Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  “Why are you slowing down? You know where we are, don’t you? Don’t mess this up,” she said.

  “I won’t,” I said. “Just hold on a second.” I shifted the knife into my palm and squeezed the other tools shut, leaving the blade extended. I didn’t know what exactly I was planning to do with my tiny knife if the crocodile was there, but I wasn’t about to be caught unarmed if he jumped in our boat or went after my sister. Weapon secured, I fixed my grip on the tiller, opened up the engine, and roared toward the bank, trying not to think about poor Kamanga. We passed the bank (mercifully empty), and I yanked the tiller toward me, making the right turn at the perfect angle, if a little fast. Just a bit too cocky on the turn there, kid, I heard Dad say in my head. But, whatever! He wasn’t there. Lucy turned around and gave me another thumbs-up. Knife still clutched tightly in my left hand, I pushed on, past reedbeds filled with weaverbirds and thick, overhanging trees sticking out from the banks over the river.

  Next it was time to face the lagoon full of hippos. What’s your strategy here? I asked myself. There are usually more than a dozen hippos in there. I looked up to the sky. The sun was high, just past noon, and the air was warm. If the hippos were behaving as hippos should in the middle of the day, they’d be sleeping—either deep underwater or lying in the sun in the reedbeds on the side of the bank. Though I knew from Dad’s and my past experience that hippos on the bank weren’t exactly an ideal situation for passing boats, if I was right about them being asleep they’d be too slow to get themselves up and back to the water in the time it would take me to drive by. We just had to gun it. I opened the throttle and we flew down the river, barely skimming the top of the water.

  Again, Lucy and I got lucky. No hippos charged us as we flew past, either from underwater or from the bank, and by the time we entered the minefield stretch of lily pad–infested river in front of Delta Camp half an hour later, I was already taking my victory lap. I unclenched my hands and eased up on the tiller, zipping skillfully between the lily pads on my way to the boat landing area behind Delta Camp. As we approached the shore, I squeezed my knife closed and shoved it back in my pocket.

  “You did it! I knew you could do it!” Lucy cheered as I shifted the boat into neutral and cut the engine. I grinned. I tried to lift the engine up to drag the boat closer to shore but found that my arms were shaking too much. So I got out of the boat and dragged it as close as I could and tied it to a clump of reeds. Lucy jumped over the side and waded through the shallow water to join me on the bank. In the warm afternoon sun, we walked down the path to Delta Camp.

  What Bob saw, when he looked up from his desk in Delta Camp’s office, were two tiny girls walking into camp completely alone. Both were sunburned and windblown, neither was wearing shoes, and the smaller one was carrying a pink stuffed pig. Utterly shocked, he came out to meet us.

  “Girls? Where are your parents? Are you okay?” I nodded and explained that Mom was collecting the guides from the staff village and we’d brought the boat down ahead of her.

  “You drove down here by yourself?” he asked. Again, I nodded. I was so proud of myself I thought I might explode, but was determined to act casual in front of other people. This was just what adults did, nothing to be surprised about. He stared at me. “And remind me how old you are?”

  “Ten,” I said.

  “And I’m seven!” Lucy added.

  “I see,” said Bob. “Well, my girls, I think we better find you something to drink.”

  When Mom drove into Delta Camp half an hour later, she found Lucy drinking orange Fanta and me with a cold beer sitting in the guest lounge, doing what we always did when we visited Delta Camp: poring over the book of snakebites and discussing which looked the grossest. Though the beer wasn’t my first, it was certainly the best-tasting beer I’d ever had, and definitely what an adult should be enjoying after a long day on the river.

  Years later, Mom told me all she could think about on her drive to Delta Camp was the video game in which the frog hops across the freeway, trying not to get squashed by passing cars. Had she really sent her two young daughters down a hippo- and crocodile-infested river alone? In retrospect, she said, it was a terribly stupid thing to do. So stupid that sweet, mild-mannered Bob had actually admonished her when she came to pick us up. He hadn’t realized that there wasn’t anyone else to drive our boat when he asked us for the favor and was furious that she had taken such a risk with her children.

