Whatever You Do, Don't Run Page 12

  Paul and I were at the bar, gathering some drinks for a party we had planned for that night. We had chosen a location at a waterhole a mile or so from camp, where we could be as raucous as we liked without fear of offending any tourists. We were enthusiastic that for once we might have something resembling a social life. (“We had big party recently,” I would tell my city friends. “There must have been at least six of us!”) Paul and I had already had a few beers and were getting merry with remarkable ease.

  Eugene had escorted the last guests back to their rooms, and we could see his flashlight beam bobbing as he made his way back. Then it dipped, and he shouted out, “Hey Paul, what sort of snake is this?”

  Then, “Errrrrrgh!”

  It wasn’t the right thing to do, but Paul and I burst out laughing at the sound. We quickly curtailed it, regathered our professionalism, and ran down to find Eugene, who was universally known as Genius precisely because he wasn’t. He was clutching his thumb with a bead of blood just welling from its meat.

  “What bit you? Was it an adder? Mamba? Cobra?” Paul asked, rapid-fire.

  “Don’t know,” Genius moaned. There was silence for a moment, except for some whimpering from Genius.

  “Then why’d you bloody pick it up?”

  He didn’t answer. He gave us a description of the snake, and Paul was convinced the culprit was a member of the burrowing adder family. Eugene moaned at the news. We looked in a book, and it said that necrosis from their bite was rare, so he would most likely not watch his thumb endure cell death and rot off, like he would have if a puff adder had bitten him. He moaned at this news as well, which seemed a bit rude, so we sent him off with two of the female camp managers, who seemed inexplicably impressed by his wound.

  “Party’s over,” I said to Paul. “Let’s call Maun.” If Genius’s injury had been life threatening, I wouldn’t have minded the loss of a night’s fun. If he had been a guest, I wouldn’t have been as surprised by his foolishness. But the injury was nothing but painful, and Eugene was staff, so he should have known better. I was as cranky as the local porcupines when they couldn’t get into our bins.

  “Hmmph,” grunted Paul, and I knew that he felt as I did.

  Mustering sobriety, Paul and I radioed on the emergency channel to Maun. In cases of such an event, the local head of our company slept with a radio in his room, and we had a nurse on staff who could be contacted at all hours. We told them we had a snakebite.

  “Guest or staff?” our boss Alan asked. I knew if we said guest, he’d moan too. We told him staff.

  “Who is it?” the nurse asked.

  “Genius.”

  “Damn fool. Did it get him on the foot?” Alan asked.

  “No. Hand. He picked it up.”

  Alan swore. Anyone who handles snakes knows there are two ways to pick them up. You can either use an over-and-under grip on the head or grab it right at the neck on either side. Anyone who has this base knowledge is aware that this works with every snake in the world, except for a peculiar few in Africa—the burrowing adders. Their fangs are hinged, and they can flick them sideways and scratch you with one no matter which way you are holding them. They are generally acknowledged as the only snakes in the world that we have no safe way of handling. Sensible people do not, out of idle curiosity, pick them up.

  “Well he can pay for the plane we’ll have to send in the morning,” our boss muttered. The nurse came over the radio and instructed that he should be watched all night. Paul and I made a plan.

  We’d still have the party! We had to stay up anyway, so we’d have it around Eugene’s bed! Perfect! We carried the beers, gin and whiskey in a cooler back to his tent, dragged in some chairs, and turned up music loud enough to drown out his moaning but not so loud as to wake the guests.

  Eugene moaned erratically, and I realised it corresponded directly to the distance that either of his “nurses” got from him. While I had no doubt he was in pain, I was extremely skeptical that he would die without one of the girls stroking his brow with a wet cloth, something that he had intimated. Paul and I still attempted to make a night of it, though we felt somewhat irked by all the attention the girls gave him.

  Later in the night, Paul mellowed somewhat in his feelings. He sat on the edge of the bed, swaying noticeably from his drunkenness, and Genius wailed, a refreshingly new sound after hours of feeble moans.

  “He doesn’t think you’re pretty,” I told Paul.

