I had to take an IQ test in order to be accepted into the school and, when he gave my mother my results, the test assessor shook his head and said, “She meets the Shipley School’s standards, I just don’t understand why she was talking so much about gold and rubies.” (It was because I’d just been sick with a stomach bug and had been allowed the rare privilege of watching a movie; I’d picked The Hobbit.)
At the Shipley School, first grade was on the second floor of what my teacher called a carriage house, surrounded by tall, dark trees that were much bigger than the trees we had in Amboseli and also much less interesting because only squirrels lived in them, not eagles or leopards. Though getting up every morning and going to school was a completely foreign experience to me, I found that I liked first grade, largely due to my exceptionally understanding teacher, Mrs. Morgan. After Mom explained where we’d come from and how I usually spent my days playing with car parts or chasing zebras behind our house, Mrs. Morgan made sure I ran around as much as possible at recess and was gentle when she told me not to bring my Tusker beer T-shirt to school after I wore it one day for show-and-tell. Realizing how much I disliked sitting still, she let me doodle as much as I wanted during class as long as I promised I was listening, and even made sure I had a seat by the window where I could watch the squirrels chase each other up and down the trees. Everything was very clean and very orderly and I did my best not to fidget, since I remembered that I had to behave myself in America.
There were only twelve students in Mrs. Morgan’s class, and she clustered our desks in four groups of three, so that each student had what she called “desk friends.” While she said it was important that we made friends with all the other students, our desk friends were supposed to be our “at-school family,” the classmates who would lend you their markers if you left yours at home and hold your hand on the walk to the cafeteria for lunch.
My two desk friends were a boy named Nat and a girl named Meghan. Nat had wavy brown hair like mine and was very quiet. He was nearly as short as I was and was the only other person I’d met who liked the book Redwall as much as I did, though he said he preferred computer games to reading if he could choose. Nat taught me how to draw dragons and told me that if there was ever a girl who could be an X-wing pilot in Star Wars, it would be me. I liked him immediately.
Meghan was a little taller than me and had soft blonde hair that she pinned back with pink ribbons or a glittery hair band. Her shoes were always tied and she had beautiful handwriting that slanted to the right just the way Mrs. Morgan wanted it to and never sprawled across the page like mine did. Meghan was kind and smart and reminded me of the little girls in Madeline who did everything in two straight lines, rain or shine. If she were British, I thought, I would call her “proper,” but people in America didn’t seem to use that word.
Mrs. Morgan was very pleased that Nat and Meghan quickly became my friends. “Keena is a very smart little girl with a wild imagination,” she wrote to my mother after a parent-teacher conference, “but would benefit from spending more time with the other children and less time reading by herself.”
Here I am behaving in my first-grade school picture. Mom paid me five dollars to wear a dress.
“Well, I can’t really fault you for reading,” Mom said. “Do you bring your books to recess with you?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “Recess is for running around!”
She laughed. “That’s what you do at recess? You run around?”
“Yes. The boys all want to pretend they’re Ninja Turtles but they won’t let me be one because I’m a girl. There’s only one girl in Ninja Turtles and they always want Meghan to play her. They make me play an evil pig and they chase me.”
“That makes…some sense, I guess,” she said. “Is that fun for you?”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter what I’m supposed to be; they never catch me anyway.” And if I was being honest with myself, I liked being stronger and faster than they were. At least I knew I could outrun them if some animals appeared.
“I see,” she said. “Well…carry on, then.”
What Mom didn’t tell me was that she actually was growing worried about my reading, since at the time my reading pile wasn’t full of books at all, but rather something called the Wildlife Fact-File. The Wildlife Fact-File was a heavy three-ring binder that held more than a thousand cards, each describing everything about a particular animal, from its size, shape, and breeding habits to where it lives, what it eats, and what its social behavior is like (if it has any). In America, I had a subscription to the Wildlife Fact-File, and every month I would receive thirty new cards in the mail and could sort them into the right order in my binder: reptiles, insects, mammals, what they called primitive animals, and animals that were extinct. This last category was my favorite because it contained the dodo bird, the passenger pigeon, and all the dinosaurs.
I pored over this binder day and night, memorizing details about each of the animals and tracing the maps of where they lived in the world to see if and where they overlapped.
“The Wizard of Oz is wrong,” I said to my mother one morning at breakfast.
“Oh?”
“Yes. There is no place in the world where lions and tigers and bears all live in the same place.” Mom flipped a pancake and turned to look at me in what I thought of as her “professor face.”
“That is true,” she said. “And you’re right. But remember that Oz is a fictional place, and maybe there they do have lions, tigers, and bears that all live together. And the rules have to be different there anyway; otherwise, how would it be possible that the lions in Oz could talk?”
She was right. My mother, I believed, knew everything there was to know about animals, both real and fictional. She didn’t need the Wildlife Fact-File; she already knew where all the animals in the world live and what they do and how they eat. If I wanted to be as smart as she was, then I clearly had to study my Fact-File a lot harder.
