Cry of the Kalahari Read online

  I quickly slipped into the tent to lie next to Delia. Half frightened and half excited, she chattered for a while and then buried her head in my chest. Soon we were sound asleep. I woke once, when a rat dropped onto my forehead. I slapped it against the wall of the tent and shivered, and after a while fell back to sleep.

  Some nights later, we were following one of our collared jackals when the eastern sky flushed angry red. “Mark, the fire’s almost here! We’ve got to get back to camp and get ready!” I felt sure it was still quite far away and that it would be a waste of time to tear down camp so soon. But Delia insisted, and I finally succumbed to her pleas and turned the truck around.

  Before I had even brought the Rover to a full stop, Delia leaped from her seat. She began collecting pots, pans, and bags of flour and mealie-meal, hauling everything she could drag or carry toward the truck. I tried to reason with her. “Look, Boo, it’s not going to come tearing over the dunes within the next few minutes, or even before morning.”

  “How do you know!” She snapped, as she struggled with a heavy bag of onions. “You’ve never seen a range fire in the Kalahari—or anywhere else.”

  “We’ll be able to hear the fire way off, you’ll see the flames in the grass—there’ll be sparks. Where are we going to eat, sleep, and work if we pack up before the fire’s even here?”

  But it was no use trying to stop her. I half expected her to smother me with a wet blanket at any moment. Now she was staggering toward the truck with another armload of boxes, some clothing, and a jerrican. The pile in the back of the Land Rover was growing by the minute. I began to sneak things out the side door as she piled them in through the back. “Now look, dammit! When the fire gets here we’ll know it. Get hold of yourself!”

  “I’m not taking any chances!” She shouted back.

  I had just managed to hang the onions back in a tree on the dark side of the truck when one side of the mess tent collapsed. Delia was hauling up tent stakes like a gopher in a turnip patch.

  “What are you doing?” I begged.

  “I’m putting the tent in the Land Rover.”

  I stomped over to the truck and shoved all the stuff out the back onto the ground. “Stop!” I yelled, standing between her and the pile. “If it’ll make you feel better, we’ll do something constructive—like make a firebreak around camp.”

  I tied a fallen tree to the back of the Land Rover with a heavy piece of old cotton rope. A few circles around camp and I had flattened a swath through the tall grass.

  When I had finished I began making up our bed in the back of the truck. By now it was long past midnight.

  “What are you doing?” Delia was standing behind me.

  “I’m going to sleep. I know we’re perfectly safe. Anyway, you’re so damned stubborn . . . no matter what, you’ll watch that fire all night.”

  Much later, cold, stiff, and contrite, she crawled into her sleeping bag and huddled against me. I put my arms around her and drifted back to sleep.

  About midmorning, Bergie’s flatbed came churning over East Dune and into camp. Laughing, he slid from the driver’s seat. “What’s all this?” he asked, as he eyed our disheveled camp.

  We asked him about the approaching fire.

  “Well, I guess you’ll likely survive for a while yet.” He chuckled. “That fire’s still thirty miles east of here—passed my camp day before yesterday.”

  Delia glanced at me and smiled faintly.

  Then Bergie frowned. “Make no mistake, though, its bloody-minded. Even with a tractor to make a break and my crew to fight it, we had a time. Take care when it gets this side—it’s no small fry.”

  “How did it get started?” I asked.

  “Mon, the bloody Bushmen set these fires every year, you know. They can hunt—track—better with the thick grass burned away. And it’s easier for them to collect bauhinia nuts, one of their staple foods. I suppose you can’t blame ’em too much, but the fire sure raises Cain with the trees in the woodlands. Dries out the lower leaves the animals need for browse in the dry times. And the Bushmen aren’t the only ones to blame. The safari hunters set the veld alight, too, though you’ll never hear ’em admit it.”

  He turned to the back of his truck. “Had a few things extra around camp I thought you could use.” He set a gunny sack full of goat meat, eggs, and mealie-meal in the grass next to the mess tent. Our near-empty water drums boomed as we filled them from the drums on his truck. Delia brewed some coffee.

