A low, mechanical hum interrupted the sounds of grazing cattle. I sat up, rubbing my eyes against the change in light and realized I’d been dozing on the trunk. Two boats swung into view down the river. The first was a large blue cargo boat about thirty feet long being driven by a gigantic man with blond hair, a veteran of the Zimbabwean civil war named Dan Rawson, who always smiled and smelled like wood chips. Dan owned a shop in Maun that built and repaired boats, and we’d visited his shop a few days earlier to buy the boat that would eventually accompany us up to camp. The boat, along with an old Toyota Hilux that Bill left on the island, would be our only way to get in or out of camp while we lived there.
I couldn’t see the second boat behind Dan’s, but knew it was much, much smaller. When Dan had sold it to us, he laughed when Dad told him we didn’t need a big boat, just something large enough to get us where we needed to go on the river.
“Whatever you say, Robert, hey?” Dan said. He’d punched Dad in the shoulder and laughed. “If a hippo bites it in half we’ll just get you a new one!”
I listened to the higher-pitched whine of our smaller engine and frowned, thinking I’d make sure to ride in the larger boat with Dan.
Our boat, which now looked utterly pathetic when it finally moved into view, was driven by Mom and Dad’s old friend Tico, who studied wild dogs in a different part of the delta. I didn’t know how they knew him, but it seemed like everyone who studied animals knew each other in some way. When Mom and Dad introduced him, my first question was, “So what do you study?” I assumed everyone they knew was a researcher of some kind.
Tico was from the US and had been working in Botswana for several years already; he had spent the last few days helping Mom and Dad get all our paperwork in order in Maun before we moved to camp. He had also introduced us to some friends of his, Tim and Bryony Longden, who owned an ostrich farm on the outskirts of town along the Boro River. Tim, a white Zimbabwean, and Bryony, from the UK, had two daughters named Maxie and Pia who Tico thought we could play with while Mom and Dad bought all the supplies we’d need to move to camp.
The Longdens’ ostrich farm was about ten kilometers outside of Maun, so my first exposure to the town came only in bits and pieces when I accompanied my parents on their errands. Though it looked a bit like Loitokitok, there seemed to be only one of everything: one streetlight, one supermarket, and one bank. Everything was covered in a film of dust, and goats and cows wandered the streets, nibbling the butterfly-shaped leaves of what Tim told me were mopane trees. There were people everywhere, but I didn’t get a chance to meet many of them since we were only in Maun for about a week before we were ready to take the boat up to camp.
Tico was the only person other than Dad who actually knew where Baboon Camp was, and I was glad to have him along. Tico looked and sounded like Han Solo, and because of this, I trusted him immediately. The boats nudged into the muddy bank alongside our pile of supplies, and we began loading them into the two boats: crates of tuna fish, boxes of Corn Flakes, and piles and piles of tools.
Determined not to appear nervous in front of Dan and Tico/Han Solo, I settled onto the canvas-covered bench on the side of Dan’s boat and tucked my knees up under my jacket to keep them out of the wind. Mom and Lucy joined me in Dan’s boat while Dad rode behind us with Tico.
“No standing, girls, hey?” Dan called and I nodded. Silly, of course I knew not to stand in a moving boat. I didn’t know much about the delta but at least I knew that. I held on to the railing as Dan started up the engine and the convoy lurched slowly forward up the river. The riverbank, cows, and birds disappeared behind us, and off we went, into the complete unknown.
The roar of the engine and the wind made it too loud to talk. Mom tried to hold Lucy in her lap to keep her warm but Lucy wiggled free and wormed her way through the piles of building material to the bow of the boat where there was a small, raised area for sitting. She slid onto the seating area on her stomach and placed her chin on her hands, gazing forward. I glanced at Mom, who shrugged. Lucy always did what she wanted; it was impossible to tell her no. Though I desperately wanted to join Lucy in the front, I didn’t want to disobey Dan’s rule not to stand and so sat stubbornly in my seat, holding on to the railing and watching the riverbanks flash by. Lucy’s body tipped left and right as the bow snaked between reedbeds and around floating piles of grasses and bobbing clumps of elephant poop.