It was very exciting whenever a new set of Fact-File cards arrived in the mail, though it was brutally disappointing every time a set arrived that contained the common cards I already had. One afternoon, I burst into tears when I realized, yet again, how far I was from completing my set.
“I already have earthworms and llamas,” I sobbed into my mother’s shoulder. “I’m never going to get a water vole!”
“I know, I know,” she said, rubbing my back. “It’s terrible, and I know how badly you want that water vole. Maybe he’ll come next month.”
Mom reached around me and flipped open the Fact-File where it sat on the couch next to Lucy, who had been playing in her bedroom but had come downstairs when I yelled. Lucy didn’t like it when I was upset. The page Mom opened to was the file for spotted hyenas, a common sight in Amboseli and an animal that I knew well.
“Hyenas actually have a fascinating social structure,” she said. “Did you know that in a hyena group the females are more dominant than the males and their whole social network is determined by who their mothers and sisters are? Hyenas are a lot like monkeys in that respect.”
I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve. “That is kind of cool,” I said. Mom ran her finger down the page, and I knew she was silently fact-checking the information to make sure it was correct. Nothing made her angrier than bad data.
“They aren’t primarily scavengers either,” she continued. “Hyenas are some of the best hunters in the world, even better than wolves, if you ask me.” Her finger paused on the map of spotted hyena distribution in Africa and she looked at me.
“Do you know where this is?” she asked, pointing to a spot near the bottom of the African continent, right between Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
“No.”
“That,” she said, tapping her finger against the page, “is the country of Botswana. We got a letter from a guy who works there who might want to have us take over his study site for him next year.” My heart leapt.
“We get to go back to A
frica?” I asked. I’d been asking about going back for months, but Mom kept saying she wasn’t sure. “What’s it like in Botswana?” Mom sat down on the couch and pulled Lucy into her lap.
“I don’t know everything yet, but I’ll tell you what I do know. It’s very different from Kenya,” she said. “There are many more animals and the camp is very far away from any other people.” I began firing questions at her: If we moved there would we have a house? Would there be a village nearby? Would I have to take malaria medicine again? Could I bring my stuffed animals with me? “I’m sure you can,” she said. “The Okavango Delta is a big swamp, but I see no reason why you can’t bring your stuffed animals.” A big swamp? That didn’t sound very appealing.
What I hadn’t known before this was that after a year of fruitless searching, my parents had been contacted by a guy named Bill Hamilton, a researcher from the University of California, Davis, who had a study site in the Okavango Delta in Botswana that he was ready to leave. Bill thought it might be perfect for our family since Botswana was a stable place to work politically and the baboons at his site were already habituated to humans. Bill had had enough of fieldwork with primates and wanted to go back to California to study wild turkeys instead. Overjoyed at the idea of starting their fieldwork again, Dad set off to Botswana around the time I had my meltdown about the water vole to check out the study site while Mom, Lucy, and I stayed behind in Philadelphia—Mom teaching their classes at the University of Pennsylvania and me finishing what had turned out to be a fairly torturous year of second grade after my “Gorilla Man” performance.
We didn’t hear from Dad at all while he was gone. Even in Kenya we had received the occasional airmail letter from my grandparents, so not hearing from Dad for almost two months made me anxious. Where was this place he had gone and why was it so far away? Was it dangerous? Were there zebras there, and did the wind smell like elephants? Why hadn’t he taken me with him and away from the girls at school who kept laughing at me and calling me “gorilla girl”?
We met Dad at the airport on a cold afternoon in December, two months after he left to visit the potential new field site in Botswana and four months after my dance performance.
“DADDY!” Lucy and I yelled, scrambling under the barrier at the arrivals terminal and jumping into his arms.
“My girls!” Dad shouted, hugging us. “You’re so clean!” Botswana was, apparently, a very dusty place, and as Dad peeled off his Red Sox hat, sand sprinkled over the floor of the terminal.
Dad reported that the study site was perfect and the camp would be a fine place for us to live as long as we completely rebuilt it, since at the moment there was basically nothing there except a couple of run-down huts and some junk that Bill Hamilton would be leaving behind. Over dinner in the dining room the following day (Dad said it counted as a special occasion since he hadn’t had fried chicken in months), Mom and Dad announced that at the end of the year we would be officially moving to Botswana. Mom and Dad had to finish the year teaching at the university and Bill Hamilton needed to wrap up his own work, but after that we would be packing up again and moving to the Okavango Delta.
Mom put down her knife and fork and looked at us seriously, the way buffalo do right before they get angry. She said that they would only be able to do their research and maintain the camp and keep us all safe in the process if everyone worked together. Lucy and I were just as important to the success of this mission as she and Dad were, and they had decided to go because they knew they could trust us.
“You’re bush kids,” Dad said. “You know the animals and you understand the dangers. We wouldn’t be going if we didn’t think you could handle it. We know you can. We’re all in this together.”
