by Tony Park
‘Sydney, stop!’
Chipchase put on the brakes and veered off onto the dirt strip. The road’s surface had improved between the turn-off to Elephant Springs camp and Nata, the next fuel stop. ‘There’s nothing here. Do you need to go to the loo?’
Sonja shook her head and pointed to the figure ahead of them, taking form out of the shimmering heat haze, the horizontally shifting bands slowly coalescing into one outline. It was, as she had spotted long before the ageing Chipchase, a man on a horse.
She got out and opened the back of the campervan, retrieving her pack, which contained food and water and a compact camping gas stove she’d bought in Kasane. It also held her M4, broken down into its component pieces, and spare magazines. She moved the nine mil from the front of her shorts to the rear of her waistband and stretched her tank top over the pistol grip.
Sonja hoisted her pack on to her shoulders and walked to the driver’s side window. ‘Sydney, I can’t thank you enough, but please take this.’ As she shook his hand she palmed some green bills to him.
‘I won’t take money from you, Sonja.’ He thrust the cash back at her.
‘If you don’t want it then do some good with it. You’re a missionary, for fuck’s sake, you must know a worthy cause somewhere.’
He smiled down at her from the cab and reached his hand out to shake hers again. Instead, she rose on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. She was rewarded with a brick-red blush on his weathered old face.
‘I’m sorry, Sonja, if it seemed like I was prying about … well, you know, about the old days.’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to talk or even think about it and haven’t for years, except in my nightmares. I don’t know if it helped, but I do know I’ve had enough of the past. I’ve got enough problems in the near future to keep me going.’
‘Aye, well if you feel the need to go after any other African despots then my advice is …’
‘Read the Bible?’
‘Better intelligence and a .50 calibre sniper rifle with a decent scope.’
She smiled and waved as the Land Cruiser was swallowed by the heat haze. The clip-clop of the hooves was close enough to hear now, and she stood in the middle of the road waiting for the man to arrive. She’d need to conserve her depleted energy.
The man was in far better shape than the horse that bore him. He wore a ten gallon cowboy hat made out of zebra-print fabric, and a single-breasted charcoal grey business suit, old and frayed, but clean and pressed. The same went for the blue business shirt with white cuffs and collar. The uppers of his black leather shoes, though as clean as the Kalahari sand would allow, were peeling up from the soles. When he stopped in front of her she saw tightly frizzed patches of grey hair beneath the deep shade of the hat. If she was a tourist she would have wondered what an old African man in a suit and cowboy hat was doing riding slowly down the Nata to Kasane road in the middle of the day in forty-two degree heat, but she wasn’t a tourist.
‘Dumela,’ she said in Tswana, lingering over the middle syllable. ‘Le kae?’
‘Ke teng, wena o kae?’
‘I, too, am fine, thank you,’ Sonja answered in Tswana. In addition to English, from her mother, and German, from her father, she spoke Ovambo, from the maid who had nursed her until she was ten, and Tswana from Stirling and the staff kids at Xakanaxa. If the old man was curious as to what a white woman was doing wandering the empty highway by herself, then he knew better than to be so rude as to ask. ‘I would like to buy your horse,’ she said to the man.
He shook is head. ‘If I sell you this horse, then I would have to walk, and I do not wish to walk to where I am going. Thank you, but no thank you.’
‘With what I will give you, you can buy a motor car.’
‘I have no need of such a thing. Besides,’ he looked around him from his position above her, ‘where would I buy the petrol?’
‘I will give you three thousand pula,’ she said, reaching into the pocket of her shorts. Pula, the currency of Botswana, meant rain in English. She’d offered him close to five hundred US dollars, but the man shook his head. ‘Four thousand?’
‘Not for ten. This horse is not for sale. He is my prized possession.’
Beneath the cracked saddle she saw the outline of ribs and the fuzzy coat that spoke of malnourishment and disease. The horse shook its head in a futile attempt to chase the flies away and looked down at her through rheumy eyes.
‘Twelve.’
The cowboy shook his head and clicked his tongue. He was serious about not selling.
