Fortunately, I never needed to have this conversation with my parents because I could have it with the characters in my books. I knew these characters almost as well as I knew my family, and was sure they felt the same sense of restless anticipation that I did. Before we left for Botswana, Dad had gone to Barnes & Noble and said to one of the booksellers, “I need books about strong girls, dragons, and adventure, and the longer the better because my daughter already reads too fast.” In a stroke of good luck for me, the bookseller Dad spoke to was a science fiction and fantasy enthusiast who led him straight to my second-favorite place in America after the farmers market: the science fiction/fantasy section in the bookstore.
Every afternoon in Baboon Camp, after Mpitsang and Mokupi had gone home and it was still too early to start the shower fire, I read. There were three trees I liked to read in, all within shouting distance of the kitchen in case someone was looking for me, and all rigged with rudimentary pulley systems so I could haul my book, water bottle, and the frozen chicken up to my reading spot once I’d climbed up. Though I read anything I could find in Maun (including a number of unbelievably filthy British romances we borrowed from the Longdens before Mom realized what they were about), I spent most of my time reading and rereading my fantasy books.
Through the Dragonlance series, I met the elf princess Laurana Kanan, who sacked castles, killed an evil dragon lord, and became the commander of a race of knights who, until her, had only been led by men. Through the Dragonriders of Pern, I met Lessa, who, as the sole descendant of a family killed by a ruthless dictator, recovered her family’s throne, became bonded to a gold dragon, and went back in time two hundred years to gather a dragon army to save her planet. And through the Swallows and Amazons series, I met Captain Nancy Blackett.
Though Swallows and Amazons isn’t a fantasy series, it was the first series I completed entirely on my own. Swallows and Amazons is about a group of British children who sailed around the lakes in the north of England and went on fantastic adventures, usually led by the eldest girl and captain of the boat Amazon, Nancy Blackett. Captain Nancy (she would be angry if I didn’t include her title) was a tomboy, completely self-reliant, and independent, with a limitless imagination that turned fellow vacationers on the lake into pirates, caves in the countryside into bandit gold mines, and the hill above her family’s house into the Himalayan mountain Kanchenjunga. The other children regarded Captain Nancy as their undisputed leader, and throughout their adventures looked to her for guidance and reassurance as well as a well-placed “Shiver me timbers!” if someone stepped out of line.
Captain Nancy was twelve in the first book, almost three years older than I was at the time. I fell in love with her immediately, when her first action upon meeting the other children was to fire a green-feathered arrow into their campsite and demand ransom for their youngest brother, whom she’d kidnapped and was sailing around with in her boat while she waited for her demands to be met. Though Captain Nancy was often the main character in the stories, it irritated me that she was never thoroughly described. I knew she was tall and had brown hair and wore a red hat when she was sailing, but I wanted more. Where did she get her imagination? What did she do when she was frustrated and felt trapped? Was she anything like me?
Captain Nancy, Laurana, and Lessa were my best friends. They were bold and unapologetic in their strength, role models before I knew to want such a thing. As I sat high in my marula tree, gazing across the melapo and thinking wild thoughts about elves, pirates, and dragons, I wished with my whole heart that I could live in a world like theirs, where I had a shiny sword and a bow and arrow and could go out and fight the monsters roaming the wilderness around me.
“I wish dragons were real,” I said to Dad one evening as he tucked me into my cot and arranged the pile of blankets at the foot of my bed. Even the nights were hot now, and blankets were almost unnecessary as the temperature rarely dipped below eighty degrees. I kicked my feet free, needing to feel the cool night air on my skin. Dad looked down at me, his arms crossed across his chest.
“It would make the world a much more interesting place, that’s for sure,” he said. “But let me ask you something: Why do you need dragons when you have lions and elephants?” He didn’t wait for a response, but kissed Lucy good night and zipped our tent closed behind him before clicking on his flashlight and walking through the darkness toward the glow from Mom’s reading light in their tent.
I stared out the mesh window next to my cot. Dad was right. My heroines may live in worlds awash with mystical monsters where girls carried swords, but I supposed I did too, if I looked at it a little differently. My monsters were snakes and hippos, and even if I didn’t have a sword, I did have a sharp pocketknife and an air gun, and really that was just as good when it came to adventuring. I wanted more out of Baboon Camp, and maybe my heroines were just the answer I needed—they didn’t wait for adventure to come to them, they went out and found it themselves. Maybe I needed to do the same.
A soft gust of wind blew through the tent, causing the canvas walls to snap against the metal frame outside and sending a cloud of dust over my cot. I pulled the sheet up to my neck and grinned into the darkness as a hyena whooped in the distance. I wasn’t waiting anymore; it was the beginning of a new day for Captain Keena, shiverer of timbers, Pirate Queen of the Okavango Delta.
By the beginning of September, the water in the melapo was starting to recede. The nights grew warmer, the days grew hotter, and the animals migrated closer to the river as water holes across the islands began to dry up. We packed our jackets away for the year and struggled to drink our tea, as the sun rose earlier and hotter with every passing day, the temperature already in the eighties by 7 a.m. By 10 a.m., it was in the high nineties, and by noon, usually above one hundred. Lucy and I began taking a second shower before bedtime, since we couldn’t fall asleep unless our hair and pajamas were soaked in cold water.