“We got you these,” Mom added, handing me and Lucy two notebooks with flowers on the covers. They looked like real books, not like the notebooks Mrs. Elliott had us use in school. “These are your journals. Every day you can write in them about what we’re doing and what Baboon Camp is like.”
“Every day?” I said. Mom gave me the buffalo stare again.
“Yes, every day,” she said, adding under her breath, “This is what passes for school now, I guess.” She looked at Dad and then back at me and Lucy, now ages eight and five, and clasped her hands on the table in front of her. “This is serious, girls. Are you ready?” I thought back to the year of school that had just finished, and heard nothing but the sounds of the synthesizer, the sound of the “Gorilla Man” song, and the laughter of my classmates.
I straightened in my chair, heart pounding with excitement and trying to banish all thoughts of second graders and swamps from my head. Mom was talking to me like I was a grown-up, so I had to start acting like one.
“Yes, Mom,” I said. “I’m ready.”
CHAPTER 4
The African Night Is Long and Dark
Just a month later, I found myself lying on my back on a tin trunk next to a shallow river in Botswana. The air was crisp and cold and I stared up into a stark blue sky, watching long-tailed shrikes and brightly colored bee-eaters swoop between the acacia trees along the banks of the river, catching flies in elaborate loops. The sun was barely up, and I was freezing. We had to start our trip early because we weren’t entirely sure we knew the way and couldn’t afford to get lost. Dad and I guarded our small pile of supplies while Mom and Lucy wandered up and down the riverbank looking for snail shells, all of us waiting for our boat escort into the Okavango Delta.
The Okavango Delta is the only wet part of Botswana, which is almost entirely desert. As rains collect in the mountains of Angola to the northwest, floodwater flows south across the Caprivi Strip in Namibia and spills into the dry, dusty expanse of Botswana, creating the permanent and seasonal swamplands of the Okavango Delta. During the winter flood season (generally from April/May to October/November), endless tiny channels snake across the delta in between wooded islands. Although many of these channels are navigable by boat, they can be terribly confusing to all but the most experienced navigator. As the floodwaters recede and the summer temperatures rise (between October and April), the water dries from the floodplains between the permanent islands and leaves behind grassland. Boats are abandoned for cars, and roughly marked roads emerge where channels once ran. We arrived in Botswana in June, and it wouldn’t be until October at the earliest that we’d be able to drive, so on our first trip up to Baboon Camp, we had to go by boat.
Though several tourist lodges were scattered across the Okavango Delta, the delta was largely dominated by the Moremi Game Reserve, a protected area for animals much like the Amboseli National Park in Kenya. The big difference in Botswana, Mom and Dad told us, is that the nearby town of Maun would be more than four hours away from our camp, unlike Loitokitok in Kenya, which had only been a fifteen-minute drive from our house. That meant that doctors, stores, schools, and everyone except the few people who worked at the tourist lodges would also be more than four hours away.
“We also can’t have a house,” Dad said, “since the government of Botswana doesn’t allow any permanent structures in national parks. We can have big tents and build a couple of huts like the ones they have at the tourist lodges, but nothing else. It’ll be a lot more like…” He paused. “Well, long-term camping is probably the best way to describe it. You’ll see.”
I snuggled closer in my jacket, a bright purple Patagonia windbreaker that I’d begged and begged for in the aisle of the Eastern Mountain Sports store back in Pennsylvania.
“This is an expensive coat,” Mom had said, pausing while loading our cart full of batteries, oral rehydration salts, and gauze bandages. “If I buy this for you, will you promise to wear it every day?”
“Every day for the rest of my life,” I swore, dropping to my knees. She laughed, but added the coat to the already impressive load in our cart. I’d carried the coat in my backpack through two interminable night flights and halfway across the world, but it had made it safely and was now wrapped tightly around my small, shive
ring body as we waited by the riverbank. The coat felt fancy and outdoorsy, like the coat of an adventurer, which I now supposed I was.
The air smelled like cows, and I could hear cattle moving slowly through the bushes, lowing softly to each other as they ate. I didn’t mind the smell; it reminded me of buffalo, and buffalo smelled comfortingly like Amboseli. My stomach lurched as I remembered that even though the smells were familiar, I wasn’t back in Amboseli, I was somewhere new. We were half a continent away from our green house in the grasslands, where someone else probably lived now. We were getting ready to move to a place no one but Dad had even seen, and a place that he had already told us was barely habitable. And what did he know about habitation anyway? All he needed to survive was a polo shirt and coffee. Did he even think about where I would put my books and stuffed animals?
I bounced my bare heel on the side of the tin trunk and stared up into the sky, trying to settle my nerves with slow, deep breaths. What were we thinking? This would be nothing like living in Amboseli; we would have no house, no nearby village with people to talk to, nothing except what we brought with us, and I knew that wasn’t much—just a couple of tents, some tin trunks to store food, and a few boxes of tools. How were we going to do this? How was I going to do this? I caught the zipper of my coat between my teeth and sucked on it, still tapping my heel against the trunk. I closed my eyes. Could we at least get going?
Wild Life Page 4