Sonja sighed. She’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. She reached behind her and pulled out her pistol. Levelling it up to his startled face she said, in English. ‘Get off the fucking horse.’
The old man moistened his lips with his tongue and looked behind him. There was no one. She could see him weighing his options, wondering if he could outrun her. They both knew the horse wouldn’t get far at a gallop, but still he didn’t move.
Sonja fired. The tired horse tried to rear up but, with the weight of the African on its back, barely managed a buck. The man was on the ground, his feet raising puffs of dust, before she had time to readjust her aim. He brushed imaginary specs from his jacket and tossed away the reins. ‘I will call the police!’
‘I’m sure you will. And be sure and tell them I gave you this.’ She threw the rolled wad of twelve thousand pula at his feet, ‘which is more than you deserve for the way you’ve treated this poor excuse of an animal.’
Sonja wheeled the horse and headed east, towards Zimbabwe.
Fark, fark, faaaark! The screeching of the bird roused Sam from his dozing. He sat upright in the tent and looked around its gloomy green interior. He was disappointed to discover the events of the past eighteen hours had not been a nightmare.
He’d found it hard to sleep, not only because of the duelling whooping and grunting of the hyena and lion, and the snuffling of something snooping in the grass around his camp fire and tent, but because he was worried about Cheryl-Ann and the camera crew.
Cheryl-Ann had told him to expect surprises, and to keep the camera rolling, but never before had they broken the routine of the morning and evening calls on the satellite phone. It was a safety precaution.
He checked his watch. He’d set the alarm for six a.m., but had woken half an hour earlier. He pushed the send button anyway. ‘Fuck.’ It was the out-of-contact recorded message again. ‘This can’t be happening.’
He cursed himself for not writing down the number of Xakanaxa Lodge and for not spending more time learning about the satellite phone and the service they used. If he had, he might know the number to call for directory assistance.
‘The office!’ He wasn’t good at remembering phone numbers – never had been – but he knew the number for the Wildlife World Channel’s production office in Los Angeles. He calculated the time difference and punched in the digits. It was just after eight-thirty in the evening in LA, but the switch was manned late as there was almost always someone working well into the night on post production. The phone started ringing. ‘Come on, come on, please be working late …’ He would ask whoever answered to track down Tom, Cheryl-Ann’s personal assistant, and get him to call back with the number for Xakanaxa, and to call them to find out what was going on. No doubt there had been some easily explainable misunderstanding somewhere along the way.
As an afterthought, he leaned over to push ‘record’ on the tripod-mounted camera. As he was clipping on the lapel microphone with one hand he lowered the phone, but still heard the female voice.
‘Good evening, this is Wildlife World, Stacey speaking, how may I direct your call?’ It was Stacey, one of the receptionists.
Sam sat upright and in doing so snagged the microphone cable. The camera crashed into his lap. ‘Shit! Hello … hello?’
‘Excuse me?’ said the receptionist.
‘Stacey, it’s …’
There was an echo on the line and Stacey cut across
him. ‘Hello … yes, this is Stacey. Who is calling, please?’
‘Stacey, Stacey, listen to me, it’s Sam Chapman here …’
‘No, sir, I’m sorry, this is a bad line, but Sam Chapman is not here. If you’d like to contact him I can give you the address of his official website and you can click on the contact options there to—’
‘No, no, no! It’s Sam Chapman HERE! Stacey, I need you to—’
‘Sorry, who did you say it is?’
‘Aaaaaargh.’ Sam heard a series of beeps and quickly glanced at the phone’s screen. ‘Listen,’ he yelled. ‘This is Sam Chapman. I’m in Africa. Something is wrong. I need you to get a message to Tom Cartman ASAP!’
‘Mr Chapman, is that really you?’
Sam swallowed a quick breath. ‘Yes, Stacey.’
‘Oh my god! I’ll put you through right away. Just hold on, sir.’
Sam wished he hadn’t been put on hold, and wondered what Tom was doing working back so late. With his workaholic boss Cheryl-Ann away in Africa he should have been keeping regular hours for a change.
