Whatever You Do, Don't Run Read online

The people I worked with in South Africa were mainly from the Shangaan tribe and were considered the masters of getting right to a person’s essence and defining it with one or two words. The couple who owned our camp, and were not always loved by the staff, were known as “Mamba Eyes” for her and “June/July” for him—a reference to the South African winter months and the way the staff felt a chill when they saw him.

  I waited eagerly for a moniker, sure that since I was a nice guy I would be treated well. If I caught a staff member looking at me with the slightest hint of assessment, I would try my best to act as serene as the Dalai Lama, as kindly as Santa, and as cool as Elvis in the hope of being called something like “That Hip Guy From Far Away” or “Number One Sexy Beast.” Most likely I came across as constipated, but it was irrelevant, as the assessing look often turned out to be a warm-up for a request for a loan until payday. I was then faced with the dilemma of rejecting them (unbeknownst to them I was one of the lowest-paid people in the camp, making about four dollars a day) and getting a name like “Cheap Bastard,” or coughing up the cash and being known as “Rollover” or “Soft Touch”—either of which had disturbing double meanings that I was sensitive about since I was lonely on the romantic front. There were no single girls in camp, and my fumbling attempts at seducing guests were rejected because they only had eyes for the guides and I was only the barman. And all the alcohol at my disposal couldn’t make the animals attractive.

  In the end it was this missing element in my life that decided the name for me. Titus, one of the trackers, called me one day by shouting “Ngwenza! Gunjaan?” I only understood the second word, which means “How are you?” So I asked the chef, a kindly woman named Rosie, what Ngwenza meant. She snorted into the bread she was mixing and said, “Is that your name?”

  “I think so. What does it mean?”

  She wouldn’t tell. I asked Harold, the gardener. He reeked of marijuana, and I was sure that he was taking better care of a garden somewhere else than he was of the lawn in the camp. As soon as I said the word Ngwenza, he went into high hysterics, fell on all fours, thumped the brown grass, and said, “Yes! That is you!” He wouldn’t, or possibly couldn’t, tell me anymore, so I left him with his grass and went in search of an answer elsewhere.

  Eventually I asked Alpheus, the camp’s other tracker what Ngwenza meant. His pitted face split into a grin, and he said in his rough voice, “A man who has not been with a woman for a long, long time.”

  “You mean sexually frustrated? That’s my name?”

  There was no point arguing it. I guessed that doing so would only reinforce it. Anyway, it could only be a matter of time before I gave the name reason to be changed—I hoped.

  The name did change, but not for the reason I wanted it to. One of the impediments I faced in becoming a guide was that I didn’t know how to drive. I’d left home too early to have my parents teach me, and I never could have afforded driving school. The guides declared that I knew enough about the animals, birds and trees to start guiding, if I only knew how to get a Land Rover around on the rough tracks—and off them when following something like a cheetah as it hunted. They took me out in turns. Chris, the most knowledgeable, gave up after I scraped the side of the vehicle while getting it out of its bay. Iain, who I was closest to, grew quickly frustrated at my inability to master the clutch, brake, accelerator and four-wheel drive select knob in one go. To my surprise it was Devlin (known to the staff as “19” because of a missing finger), a party animal and genital exhibitionist, who was the best teacher. He was patient, and good at explaining the process that occurred as gears meshed and released and fuel was applied, but most important he took me to a place where I could do the least amount of damage.

  Unlike the open plains shown in many documentaries, the South African bush is fairly dense and scrubby, so the places to practise were few. Devlin drove us to a clearing that had one tree in it, inventively called One Tree Plain, surrounded by open grassland. Along the way we had to stop and clear a tree that had been pushed across the road by an elephant. Elephants push over trees for two reasons. The first is for food—to eat the leaves at the very top of the tree or to get at the exposed roots. This tree, though, had not been fed on, so it was apparent that the culprit was a bull who was filled with testosterone but no outlet for it, so he pushed over trees. It’s a great release for a bull and a way of showing his strength after a female has rejected him. If human males had the same ability, global deforestation would be complete by now.

