Cry of the Kalahari Page 5

  We picked through a depressing breakfast of beans, a meal we had had three times a day for the last sixteen days, and then began loading the truck with our few belongings. The droning of an engine abruptly roused us from our apathy. A stubby green-and-white Land Rover bounced down the duneslope east of the riverbed, a long tail of dust rising behind it. We stood and watched it approach, completely amazed that there was another truck in the area. Before it had rolled to a stop a freckled, ruddy-faced man in baggy shorts, knee socks, and a knit shirt stretched over his round belly launched himself from the driver’s seat. His thin, greying hair was slicked straight back over his sunburned head, and his eyes crinkled with a smile. Kalahari sun, wind, and sand had etched his face deeply.

  “Hello! Name’s Berghoffer, Bergie Berghoffer. You can call me Bergie. Someone in Maun told me that you two were out here somewhere, and when I crossed some truck spoor miles east of here, I figured it was you.” Rummaging in the back of his Land Rover, he called over his shoulder, “I reckon by now you might be needing some of this.” He set out some brown paper packets of goat meat, a bucket of mealie-meal with eggs buried inside—to keep them cool and protect them from breaking—potatoes, and coffee. While we were thanking him for about the twelfth time, he finally put up his hands and said with a wink, “It’s only a pleasure . . . I’m half Yank myself, you know.”

  We were to learn later that Bergie had roamed the Kalahari for twenty-three years, living in bush camps while drilling mineral test holes for the Botswana Department of Surveys and Lands. He lived a nomadic existence, moving his camp from one area to another, usually far outside the game reserve. “I’d much rather never find anything out here except the animals—not sure I’d tell anyone if I did.” He said wryly. “I’m bloody glad someone is finally here to study the wildlife. No one ever has, you know. The Kalahari needs someone to be her champion.”

  Bergie had a special affection for “Yanks” because his father was an American who had traveled to the Republic of South Africa with the Bill Cody Wild West Show. There he had met and married a woman of British extraction and had settled in the republic. Bergie reckoned it was his father’s yearning to travel that coursed through his own veins and kept him on the move and in the bush for most of his life.

  “I’m sorry . . . wish we could offer you some tea or coffee,” I apologized. “But we’ve got a problem.” I showed him the empty drum.

  “Well, a bit of bad luck, that.” He frowned, rubbing his chin. “Not to worry about the coffee, but what are you chaps going to do for water?”

  I explained that we would be heading for the river, then Maun, and that we wouldn’t be able to come back to Deception. “Oh . . . I am sorry about that . . . that really is a bit of a bugger.” Looking out over the riverbed, he sighed.

  “Tell you what.” He brightened. “You take this, just to be sure you get there.” He hefted a jerrican of water from the back of his Land Rover. “Now I’ll have that cup of coffee, if you don’t mind, missus.”

  Despite our protests, Bergie would take none of the water with him to insure his safe return to his own camp. He had scarcely finished his coffee when he held his hand out to me.

  “Okay, Marie, okay, Delia, I must be on my way—I’ll be seeing you.” Then he was gone, his Land Rover disappearing over the eastern dune.

  Blind luck and Bergie’s generosity had provided us with more than enough water to get to the river—or to Maun, for that matter. We decided to spend one more night in Deception Valley. We hated to leave it, and besides, we were exhausted from the trials of the previous night.

  Not an hour before we were to leave Deception Valley for good the next morning, Bergie was back, this time with a large flatbed truck and his drilling crew of eight natives. They unloaded a folding wooden table, two chairs, a heavy iron fire grate, a gas burner complete with cylinder, a small cooking tent with a big fly sheet, four drums of water, and some gasoline. Bergie was like a genie. He waved his arms and shouted orders to his crew, and as if by magic, a small camp appeared.

  Almost before we had realized what was happening, he was gone, a wisp of dust vanishing across the dunes again. We stood in the middle of our instant camp staring after this whirling dervish of the Kalahari. In one swift gesture of unbelievable kindness, Bergie had made it possible for us to stay in Deception Valley, at least for a time, while we fought to get more research data and a grant.