Beep, beep, beep.
‘No!’
Sam had left the phone on all night, in case Cheryl-Ann tried calling him. Their standard procedure in the past had been to keep the satellite phones switched off, to conserve batteries in the field. If for some reason they couldn’t make contact at the appointed hours, usually six p.m. and six a.m., then they would switch on again every half-hour afterwards, for five minutes. Sam had done that, until midnight, when he decided he needed to try to get some sleep. He’d left the phone on, reasoning the battery would last through the night. The call was obviously chewing battery power.
The low-battery warning beeped again. ‘Come on.’
While he waited he busied himself righting the fallen camera and re-attaching his microphone. ‘This is seriously not funny. I’m stranded in the African bush with no contact with my producer and now my satellite phone battery is going flat while I listen to a computer-generated version of a Barry Manilow song.’
‘Sam?’
‘Tom. What the hell is going on, man? I’ve been trying to call Cheryl-Ann and she’s not picking up. I need the number for—’
‘Sam, are you OK?’
‘Me? I’m stuck in the African bush surrounded by man-eating animals and poisonous snakes, but other than that I’m just peachy. Do you know why Cheryl-Ann isn’t answering her goddamned phone, Tom?’
‘Sam … oh my god,’ Tom sniffed. ‘Cheryl-Ann’s …’
Bee-eep.
‘Cheryl-Ann’s what?’
Sam looked at the darkened screen of the phone and screamed again in frustration. He ferreted through the black nylon carry bag, but couldn’t find a spare battery. He couldn’t recall ever seeing – or needing – one.
He ran a hand through his hair and over his stubbled jaw while he thought. It was probably all a set-up, he told himself. If they wanted raw emotion – good TV – they would get it. Was sniffling Tom back in New York in on the act as well? Could Cheryl-Ann be that conniving, that manipulative, to get Stacey on reception – normally so efficient and prompt at fielding calls – and Tom to start crying in order to rattle his cage?
Yes.
Sam composed himself and looked at his image in the small LED screen to the right of the lens. ‘It’s at times like these – when you realise you’re in a jam, with no communications, and no food – that you wished you’d paid more attention to TV programs like Coyote Sam’s World Survival. We’ll be back after the break with some tips about how to save yourself when your phone battery goes dead …’
He switched off the camera and exhaled. At least Cheryl-Ann and the guys would get a laugh out of his station break announcement, even if they didn’t use it. He sucked a deep breath. He’d show them. No matter how disorientated and scared he was right now, he wouldn’t show fear or panic on camera.
Sam unzipped the tent and crawled outside, stretching to ease away the cramp of sleeping on the foam camping mattress. At forty-two, he wasn’t getting any younger. He remembered nights sleeping on the floor of his pup tent on the prairie, with nothing except a thin high-density foam camping mat between him and the ground, when he was a college student working on his thesis. He couldn’t even afford a decent sleeping bag in those days, but now he earned six figures for being the face of a range of expensive camping equipment. Much of the stuff wouldn’t last a weekend in Yosemite, let alone the Okavango swamps of Botswana. He thought about those good days, and the bad ones beforehand, when he was in juvie. He’d imagined leading a quiet life of solitude in the mountains and prairies, dedicated to the study of his beloved coyotes. He’d loved the fun ride of his early years in television, but now he wondered if any of it had really mattered. His ratings were slumping and the survival series was a last roll of the dice. Perhaps he’d been heading for a fall all along.
The fire was out, and so was his stock of wood. Sam crouched and placed his hand over the ash and felt a faint aura of warmth. He looked around him and snatched up some dry stalks of yellowed grass. Placing them on the coals he blew them to life. ‘All right!’ he said out loud as the grass blossomed into flame. He looked around but there was nothing else to throw on the flames, which quickly died.
‘Shiiit.’
He still had some matches, so it wasn’t a total disaster. He’d do the blowing-on-embers trick again for the camera, even if he had to reshoot it tomorrow.