  With a last sip from his cup he was on his feet and saying goodbye. “I’ve got three weeks’ leave due me. I reckon I’ll go to Johannesburg for a spell to visit my daughter and her family. But you can bet I won’t be able to stand the city life for long—I’ll be back in ten days or so. Probably beat the fire here; it dies down a lot each night so it’s still a couple of weeks away from Deception.”

  We begged him to spend a few days with us on his return, so that we could show him some of the things we had learned. “All right, all right—I’ll pop over directly when I get back. Okay Mark, okay Delia—I’ll be seeing you.”

  Two weeks went by, but still Bergie had not come back. Day after day we listened against the wind, imagining dozens of times that we could hear his truck approaching. Maybe it was a tent line humming in the wind, or our ears buzzing from the silence, that fooled us again and again. It’s like that in the bush, when you’ve waited a long time for a friend.

  Was he ill? Had his truck turned over somewhere along the spoor east of Deception? Worried, we finally drove along the track he took to our camp, but we found nothing. We decided he must have stayed longer than he had expected in Johannesburg.

  A few days later, on a frosty morning in early August, I opened the back door of the Land Rover and crawled from bed. The sickly sun cast a frail, sallow half-light over the old riverbed. The birds were silent. Hordes of insects—ones that usually came out only at night—swarmed in the air or crawled through the trees and over the ground in the eerie quiet. The ashen skeleton of a grass leaf, incinerated by intense heat, settled on the back of my hand. I looked up, and the air was full of them, floating in, softly covering everything, like black snow. From north to south, the veil of smoke in the eastern sky boiled skyward for thousands of feet. The fire was almost on us. I felt small and threatened. It looked larger, more powerful than I had imagined. I knew we probably should have packed up camp days before and gone to Maun.

  I hurriedly piled into the Land Rover pots, pans, bags of flour, mealie-meal, and everything else that would fit, and Delia flattened the mess tent and its fly sheet to the ground. But if the flames hit the valley in midafternoon, with the humidity at rock bottom and the winds blowing easterly at thirty to forty miles an hour, it would be almost impossible to keep the camp from burning. Aside from our personal safety and that of the animals, we were most concerned about our data books—the record of our research—and about the Land Rover. Tying the dead tree to the truck again, I dragged it around camp to broaden our firebreak. With a spade and axe, we cleared away as much grass and dead wood as we could. Delia set pans of water near the mess tent, and I cut branches for beating at the flames. There was little more we could do.

  The morning wore on, the winds blew harder, and the roar from the fire grew louder. More and more ash rained into camp and swirled across the ground in the churning air. By midafternoon, driven by the heavy desert winds, the first flame reached the top of East Dune. It paused for a moment, licking at the tall grasses and lower branches of a tree, then leaped quickly to the top, turning the tree into a thirty-foot torch. Another flame crested the dune, then another. A line of fire invaded the woodlands, and whole trees exploded like flares.

  The intense heat created its own wind, a wind that fed oxygen to the flames and spurred them down the duneslopes toward the riverbed at an incredible speed, sweeping them through grass and bush as far north and south as we could see. Nothing could have prepared us for that sight.

  “Our break will never stop
it!” I yelled above the roar. I dropped the branch in my hand and ran to the Land Rover, tied the fallen tree to the hitch again, and dragged it round and round camp to widen the firebreak.

  When the flames reached the riverbed, 1000 yards from camp, they dropped and spread out in the grasses. An immense cloud of seething white smoke erupted from the savanna, and the fire, with flames eight to ten feet high, swept down the valley. I had hoped that our truck spoor across the riverbed, 400 yards from camp, would slow the advance, but the fire only paused for a moment and then surged toward us again. I could see immediately that the break around camp was still far too narrow.