Though I’d been thankful we had Dan with us from the beginning, I didn’t know how much we needed him until we left the main channel that led back toward town and entered the swamp proper. Sitting on the side of the boat, I couldn’t count the number of times I ducked under reeds or shielded myself from spray as Dan navigated the boat around tight corners and down tiny, thin channels, dodging between beds of papyrus and completely ignoring the open, wide channels on either side of the reedbeds. I turned around and glared at him after he made a particularly tight turn that covered me in icy cold river water and pointed at the wide, open channel to our right. He grinned and pointed farther upriver in the channel, where the heads of more than a dozen hippos stared back at me, ears flicking in the early morning sunshine. My eyes widened and Dan laughed, turning us down yet another corridor between the papyrus beds. I knew from my Fact-File that hippos were responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other mammal.
The sun climbed higher in the sky and the air grew warmer. After it became clear that Dan didn’t care at all that Lucy was lying on the bow of the boat, I hopped off my seat and inched through the supplies to join her. The metal on the seating area had been heated by the sun and it was actually quite warm once I settled down flat and out of the wind. I stared down into the river rushing past below me. The water was clear and clean, and I could see right to the bottom. In the shallow parts, catfish with giant heads cruised slowly across the sandy bottom and smaller fish darted in and out of the reedbeds. Higher up, islands covered with thick trees dotted the floodplains (which Dan told me were called melapo in Setswana, the most common of the local languages) on either side of the river, full of dark trees and thick bushes. As we sped up the river, white egrets and turquoise kingfishers flew out of the reeds and flashed in front of the boat before disappearing into the melapo. I tried to count the turns in the river but quickly lost track, getting distracted by the beautiful birds and the gigantic crocodiles sunning themselves on the sandbanks with their jaws wide-open. No wonder Mom said we wouldn’t be allowed to go swimming.
On and on we drove, past wide-open melapo dotted with palmetto groves and palm trees standing starkly against the bright blue sky. We passed island after island of dense bushes and tall termite mounds placed like wedding cakes on small mounds of dirt. We passed trees half-submerged in the water from where elephants had pushed them over and flattened beds of reeds where Mom yelled that hippos had been sleeping. The wilderness spilled to the horizon in every direction, completely devoid of any sign of human life. As the minutes stretched into hours and we were still moving, I began to understand just how far away we were from civilization; the nearest grocery store, paved road, and doctor were all back in Maun. There would be nothing out here but us and the supplies we carried with us in the boat—no one to talk to but my family and no help if we needed it. I felt a lump form in the back of my throat and consciously swallowed it down.
After almost five hours of driving, Dan turned off the main channel and entered a big lagoon alongside one of the larger islands we’d seen thus far. A narrow path had been cut through the spikey green hippo grass at the far end of the lagoon, and Dan steered his boat down this path, killing the engine and letting the boat drift to the end, where it bumped gently against the sandy shore.
“We’re here!” Dad shouted from the boat behind us. I looked around skeptically, not seeing anything that could properly be called “here.” My ears were still ringing in the sudden silence that followed the roar of the boat engine and I shook my head to clear it before looking around. Though I knew my parents had d
escribed Baboon Camp as “long-term camping,” I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I saw—or didn’t see—on the island in front of me.