  Mom drove us home as the sun dipped toward the horizon and the birds flew back to their nests to roost, through the lily pad minefield, past the lagoon at the Game Scouts Camp, and flying so fast past the man-eating crocodile lair that the insects whipped against my face and got trapped in my eyelashes. It was dark by the time we got to Baboon Camp and nearly midnight when Dad and Binky finally showed up, having successfully ferried all the beer to Delta Camp and gotten Desmond and the Leopard-Spotted Lorry unstuck. They were muddy and exhausted, but relieved that so many parties had pulled together to get the beer to Delta before the executives arrived.

  “Well, I hope they enjoy their beer,” I said. Binky laughed and pushed another log into the fire.

  I couldn’t stop smiling. Here I was, sitting around the campfire with the grown-ups, talking about all the things I’d done to help with trucks and planes and boats. If I could drive to Delta Camp on my own, I really could do anything.

  July 29, 1994 (excerpt)

  Keena’s Journal

  Today was a very important day for me. And all because of beer!

  CHAPTER 8

  Pearl Jam and Other Things

  I Didn’t Know

  It was a stifling evening in December a year after my boat ride to Delta Camp when my parents, Lucy, and I gathered at the dining table for a talk. The air was so thick and heavy it felt like I could hold it in my hands as we sat in puddles of sweat, swatting flies away from our food. We’d just finished a dinner of freshly caught fish and my thumb was throbbing from where I’d sliced it open with my pocketknife trying to remove a hook from an especially disagreeable pike. The water in the lagoon had diminished to a small stream, and upturned lily plants lay sprawled about in the dust like sunbathers on the beach. A group of giraffes drank from the river just to the north, and as they dipped their heads to the water they moved across the light from the setting sun, sending shadows slicing across the dinner table and my parents’ tanned faces. Dad cleared his throat and reached for his beer.

  “At the end of the month we are going back to America,” Dad said. I stiffened. “We have a lot of work to do on the data we collected and we have to spend some time teaching at the university or we won’t be able to renew our grant.” He glanced at Mom, who was drumming her fingers on the table next to her tin plate. “No one wants to go back, obviously, but…” he trailed off. Mom stared ahead across the melapo. Lucy fidgeted in her chair and reached for her mug of milk. She’d put three heaping tablespoons of Nesquik in it, but the milk was still lumpy and sour. It had been ultra-heat treated in Zimbabwe to make it last longer, but that didn’t make it taste any less disgusting. Mom and Dad still had a rule that we had to have one glass a day.

  Mom shook her head to clear it and looked at Lucy and me.

  “Well, it can’t be helped, can it?” she said brightly. “We have to go, so we might as well enjoy it. Just think, you’ll get to see all your friends again! That’s at least something positive.”

  I scowled. I’d been planning to spend the next month building a tree house in my favorite reading tree, not packing to move back to America. I didn’t even know if my school friends would remember me. It had been a year since I’d last seen them, when I spent a couple of weeks in fifth grade while my parents renewed our passports and got the solar power system fixed. I received an occasional letter from Meghan, but the only person who’d really kept in touch with me while I was gone was Nat, and he wasn’t the most detailed correspondent.

  10:05 a.m., June 12, 1995

  Dear Keena, />
  I miss you a lot. But I disagree that Menolly is the best character in Dragondrums. We’ll talk about it when you come home.

  Today we’re having our fifth-grade pool party. I wish you were here. Two more days and school’s out. Could you please write soon? I’m getting anxious. I’m not sure if my first few letters have all reached you but if they haven’t I hope they do soon. You are so far away! Why does the mail have to take so blasted long!?!? I really wish I could just teleport them there! Oh well. It’s probably going to be a while before they figure out how to do that. Until they do it’s just going to take some time for letters to get where they’re supposed to go. Write soon!

