our technique worked very well. We could see the species of bird, and often the kind of rat or mouse, that Captain caught before it had been chomped down. And by driving to the spot in the grass where he had been nosing about, we usually discovered a line of frenzied termites or ants he had just lapped with his tongue.

  One night in early June, soon after the theft of my shoes, we were following Captain when, without warning and with incredible speed, he took off after a steenbok fawn. I accelerated, and we managed to keep him in sight during a long chase that involved several complete circles, before he disappeared. But after that, no matter which direction we took, we could not spot the lantern we had hung high on a limb in camp to guide us back after dark. Captain had led us out of the stretch of riverbed that was familiar to us, and he had changed directions so frequently that he had scrambled our mileage and compass readings. We could not backtrack with any certainty. We were lost.

  With less than a quart of water on board the Land Rover, we could not risk driving farther from camp. So we stopped for the night. From the roofrack the next morning, we could see North Tree on the riverbed about a mile away; our camp was about the same distance south from there. Heading back, I decided that I would tap the red water drum that day and fill a jerrican, and from then on always keep it with us in the truck. There had been no rain for weeks. Each day was cloudless, the savanna drier than the day before. If we got lost again without water, it might be more serious than having to spend one night away from the shelter of our tree island.

  Back in camp, while Delia began to make our breakfast, I took a wrench from the toolbox and carried one of our empty jerricans and a length of siphon hose to the drum. I laid the wrench in the bung to unscrew it. A hollow, empty sound rang from deep inside.

  It just couldn’t be . . . I dropped the wrench and pushed the drum. It toppled over and rolled aside—empty. All that was left of our water was a patch of dampness in the sand.

  “Delia! There’s no water in this blasted drum!” I stooped to look at the rusted bottom, and then I kicked the damned thing. Delia was as shocked as I was. In a small voice, she asked, “Mark, what are we going to do? Can we make it to the river?”

  The Boteti River was nearly a full day’s drive away through the heat, sand, and thornscrub. We had less than a quart of water in the truck, and we needed much more than that just to keep the motor cool. If it ran dry and seized up, we would be in a lot worse trouble. How could I have been so stupid! Each day I had measured the level of gasoline in the large inboard tank in the Land Rover to make sure we had enough to get to Maun. I thought we had plenty of water—but I should have looked! We stared at the damp spot as if to will the water out of the ground. I fought off a growing uneasiness. This was just the type of situation we should have avoided.

  “We’ll have to go tonight when the air is cool, so we won’t have to use so much water in the radiator,” I said, putting my arms around Delia. There was nothing else to do.

  That afternoon we climbed into the Land Rover to leave for the river. I fumbled with the ignition key, switching it over and over. “Come on, you son of a bitch!” My throat was tight with anger and rising fear. There was nothing but a deadpan click. I jumped out, ran to the front, and threw up the hood. “Try it again!” I called to Delia, then listened to the motor, trying to find out what was wrong.

  From the time we had driven out of Gaborone on our way north to Maun, what I had feared most was being stranded somewhere far away from help with a broken-down Land Rover, which I could not fix because I lacked the talent, tools, and spare parts. Up to this point we had had continual minor problems with the worn-out vehicle: corroded battery cables, a discharging generator, punctured tires, and broken exhaust lines. I had always been able to make these relatively minor repairs. But now, as I peered under the hood and Delia worked the ignition switch, the tension settled heavy in my chest. The click that comes from a dead battery now had become a deeper, more ominous clunk, a sign that something much more serious had gone wrong.

  I kept my worst fears to myself and went to work. It was dark by the time I discovered that the starter had come apart. Its ring gear had fallen into the flywheel housing and had jammed the motor, so hand-cranking was going to get us nowhere.

  I found a piece of heavy wire and bent the end into a hook. We crawled under the truck. Delia held the flashlight for me as I slid the long wire into the housing, trying to feel my way past the flywheel. But through the wire everything felt the same; I could only guess where the engine was jammed.

  About midnight we came out from under the truck. My knuckles and forehead were bleeding and smeared with grass chaff, oil, grease, and dirt. It seemed hopeless. I could not be certain that I had even touched the ring gear. I heaved on the crank. The motor turned slightly, and then stopped soli
dly.

  We put some wood on the fire, and while we warmed ourselves and rested, I tried to think through our predicament. If we were going to survive this, the starter gear had to come out. We were both thirsty, but neither of us would drink. I looked at Delia, sitting beside the fire, her head on her arms. I felt utterly frustrated. I couldn’t think of anything else to try, and time was running out. Only a quart of water was left for the two of us.

  Back at the truck I moved the crank counterclockwise until it stopped, then clockwise just slightly. I was sure the wire was long enough and must be touching the gear. For the rest of the night I bent the end into hooks of different shapes and inserted it at different angles, poking and probing into the housing while Delia held the light. When I could feel nothing move, I repositioned the engine and probed some more.

  It was sometime after sunrise when I heard a clank. I hurried to the crank and turned the motor—it was free! We would rest through the day and set off at dusk.

  This predicament made us realize that staying in an area as remote as Deception Valley was out of the question. Assuming that we were able to get to the river and return, how long before another crisis? And how many such crises would there be before a real disaster? The hard truth was that we just did not have enough money to do research in such a place. What little we had left would soon be consumed in trips to Maun for supplies, especially since we had no way to haul and store adequate quantities of water and gasoline. We would have to find a less remote place to work, a place less wild . . . and less free. It was a bitter realization. Two years of planning and working to save enough money for the expedition, five months of reconnaissance and study in Africa, all seemed to have drained away with our water into the sand. Though we had been in the Kalahari for little more than a month, we had already developed a deep attachment to this old riverbed and its animals, especially the ones, like Captain, whom we recognized.