I stepped stiffly off the boat and onto the shore. I wanted to show everyone how brave I was by being the very first person to step into Baboon Camp, whatever it looked like. I promised Mom I could do this, and I wouldn’t start by hanging back behind my parents. They trusted me to act like an adult, and this was my first test. Aside from a large clearing in front of me, the island looked much like the others I’d seen on the trip from Maun: Tall, gnarled trees filled the thick riverine woodland all around me and the wind blew softly through the branches, rustling the leaves and sending small clouds of dust swirling across the clearing. An enormous fig tree at the edge of the water dominated the forest to my right, towering over the surrounding bushes and leaning far out over the lagoon. To my left, the shoreline curved in a wide loop around more of the island, tightly packed with hippo grass waving in the wind. I was relieved to hear the familiar coo-coo-coo of mourning doves—I remembered them from Amboseli. I made a mental note to look at whether the doves in the Okavango were the same species. Maybe my Wildlife Fact-File would know. Yellow weaverbirds darted through the high branches of the fig tree and bright, iridescent starlings poked through the dead leaves and branches on the forest floor. I turned my back to the clearing and looked across the lagoon, over miles and miles of melapo to the far distant tree line. The waves lapped gently against the shore, the air was clear and smelled clean, and the midday sun felt warm through my T-shirt, my new purple coat long forgotten on the bottom of Dan’s boat. In the far-off molapo I could see the dark, shiny backs of hippos grazing in the grass, and a large crocodile glided silently with only its eyes and nose above the water (like a battleship, I thought). The chattering call of a vervet monkey interrupted the birdsong and I grinned. There were monkeys here!
I slowly made my way back to the rest of my family, who were still climbing out of the boats. Dad ran his hands through his hair and straightened his Red Sox hat.
“Well, this is it,” he said. “Let’s take a look at the old kitchen.”
“Kitchen?” Mom said. “You mean the pile of debris over there?” Dad laughed and made a “pooh-pooh” noise.
“Obviously, Dorothy.” We walked over to the old kitchen and stood around it in a semicircle. A piece of tin roof lay on top of a pile of rotting reeds, which I supposed had once been the kitchen’s walls. The piece of tin looked like it might still be useful, but the reeds were full of insects and smelled like wet hay. I poked the piece of tin with the toe of my black-and-white Samba sneaker and looked up at Mom with my eyebrows raised.
“It will look a lot better once we rebuild it,” she said.
No kidding, I thought.
Dad pointed to another structure on the opposite side of the clearing and told us this was the storage hut. It looked dark and sinister, but largely intact. Mom walked over to the hut and tentatively pushed the door open. It swung silently inward, revealing a pitch-black interior with a sandy floor, crisscrossed with delicate, feathery trails.
“Do you know what those are?” she asked me. I’d followed her over to the hut and peered around her waist and into the interior. I shook my head.
“Spider tracks.”
I gasped. “But they’re so big!” I said.
She laughed. “Yes they are. Big tracks for big spiders! We’ll have to keep an eye out for those guys.”
“Are we going to kill them?” I asked. The only spiders that big I’d ever heard of were the Mirkwood spiders from The Hobbit—famously difficult to kill.
“No,” she said, pulling the doors closed and, I hoped, sealing the monstrous spiders inside. “Spiders eat mosquitoes and mosquitoes give you malaria. These spiders are our friends.” She walked back to the boats to check on Lucy but I stood a moment, gazing at the storage hut. You and me—we aren’t finished yet, I silently warned the spiders.
We helped unload Dan’s cargo boat and said goodbye as he headed back to Maun. Tico pitched a small tent next to the storage shed, since he was going to stay with us for a few days to help rebuild the kitchen and get our big tents set up.
In the hours remaining before sunset, we pitched two more small tents and made a fire in the clearing in front of the old kitchen. I could see more remnants of Bill’s old camp as I foraged through the bushes to find kindling for the fire; some of the trees had clearly been chopped with an ax, and I found a stack of homemade bricks behind the storage shed that we used to line our new firepit. We rolled a few larger logs through the clearing to the firepit, where we positioned them in a circle to sit on.
As the sun sank lower, Lucy and I perched on the logs next to the campfire and tried to stay warm. Lucy was still wearing her sundress and I was still in shorts. Our long pants were somewhere in our luggage but we had been too busy helping out to look for them. I pulled the log closer to the fire and leaned forward, trying to convince myself that the hotter my shins were, the more the warmth would travel to the other parts of my legs, which were freezing.