  After moving the fallen tree, we carried on to One Tree Plain and the driving class. By the end of my lesson, the name of the area had to be changed to No Tree Plain, and the vehicle sported a conspicuous dent in the bumper guard.

  I had futilely hoped that Devlin might not tell anyone, but it was apparent that he had because the staff stopped calling me Ngwenza, and added a postscript. I was now “Ngwenza Indloovu,” the “Sexually Frustrated Elephant.” I was never addressed as anything else. And even after months had passed, cackling still accompanied any mention of my new name.

  I finally left South Africa to move north, and the name didn’t follow me across the tribal and political border into Botswana. But on a return visit after many years, the staff I still knew snorted as they greeted me as Ngwenza. As I squatted to have a bush tea with Titus (whose last name really is Indloovu), he asked if I was being lucky (a colloquial phrase that doesn’t require the addition of “with women” to be clear).

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m a guide now.”

  “Naaah,” he drawled out the word. “You’re still Ngwenza.”

  “Ngwenza Indloovu, you mean,” I corrected him, but smiling as I did.

  “Sure,” he said, mimicking me. “Ngwenza.”

  Maybe it was because I wasn’t nineteen anymore, or maybe it was because I knew that there were worse things that I could be called, but I didn’t mind my name at all. We drank our tea, I asked after his family, and he told me who had left, who had died and what the animals I used to know were doing. He told me that Bombi the leopard was dead, but Uncle One-Horn the rhino still held his territory.

  I’d learned a lot more about Africa and its customs in the years I had been away, so I asked him about his cattle and whether he was expecting to be blessed with any more sons. When I left, he shook my hand and bid me farewell using the name he had given me, and as improbable as it may seem, he made it sound respectful.

  The Great Mouse Plague

  I left the relative safety of South Africa after two years working at Idube, and went in search of more experience, more knowledge and a wilder adventure.

  Knowing very little about Botswana, except that my friend and mentor Chris was working there, I moved north and settled into the Okavango Delta. The Delta is the world’s largest oasis in the world’s largest stretch of sand, and I was based on the largest island in it. Whereas the camp I had worked for in South Africa was made of brick and mortar and connected to the outside world by decent (if dirt) roads and had luxuries like a telephone line, my new home in Botswana was reachable only by air, communicated with the outside world by a crackly radio, and was built out of timber and canvas. In my first year through a combination of bravado and greenness, I got the experience I was after—and maybe a little more knowledge. Living among wild animals ensured that I would also have adventure. What I hadn’t predicted is what sort of animal would provide most of it.

  As the year drew to a close, the annual rains came to Northern Botswana. There was a little more rain than usual, but nothing extraordinary enough to foretell what was coming. What those of us living in the Okavango didn’t know was that just enough had fallen for the grass to make huge amounts of seeds without them getting so soaked that they would rot. We were just as unaware that the grass was the perfect length for mice to make nests, then breed again, and again and again. By the time the rains were drawing to an end in March, we knew we had a problem. People came to Africa for the wildlife, but as they remarked with great frequency
, the list of animals they wished to see did not include mice. They could go to Anaheim for that, they’d add, not realising that we didn’t know what they meant (only years later would I see a map of Disneyland and say, “OK, now I get it”).

  But see the mice they did. They were inescapable. Our food stores were overrun—they even ate the laces out of shoes and tore up clothes to pad their homes.

  Although the mice were usually nocturnal, by March the bush started to dry up and their natural food dwindled, so they had to stay out longer to forage. In the mornings as I made my way to wake the guests, the mice would move ahead of me in waves. And as I shone my flashlight in the strengthening light, I would see them closing ranks behind me again, forming a moving carpet of fur.