  Yours truly,

  Nat

  We left Baboon Camp on a hot and dusty day just before the new year. My parents had arranged for some graduate students to come from Penn to continue their work while we were in the States, so very little was going to change about the camp except who was living in it. Lucy and I packed some of our books and outdoor gear in duffel bags under our beds to await our return, and donated the rest to the children in Mpitsang and Mokupi’s village. Though we were coming back the next summer, there was an element of finality in packing away our prized possessions that made me think of Amboseli and made my stomach lurch. I didn’t want to be separated from my book best friends Captain Nancy Blackett and Laurana Kanan the elf princess for such a long time. How would I get to them if I needed them? Instead, I had to satisfy myself with my stuffed owl and my knife, both of which lay nestled against the small of my back inside my backpack as we flew to Maun, Paris, and then to Philadelphia, where we landed in an icy blast of December winter that felt like a physical assault after the Botswana heat.

  The first leg of the trip back to the US

  Nat’s mother, Cathy, picked us up at the airport and drove us home through the snowy streets, past houses still twinkling with Christmas lights and fields devoid of any movement except the swirling snow. Our empty house was dark and cold, and I could see my breath as I dragged our duffel bags into the laundry room. Mom said everything we had in camp had to be washed before it was put away—even our shoes and stuffed animals. This seemed like madness to me, since we never cared how dirty our clothes were in Baboon Camp. Why did it matter so much now that we were in America? Was there some kind of rule about having perfectly clean clothes that I didn’t know about? There was too much change happening all at once, and I was tired. Dad drove out to find us something to eat and returned with microwavable dinner rolls and fried chicken, two things I hadn’t eaten in almost three years. As I fell asleep under the icy sheets in my bed at the top of the stairs, I strained to hear the sounds of night animals but heard only the spitting and sputtering of the radiator in my bedroom welcoming me back to America, to a house with too many rooms and a second floor that still felt like it might tumble off at any minute.

  I arrived at school for my first day of sixth grade a few short days later, on January 2. Mom and Dad dropped me off at a tall, modern-looking building far away from the familiar elementary school campus where I’d always gone before. They drove to work, leaving me standing in the tiled foyer, shivering in my school uniform of navy-blue pants and a white polo shirt, completely at a loss about where to go or what to do. My backpack was still covered with dust, and my sneakers were faded and tattered from years of nudging logs into place in our firepit and being ripped by thorns as I scavenged in the woods for kindling. I stared straight ahead, wanting nothing more than to turn around and run, as far and as fast as I could, until I got back to the heat and the sand and the birds.

  A tall male teacher with blond hair and a trim blue suit emerged from the office in front of me and greeted me warmly.

  “Welcome back!” he said cheerfully, shaking my hand. He handed me a clean white sheet of paper with my name at the top and a grid printed below it. “Here’s your class schedule,” he said, running his finger down the page. “Looks like your first class today is English with Mrs. Richards. Let me show you where that is. Do you have your books and a Trapper Keeper?”

  “No,” I said. What was a Trapper Keeper?

  The hallways were full of kids I didn’t recognize, milling about in small groups, talking with their heads close together or writing in brightly colored notebooks covered with stickers. A boy with blond hair threw a highlighter at another boy who shrieked and ducked, sending the highlighter skidding across the polished laminate floor. I swallowed. I had hated laminate floor ever since my “Gorilla Man” debacle in second grade. My head buzzed under the fluorescent lights and immediately I was back on that gym mat, melting under the gaze of fifty other girls who were convinced I was a complete weirdo. I shifted the backpack on my shoulder as the tall teacher escorted me through the crowds, ignoring the stares from onlookers. It was a small school, and clearly the introduction of someone new halfway through the year wasn’t going to go unnoticed.

  Three floors up and down a long carpeted hallway, we finally came to Mrs. Richards’s English class. Students trickled into the room in small groups, and I recognized some of them. One or two even waved to me or said hello. Mrs. Richards led me to a desk in the back row and handed me a copy of The Giver, a book her class was just beginning to read together and discuss.