  “Wassa matter?” Paul slurred. “Your hand hurts?”

  “Ye-es!” Eugene gasped. Then he added, “You’re sitting on it!”

  Soon after, we began to drop off to sleep, some making it back to their tents and others sleeping where they fell. Camp life resumed at dawn as it always did, whether we were hungover or not. Eugene’s hand had taken on some remarkably pretty colouration in the night, and his fingers were much larger than they should have been, but otherwise he was absolutely fine. We were unapologetic for having had fun while Genius writhed, and he showed no remorse for almost putting an end to it.

  We flew Genius out that morning. Some guests left, and some more arrived. I bumbled through my afternoon drive, then sat sleepily through the evening meal. As it ended and Paul and I escorted the last guests to their rooms, scanning the surrounding bush for glinting eyes, I asked him a question.

  “Want to grab a drink?”

  “No.” Bushes nearby rustled, but it was only a breeze. “Do you?”

  “No.” I shone my light around, picking up nothing but a spider’s eyes glinting on the path. “Do you reckon Genius is alright?”

  “Don’t care.” We were back on the deck now, and a hyena that had been sniffing the table scampered away. “Do you?”

  I laughed, but said nothing, even though I did care. Eugene was a fool, but this was not a job for reasonable people. Our night of fun could have been curtailed just as easily by me getting trampled by an elephant or Paul being bitten by a guest or any one of the other guides who took risks every day for our own entertainment. So it was with guilt that I heard that Eugene had resigned and that he would never come back.

  Lost

  Maybe it was due to carelessness, or alcohol, or both, but for some reason Al didn’t tie up his boat one night.

  For two years it floated and bumped along the lazily flowing channels of the Okavango. Occasionally it was picked up by the winter floods and crossed submerged plains, sometimes settling there in summer, when the waters receded. I imagine it would have presented a strange sight to any of the light aircraft that ferry people around the Okavango, this little tin boat stranded in a grassland or bobbing along and alone between the hippos and the crocs.

  Members of the Botswana Wildlife Department found the boat on one of the many patrols they make to catch poachers. The registration on the boat was still visible, and once Al heard his old vessel was tied up just outside Xaxaba, he asked Cliffy and me if we wanted to get it for him.

  “Sure,” said Cliffy.

  “Sure,” I repeated. But I had a question: “Where are we going with it?”

  “Duba,” Al said, which was the name of a camp he co-owned. The obvious question that I should have put to Cliffy next was, “Do you know the way?” The answer was particularly pertinent, since we had become lost on the two previous occasions that we had been in a boat together. And both times we had been in familiar territory. But I did not ask, as he seemed confident. And the next thing I knew, we were renting a motor for our trip. The Wildlife Department officials said the old motor had been stolen.

  We took our motor and borrowed a dented cooking pot from some friends who were domesticated enough to own one. Then we bought countless packets of two-minute noodles and some beer and vodka and packed a first aid kit lest an accident while cooking the former should occur while under the influence of the latter.

  As we were lashing down the motor in the tray of the vehicle we were going to set out in, a guide walked out from his room at our company plot. Unlike Cliffy, who t
rained guides, and me, being based in a camp full-time, Paul took long overland trips of a few weeks at a time. We had caught him between journeys.

  “Hey Paul!” Cliffy hailed. “We’re going to Xaxaba to get Al’s boat, then taking it to Xigera, then on to Duba. We’re just gonna camp on islands along the way. Wanna come?”

  “I’ve got a group coming in three days,” Paul replied. “Pity. It sounds like fun.”

  Cliffy told him that we would be in the bush for only two nights. He could fly out from Xigera or if we made good time, he could grab a Cessna out of Duba.

  “Sure,” Paul said. “If you’re sure that I’ll be back in three days.”

  “Sure,” said Cliffy.

  Sure.

  A driver took us over sandy roads for many hours to the wildlife camp, where we got our first look at the boat. To say someone with no imagination had designed it was an insult to designers. There was no design at all. It was a plain rectangle of chevronned metal, with four slab sides, about ten feet long by five feet wide. A reinforced section at one of the shorter sides supported the motor, but otherwise it was nothing more than an oversize sardine tin.

