Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  When our schoolwork was finished, I walked back to our tent to retrieve my book from the pile of blankets on my bed and discard my jacket. It was warm enough now that I didn’t need it, and fairly hot in the direct sun. Carefully dodging around bush willow trees and jumping over patches of tiny paper thorns, I ran back to the kitchen, the path scorching the bottoms of my feet and making me hop.

  I made sure the breakfast dishes were clean and swept out the kitchen, paying particular attention to the areas beneath the counters, which we made from pieces of old mokoro boats, and around the stove where pieces of our toast might have fallen. The kitchen had to be spotless. Messes attracted mice, and mice attracted snakes.

  Lucy slapped a textbook shut and rolled her neck to loosen the stiff muscles. She leaned back in her white plastic chair and called out, “Hey, do you want to make a cake?”

  I leaned the broom against the doorframe and opened the small fridge.

  “Do you think we should?” I asked. “We only have four eggs left until next week’s shipment from Maun.”

  “I only need two for the batter and I don’t need any for the icing,” Lucy said. “Might as well ask.” She grabbed the small Motorola walkie-talkie from the kitchen counter where Mom and Dad left it for us to be able to reach them when they went out with the baboons. It had been silent for hours, which meant that Mom and Dad had found the baboons and were together with Mokupi. On days when they didn’t find the baboons, the radio broadcasted constant chatter among the three of them, asking each other where they were and whether they’d heard anything, and maddening responses from Mokupi like, “Robert, I am here by the tree.” Lucy held the radio up to her mouth.

  “Dad, do you hear me?” We waited, but heard nothing but static. “Daddy, this is Lucy. Do you hear me?” Still nothing.

  “We might need to get higher,” I said. “Maybe they’re farther away.”

  Lucy locked the kitchen door and the two of us walked out beyond the choo, where the car was parked under the shade of two leadwood trees, confined to Camp Island due to the flood. Lucy scrambled up the hood of the car, holding the radio antenna between her teeth. I took a deep breath and looked around. The air smelled different in the car park, probably because the bushes were a different species farther away from the water. I smelled mopane trees and more concentrated sagebrush, as well as ash from a fever-berry tree that had been hit by lightning the year before. Peering between the swaying bushes, I saw a herd of impala grazing in the woods to our right and three giraffes gliding slowly across the plain in the center of the island. Everything was calm and still, the cloudless sky a clear blue.

  Lucy stood up gingerly on the roof of the car and lifted the radio.

  “Dad, this is Lucy; do you hear me?” The radio crackled.

  “Hello! We hear you loud and clear. But you’re not calling properly.”

  Lucy looked down at me and rolled her eyes. I kicked my bare toes against the car tire and smiled.

  “Okay, fine,” Lucy said. “Base to Baboon One, do you read?”

  “Baboon One to Base, reading you loud and clear, over,” Dad replied.

  “Can we use two eggs for a cake?”

  “Try again, Lucy.”

  “Base to Baboon One, can we use two eggs for a cake please OVER.”

  “How many do we have left?”

  “Keena says four.”

  “You girls know that means no eggs for Sunday breakfast then, right?”

  “We know.”

  “Then go right ahead.”

  “Okay, we will. Thanks. Base out.”

  Lucy clambered down from the car and we set off back into camp, each walking in one of the tracks in the dirt road and picking paper thorns from our heels.

  Mpitsang emerged from the woods behind the laundry area with his wheelbarrow of firewood.

  “Keena,” he said, “there is a snake in the laundry sink. I am getting the rake.”

  Lucy and I drew up short next to the shower. “What kind of snake?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I did not see. But the birds are upset.”

  I cocked my head to the side and immediately heard a chorus of harsh bird alarm calls from the laundry area, mostly arrow-marked babblers—the undisputed queens of snake detecting. Babblers moved about in family groups, grumbling to each other and foraging through the undergrowth for seeds and insects. If there was a snake around, they were the first to find it. They would jump around the snake, screaming at it with their feathers puffed up until one of them built up the courage to dart at the snake, trying to peck its eyes out.

