Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  I looked across the melapo at the setting sun. I smelled dust on the wind, the smoke from the campfire, and the faintest hint of buffalo under the smell of the elephants. The heavy tension I’d been carrying in my shoulders for months drained away and everything in the world was right again: no more school, no more malls, and no more dresses. The relief was so acute I wanted to cry, but at the same time I knew that my time back in Baboon Camp was limited; as soon as I stepped off the boat, the seconds began ticking away until I would have to leave again. In an instant, I decided that every single one of those seconds had to count. I was game for anything. I looked at Mom.

  “Sure,” I said. “Lucy, hold my beer.”

  Mom turned the stun gun on to the lowest setting. She aimed it at me, and I nodded. There’s a scene in Return of the Jedi when R2-D2 gets shot by a stormtrooper. When the blast hits him, he squeals and jerks. The electricity from the blast radiates across him in blue waves and makes all the pieces of his machinery blow up and start smoking.

  That’s what it felt like. My chair toppled over backward, sending me sprawling in the dust and staring up at the stars through the branches of the fig tree, gasping like a fish out of water. Mom was right; it didn’t hurt exactly, but it sure knocked the wind out of me and made my fingers and toes twitch.

  Mom helped me up and Lucy brought me a fresh beer from the river.

  “That’s what you want us to do if someone gets bitten by a snake?” Lucy asked. “That looks pretty bad.”

  “It was just an idea,” Dad said from the other end of the table. “And probably not a very good one. But feel free to shock me if I get bitten by a mamba. With only half an hour left to live, I welcome any and all attempts to save my life, be they stun guns, limb amputation, or whatever you happen to find first.” And with that he stood up and walked into the woods with a pile of chicken bones for the hyenas to eat.

  I was surprised that Mom had even thought of buying the stun gun in the first place. We saw snakes in camp fairly regularly but had never had encounters that were close enough to really upset us. Usually the snakes we found were harmless and we let them go, or Mpitsang killed them with a machete. It seemed like we already had a good protocol in place.

  But Mom said it wasn’t the snakes in camp that really worried her, it was the snakes she and Dad ran into when they were with the baboons. The baboons walked on narrow game trails made by other animals like impala and kudu, and snakes often lay across these trails, searching for direct sun in the early mornings. The baboons also liked to sun themselves on the termite mounds that were scattered through the islands and looked like castles rising out of the grass. The sun heated the clay compound of the mounds and made them perfect places to warm up from the cold mornings. The problem was, the snakes thought so too. Almost every day in the cold months Mom and Dad saw snakes sunning on termite mounds and Mom said it was only a matter of time before they stepped on one by accident. She thought it might be a good idea to keep the stun gun in her backpack in case that did happen, but admitted it was a long shot since nothing had ever been proven to work against a mamba bite. Like all the animals we ran into, avoidance was still the best strategy to keep ourselves safe.

  “Or maybe all these brushes with death are just too exciting for me,” Dad said.

  Too exciting? I thought. I never considered Baboon Camp itself to be too exciting. All the real adventures I’d had so far had taken place outside the camp, whether on the river to Xaxaba or when Mom and Dad took me out with the baboons. I wasn’t allowed to go off on my own when we were with the monkeys, but even walking around with them was more exciting than doing laundry or reading in my tree. I wrinkled my nose. If there was something more exciting I could be doing, then that’s where I wanted to be. I only had so much time in Baboon Camp and I wanted that time to be as exciting as possible.

  I realized I wanted to participate in my parents’ work. I envied how quickly Mokupi was able to identify all the baboons and how Mom and Dad gossiped with each other about which baboons were friends with other baboons and who had just had a baby. I knew who a few of the adult females were since we had a list of them in the kitchen, and I could identify them when they came into camp: Cordelia’s left ear was folded over and Sierra’s tail was bent from where it had been broken as a baby, but beyond that they all looked the same to me. Mokupi said, “Ah, Keena, how can you not see that is Balo and that is Nutmeg? Balo’s face is like this and Nutmeg looks angry, angry, angry.”

  And Mokupi was right; she did. I tried to remember what he said when the baboons came into camp a day or two later. When I looked closer, Nutmeg’s fur was darker than the other females’ and wirier. Her face was more pinched than Balo’s and her lower jaw jutted out like a barracuda, giving her a permanently unpleasant expression. Balo’s face was rounder and softer than Nutmeg’s and she walked faster than the other baboons, as if she were late to pick her kids up from soccer practice. And she might have been too; Balo had five daughters and one grandson by the time I met her and it seemed like one of her offspring was almost always in trouble.

  I began a campaign to get my parents to agree to bring me with them into the field—to convince them I was old enough now. I loved their stories of dramatic fights between baboon families or the time when a young female tried swinging on the tail of a giraffe. Once Mom and Dad were convinced I was fast enough and strong enough to take care of myself if we ran into something dangerous, they agreed to start letting me go out with them every day, provided that I start helping them collect data as soon as I knew the baboons well enough.

  As it turned out, this didn’t take long. They say that everyone has a talent, they just have to discover what it is. I discovered mine the summer I was thirteen. What I am good at is recognizing baboons.

  June 16, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  I went out with the baboons again today. They started out in the woods on Camp Island but moved through the melapo and across Airstrip Island. None of the animals enjoyed the water crossings and most either crossed with their tails in the air or on their hind legs, all the while making anguished grunting noises. The older infants like Amber and Akela got to ride their mothers across and watched the others struggling along beside them. Some of the very little ones like Jupiter and Lulu had to swim the whole way. The current was weak, but still swept them away from the rest of the group. When they got to Airstrip they were soggy and looked miserable.

