“Dad? Someone from Delta Camp is here,” I called.
“Oh? Huh. Okay.” Dad put down his recording equipment and followed me back to the kitchen, where Lucy was talking to Binky, the blonde South African manager of Delta Camp, a lodge more than two hours downriver and, aside from Xaxaba and its staff village, the only human settlement between us and Maun. I liked Binky. She sometimes stopped by on the weekends to tell us stories about her tourists, like the time when a baboon had stolen a kilo bag of sugar and sat in a tree above their dinner table eating sugar and sprinkling it down on the dinner guests like snow. But I knew that Binky wouldn’t be visiting on a weekday morning just to tell stories.
“Robert. Howzit? We need your help.” Binky explained that Delta Camp was due to receive a group of twenty guests that afternoon, executives from a beer company in South Africa. The company was sending them to Delta Camp for a corporate retreat that included a lecture from one of the guides about how termites cooperate to build termite mounds, the intention being, I supposed, that the executives learn to cooperate like termites. The executives, however, were less interested in team-building exercises and more interested in taking a vacation. Before their arrival, they called ahead to Delta’s corporate offices in Maun to request that each executive be provided four six-packs of beer per person, per day, which Binky was determined to provide.
Dad’s eyes went wide, and I tuned out of the conversation to do some quick math in my head. Twenty executives are staying at Delta Camp for five days. Each case of beer holds four six-packs, so that’s twenty executives times five days which equals one hundred cases of beer…
This is where the problem began. Delta Camp had an airstrip and one plane, a six-seater that they used exclusively to take tourists back and forth to Maun. It would be impossible to get that quantity of beer up to Delta Camp on such short notice on their tiny plane; they wouldn’t be able to take it out of rotation for that long because they had other guests to pick up, and even simply bringing the beer to the lodge would take several trips. So Binky had hired the Leopard-Spotted Lorry to bring up the beer from Maun instead.
The Leopard-Spotted Lorry was a gigantic truck painted army green with bright yellow spots, which was hired out by tourism companies for exactly this sort of purpose. When the road was passable and a lodge needed to bring up really heavy loads of cargo (or something flammable that couldn’t be flown), it was the best way to transport it. However, the roads were tricky this time of year, as the floodplains had just begun to dry up and it was anyone’s guess what state the tracks would be in after months of being underwater.
Nevertheless, a Delta Camp employee named Desmond had loaded up the beer in Maun the day before and set off in the Leopard-Spotted Lorry. But he had never shown up at Delta. When Desmond didn’t arrive as expected, Binky radioed to town and confirmed that he had left Maun and must have disappeared somewhere on the road. At the time, she didn’t know if the truck had broken down or gotten stuck, or if something worse may have happened and Desmond was hurt. The only way to look for him was to find a pilot willing to fly low over the road to Maun, trying to locate the Leopard-Spotted Lorry and hopefully drop Desmond a radio so he could communicate with Binky.
So Binky called Henny, a freelance bush pilot who lived in Maun and the only man for this job. Henny liked to fly as low as possible over the melapo, skimming the reeds with his windows open, tormenting the elephants and sending giraffes fleeing into the woods. He’d seen us fishing on the river once and skimmed so low over the boat that he sent my hat flying into the water.
Even before Binky came to visit us, Henny had been dispatched from Maun with a radio secured in Bubble Wrap, and he had soon found Desmond with the truck, stuck deep, deep in the mud between the islands a few kilometers away—not an unexpected or uncommon situation that early in the driving season. He was fine (aside from being out of cigarettes), but now they needed help getting the beer to Delta Camp before the executives arrived.
This was what brought Binky to Baboon Camp. The Leopard-Spotted Lorry and its one hundred cases of beer were on our side of the river, and Delta and Xaxaba were located on the other side. Their trucks couldn’t reach Desmond from the opposite shore, so she needed our help to ferry the beer from the Lorry to a spot near Delta Camp, where an army of staff would use mokoros to transport the beer in batches across the river and to the lodge before the executives arrived that afternoon. It astonished me the lengths to which they would go just for some cases of beer, but if it was important to them, it was important to us; living as far away from civilization as we did, we all had to help each other when there was a crisis. My parents quickly agreed to help the cause.