  “But I’ve already read it,” I said quietly.

  “Well, please don’t ruin it for everyone else,” she said kindly. “You’ll just have to pretend you don’t know the ending.” She bustled away to the front of the class, motioning to the other kids to take their seats so she could begin the lecture. I stared at the floor, counting the crisscrosses in the blue carpet fibers. My stomach roiled with acid and the buzzing in my ears made it hard to hear the conversations going on around me.

  This feels a lot like danger, I thought. But it’s not, not really. Nothing here is trying to kill me. Nothing here is going to make me sick or keep me from going home. So, okay then how bad can it really be? I opened my eyes, not realizing I’d been squeezing them shut. Mrs. Richards was telling the class to open to some page or other but I hadn’t been listening and my book sat unopened, spine unbroken and cover uncreased, on the desk in front of me. I saw the boy at the desk next to mine open his book to the title page and I reached for my book to do the same, horrified to see my hands shaking. Stop that, I told myself. Stop being scared; this is not a scary place. But my body didn’t seem to believe me.

  Since it was already halfway through the school year when I arrived, my classmates had already divided themselves into social groups and essential decisions had been made: who they were friends with, who they hated, and who they had crushes on—this last a completely new concept to me. Nat was still his old self, though he’d started wearing glasses, but Meghan had changed completely. No longer was she the little girl I knew from elementary school who liked stuffed animals and drawing. Seemingly overnight she’d become a poised and self-assured young adult, with a stylish new haircut and sweet smile that made some of the boys in my science class call her the Queen of Sixth Grade. Meghan also had our class’s first real boyfriend, which conferred on her a degree of maturity that made her untouchably cool to the rest of us. I wasn’t sure whether Meghan knew just how popular she was, but it was immediately obvious to me how far out of my league she now was as a friend. Though I’d missed Meghan and wanted to spend time with her in school, I wavered. I didn’t look at all like the girls who hovered around her, and though I couldn’t have said exactly why, I somehow felt unworthy of being in her presence—a thought that made me angry since I knew it didn’t make any sense. Meghan and her new friends were another species entirely, and even though Meghan waved when she first saw me at school, I hesitated to go over and say hi. Her friends swirled around her like a flock of birds, and before I could gather the courage to talk to her, she was already gone—off in a crowd of smiles and giggles and faces I didn’t know. It took me almost a week to finally say hello to her in person, but I quickly gave up trying to renew our friendship when I discovered I had much bi
gger problems to deal with.

  There were some members of the class who had joined more recently and didn’t know me at all. I heard some of them whispering, “Who’s that?” and the classmates who did know me would sigh and say, “Oh, her? That’s just Keena. Sometimes she comes to school and sometimes she lives with monkeys or something. She’s weird.” As much as I wanted to blend in, it was very hard to be inconspicuous, especially because of how I looked: My hair was short, bleached by the sun, and chopped in odd layers, since the last time it had been cut was by the firepit with a dull pair of scissors. I was deeply tan and covered in healing scratches, cuts, and mosquito bites, which made me stand out even more in a Philadelphia winter. Unlike the other girls in my class, I wore pants instead of skirts, and sneakers instead of dress shoes. I thought it was too cold for skirts, and dress shoes were impractical because it was impossible to run in them.

  About a month after I joined the class, I arrived in homeroom early and sat down at a desk, not really sure what I should do with myself until class started. Nearby, two girls sat talking loudly, smacking their gum.

  “Oh my God, I love Pearl Jam so much,” one of them said.

  “They’re the best,” the other girl said, nodding. “I’d, like, die for them.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, feeling brave. “What’s Pearl Jam?” The girls stared at me. “Because I know a little about animals, and no one makes jam from pearls. Not even in other places in the world. People farm oysters for pearls sometimes but no one eats those.” The girl who loved Pearl Jam, like, so much, made a face.

  “Do you even hear yourself talk?” she asked. “God. Just shut up if you don’t know.”