My parents insisted that every opening in the kitchen’s walls be covered with chicken wire, in an attempt to keep out the baboons and vervets. In reality, any animal could have easily ripped the walls apart, but like so many things in camp it was the illusion of impenetrability that mattered, or so we told ourselves. In any case, the hope was that the chicken wire would prevent the baboons from discovering that the kitchen contained food and so deprive them of the motivation to rip the walls apart. Once the walls were sufficiently layered with chicken wire and the tin roof covered with thorn branches, Dad and Tico installed a door with a dead bolt and declared the kitchen reconstruction finished. Since the storage hut was largely intact, nothing much was done to improve it. It remained as dark as the previous day, though I found it slightly less ominous now that it had been filled with the tin chests of food, tools, and other miscellaneous items we’d brought with us from Maun. Though we saw no spiders, I knew they were still there. Waiting for me.
My parents didn’t want us to sleep in huts like Bill Hamilton had. Huts weren’t particularly clean, first of all, and it was easy for insects to live in the walls and for bats and snakes to hide in the ceiling. The one sleeping hut that remained from Bill’s time on the island was down a path behind the storage hut and was always full of bats (Lucy and I were sure a vampire also lived there). As an alternative, my parents bought two very large canvas tents from Maun and set these up behind the kitchen under a light-colored tree with heavy, cylindrical fruits hanging from it by thin vines. Tico said it was called a sausage tree and that we should be careful not to stand under the fruits in case they fell and bashed our heads open.
Baboon Camp as seen from the lagoon
Down the path from the kitchen and storage hut was an open-air shower, also made from letlhaka with a cement floor. Beyond the shower, the path split in two. The right branch led to a large plastic tank that had been suspended in a tree as well as a petrol-fueled water pump at the edge of the river that pumped water up into the tank. The tank gravity-fed the shower and kitchen through a series of underground plastic pipes that appeared largely broken, since many of them were sticking up from the ground like skeletons rising from a cemetery. The left-hand branch of the path led to the interior of the island (also the start of the road to Maun in the dry season) and the latrine, which we called the choo (pronounced like “cho”). Choo is Swahili for toilet; Mom said using a different word might make it feel fancier than it was. Behind the choo was a laundry area, made up of a sink in the middle of a clearing with wires running between the trees as clotheslines.
This was the extent of camp when it was fully set up. We tried to keep the “buildings” clean, installed small military cots in our tents to sleep on, and built a few bookcases from two-by-fours we found in the woods, also left over from Bill’s time. The kitchen was finished with a small stove and deep freeze, both powered by propane and the largest and most expensive of our purchases in Maun. As a last touch of what she jokingly called “needless extravagance,” before we left the States, Mom used some of her savings to purchase a solar power system so that we could have electric lights in our tents and the kitchen. Though small, the solar power system provided more than enough power for us to have lights at night and made the kitchen feel vastly cozier than it had with the candles we had been using. After a few days, Tico returned to Maun and my family was left alone.
The more I walked around the camp and learned where everything was, the more comfortable I began to feel. I didn’t have everything I wanted, perhaps, but I had everything I needed: food, clean water, a safe place to sleep, and my family. I hadn’t seen many animals yet, but I was beginning to get excited. Though the Okavango didn’t look at all like Amboseli, many of the underlying pieces were the same, and the more I began to see the similarities, the happier I felt.
The morning after Tico left, Dad got up early and used the new propane stove to make us pancakes. I sat at the kitchen table (a repurposed door discovered in the woods), eating pancakes off a tin plate and rolling the pieces around in my mouth to savor the taste of the small dollop of maple syrup Mom had given me.
“We only have this one jug of maple syrup to last us all year,” Mom said. “But today is a special day and the start of a new adventure. On special days, brave little girls get pancakes with syrup.” They were delicious, and I was happy. We were really here, and everything, it had turned out, was okay.