  Once again I dragged the tree, this time in large figure eights. When the flames were about 200 yards away, I ran to the edge of our break and knelt to set a backfire. My hands fumbled with the matches, trying to get one lit. It was impossible in that wind; I turned my body to form a shield and felt heat on the back of my neck. I fought off an urge to stand up and run. Finally I touched off the whole box and stuffed it into the grass.

  But it was too late—the backfire could not burn fast enough against the strong wind. I sprinted to the truck and drove along just ahead of the fire line, pulling the dead tree. If I could break the fire’s momentum, we could beat it out around camp when it reached our backfire and break.

  I made several passes just ahead of the flames. But they were still moving much too quickly toward Delia and camp. At a spot where the fire had slowed down a little in the flattened grass, I drove directly into the flames, straddling the fire line with the truck and driving as fast as I could while dragging the tree. After about fifty yards, I turned out of the fire and looked back. It was working. There were gaps in the fire line, and it had been slowed. Before it could rebuild momentum, I swung around and made another pass, and then another.

  On the third sweep, the smoke from smoldering grass was so thick that I could hardly see. Suddenly Delia appeared in front of the truck, beating at the flames, her branch above her head. I slammed on the brakes and missed her by a foot. She jumped back and I sped away.

  When I was turning for another pass at the fire, she came running toward the Land Rover, screaming and waving, her face white.

  “Mark! My God, you’re on fire! The truck’s on fire! Jump! Get out before it explodes!” I looked back. The tree, the cotton rope, and the undercarriage of the Rover were in flames.

  A fifty-gallon tank of slopping gasoline was riding against the back of my seat; its overflow pipe ran through the floor of the truck and came out ahead of the right rear wheel. Stamping on the brake and turning off the motor, I lunged from the door as flames leaped up around both sides of the Land Rover. Then I ran the thirty yards to where Delia was standing. Together we waited for the explosion.

  “All our data books, our cameras, everything is inside!” she cried.

  Then I remembered the old fire extinguisher clipped to the ceiling over the front seat. I got back inside the burning truck, but the trigger of the extinguisher was frozen with rust. I threw it out the window, started the motor, and jammed the truck into gear. Holding the accelerator flat to the floor, with the engine racing, I slid my foot off the clutch pedal. The Land Rover lurched forward with a shudder that shook every part of it. The flaming rope and tree broke free and, miraculously, most of the burning grass dropped from beneath. I stopped the truck over a small patch of bare calcrete rock and threw sand into the undercarriage to put out the rest of the flames.

  We poured pots of water over the mess tent and flailed with branches and tire innertubes while the fire continued to burn around the edge of camp. Flames crawled over the ground we had cleared, working their way across the break along single stems of grass. One of the guy ropes to the tent fly sheet was on fire; I cut it free. We dragged a plastic jerrican of gasoline and a box of Land Rover parts farther into camp. Sparks showered over us. Beating at the flames, we struggled to breathe, choking and gasping in the acrid smoke and hot, deoxygenated air. Time and the fire seemed to be standing still. We barely had the strength to raise our branches for another feeble swat at the flames.

  In minutes, or seconds—I don’t really know how long—the main fire had passed. We had slowed it just enough to divert it around camp. After mopping up some of the remaining small pockets of flame, we were finally safe.

  We sank to our knees, coughing and heaving in exhaustion, our lungs burning. When we were able to look up, we watched in a stupor as, one by one, the other tree islands along the valley became torches of orange flame. North Tree and Eagle Island were burning wildly.

  Our lips, foreheads, and hands were blistered, our eyebrows and lashes singed. We would be coughing up ash and soot for days after, and the charcoal had invaded the pores of our skin so deeply that it was impossible to wash it away. For weeks, wherever we drove or walked, a grey cloud would envelop us. On windy nights, the Land Rover would be filled with a gritty haze that dimmed the light of our kerosene lantern to a murky yellow glow. We slept with bandanas tied across our faces.

  After the fire passed us it marched on across the dune tops into the Kalahari, lighting the night sky like a spectacular sunset. Behind it, the cool pink glow of burned-out trees and logs remained, until the fire’s crimson was lost in the blush of dawn.