Baboons and work abandoned for the day, Dad set off with Binky in our car to find Desmond. Binky left us with her radio so we could respond if anyone called from Delta Camp with an update, since she and Dad were driving farther away from the river and would be out of its range. After they drove off, Mom, Lucy, and I sat around the radio at the kitchen table, listening to the corporate office talk to Delta Camp and to Desmond, who was swearing colorfully as he tried to dig out the truck.
After an hour or so, I started to get bored of listening to the disembodied voices yell at each other and was thinking of returning to The Mists of Avalon when the radio crackled again: “Baboon Camp, Baboon Camp, do you read?” I knew the voice well; it belonged to Bob, Binky’s assistant manager, an absolutely massive man from Zimbabwe and one of the kindest people I’d ever met. Mom had walked away to work in the laundry area, so I answered on our behalf as I ran the radio out to her.
“Baboon Camp is here!” I called back, hoping I sounded important.
“Hiya, is this Keena or Lucy?”
“This is Keena,” I replied, slightly offended. How could he not know it was me from the sophistication of my voice? My voice was older.
“Ah, Keena, is your mother still in camp?”
“Yes, she’s here, but my Dad went off with Binky to get your beer,” I said, reaching the laundry area and handing the radio to Mom.
“Bob, what’s going on?” Mom said.
“Dorothy, hey. Now two of our guides are sick. We need to fetch two replacements from the staff village at Xaxaba to take our guests out this afternoon, but we can’t get them ourselves because our boat is up with you. So, we need one more favor. Any chance you can swing down to the village and fetch the guides for us?”
“Sure, no problem,” Mom said. “We’ll be down shortly.” She balanced the radio on the side of the sink and wiped her hands on her shorts before looking at me. “Now our problem is figuring out how we’re going to get both boats down to Delta Camp.”
“Both boats?” I asked.
“Well yes, both boats. Otherwise how are we going to get home?”
“Oh. But Dad is out with Binky so who’s going to drive our boat?”
Mom looked down at me and smiled. “Think you’re up for it?”
This was huge. I had driven the boat before, but always with an adult, and I’d certainly never taken the boat so far on one trip. Delta Camp was almost two hours down the river.
Though it was getting on to lunchtime and the sun was high in the sky, I shivered as I waited in the boat for Lucy, who insisted on coming with me and not Mom, out of support, I hoped, for my mission. Mom said we couldn’t leave my seven-year-old sister in camp by herself and Lucy said there was no way she was getting left behind while we went on an adventure anyway; she just needed a minute to get a stuffed animal. She came running back from our tent with her pink pig named Soogie tucked under her arm.
“You go first,” Mom called from Delta’s boat. “I’ll follow you down to Xaxaba and then you can go on to Delta Camp. I’ll stop by the staff village for the guys and meet you down there, okay?”
“Okay,” I called. “I’ll see you at Delta.”
“You’re all right?”
“I’m fine. I’ll…see you in a little bit.” I paused to take a deep lungful of air, then drop
ped the engine into the water. I checked to make sure the gas line was clear and the engine wasn’t flooded, and pulled the rip cord. The engine roared to life, sending a cloud of smoke over Lucy and me. I sat down, shifted into forward, and flew out of the lagoon, turning left down the river toward Xaxaba. It was a beautiful day, clear and cool like most winter days in Botswana. I would have been warmer with a jacket, but liked the way the wind ripped through my T-shirt and made it flutter across my chest.
Sometimes pirates need outboard motors.