While it had quickly become clear that my parents were capable of running the camp by themselves, there was enough to be done that some tasks inevitably had to be outsourced to the kids, just as Mom predicted. Maybe I wasn’t able to help Mom fix the AC/DC line leading from the solar panels or work with Dad to replace all the broken water pipes, but I could do our laundry, bake bread, and keep a fire going under the hot water tank so we could have warm showers at the end of the day. I could also follow Mom’s instructions to keep an eye out for any animals wandering through, and let the rest of the family know if I saw anything dangerous.
“An elephant is an elephant no matter who sees it,” Mom said. “And if you see one, I want to know about it.” I was beside myself with excitement when, the day after this pronouncement, I was sitting at the dining table eating toast when I saw my first Botswana elephant, meandering slowly through the molapo far across the lagoon in front of camp.
“ELEPHANT!” I screamed, tossing my toast to the side. “ELEPHANT, ELEPHANT, ELEPHANT!”
Mom and Dad came running from their tent and Lucy from the kitchen where she’d been making a cup of tea. We stood silently for a while, watching the elephant slosh through the molapo, Dad’s hand on my shoulder.
“Thanks for the alert,” he said. “But that elephant is miles away. Let’s only use the shrieking alarm if he’s actually in camp, okay?”
Lucy giggled.
I watched the elephant reach the tree line and disappear, as silently as he’d appeared a few minutes earlier. Fine, I thought. You stay right over there on your own island, but if you come over here, I’m going to know about it. This is my camp now, and I’m going to know everything that’s going on here, spiders and all. Take that, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
CHAPTER 5
Snakes and Cakes
Six months later
Long before the sun rose over the rain trees behind the solar panels, the francolins began calling. These small birds were always the first to know when sunrise was coming, and in the darkness before the dawn they would crow like roosters, letting the still-sleeping world know that the sun was on its way. Since the francolins inevitably began calling right next to Lucy’s and my tent, when they woke up, I did too.
At the first francolin call, my eyes snapped open. I lay completely still for a minute or two, sniffing the air to see if I smelled elephants or buffalo among the scents of dry dust and sage bushes outside the tent. Smelling only the earth and hearing only the birds scratching on the ground, I sat up slowly. Careful not to wake Lucy, I slid out from under the heavy blankets piled on my cot and pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, and my purple Patagonia jacket. I was supposed to wear shoes so I didn’t track dirt into the tent, but I rarely followed this rule—I liked to feel the ground under my feet, the way the dust pooled between my toes and puffed up around my ankles. I could always sweep the tent out later if it got dirty. I slowly unzipped the canvas front flap to our tent, feeling each tooth of the zipper slither under my fingers one by one until the opening was just large enough for me to slip through and hop onto the tarp outside. Ignoring my flip-flops, I paused and looked around. Though my nose told me there were no dangerous animals nearby, it was always worth checking again, especially because I couldn’t track lions or hyenas by smell as I could with other animals. When Dad was teaching me how to field a baseball, he used to say I had to stop, aim, and then throw. If I didn’t take that one second to prepare for the throw, it wasn’t going to be a good one. The same was true here; if I didn’t stop and take a look around, I would never know what I was running into
before it was too late.
My breath smoked from my mouth in the cold air and though I shivered in my shorts, I never wore pants. I knew the day would warm up quickly and I didn’t want to waste even a second of my time changing clothes. Finally satisfied that there were no lions or elephants around, I took off down the soft, dusty path toward the kitchen, keeping one eye on the ground for animal tracks. Usually leopards came through camp at night, as well as hippos, impala, kudu, and sometimes lions. If the tracks looked fresh, I stopped and tried to figure out just how fresh they were, since it would tell me whether or not the animals were still close by and how careful I needed to be. Were the lines on the paw print crisp and clean or had they been muted by the wind? Was the grass underneath still bent? Which way had the animals come from and which way were they going? Had the hyenas eaten the soap from the shower again? Had a porcupine chewed up anyone’s shoes?