  At sunrise the next morning we sat staring over the blackened Kalahari. Tendrils of white smoke crept from burned-out stumps. Fragile tufts of grey ash—all that remained of grasses along the dunes and riverbed—would soon crumble to a powder before the winds. Whole trees, big ones, had been completely consumed, leaving an embroidery of white ash against the blackened sands. We felt as though we were the only inhabitants on a volcanic island that had formed in the night. Lava and ash had not yet cooled, and flares from within the earth still flickered through the molten surface. Our research had been incinerated.

  Around noon Bergie’s big white truck came growling over the blackened face of East Dune and lumbered toward camp. Delia quickly began stoking the campfire for coffee.

  The four-ton Bedford rolled to a stop, and the Africans who worked with Bergie climbed down and stood in a ragged line.

  “Dumella!” I greeted them.

  “Ee,” came their hushed reply.

  “Where is Mr. Bergie? How is he?” Delia asked. They all looked at the ground, coughing and scuffing their shoes in the dust.

  “Khaopheli,” I asked the foreman, “what’s the matter? Where is Mr. Berghoffer?” They hung their heads in embarrassed silence.

  “Mr. Bergie no coming back,” Khaopheli said softly, still looking at his feet.

  “Why not? You mean he’s still in Johannesburg?”

  “Mr. Bergie dead.” I could scarcely hear him.

  “Dead! What do you mean—that’s impossible!”

  He lifted his face, patted his chest, and muttered, “Pilo—heart.”

  I sat down on the bumper of the truck, my head in my hands. Though we had known him only a short time, he had been like a father to us. I kept shaking my head, still trying not to believe it.

  “We take camp . . . Mr. Bergie’s things,” Khaopheli mumbled. I nodded and turned to stare over the Kalahari that Bergie had loved so much. The crew immediately began loading their truck with our only table, the two chairs, the tent, and other pieces of equipment.

  “But Mr. Bergie would have wanted us to have these things,” I protested. Khaopheli insisted that the government would have to decide what to do with them. When they began rolling the water drums toward their truck I flatly refused to give them up, explaining that I would contact the Department of Surveys and Lands for them to be formally loaned to us. They finally relented and drove away. The few trees we had saved from the fire, the Land Rover, the drums, a sack of mealie-meal, and other foodstuffs were all that was left.

  We had never felt such utter despair. We couldn’t even tell Bergie’s family how much he had meant to us; we didn’t know his daughter’s name. A book we had planned to give him lay on the ground next to where the tent had stood
, its pages fluttering, gathering ash in the wind.

  After a while we drove across the charred riverbed. Dense clouds of soot and ash swirled about us, filling our eyes, noses, and throats. Everything was black. At the top of West Dune we stood on the roof of the Land Rover: Complete destruction ranged as far as we could see in every direction.

  A month or so earlier, we had gambled our return airfares to the United States on more supplies for the project, trying to keep our research alive while waiting for word of a grant. None had come, and now we had less than $200 left. Our research was finished. Somehow we would have to earn the money to get home.

  We stood staring despondently over miles of blackened dunes. Delia, with tears rising in her eyes, put her head on my shoulder and said, “Whatever brought us to this place?”

  4

  The Cry of the Kalahari

  Mark

  The earth never tires,

  The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first,

  Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,

  Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,

  I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

  —Walt Whitman

  THE SANDS were laid bare by the harsh, persistent winds. An ashen debris of cremated leaves tumbled over the dunes before the gale—a black wind howling over the Kalahari.

  The fire had burned away the privacy of steenbok, korhaans, jackals, and others who lived in the grasses. Bat-eared foxes skulked nervously about, or tried to hide behind stubble an inch or two high, their big ears drooping sadly. There was no refuge.

  But there was warmth and darkness not far below the blackened surface, and hidden in the soil, left by the heavy rains of months before, there was moisture, the universal ingredient of all life. Long chains of water molecules, linked through capillarity, were being drawn from deep beneath the dunes by the hot, thirsty winds above.