  We resumed our research, but it was not easy to observe and follow animals without a starter on the truck. Every day near dusk, when we found a jackal sleeping in the grass on the riverbed, we would park nearby, switch off the motor, and wait for it to get up and begin foraging. As soon as it stood and began to stretch, I would sneak to the front of the truck and crank the engine while Delia tried to keep her eye on the jackal moving away through the tall grass. The hand-cranking created such a terrific racket that it drew the attention of every creature for half a mile around. And whenever we were sitting with lions at night, it was a little disconcerting for me to turn my back on them in the dark, knowing that they were watching as I heaved on the crank.

  Two weeks after Bergie had given us our camp, he was back with more water. While Delia was making coffee, he quietly took me by the arm and led me to his truck. “Now listen lad, if you expect to keep Delia in the Kalahari, you must spoil her a little. Every woman needs a hot bath!” He turned and pulled a tin tub from the back of his truck. “And does she have a looking glass?” Reaching through the window, he brought out a mirror. From the expression on Delia’s face when she saw these gifts, I knew Bergie had been right.

  His camp was so far away that we only saw him rarely, but he had an uncanny sense of timing. Weeks would pass, and just when we were getting low on water, he would appear, always with more gifts of goat or wildebeest meat, eggs, potatoes, brawn—a meat gelatin, or headcheese—and other luxury items that he brought either from his camp or from Gaborone. Even if we had had a way of getting these things, we could never have afforded to buy them.

  One day he took us much farther south along Deception Valley than we had explored. After an hour of riding in his Land Rover, with its stiff, super-reinforced leaf springs—he was very proud of them—our kidneys ached and our necks were stiff from the pounding. We finally stopped on a dune overlooking a large, perfectly round clay pan. Because of the slate-grey soil in its bottom, it looked as if it were covered with water, an illusion so complete that in later years we saw migratory water birds, once even a pelican, drawn to its surface during drought. Bergie told us the Bushmen had named the valley after this pan, with a word in their language meaning “deception,” and also because when traveling along the riverbed, one is deceived into believing every bend is the last. Below us, the old river channel continued winding away into the Kalahari beyond this Real Deception Pan, as we often called it.

  “I’ve been this far and no farther,” Bergie said. “Beyond here no man knows.” None of us spoke for a long time. We listened to the wind singing in the grasses and looked over the great expanse of wilderness stretching for hundreds of miles beyond. “You know,” Bergie said, “there’s only one thing that really frightens me out here, and that’s fire.”

  3

  Fire

  Mark

  Voices of jackals calling

  And, loud in the hush between,

  A morsel of dry earth falling

  From the flanks of the scarred ravine.

  —Rudyard Kipling

  THE RAINS of 1974, which flooded many parts of the country, had been the heaviest ever recorded in Botswana. They had ended in May, but in their wake, the grasses of the savanna stood taller than a Bushman’s head, like a field of golden wheat hundreds of miles across, bowing in the wind. By July, when we had been in Deception for three months, the dry-season sun had turned the wheat to straw, the straw to tinder. Some said the sun’s rays passing through a dew drop could set it off.

  “Grass number 27: base, 9.2 centimeters; dry canopy, 57.2; green ca
nopy, 14.3. . .” We had been at it all morning, measuring the basal areas, canopies, and species composition of the grass and herb communities along our vegetation sample lines from riverbed to dune top.

  I stood up to rest my cramped knees and noticed a curious grey cloud rising from the eastern horizon. Billowing thousands of feet into the higher atmosphere, its top was sheared off by winds into a vaporous tail that slowly drifted south. Far away—how far we could not tell—the Kalahari was burning.

  As we stood watching the ominous cloud, a strong wind, gusting to thirty miles per hour, struck us full in the face, tugging at our clothes and bringing tears to our eyes. Only miles of dry grass stood between us and the fire.