Tomorrow. It seemed a long way off. He scanned the sky, hoping to spot the spec of a hovering helicopter, briefly fantasising that he was being filmed by some long-range military-type image intensifier, that his every word was being recorded by hidden microphones. Instead, he saw a sun whose ember-red colour would soon ignite to scorching gold. His stomach rumbled. He needed to pee.
Sam walked ten metres from the tent, as far as he dared for the moment, and unzipped. He looked around him as he urinated, but a rustle in the dead leaves and long grass in front of him made him clench.
‘Holy crap!’ The dark serpentine tail slithered away from him. He jumped back and his bladder released again, splashing his leg. ‘Goddamn!’
He was pleased the camera wasn’t rolling now, catching him pissing on his pants, Sam zipped up, picked up a dead branch and snapped off the ends to create a short fork. He’d caught snakes as a kid and although this one had startled him, he wasn’t going to let some reptile scare the pants off him. He’d eaten snake in Malaysia and while he hadn’t agreed it tasted like chicken, it was edible. He wanted to get through this whole episode without killing anything in the concession, but his stomach was telling him berries and insects might not be enough.
Sam crept forward, watching where he put his boots to avoid snapping twigs. He paused and listened. He heard, then saw, the movement in the grass. It was impossible to film the hunt, but he’d recreate it later, then cut to a nice shot of skinned snake roasting on the coals. Involuntarily, his mouth started to water.
‘Gotcha!’ He lunged and planted the prongs of the stick in the ground. Trapped between them however, was not a snake, but a lizard as long as his arm and as thick, at the widest part of its belly, as his calf. ‘Leguan,’ he said, identifying its sandy background colour and grey-green camouflage stripes. It twisted and flicked against the stick that imprisoned it. It was a slow mover, searching for ground-nesting birds’ eggs and carrion. Sam looked down on the poor tormented thrashing reptile and, though he imagined it would be edible, he didn’t have it in him to kill the creature. He lifted the stick and took a step back. The lizard scampered off.
‘Shoot,’ he said. He knew that a key ingredient of the survival show was him killing something and eating it. He’d had some ethical troubles with it during filming of the first show, but Cheryl-Ann had told him outright – the only way she knew how to communicate – that people out there in TV land, no matter how squeamish some of them might pretend to be, wanted blood.
‘It’s the same as on the news,’ she’d said. ‘If it
bleeds, it leads. Ditto for us in the ratings.’
Sam fossicked in the bush for more firewood, gingerly probing each fallen branch with the toe of his boot before picking it up, in case one of Stirling’s pet pythons was hiding underneath.
A branch snapped somewhere close by.
Sam stopped and cocked his head. ‘Hallelujah,’ he breathed, looking heavenwards. The cavalry was on its way, hacking through the bush to come get him – hopefully with an attractive female chef riding shotgun and carrying breakfast. He dropped the termite-ridden bough he’d picked up and wiped his hands on his shorts as he walked towards the sound. Peering ahead he tried, as Stirling had advised him, to look through the trees, not at them.
The splintering of wood was almost as loud as gunfire now, but still he could see nothing of his rescuers. Was this one of his surprises? God, he hoped so. If Cheryl-Ann had been trying to put him off balance she had succeeded in spades.
‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘Over here.’
The noise stopped, and so did Sam, realising he had probably just done something monumentally stupid. He heard a rumbling noise, like his own stomach, though amplified a hundred times.
Now he saw the movement. A grey sail flapped slowly in the nonexistent breeze and a shadowy bulk eclipsed the sunlight filtering through the trees. Sam started to walk backwards, slowly. How could he not have seen them? A trunk curled and rose like a periscope, seeking him out. Was he downwind or upwind of them? He couldn’t feel a breath of wind, but the elephants had heard him and now they were intent on finding him.
The matriarch – he remembered from what Stirling had said that the big one in the lead with the squared-off forehead would be a female and the greatest danger – shook her head. The dust surrounded her like an ominous rain cloud. He kept moving, faster now, though still not looking where he was going. She watched him through a beady eye and rocked her left front foot backwards and forwards, a gesture of irritation. He fell.