  This abundance made the predators happy, as were some of the smaller herbivores whose normal enemies were so heavily gorged they were barely capable of movement. Jackals, wildcats, owls, mongoose, genets, servals and even leopard swatted away at the ground without taking serious aim. But the predation didn’t dent the population.

  Eventually the mice ran out of food on the ground and were seen stripping shrubs and even trees of anything edible. Nothing was beyond their reach. It was like we were living in the Old Testament and had pissed off God.

  I suggested that someone brave radio the office in Maun and tell them to either shut the camp no matter what the cost or let the incoming people know that they would be sharing their tent with some hungry invaders. We’d just had the third case of a mouse overdosing on a guest’s malaria pills, which would have been funny if I hadn’t seen the mouse in question on its back in a toiletries bag draw its last few desperate breaths. By then mice were the only exception to my love of all things animal, yet I still didn’t like seeing them die.

  The dead mouse did give me the opportunity, though, to identify the species that was plaguing us. My colleagues told me that I was obsessive compulsive, but it was only my first year in Botswana. Despite a confident air that I put on, I was still unsure of myself and keen to impress. So I pored over a book, deciding the deceased was too large to be a desert pygmy mouse, was out at night so was not a single striped mouse, and was not chubby enough to be a fat mouse (the species’ real name). Eventually, triumphantly, I declared it to be a common pouched mouse, at which my colleagues congratulated me mockingly and declared me a nerd.

  “How can you be sure—don’t all mice look the same?” Chloe asked.

  “Because I’m never wrong,” I answered cockily, stealing a line from my friend Devlin. Then changing the subject I explained more about the mice. “It says here that a female can breed every five weeks, having as many as seven babies.”

  My colleagues grunted to show how much they cared.

  “The young are ready to breed when only four weeks old. One mouse can produce something like ten thousand descendants in the space of a few months.”

  “Maybe you should stop sleeping with them then,” Grant replied.

  “Maybe you should radio the office. It’s only going to get worse.”

  Since Grant was the manager, he finally called to say that we were overrun. Our Maun office told us they would handle our problem with the mice. We waited, curious to see what they would do. When the next plane came in to drop off tourists and supplies, they’d sent a mouse trap. Not just any mouse trap, but an ecofriendly one. This was a little two-story cage that caught the mice alive so they could be relocated.

  “No way,” Grant said. “I don’t think they understand the scope of this.”

  We were almost 90 miles away, but we often felt as if we were on another planet from the people in the office. Somehow we needed to make them understand.

  That night we put some peanut butter (a far better mouse bait than cheese) in the lower tier. As we watched, a mouse approached and climbed the access door to the top level. He ran along inside the cage, until he hit a spring loaded hatch that dropped him to the lower level, at which point the hatch sprang back, trapping him on the lower section. Another mouse followed almost immediately. By morning the cage was so full that mice were pressed hard up against the bars of their prison. Without emptying it, we put the trap into the mailbag and returned it to the office.

  They sent it back, empty, with a note, addressed from the office cat, simply saying, “Thanks.” We decided it was to be a war of attrition, so set the trap again. The first guide to come out in the morning found the cage full again, but with the mice backed in abject terror against one side. There was a cobra whose head and first third were in the cage with them. To the snake the cage must have looked like a buffet, and it had slithered in, only to find that when it swallowed its victims they stuck in its gullet where the bars were pinching. From the lumps we deduced it had swallowed three before possible indigestion or a tail tickling its throat made it stop. Nobody wanted to pull it out, so we picked the whole thing up, stuck it in the mailbag, and sent it away again, the cobra hissing angrily. This time when the office returned it empty, it didn’t have a thank-you note.

  As winter approached, the grass started to die back, reducing the cover for the mice and exposing them to aerial predators. It was spectacular to see a sky filled with hawks, eagles and kestrels, many of which had delayed their return to Europe to swoop and gorge on the abundant prey. It felt like the mice numbers were dropping, only because the times you were woken at night by an animal scurrying over you was reduced to three or four. We were sure that we had won the rodent war.