  We continued to follow Captain and the other jackals every night, always conscious of the eerie glow on the eastern horizon. There was still so much savanna between the fire and our camp that it would take several weeks to reach us. Before then we would have to develop some plan to protect ourselves, the Land Rover, and camp.

  The July nights were bitterly cold. We had not expected temperatures that dropped from a daytime of seventy degrees to fourteen above zero just before dawn. We had no winter clothes—there had been no room for them in our packs when we left home. Following the jackals, we could hardly bear the frigid air, and after holding the spotlight out of the window for just a few minutes, my arm and shoulder would be numb. The truck had no heater, so I cut holes in the sides of a coffee can, turned it over a candle, and set it on the floor. We put socks on our hands, sleeping bags across our laps, and ate cans of stew heated on the exhaust manifold. Still we cramped with the cold and could stand no more than three or four hours in the Land Rover before heading back to the campfire.

  At first most of the jackals looked alike, especially at night, so we decided to immobilize and collar some for easier identification. On our first supply trip to Maun, when I had fixed the starter on the truck, Norbert Drager, a German vet in the village, had given us some buffalo-collaring material and a carbon dioxide darting rifle full of leaks and covered with rust. I sealed the rifle with tire patches so that it would hold a charge and, using the buffalo material, made some lightweight collars that fastened with small bolts.

  One very cold night in mid-July, we managed to immobilize a jackal near camp. Animals sometimes develop hypothermia when drugged in such weather, so when we had the collar in place, we gently carried our subject into camp, where he could recover near the warmth of the campfire. Then we kept watch from the Land Rover to protect him from larger predators until he fully regained his coordination.

  Hours passed, the night grew colder, and our coffee-can heater could not keep us warm. By 1:00 A.M., Delia had had enough. Casting a dim yellow light ahead of her with our weak flashlight, she dragged her sleeping bag and our flimsy foam mattress into the small mess tent. On the riverbed there was a rodent boom—so many furry creatures that for several weeks we had had to eat supper with our feet on tin cans to keep them from crawling up our legs. In spite of the occasional rat or mouse that would scurry over her, Delia was determined to be warm and get some sleep.

  I sat in the truck, now and then turning the spotlight on the jackal, who was beginning to flop around, trying to stand up. The light warmed my hands and I wanted to leave it on, but I didn’t want to run down the battery. So I sat with my binoculars resting over the steering wheel, shivering in the dark and studying the distant glow of the grass fire, wondering how far away it was.

  Two weeks had gone by since we first noticed it. Since then it had broadened and intensified into an orange-red corona stretching across the entire horizon from north to south. Now, in the quiet of night, with the air still and moist, the vivid colors had nearly faded from the sky. The fire seemed to have gone to sleep. But I knew that in the morning, the heavy winds would return and send an immense curtain of grey smoke into the atmosphere.

  The little camp Bergie had given us wasn’t worth much materially, but it was all we had in the world, and we could never have afforded to replace it. If the fire destroyed it, we would be wiped out financially and our research would be finished. Furthermore, the roots we had put down in that tree island were already something very vital. In the short time we had been there, Deception Valley had become our home.

  We worried, too, about Captain and the other animals. Surely some of them would die in the fire. And the sample plots along our vegetation transect lines would be incinerated. After the burn there might be little left to study.

  Now, sudden fountains of color surged into the night sky, and then, mysteriously, drained away to a small, dim smudge, only to flare up again minutes later: The fire was dune-walking. Each time it descended into the shelter of an interdunal valley where there was less tinder, its intensity diminished, but as it crept back to the wooded crests, added fuel and wind renewed it. With growing concern, I began to realize what a giant it really was. The Kalahari was burning along a front more than fifty miles long from north to south.

  I hung the spotlight outside on the mirror bracket of the truck, and turned it on. It was about 3:30 A.M. and the jackal was recovering nicely. After switching off the light, I sat blowing through my hands to warm them. But then something urged me to have another look. I flipped the switch again and saw seven lions standing ewer the jackal.