  “Do you need help?” I asked. “Do you want the gun?” Again, he shrugged. Mpitsang never needed the gun, but I always offered it to him anyway, just so I could say that I did before taking it myself. Lucy said she was going back to the kitchen to get started on the cake but I followed Mpitsang to the storage hut, where he brought out an orange metal rake and a machete. I opened my parents’ tin trunk and unwrapped their air rifle and a box of lead bullets. Since we lived in a game reserve we weren’t allowed to have a real gun, but Mom and Dad said an air rifle was more than adequate for killing snakes. Technically, they said, we shouldn’t kill anything in the park, but snakes are territorial and we couldn’t have them living in camp, especially the black mambas. Black mambas are fast and aggressive and have a neurotoxic venom that can shut down a person’s entire central nervous system in thirty minutes. When I offered it to him, though, Mpitsang shook his head with a smile. “You don’t need a gun to kill a snake, Keena.” He may have been right, but I wanted to participate anyway.

  I braced the stock of the rifle between my feet and pulled back hard on the barrel to cock it. It had taken a lot of practice to learn how to use the gun since it was quite heavy and I was too small to manage it with my eight-year-old arms alone, but once I’d figured out how to brace it, I found it much easier. I often built pyramids of beer cans around camp and crawled through the bushes with the gun hung sniper-style across my back to assassinate the cans one by one for practice, always careful not to fire toward the kitchen. Mom hated that.

  Snake-shooting practice never requires a shirt.

  “Just promise not to hit a gas cylinder with the gun, please,” she said. “The whole place will explode.”

  With the loaded rifle in my hands, I followed Mpitsang out to the laundry area. The babblers were hopping all around the faded pink plastic sink, screaming and cackling and lunging at the sink from their perch on the soap dish just to the side.

  “It needs to leave the sink,” Mpitsang said. “I will kill it on the ground.” I nodded. Mpitsang crept closer to the sink, the rake in one hand and the machete in the other. The babblers made room for him but kept up their relentless attack at whatever was in the sink.

  “Can I shoot it?” I asked.

  “If you want to,” he said, smiling. “Here, let me give you a shot.”

  Mpitsang waited a minute or two and then reached out with the blade of the machete and slapped it hard against the bowl of the sink. There was an immediate explosion of calls from the babblers and a narrow, black head reared out of the sink. Mpitsang took an involuntary step back and gestured with his machete. This was no tree snake or harmless grass snake. This was a mamba. Even from where I was standing, I could see its distinctive coloring and eerily curved mouth. Shaking slightly, I closed my left eye and peered through the sight at the end of the gun barrel. I waited until the babblers were out of the way, took a slow, deep breath, and fired.

  The body of the snake slammed against the side of the sink and Mpitsang quickly reached over and looped the blade of the machete under the snake. With a flick of his wrist he flipped the snake out of the sink and onto the ground, where it writhed in a heap as the babblers screamed and screamed on the soap dish. Mpitsang dropped the machete, gripped the rake with both hands, and beat the snake with the blade of the rake until it stopped moving.

  The babblers quieted and I approached slowly, the gun still in my arms.


  “Is it dead?” I whispered. Mpitsang nodded. He poked the snake with the rake to make sure and then flicked it into the woods behind the laundry area. He looked down at me.

  “Breakfast for the fish eagle,” he said.

  “Did I hit it?”

  Mpitsang smiled. “Not in the head. You hit it here.” He pointed to his stomach. I frowned. I clearly needed more practice if I was going to be as good as my mother. She never missed the head.

  The baboon watchers came back around 1:30 p.m., hot, sunburned, and exhausted. Their legs were torn and bleeding from walking through thornbushes and their feet were covered with layers of grime from walking through water, sand, and water again as they passed from island to island following the baboons. Dad took off his Red Sox hat and pushed the sweaty hair off his forehead.

  “How was the day, girls? Everything okay?”

  “Mpitsang killed a snake in the laundry area,” I said. “And Lucy baked a cake.”

  “Fantastic!” he said. “Cake is exactly what I need right now.”

  “None for me please, Lucy,” said Mom, peeling off her sandals and examining where the sandy straps had rubbed her feet raw underneath. “What I’d really like is some water. I’ll save my cake for teatime if that’s all right with you.” Lucy nodded.