The first part of the river was easy and familiar, with wide-open stretches of clear water—dark, deep, and free of hippos. I gave myself a few minutes to slow my heart rate, talking to myself as I drove. I can do this, I can. I’d driven the boat plenty of times. Not alone, never alone, but this was just the next step in becoming a real part of Baboon Camp—a real adult. It had always bothered me that people we knew both in America and in Maun made such a big deal about there being children at camp. I wasn’t a child, or at least I never felt like one. Mom and Dad told me the whole reason we’d come to Baboon Camp was because they could trust us to act like adults, and they’d always treated me as if I was one. Why did people seem so surprised when I talked on the radio or made fires or changed the tires on our truck? My age had no reflection on my abilities. After three years, I knew this river better than anyone; Mokupi said so. I knew to take this turn extra wide where there was a sandbar under the weeds and not to fly around this turn or the boat would bounce sideways across the water and slam into the bank.
I can’t get weeds, I can’t get weeds, I told myself. If I steered poorly and the propeller clogged with weeds, I’d have to stop the boat, flip up the engine, and clean out the propeller while floating downstream. This was one of the most dangerous situations we could find ourselves in on the river, as I had been told time and time again. If the engine were disengaged, there would be no way to escape if a hippo popped up. I knew I was capable of lifting the engine (Mom hadn’t let me learn to drive the boat until I was strong enough to do that by myself), but I wasn’t going to need to, I insisted to myself. Only people who didn’t know the river get stuck in the weeds. And I knew the river.
Lucy sat in the front with Soogie under her arm, her blonde hair flying in the wind. I knew she was singing to herself, as she often did on boat rides. Since the engine made it too loud to talk, we were left to our own thoughts. I usually used the time to tell myself stories or count birds, but Lucy always sang—usually Mary Chapin Carpenter songs she taught herself from Mom’s cassette tapes. We entered a wide, clear straightaway and I used the extra space to waggle the tiller back and forth so the boat zigzagged from side to side. Lucy loved it when I did that, and she turned back and gave me a thumbs-up. I grinned and thought, We are going to be fine.
The riverbanks flew by and I kept my eyes open for reeds moving against the wind, a clear sign of animal activity. With the water high, it was unlikely there would be any animals close to the main channel other than elephants or hippos, but those were dangerous enough. The previous week, Dad and I had been driving down to Xaxaba in the early morning to borrow some tools from their mechanic when a hippo appeared on the bank above us, moving back into the water after a night of grazing on one of the islands. When he saw us, the hippo freaked out and leapt into the water, landing only inches from the side of our boat and completely soaking both Dad and me. It had happened so fast that we had no time to be scared, but as we made the rest of the trip in our dripping clothes, freezing in the wind, I realized again just how little control we had over our safety where the hippos were concerned. He’d come so close to landing on top of us.
I drove for an hour before slowing down at the entrance to the Xaxaba lagoon and bobbed on the side of the river, leaving Mom enough room to pass me. As she came around the corner about fifteen minutes later, the wake from her boat caused us to bounce up and down in the water. Mom didn’t say anything, but opened up the throttle and roared off at top speed toward the staff village. I knew she was doing it because she was worried about running into hippos in the Xaxaba lagoon. They regularly showed up in the water near the lodge, often in very large groups. Though everyone in the family had their own fears and dislikes when it came to animals, Mom really, really hated hippos.
“Keena? You ready to go?” Lucy said.
“Yeah,” I replied, gunning the engine and turning the nose of the boat back downriver toward Delta Camp.
I wasn’t as relaxed on the river past Xaxaba. At that point, I had been in the boat for what felt like a very long time, though in reality it had only been just over an hour. The adrenaline had worn off, my arm ached from holding the tiller, and the enormity of the situation finally hit me. I watched Lucy’s hair whip back and forth in the wind and wished she had gone with my mother. What would I do if something happened to her? Would I know what to do if we got stuck or there was an elephant in the river or something happened to the engine? If I screwed up, would my parents stop trusting me to handle myself? Would everyone else think I was just a kid after all? I’d never done anything like this alone before. I’d been so confident, but now I felt a hard knot of panic forming in my throat. This boat is too small and too light, I thought. It’s not safe. Just remember—if we’re flipped by a crocodile, I should swim on the top of the water because it’s harder for them to pull me down, but if we’re flipped by a hippo, I have to swim underneath the water so it can’t chomp me. I swallowed hard. Well, it was too late to back out anyway. Nothing to do but keep going.