Mpitsang had been busy clearing an area beneath some palm trees behind the water tank because another family was coming to join us in Baboon Camp for a few months. A colleague of my parents’ from UC Davis, Joan Silk, was bringing her family to Botswana to work with my parents on a study they’d been collaborating on regarding baboon social relationships. I didn’t know anything about Joan except that she was a small lady and brave, since she had worked with Jane Goodall for a while and wasn’t afraid of chimpanzees.
Joan and her husband, Rob, were bringing their son, Sam, with them as well, who was six years old, just like Lucy. Lucy was excited to have another kid in camp, but I was skeptical. Captain Keena, Pirate Queen of the Delta, didn’t tolerate intruders in her realm, and I prepared my imaginary animal armies to repel the invaders if they decided not to like Baboon Camp. But as it turned out, they were very nice, though I found Sam a bit sensitive when it came to the more unpleasant parts of living in Baboon Camp.
October 29, 1992
Keena’s Journal
Today we had a scorpion experience. Joan and Sam were in their tent after Sam had a shower when Sam yelled, “Mom, Mom, something’s biting me! Ahhhhhhh!” Then Joan said, “Oh, don’t be silly, watch this.” She put her hand down his shirt. “You’re right! Ahhhhhhh!” she yelled. She pulled her hand out with a scorpion’s stinger still stuck in it. She flung it on the tarpaulin outside and beat it with a metal tent peg until it was dead as a doornail. I went running over when I heard Sam screaming.
“What is it?” I yelled.
“A scorpion,” said Rob. Sam cried for ten minutes. Then we went to dinner.
Joan and Rob fully embraced my parents’ style of homeschooling and began leaving assignments for Sam in the same pile as Lucy’s and mine. Though I felt the camp was noisier with three more people around, having more hands to help with the daily chores meant that we had more free time, which I had to admit I appreciated because I could spend more time reading.
By the end of October the water in the melapo was low enough to take the car off the island, so if
Lucy, Sam, and I had behaved ourselves and could prove that we’d each done our homework and had a glass of the milk we got in our weekly grocery shipments (“for vitamins,” Mom said), we were rewarded with a game drive in the afternoon. The drying floodplains drove the animals onto the islands closest to the river; the high concentration of animals on our island made these game drives a lot more exciting than our boat rides, and often meant that we got to see giant herds of animals moving along together like we used to in Amboseli. Dad said that the animals joined up in big herds when they needed protection against lions, which, according to my Wildlife Fact-File, is also one of the theories about why zebras developed their stripes—so that it would be harder for lions to pick out individuals when they were all running together.
Baboon Camp elementary school picture with Lucy and Sam
One afternoon around Thanksgiving when it was easily 110 degrees in the sun, Joan and Rob took us three kids on a school game drive to Xamashuro looking for animals. Xamashuro was a spot about ten kilometers from camp down the main track to Maun, in the middle of a floodplain that had a deep channel running through it that we guessed was an offshoot from the main river. The determination of whether or not it was possible to drive to Maun was dependent on Xamashuro and whether it could be forded, and testing this always involved sending a child across before the car to see how deep it was. The tester child would wade across Xamashuro and then come back to stand next to the truck so the adults could see how the water level on our shorts matched up with the wheels.
On this particular day, Lucy, Sam, and I were tallying animals as part of Joan’s school assignment. This was partly an exercise in averages (on average, how many zebras are on a molapo?) and partly about teaching us how to do a census so we could eventually help with the baboons if needed. The most memorable moment on the trip out to Xamashuro was when we asked Lucy what animal she was looking for, and she said, “I will count wild dogs!” We all responded with variations of, “Yeah right, Lucy; we never see them,” only to round the corner and come upon a pack of forty-eight. Lucy smirked and clicked her pen, counting each tally mark aloud until she reached forty-eight. It was unbelievably hot, and the truck lurched along the sandy tracks, swaying from side to side and causing us to bump our heads against the doorframes at the back of the cab.
The road to Xamashuro involved going through a very sandy island that we called Elephant Sands, because we kids liked naming things. There was a way to navigate through the sand if you stuck to more solid ground, but it required lining the car up with a particular third tree to the right of another tree on the horizon that almost no one was able to do with any accuracy. Plus, a few days prior to this trip, an elephant at Elephant Sands had knocked the tree over, so there really was no way to find the right path. We had made it through Elephant Sands successfully on the drive out, but on the way back we got stuck.
We didn’t have a radio so we couldn’t let my parents know what had happened to us. We just had to hope we made it back to camp before it got dark, since we didn’t have flashlights with us either, and we already knew from our exercise in averages that there were lions on Camp Island. Joan said my parents would probably guess that we’d gotten stuck and come looking for us, but there was no way of knowing.