  When Mokupi and Mpitsang went home after lunch, we completed various projects around camp until dinnertime. Sometimes there were things we had to do, like bake bread if we had run out, collect kindling for the evening fire, or clean and fill the water filters we used to purify the water from the river, but if our chores were done, Lucy and I were on our own. We explored the woods around camp, staged elaborate plays with our stuffed animals, and played endless card games of Spit and War in the kitchen. But most often, we read. Usually, around midafternoon, Dad would come find me wherever I was reading and hand me a frozen chicken in a plastic bowl.

  “Guard this while you read,” he would say. “It needs to defrost for dinner and I can’t leave it alone because Dougie is around.” Dougie was the old baboon who had left the group and decided to live in camp with us. We hadn’t known about him until one day he grabbed a frozen chicken from where it was thawing on the solar panels and ate it in the shower. We only figured out what happened when we saw baboon tracks going into the shower and the chicken carnage on the inside, splattered all over our bottles of Pantene. Since then, no chicken defrosted without a guard.

  When the sun passed over the top of the fig tree, I knew it was around 4:00 p.m., and I took a break from reading to light the fire under the hot water tank. We had a small barrel called a donkey boiler that heated up the water for our showers. It was gravity-fed from the water tank just like in the kitchen, but needed fire for the water to heat up. Every afternoon, I shoveled out the ashes from the fire the day before and built a new one using kindling from the wood and log piles Mpitsang collected. Once I got it going, I tended the fire while I read. Sometimes a gust of wind would stir up the fire and send ashes blowing all over me and my book. (This is why there are charcoal smears across page 47 of my copy of Little Women.)

  I always took the first shower so that I had enough time to build the campfire for dinner. As my family trickled back to the kitchen in their evening clothes of pants and fleece jackets since it was getting cold again, we chatted about our day and helped cook—chopping vegetables, slicing bread, or escorting Dad with a flashlight while he carried chicken back and forth to the campfire down by the water. As the sun sank lower over the melapo, gigantic beetles cruised through the trees buzzing loudly, flocks of birds flew home to roost calling out to each other between the islands, and impala crept closer into camp, knowing that the smell of humans helped keep the lions away—most of the time.

  Finally, we brushed our teeth in the kitchen sink and walked back through the darkness to our tents, flashlights bobbing through the bushes looking for eyeshine and headlamps tilted toward the path in front of us in case something came scuttling by. We sang at the top of our voices to keep the lions away—usually Christmas carols or the songs about Irish highwaymen and pirates that Mom taught us when we were small. I slid back into my cot and piled the blankets on top of me, my breath again rising in small clouds in the cold of the night. Every night Lucy and I argued over whose turn it was to climb out of our warm nests to turn off the light bulb overhead and every night I gave in, telling myself that I was older and it was my responsibility to take care of the things neither of us wanted to do. I hopped out from under the covers to turn off the light, flooding the tent and my bed in moonlight and the sounds of the night.

  CHAPTER 6

  Stranded in Xamashuro

  When we were first preparing to go to Baboon Camp, my parents worried that Lucy and I might be bored. Not that living among the wild animals of the Okavango was in any way dull, but since Lucy and I weren’t allowed to leave camp by ourselves and the camp smelled like humans, the animals stayed mostly to the outskirts. Though they passed by in the woods behind camp in the melapo to the north, often three or four days would go by without animals actually coming into camp. And without the stimulation of other children and organized activities, my parents thought we might become restless and unhappy.

  We did not share their worry. Lucy fell immediately into a comfortable routine in Baboon Camp. She baked, she played with her stuffed animals, and though she never really let down her guard while in camp, she didn’t seem to view the world beyond the borders of camp with the same trepidation and excitement that I did. I burned to know what was going on out there, on the islands and plains I could see from camp but couldn’t reach. Every time an elephant passed through the woods, I willed him to stray just a bit closer, even just a tree or two, where I could get a better look at him, smell him, and listen to him snap branches and huff to himself as he ate, even if it was just a bit dangerous. Mom and Dad said it was stupid to wish for more danger when living in camp was dangerous enough, and I knew they were right, but I didn’t care. While they and Lucy seemed content to let camp be camp and the wilderness be the wilderness, I wanted more. I was restless and unsettled, the peace and silence of camp doing nothing to calm me but instead reminding me that even though I was outside I still felt like I was inside.