Dad grilled some chicken and vegetables while I held a flashlight for him. I kept thinking I could hear something rustling in the bushes and I stared intently into the darkness, using the flashlight to look for the eyeshine of approaching animals.
“Keena,” Dad reminded me, “I need the light; I’m trying to make dinner here.” I was excited but nervous. The camp looked nothing like what I expected a camp to be; it was just an island in a strange new place with no people around. It was so dark and so cold. Some of the night sounds were familiar, but most were not. I didn’t know what was out there, and though I felt safe in the warm circle of the campfire, it was impossible to forget how far away we were from electric lights, houses, or other people. I traced the path of the smoke curling up from our fire and saw only darkness and stars. Some of the stars I knew, but most I did not. Dad told me that they looked different farther down in the southern hemisphere, and there were some constellations we would see in Botswana that I’d never seen before. We’re so far away that even the sky is different, I thought.
After dinner, Lucy and I sat quietly while the adults chatted. I remembered from Little House on the Prairie that when Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family was camping on the high prairie, the little girls were often given the job of washing the dinner dishes in the creek by their cabin. Determined to be helpful and to continue to show my parents and Tico how unfazed I was by our new surroundings, I raised my chin and said, “Mom? Would you like me to go down to the river and wash up the dishes from dinner?” Expecting gratitude and respect for my bravery, I was surprised when the three adults looked at me in complete shock before starting to laugh.
“Dear God, no,” Mom said. “Please don’t go down to the water at night. You’ll be grabbed by a crocodile or attacked by a hippo.”
“Oh,” I said, face burning. “Okay.”
Dad held the flashlight under his chin and grinned at Lucy and me. “After all, you know what they say, don’t you, girls?”
I looked at Lucy and we rolled our eyes. Dad had been asking us this question since we were babies.
“The African night is long and dark,” we answered in unison. Dad had made up this phrase to make fun of the overly dramatic nature documentaries in the US that made it sound like no matter where you were in Africa you were always THIS CLOSE to being eaten by something when the sun went down. I knew he was just trying to make us laugh, but it didn’t seem so funny this time around. This particular African night really was extremely dark.
After the adults finished their beers, they stored our dishes in one of the coolers, locked it against prying animals, and whisked Lucy and me off to our sleeping bags in a little pup tent we’d borrowed from the Longdens. I fell asleep immediately, too tired to even write my first journal entry in Baboon Camp.
In the morning, the rebuilding of the camp began in earnest. While Dad and Tico began ripping apart the old kitchen, Mom turned her attention to
the materials we’d brought with us from Maun, including twelve gigantic logs harvested from mopane trees. Mopane trees grow in the drier parts of the delta and since their wood is very hard and difficult for termites to eat, they are the trees of choice for building material. Though already strong, mopane wood still has to be treated to avoid termite attack (and subsequent collapse of the buildings) and this was done by painting the logs with creosote, a compound of tar and plant material that is incredibly sticky and smelly. While Mom brought the logs from the boat and set them lying between two stumps, Lucy and I painted each log with a thick layer of creosote, trying hard not to get it on our clothes, since it would be impossible to remove. It stained our hands orange and made our noses burn, but I was glad to have something to do. “Just make sure to clean yourselves carefully afterward,” Mom added as an afterthought, gesturing at a bucket of water she’d hauled from the river. “On the can it says this stuff can cause cancer.”
Once the logs were painted, Dad and Tico arranged them in a circle where the kitchen hut used to be and secured them to the ground with cement that we had also brought from Maun. Between each pole they wrapped thick strands of wire and creosote-treated string overlaid with letlhaka, the bamboo-like reed that grew on the sides of the lagoon. When I realized letlhaka were hollow, I grabbed a couple of discarded pieces and tied them together. I wanted to make a pan flute just like Peter Pan’s but succeeded only in partially inhaling a fly from one of the pipes before Mom said that creosote was too poisonous to have anywhere near my face. So instead I sat quietly and watched the adults work.
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