There were three main trouble spots on the river between Xaxaba and Delta Camp, a trip that should take forty-five minutes if there are no issues, accidents, or attacks. The first was a spot where the channel narrowed and went right alongside a bank where a gigantic crocodile lived. This crocodile had a scale missing on his back and had attacked two guides from Delta Camp who were poling a group of tourists in mokoros only a month before. The crocodile launched itself from the bank into one of the mokoros and grabbed hold of a guide named Kamanga around his waist. Kamanga tried to fight back by punching the crocodile and, to their credit, the tourists tried to help him by hitting the crocodile with whatever they had with them—water bottles, backpacks, and cameras. But it was no use. Kamanga was pulled into the river and never seen again. His death had shaken everyone pretty badly at Delta Camp, and was a harsh reminder that no matter how carefully we interacted with the animals, we were still very vulnerable. That was the one thing we all kept in the backs of our minds but never, ever spoke about; if we focused on all the bad things that could happen from moment to moment, we’d never get out of bed in the morning.
Delta Camp had since changed their mokoro route to avoid the area where Kamanga had been taken, but since this area was right along the main channel, I didn’t have that option. We just had to drive right past the crocodile’s lair and hope the beast was having lunch elsewhere. You couldn’t go really fast in that section of the river either, since there was a sharp right-hand turn directly after the crocodile bank, and if you were being cocky about it, as Dad said, you’d slam sideways into the bank and have to stop and adjust the engine before moving on. I definitely didn’t want that to happen.
The second trouble spot was the lagoon at the Game Scouts Camp, at about the halfway mark between Delta Camp and Xaxaba. This lagoon was small and full of hippos. The Game Scouts didn’t drive their boats around enough to teach the hippos that boats were dangerous, and the hippos had developed a tendency to charge out of the lagoon into the main channel to attack passing boats. (“Like Hungry Hungry Hippos,” I’d said to Dad, the first time we drove down to Delta Camp. “That’s a frightening analogy,” he said. “But yes, exactly like Hungry Hungry Hippos.”) Hippos were easily capable of biting through a boat and sinking it on the spot, leaving the passengers to the mercy of the crocodiles in the deep water below. You couldn’t do much about this situation either. Just go fast and hope the hippos weren’t feeling aggressive that day.
The
final trouble spot was a large, open stretch of river right in front of Delta Camp that was full of huge lily pads. If you didn’t know exactly where to follow the main channel through the lily pads, you ran the risk of getting the propeller snarled up in the plants and causing the engine to stall out. There wasn’t anything particularly dangerous about this since it wasn’t an area where we usually saw hippos, but it would be embarrassing. Everyone in the Delta Camp lounge would be able to see me completely make a mess of driving the river, and that would never do. Not if I was going to show them I was an adult, capable of handling myself in the delta.
Though she couldn’t possibly have sensed my growing unease as we set off from Xaxaba, Lucy picked that moment to turn around and raise her arms in the air, one hand still holding tight to Soogie the pig.
“GO KEENA!” she shouted, smiling. “GO KEENA GO!” I wanted to hug her, but that would mean abandoning the engine. Instead, I raised my free hand in response and shouted, “WOOHOO!”
Okay, we would be fine. We could do this. I just had to take it one turn at a time. I kept an inner monologue going in my head as a distraction. This is just like a video game! Or a movie. I’m a pilot navigating down a narrow channel trying to get somewhere without my ship blowing up. This is just like Star Wars! I guess that makes Lucy R2-D2. What’s scarier anyway, a TIE fighter or a hippo? Definitely a hippo. The air was clear and clean, and kingfishers swooped overhead. I laughed to myself. We just had an hour more to go.
After about twenty minutes, we approached the turn where the man-eating crocodile lived. I knew I had only one shot to make this turn properly and was determined not to blow it. With my left hand, I reached into my shorts pocket and pulled out my Swiss Army Knife, flicking the blade open with my index finger. Lucy turned around.
Wild Life Page 9