  Once, when we visited my grandmother in Chicago before we left for Botswana, a friend of hers said to Lucy, “You look like your father and have your mother’s mannerisms,” and to me, “You look like your mother and have your father’s mannerisms.”

  To an extent, the woman was correct. Just like Dad, Lucy had grown into a gorgeous little blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who could have inhabited the same Norman Rockwell painting as my father. But just like Mom, she had a buffalo glare that could stop me in my tracks and razor-sharp intelligence that was astonishing at times, even a little intimidating to people who weren’t expecting it from such a small child.

  But I thought the woman was wrong about me. I knew I looked a lot like Mom, so that wasn’t news to me. When I looked in the mirror in the shower, I saw the same thick, dark hair and crooked grin that curved higher on the right, but that was where the physical similarities stopped. Mom was thin where I was stocky, elegant while I was clumsy, and had a sense of poise about her, even standing in a field surrounded by monkeys, that I wasn’t able to emulate. I didn’t think the woman was right about my father’s mannerisms either—Dad was easygoing and relaxed, the kind of person who worked hard and had a good sense of humor and said things like “I’ve had an elegant sufficiency” instead of “I’m full.” Dad didn’t bubble with unease and restlessness under the surface, never wanted to scream and shout and run and run and run toward the sunset until his lungs burned and his legs collapsed.

  “You know what it is?” Mom said one day. We were sitting in my tent on a hot afternoon and she was giving me a lecture on genetic variation. The seasons had begun changing, and as winter moved into summer, and though the mornings were still cool, by midday the temperature was easily in the mid-90s. Sweat dripped down the back
of my T-shirt and my head buzzed from the heat, making me woozy and disoriented. I was tired of drawing grids about peas, and though Mom tried to engage me by talking about dominant and recessive characteristics using our family as an example, the only lesson I was learning was how different I was from the rest of my family. Mom put her hands on either side of my face and gazed at me thoughtfully. “It’s your eyes,” she said. “I’ve never seen eyes quite like them, and they certainly don’t look like mine.”

  “They look like mud,” I said petulantly.

  She laughed. “No, not like mud! Let me see again.” She was quiet for a while, just sitting and staring at me. I squirmed. The tent was too hot, and I was uncomfortable being stared at that closely. “Your eyes change color,” she said finally. “Sometimes they’re dark brown, sometimes hazel, and sometimes green with little gold flecks in them. Just like a cat.”

  “I have cat eyes?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “You really do.”

  I was glad my eyes were multicolored, and gladder still that even an evolutionary biologist like my mom couldn’t explain why. I wanted to look different on the outside, because it might explain why I was beginning to feel so different on the inside.

  I loved Baboon Camp. I loved the sounds of the birds, the dust beneath my feet, and the buzzing, electric sense of excitement that anything could happen at any time. I didn’t want to know what my next week, day, or hour looked like; I wanted to feel all the time like I felt when I prowled around the outside edges of camp, like a coiled spring ready to jump at whatever terrifying or amazing thing the world threw my way next. I didn’t particularly care whether it was an elephant at my tent or a pride of lions by the choo, I just wanted the opportunity to experience it. Dad used to say I was like a puppy that needed to be exercised every few hours or I’d start ripping apart the furniture, and he was right; I wanted to run, to jump, to find something dangerous and put myself right in front of it to see what I would do, how I would measure up, and if I could survive. I wanted lions to walk through camp, elephants to rip up the trees next to my tent, hippos to surface next to the boat and send my system into an overdrive of electric adrenaline that would leave me dizzy and panting with relief. I wanted Baboon Camp to be scarier than it was, but knew that it was foolish to wish for such a thing when it meant my family and I would be less safe. Confused and in a near-permanent state of alertness, I explored as far from camp as I was able to go by myself, and decided not to tell my parents what I was feeling. I knew they wouldn’t understand.