  Showing the sense of style and understanding of design that we had, we all said, “Cool,” and then attached the motor. Because it was getting dark, we set up our mosquito nets just outside the Wildlife Department’s camp. We hadn’t bothered with tents, and I was careful to place my net between Cliffy’s and Paul’s, figuring that if a hungry lion came by, it would eat one of them and be full by the time it got to me. If either of them noticed my scheme, or had even thought about it, they didn’t say so.

  When the morning light pierced my eyelids, I started to scratch. Mosquito nets can be as effective at trapping bugs as they are at keeping them out. And looking at the yellowed eyes of the officials, I knew malaria was in the air and hoped that I hadn’t contracted it again in the night. It had been years since I had taken a pill but only months since my last bout of the disease. While a happy side effect had been a dramatic weight loss, I was looking forward to getting into true wilderness in our boat, away from any humanity and the diseases we carry. Even though I had lived in the bush for several years, it had been a long time since I had actually camped. Now we were heading into places unknown to any of us, and I couldn’t think of anything better.

  We puttered away from the camp and opened the motor. The boat wasn’t very fast, but we didn’t care. We took turns at the tiller, making our way to a camp run by a smaller safari company, where we wanted to ask for directional advice.

  The camp’s oldest guide, a venerable-looking man from the Bayei tribe, was brought to us. We made some bush tea and asked how long he had guided in the Delta. He sniffed and said through missing teeth that he had always been there. Many of his generation had spent time in the mines of Johannesburg, but he had always been a fisherman or guide, and he knew the waterways of the Okavango like few people ever could. He was a living map, more valuable than any paper. The waterways shifted in the delta, as new channels formed and old ones dried up. Only a man like this would have the experience to know where we were likely to find sufficient depth to manoeuvre a boat.

  We told him that we planned on travelling to Xigera, and he nodded, noisily sucking on a grass stem as he did.

  “When?” he asked.

  We looked at each other, then back at him. “Today.”

  He raised an eyebrow, sucked on the grass, blew on his tea and took a noisy, appreciative slurp. Shaking his head he told us that the floodwaters were going down and we would need to move fast but probably wouldn’t make it anyway. “How big is your motor?” he asked.

  “It’s a twenty-five.” We all knew this was not very big.

  His other eyebrow came up, then both settled into a frown. “Your boat, it is pointy?” he made a triangular gesture with his hands that was far from describing the prow of our floating sardine tin.

  “Er, no.” At this news he puffed out his grass stem and gave us a contemptuous look.

  “This boat, does it have a flat bottom?”

  “Yes!” we answered in unison, delighted to give an answer that would please. His look changed from contemptuous to sympathetic, and like a father who allows his children some gentle knocks so they can learn life’s lessons, he sent us off, giving us directions that quickly seemed meaningless once we were in the maze of channels and lagoons.

  Our plan was to find one of the Okavango’s main channels, called the Boro River, that flows right past Xigera. At Xigera we would be fed, maybe even have a shower, and then putter along to Duba. All we had to do now was find the Boro. We were determined to prove that the journey could be made in a square-fronted, underpowered vessel while the waters dropped.

  At the very first fork in the channel after leaving the old man, we debated which way to go.

  “Left,” said Cliffy confidently. “That’s the Boro.” He looked to the right, and a frown flickered across his brow. “Maybe.”

  “Right,” said Paul. I thought he was offering an opinion. Then he continued, “Let’s decide this rationally. Who has a coin?”

  “Wait. Look at the papyrus,” I said, feeling proud of a deduction I was about to reveal. “The Boro flows all year round. Papyrus is growing on the channel to the right but not on the one to the left. There must be water in that channel all year round for it to grow—which makes it the Boro. We go right.”

  The two agreed with my line of argument, and we went right. What I had not factored in was that the channel on the left might be flowing strongly enough to sweep away any papyrus before it grew. The channel we took was not the Boro River. It was one of the many nameless waterways in the vast Okavango, and from the moment we pointed the square prow of the boat into it, we were lost.