  Startled by the light, the two females and five subadults jumped back and turned away. But seconds later they were back, eyes fixed on their prey. I hit the starter and drove past the tent, where Delia was sleeping soundly. Ignoring the noise of the truck, the lionesses refused to leave the jackal. Their surprise and confusion gone, they stalked toward him, their heads low, their tails flicking from side to side.

  I drove quickly by the jackal, getting between him and the lions. They turned to avoid the truck, and I nudged one of them gently in the rear with the bumper. The lioness grunted once and then wheeled and spat at the headlight. They tried to move around the truck, but I blocked their way, turning them around and heading them at a walking pace into West Prairie, the grassland off the riverbed beyond camp. By cutting the steering wheel left and right and holding the bumper close behind them, I kept them moving away. I didn’t like manipulating the lionesses in this way, but my major concern at the moment had to be the jackal, because we had rendered him temporarily helpless.

  I was about 400 yards west of camp when, through the rearview mirror, I noticed a weak glow winking on and off somewhere behind the truck. It took some seconds before I realized that it was coming from the mess tent.

  Delia had been unaware of the lions. Awakened by the truck, she thought I was following the jackal from camp to make sure he had completely recovered. The Land Rover hadn’t been gone long when she heard the padding of heavy feet on the ground outside the tent. The canvas walls shook once. Then a heavy rush of air sounded at her feet. She slowly raised her head. Framed in the doorway—there were no zippers left on the tent flaps—and just visible in the starlight, were the massive heads of two male lions looming over her toes.

  She held her breath as the lions smelled the floor of the tent, puffs of air blowing from their nostrils, their whiskers skimming the nylon of her sleeping bag.

  She moved her feet. The lions froze, looking straight into the tent. She could hear the Land Rover moving farther away. She slowly reached for the flashlight on the floor beside her. The lions were standing dead still; they seemed to have stopped breathing. She began to raise the flashlight to the screen window above her head. The lion on the left moved against the tent, and the walls trembled again. With the flashlight held to the window, Delia hesitated to thumb the switch, afraid of the noise it would make. Finally she nudged it once—in the silence, the click was like a shot.

  The lions didn’t budge. On-off, on-off, on-off, she signaled again and again. Moments later she let out a long, slow breath when she heard the Land Rover’s engine racing and the peculiar squeak in its bumper as it rattled toward camp.

  As I neared our tree island, I swung the spotlight
back and forth. Everything looked normal. Still, the dim flashlight continued to blink on and off. I rounded the tent and then jammed on the brakes, gripping the steering wheel hard: Two black-maned lions stood shoulder to shoulder, their heads buried in the doorway. Delia was trapped like a mouse in a shoebox.

  I had to do something to distract the lions without jeopardizing her by intimidating them in the wrong way. An inept move would increase the danger. A story had been circulating in Maun when we were last there about a woman being dragged from her sleeping bag by lions in Chobe, a park in northeast Botswana. For once I wished I had a firearm of some sort. At least I might have frightened the lions away from the tent by firing it in the air.

  Maybe I could use the Land Rover to herd the males, as I had the females. Slowly, I drove toward the lions. Standing firmly in front of the tent’s flap, they both looked at the truck, their eyes round, ears perked, tails twitching. At least their attention was focused on me now, not Delia. As I drew nearer they seemed to grow, until they stood as tall as the truck’s hood, their shoulder muscles bunched and tense. They held their ground. I stopped.

  After a few more seconds, the males began to blink their eyes. They settled back on their haunches and turned back to Delia. I let out the clutch and drove forward again, this time with my head out the window and slapping the side of the Rover to keep their attention on the truck. When I was very close, they Anally turned away. Laying their ears back as if annoyed, they put their noses to the ground and walked off in the direction of the females. Just beyond camp they began to bellow, their crescendos rolling up and down the valley, and the lionesses answered from the bush savanna farther west. The jackal had escaped during all the commotion.