  What we didn’t factor in while we did our victory dance was the very thing that makes the Okavango Delta so special. Every year it floods—but during the dry season. There is a river in Angola that fills at the same time it is raining in Botswana. As it meanders south it is abruptly diverted away from the coast and into the desert by a fault line, creating the world’s largest oasis. As the rest of the Kalahari withers in the dry winter months, the Okavango springs back into life.

  It is an annual tradition to watch this flood come in. First the channels fill, then their banks are breached and the flood infiltrates the plains. The land is so flat that the clear water creeps as slowly as molasses, creating vast shallow water plains and small islands of trees. It is possible to stand and watch the water edge slowly toward you, but this year the edge of the flood was occupied. From a distance it looked like an oil field, with rigs bobbing up and down, the difference being that these rigs were taking a step back every few minutes. Through binoculars we saw that it was more marabou storks than any of us had ever seen before, literally thousands of them. They are one of the world’s largest birds, standing over four feet tall, and also one of the world’s most unattractive. They have a balding head complete with liver spots and the occasional bedraggled feather. Beneath their throat hangs an obscene-looking pink pouch that for reasons unknown to science they inflate on occasion, making it look very much like they have some sort of malformed genital under their beak—and a big one at that.

  The storks were eating the mice—watching the water as it crept in and filled the burrows, then nabbing the mice as they ran out. In the air above them, buzzards circled, grabbing some of the ones that had made it past the skirmish line. Even from a distance we knew there were nowhere near enough birds to catch all the mice, and the thousands that escaped would be looking for higher ground and the dry land it offered. Like the place where our camp was built.

  “Bugger,” I said. “They’re coming.”

  If we thought we’d had a problem earlier, now it was tenfold. Every surface was like a living thing, swarming with the rodent refugees. As an experiment one night I took off my boot as I got into bed and threw it into the corner of my tent. It killed two mice. The other boot got only one. The mice were desperately hungry and were eating everything. They ate the plastic that seals the refrigerator doors shut, then ate everything inside, even frozen meat. They chewed through the canvas of our tents and ate first the leather of our belts and boots, then started on the dry fibres of our clothes.

  Their fearlessn
ess grew to epic proportions. I watched a lion, apparently driven mad, chasing his tail, then I realised there was a mouse clinging to its tip. Elephants confirmed something that I had always thought to be a myth: They are frightened of mice. Through the day and night you would hear the occasional anguished squeal from the true king of beasts as a mouse would run over its trunk. I’m sure they squashed many mice just by walking around, but nothing seemed to be reducing the plague. Even while starving, the mice felt compelled to copulate, and I kept finding thin ribbed couples taking a break from foraging to fornicate.

  Some evenings I heard the sound that every camp manager and guide fears. In each guest tent was a gas-powered siren, which we emphatically explained was for medical or animal emergency use only. In more than ten years of safaris I have still heard the sirens less than a dozen times. Four of these were because of mice. One was for a small fire, started when a mouse chewed through the rubber coating on a wire that powered a small lantern in the room. The other three times, and by now we were all so exhausted as to find this funny, was because of bald men. The mice developed a penchant for the dark sun spots that some bald men have on their heads—nobody had a theory as to why, but the managers spent many nighttime hours apologising on behalf of our company for the behaviour of the wildlife.

  Some people demanded refunds, and we sympathised, because chewing on bald men was not the most disgusting thing the mice were doing. Oh no, that came when they were really hungry and anything that smelled was considered a potential source of food. Imagine the discomfort it causes waking up with a mouse trying to crawl into the smelliest part of your body. (It took the staff years to admit to each other that at some stage we had all experienced this, and we wondered how many guests had been just too embarrassed to mention it.)

  As I was a guide and not a camp manager, most complaints were not directed to me. On game drives we were still seeing the abundance of life that the Okavango has to offer, and that pleased most people. It only became personal when, because of the mice, I made the worst animal misidentification in the history of Africa. This history goes back a rather long way.