The dust was cold under my feet, and I made no sound as I trotted along. The early morning was my favorite time of day, and the blood hummed through my veins with the anticipation of seeing an animal by myself before anyone else was awake. Approaching the kitchen, I slowed to a walk, peering through the chicken wire and hoping I would see my favorite nighttime animal, the genet cat. Genets are long, thin, and beautifully spotted, with gorgeous black eyes and a long tail that looks like a tiny snow leopard’s. They live in trees and eat snakes, so we were glad that one decided to share camp with us. Every night after dinner, we left a few pieces of meat on the kitchen counter for the genet, hoping that keeping her around would encourage her to kill any snakes she might find on her nightly wanderings. Only the genet was small enough to slip through the cracks in the kitchen roof and make it inside. If I was lucky, she’d still be in the kitchen when I got there.
I pulled back the dead bolt on the kitchen door and shut it behind me, proud that I could move in what I believed to be complete silence. I filled two kettles from the water filter and put them on the stove, warming my hands on the heat from the burner and hopping from one bare foot to the other on the chilly cement floor. Outside, the cold air steamed off the lagoon as the sun rose above the trees and the jacana birds trotted across the lily pads, making barely a ripple in the water.
As the kettles began to boil, Dad appeared from his tent, rubbing his hands together and turning up the collar of his polo shirt against the morning cold. Even though the morning was still dim and dusky, he wore his sunglasses, just as ready as I was for the sun to come up and the day to get started.
“Anything interesting going on?” he asked quietly. I shook my head. He poured a cup of coffee from the pot I’d just made and joined me at the main table, where I sat with a cup of tea watching the crocodiles cruise through the misty lagoon and tracing the steam from my tea up into the fig tree where the songbirds were beginning to sing. I wrapped my hands around the warm mug, smelling bergamot and spices and watching the sun slowly creep across the melapo far in the distance.
We heard the sound of a male baboon’s display bark (called a wahoo) and Dad cocked his head to the side. These were baboons in Mom and Dad’s study group, though I thought of them as my monkeys too.
“What do you think?” Dad said. “Airstrip Island or C15?” Airstrip Island was the largest island in the baboons’ home range and at one point in time had an airstrip on it. Most of the other islands in the baboons’ home range were numbered. C15 was the closest island to the northwest of Camp Island, just across a deep molapo, with a swimming hole in the middle that we could sometimes splash around in if Mom said it was safe. I hesitated, listening to the birds and the wind and waiting for another wahoo.
“That sounds like Airstrip,” I said, after another round of calling.
Dad nodded. “That’s what I think too. That’s where we left them yesterday, anyway. Makes sense they’d still be there.”
The kitchen door creaked open and Mom emerged to get her own cup of coffee.
“The genet was here last night, Keena,” she said. “There are little paw prints all over the counter and the chicken is gone.”
I smiled. “I know,” I said.
The sound of quiet voices interrupted our conversation and from the path to the car park, Mokupi and Mpitsang appeared. The men were brothers from a village about an hour downriver from us, next to a tourist lodge called Xaxaba. Both men were Wayeyi, born on the western side of the delta in a large village called Etsha, where their parents still lived and younger siblings went to school. Though they knew Shiyeyi, they usually spoke to each other in the more common language of Setswana. Mpitsang, the older and much larger of the two, rarely spoke, but Mokupi was an incredibly happy person who started every morning by shaking everyone’s hands and smiling brightly. He taught me a bit of Setswana and I made sure to greet him just as enthusiastically as he greeted me. His perpetual good mood was infectious.
Mokupi had worked briefly for Bill Hamilton when he was in Baboon Camp, and was continuing his work with us as my parents’ research assistant while studying to get his guide license. We kept Mpitsang on at Bill’s recommendation, to help keep the camp in working order by doing things like chopping firewood, clearing reeds from the boat channel, and sweeping the paths with a tree branch to keep them clear of debris.
“Dumêla Mma,” Mokupi said, shaking my hand.