There was an unofficial camp rule that whenever anyone went on a game drive they took at least two large water bottles with them, so we did have water, at least. But we also faced a ten-kilometer walk back to camp with three small children in flip-flops, one of whom (Lucy) was also wearing a sundress. We had a rough idea of the animal activity between the stranded car and camp thanks to our school assignment, but we also knew that in addition to the lions on Camp Island there were approximately two hundred buffalo on the molapo closest to it, and that the road ran right down the middle of where they would be grazing.
Even as I tried to remain calm for the sake of Lucy and Sam, I knew what a serious situation we were in—yet I was young enough, too, that the fear was leavened with a kind of thrill. Captain Keena, Pirate Queen of the Okavango Delta, was finally going on a real-life adventure. I grinned as Joan and Rob unloaded the car and eagerly offered to carry the water bottles. I was going to handle this situation better than any situation had ever been handled and no animal was going to get the best of me. We headed off down the road, stumbling behind Joan and Rob in the deep sand, the sun burning the skin on the back of my neck.
For the first three hours the walk was fine, though paralyzingly hot; Joan and Rob kept a sharp lookout for animals, and Lucy, Sam, and I waded dutifully through the sand in the tire tracks next to them, though it was hard going on short legs. We had half a sleeve of gingersnap cookies to share among us, and every time we crossed a molapo and reached another island closer to camp, Joan carefully doled out half a gingersnap to each of us as a reward. The skin on the back of my neck blistered and began to peel, and though I didn’t want to admit it, I was enjoying myself immensely. As I said in my journal, “the heat, the dust, and the thirst made life almost unbearable, but I was full of energy.” I didn’t say anything out loud though, as Joan and Rob seemed to be taking the situation very seriously and I wanted to look like I was doing the same.
We’d been walking for almost four hours when we approached the last large molapo before Camp Island and, as we expected, found it full of buffalo. We crouched in the woods on the island on our side of the molapo and listened to the buffalo snort and grumble. Buffalo have a very distinct smell, kind of earthy and rich but with an undertone of cow poop, and it surrounded us like a cloud as we watched them through the trees and Joan and Rob quietly discussed what we were going to do.
Though buffalo usually travel in extremely large herds, these herds are often accompanied by lone-bull buffalo that skulk on the fringes of the herd, trying to gain access to the breeding females in the middle. Usually these males are old and partially deaf, which makes them especially good prey for lions (and the reason why lions follow herds of buffalo) but also very dangerous to anyone attempting to skirt around one of these herds on foot, since buffalo, more than any other animal, are likely to charge just because they feel like it. Joan was going to scout the woodland ahead, but when several bulls emerged from the trees in front of us, she insisted that we wait for her in a tree, where no buffalo could reach us even if they did charge. Sam, Lucy, and I found a good tree and clambered up, stabbing our flip-flops into the grooves in the bark to gain traction. Rob followed, and passed us the last of the water to share among us.
We didn’t have to stay up there for more than a few minutes, but it was exhilarating being so close to so many buffalo, without the protection of a car in between. We could hear them mooing and crashing around in the woods as they moved closer, and the smell got stronger and stronger. Buffalo aren’t the subtlest of animals. Joan soon returned from the opposite direction of the buffalo to say she’d found a safe route around the herd, and off we went, keeping our heads below the level of the grass and ready to jump up into the trees again if one of them charged. Mom always used to say you should never be out of range of a good climbing tree.
Sunburned, thirsty, and exhausted, we were just entering Camp Island, five hours after we’d set off on our game drive, when we ran into my parents, headed out to look for us with backpacks of rescue supplies consisting mostly of soda and chocolate.
“What an adventure!” Mom said as she sat with me and Lucy in our tent after I took a long shower. “You must have been terrified, going around all the buffalo.”
I squirted aloe gel into my hand and smeared it over the back of my neck, clenching my teeth against the sting and determined not to show how much it hurt.
“I wasn’t afraid,” I said. “Everyone is home safe and we didn’t do anything stupid. In fact, it was wonderful.” Mom laughed but crinkled her forehead as if she didn’t quite believe me.
CHAPTER 7
One Hundred Cases of Beer
and a Man-Eating Crocodile
Many months later, I was
sitting at the kitchen table sipping my morning tea and reading The Mists of Avalon when I heard the low hum of a boat engine against the backdrop of early morning birdsong. This was unusual. Generally, the only boats that came by on weekdays were occasional tour boats from Xaxaba, the lodge far downriver, but those boats usually set out later in the morning when it was slightly warmer and the tourists were less likely to complain about the cold. (That always annoyed me because everyone knew dawn was the best time to see interesting animals—who cared if it was cold enough to freeze your water bottles?)
This engine sounded too choppy to be a Xaxaba boat though; Xaxaba’s boat engines were expensive and ran quietly. So at this time of day and in this part of the delta, there was really only one other boat it could be.
As I expected, a large, flat-bottomed boat swung into the lagoon, scattering egrets and sending the redheaded jacanas scuttling across the lily pads on their long, spidery legs. I hopped off my white plastic chair and jogged down the path to my parents’ tent, where they were getting their gear ready to go out with the baboons.
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