  The first night, still confident that we were on the right channel or at least close to it, we found a small island to camp on. It was about fifty yards in diameter and, like many Okavango islands, a near-perfect circle. Salty sand covered the middle. From the sand grew a spiky grass that stabbed your feet as you walked over it, often drawing pinpricks of blood. On the edge of the sand grew clumps of palms. On the outer edge of the island, a variety of fruit trees grew, such as mangosteens and waterberries. We set up our mosquito nets, attaching them to low-growing branches, and built a fire to ward off any predator that might swim onto the island at night. Cat watchers from other parts of Africa might scoff at the idea of swimming lions, but anyone who has worked in the Okavango knows that a very big cat can be found on a very small island. We were on guard and quietly admitted to each other that we might have crossed the line between bravery and stupidity by not bringing a tent.

  Despite our nerves we fell asleep remarkably early, the freshest of air helping us, aided by the last of the beer that we drank faster than we had planned. Soon a snuffling sound awoke me—the sound of a sizable animal—and I was thankful for my centre position. Accompanying the snuffle was rhythmic thumping, fading and rising—the sound of drumming. For the first time ever in my years in Africa, I felt like I was in a Tarzan movie.

  I peeled open an eyelid and watched the culprit as he snorted at us and stomped his feet. Islands like this one often have hollow patches where long-decayed trees once put down their roots. He was stomping on these hollow patches, running past us then around the palms that our head faced, tapping his feet, and then coming back to face us, stomping irritably again.

  It was a porcupine—a big one. The African porcupine can weigh more than sixty pounds, and with its quills raised, as they were on this fellow, can reach an imposing three feet high. He was doing laps around us, a behaviour you would expect from a caged animal. All night he ran, making further sleep an impossibility. I lay wondering why he was so possessed and came up with many theories that grew increasingly less likely in direct proportion to my level of fatigue. Ultimately the most realistic scenario that came to me was that he was marooned on the island when the floods came in. And because porcupines are one of the few animals in
the Okavango that hasn’t adapted to become a swimmer, he couldn’t leave. This Robinson Crusoe of the rodent world may have been trying to get us off his island, or he may have been trying to communicate and make friends, turning us into his Man Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

  When the sky became grey, then pink, the porkie finished his last lap and dived into an unseen burrow somewhere under the palms. We stretched, scratched, cooked up some noodles on the embers of our fire, and set out again.

  The channel was broad. And in the still morning air, the water was free of ripples as the sardine tin puttered along. Cliffy was convinced that we were not far from Xigera. I’d spent little time in the Xigera region, and so I was happy to go along with his assessment that we should be there sooner than we had expected.

  “This channel curves just ahead, then we come out into an area with plains on either side, then we’re only five minutes from the camp. We’ll be in time for brunch!”

  After two days of two-minute noodles, I looked forward to an omelette, so I happily swung the boat around the curve that Cliffy had predicted, but grew perplexed when the channel did not open into plains. Instead it grew tighter, the reeds and papyrus brushing the boat’s sides.

  Tighter and tighter it got, and now we knew why we needed the pointy prow the old man had spoken of. The boat’s square end got jammed against the reeds, and the motor was not strong enough to move us forward unaided.

  We convened. Cliffy was sure that we were still close, just not on the channel he had thought. Paul concurred, I said “Sure,” and we decided to use the machetes we had brought to hack our way forward to the next open water, while one of us helped push from the back.

  I volunteered to push while the others hacked, thinking I would avoid the inevitable blisters from the cheap plastic handles on the machetes. Instead, my first step revealed that I had the raw end of the deal. A tendril of aquatic grass with sharp, hairy fronds wrapped itself around my knee. It pulled tight as I stepped forward, and more tendrils found my other leg. It felt like I was being molested by an aggressive and spiny octopus, and every step drew the grip tighter. The leaves were little blades, and I suffered a thousand paper cuts as I pushed and heaved, dodging the spinning propeller that was only inches from my thighs.