“Dumêla rra,” I said, and Mokupi laughed. He and Mpitsang began making their breakfast, which consisted solely of a large cup of tea with between six and eight tablespoons of sugar. I sliced bread from the loaves I’d made a day or two before and balanced the pieces on a wire rack suspended over the burners on the stove. If I tended them properly and didn’t let them fall into the flames, I could make a passable piece of toast—though the slices never crisped up the way they were supposed to.
Shortly after breakfast, with Lucy still asleep, Mom, Dad, and Mokupi set off to find the baboons and begin their workday, listening to the male baboons’ wahoos to guess where they were and whether they were on the move yet. Since my parents’ work with baboons was in its very earliest stages, they were still working on collecting a library of every type of call from every individual so they could begin putting them together in different patterns to test the baboons’ understanding of their own vocalizations. Mostly this meant following them around hoping they made the right noise so they could capture it on tape.
Mpitsang took the ax and wheelbarrow from the storage shed and headed off into the woods to cut firewood from dead trees. He never strayed far from camp because, though neither he nor my parents ever said anything about it, he considered himself Lucy’s and my babysitter and wanted to be nearby in case we needed him.
Once I finished my tea and toast and Lucy had woken up and joined me in the kitchen, we turned our attention to a stack of papers Mom had brought from her tent and left on the kitchen counter. These were our school assignments for the day, which Mom and Dad had written up the afternoon before. Usually there were math problems for each of us, as well as either an essay composition or study questions from a discussion we’d had the day before or from a history book we’d brought with us as a reference guide.
Keena’s Writing Assignment
November 27, 1992
Q: What was the Spanish Armada and why was it built?
A: The Spanish Armada was a fleet of ships in 1588. The Spanish king, Philip II, decided to get back at the English for three reasons: one, that the English were Protestants; two, he wanted to take revenge on captains like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh who had robbed his ships time after time when they were coming back from South America with cargoes of stolen Incan gold; and three, they both claimed the same land in North and South America.
Q: Write a one-page essay on the different types of insects and how to tell them apart.
A: How to Tell Insects Apart. Hello my name is Keena and I’m going to tell you about insects. The first thing you should know is that there are very many types of insects. You are probably wondering how to tell spiders apart
from bugs. Well I’ll tell you. Bugs have six legs and spiders have eight, also bugs always see things multiplied like looking through a kaleidoscope and spiders have eyes that see like human eyes.
Keena’s Math Assignment
November 27, 1992
Robert, Dan Rawson, and Tico are drinking beers. Robert has three more beers than Tico, and if Tico drinks two of his beers he will have half the number of beers as Dan. How many beers do each of the men have? How many beers would Dorothy need to give them to make a complete case of twenty-four beers?
Two hippos are running toward each other down the road. The first hippo is running at two kilometers per hour and the other hippo is running at three kilometers per hour. If the hippos are one kilometer apart, how long will it take before they collide?
The average house in the United States in 1992 is roughly 2,095 square feet. Take a tape measure and measure the square footage of the buildings and tents in Baboon Camp. Is Baboon Camp bigger or smaller than the average house in America?
As Lucy and I worked at the main table, the sun climbed higher in the sky and the air grew warmer. Squacco herons and hadeda ibis flew overhead, calling to each other, and hippos heaved themselves out of the lagoon and onto the shore to lie in the sun and grunt amicably. The sound of Mpitsang chopping wood echoed through the still woodlands, and the Okavango orioles and Kurrichane thrushes in the fig tree above chirped and sang as they hopped from branch to branch, eating figs and dropping discarded fruit onto our table and into our cups of tea. When I looked up from my problem set, I could see animals slowly moving onto the melapo in the distance to graze: herds of red lechwe, zebras swinging their tails back and forth to keep the flies away, and small groups of giraffes, splashing slowly through the water and bobbing their heads with every step. The sun was warm on my neck and as I worked I swirled my bare feet through the dust under the table, drawing patterns with my toes.
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