  I am getting a lot better with identifying the baboons. I like working on the medium-sized girls because they are cute and have more interesting personalities than the boys. The only problem is that there are about twenty of them and I confuse them all the time. After about two hours of staring at them they all start to look the same. Mokupi says that even he can’t tell them apart some of the time, so at least I’m in good company.

  In other news, there is a weaverbird in camp that is convinced that his archrival lives in the mirror in the shower. All day you can hear him hurling himself against the mirror and attacking it with his beak. I think we may have to start covering the mirror with a towel so he doesn’t hurt himself. Dad also shot a spitting cobra near the shower today. We know it’s hit, though we don’t know where it crawled off to. I hate snakes.

  (Later)

  Lucy heard something shaking the tree above the dinner table and shone her flashlight up at it - it was the genet! We got a really good look at it. It was carrying a fat gray mouse in its mouth. We spent most of dinner talking about Mokupi and his way of helping me learn how to identify the baboons: “Is it dark?” “Yes, dark, but a little less light.” Or, “It has a funny face” (to literally every single individual). He would look at baboons twenty feet away, deep in a bush with their backs turned, and expect me to know who it was. It reminds me of the dentist, when they fill your mouth to overflowing with tools and then ask you how your summer was. I don’t know how he’s so good at this.

  I already knew a bit about baboon social structure since Mom tau
ght it to me in one of our homeschool lectures, but it was much more interesting to see it played out in front of me as we walked through the islands and melapo. Every night, when I sat down after my shower to write my journal entry for the day, I found my pen flying across the paper, with so much to say from my day out with the baboons that I barely had enough space in my journal to cover everything. Whereas in the years before, my journal entries had shrunk to “and then we did this around camp,” I filled page after page with my adventures out with the baboons, sitting by the fire as the sun sank and the impala trotted around in the woods behind the kitchen.

  One morning, I got up as the sun rose to run laps around camp before it got too hot. Though in retrospect this perhaps wasn’t the smartest thing to do, Mom and Dad agreed that if I walked all around the camp singing loudly and didn’t see signs of any animals, it was probably safe for me to go running as long as I kept to the main paths.

  I was circling back through the laundry area when the baboons, who had been sleeping in the palm grove behind camp, erupted in a wild clamor of screams, wahoo calls, and shrieks. At that time of day, that amount of noise could really mean only one thing: a leopard attack. I sprinted to the kitchen where Mom was getting a cup of coffee, shouting at Lucy’s and my tent along the way, “GET UP, LUCY, THERE’S A LEOPARD ATTACK!”

  Mom, Lucy, and I ran out toward the noise and found about twenty baboons sitting around the base of a termite mound with a small croton tree on it. Nothing seemed to be happening and we wondered whether the baboons had just freaked out over nothing, which they sometimes do. But then, just as we were about to leave, the baboons leaped at the base of the termite mound, screaming, jumping, whooping, and slapping at a hole in the bottom. Though several large adult males were leading the attack, even mothers with babies joined in, and a few of my favorite fluffy juveniles too. Immediately after this outburst, we heard a soft, low growl coming from inside the hole and knew the baboons had cornered a leopard.

  Leopards kill more baboons than almost any other animal, but always at night when they creep into the baboons’ sleeping sites to attack. During the day, their relationship is almost reversed; a fully grown adult male baboon weighs close to one hundred pounds, while an adult female leopard can be as small as just sixty pounds. And, since baboon troops often include more than twenty adult males, the baboons are at a huge advantage if they encounter a single leopard when they can actually see it. Baboon troops can (and do) easily rip leopards apart if they corner them during the day, though it’s an incredibly rare thing to see.

  As soon as it became clear that this is what was happening, Mom yelled, “I need my camera!” and for a split second, all the baboons looked at her. In that second, the leopard made a dash out from under the termite mound and ran straight at us, as we were the only break in the mob of baboons. Lucy turned around and ran back to camp as fast as she could but Mom and I just stood there stupidly as a small spotted torpedo cannoned toward us, followed by a wave of baboons.

  The leopard missed my leg by inches and dashed off into the woods with all the baboons in pursuit. The crescendo of screams rose to such a fever pitch that Mom was sure the baboons had caught the leopard and were killing it. We sprinted as fast as we could through the woods toward the noise, and when we caught up to the baboons the small leopard was lying on its back under a thornbush surrounded by baboons screaming and swiping at it. The leopard’s mouth was wide-open and I remember thinking she had some amazingly big canines for a leopard that small. The uproar continued until the leopard saw another opening and dashed away again, deeper into the woodland where the bushes are thicker and it’s easier to split the baboons up. We didn’t follow them this time.

  Despite an extensive search with Mokupi when he arrived, we didn’t find anything, so we assumed the leopard got away safely. The whole episode was difficult to watch and made it very hard for me to look at the baboons in the same way after I’d seen it.

  August 2, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  Yesterday I was sitting on a log in the middle of Airstrip Island when a gigantic red-and-black beetle flew into my face. I tried to slap it away but somehow it fell down my shirt and got stuck along the band of my sports bra. I shook it out as soon as I could, but it had been oozing something and now my chest is covered with huge, raised red welts. They ache terribly and are very itchy. I have to be careful which shirt I wear because it hurts to have any fabric touch my skin. I wrapped some gauze around my chest but I have to change it every few hours because of the ooze from the welts. It feels like I was kicked by a horse.

  I was changing the bandages on my chest the next morning when I heard hyenas laughing on the plain behind camp. Hyenas only laugh when they’re fighting over something to eat, so I assumed they’d made a kill.

  I pulled on my T-shirt and flip-flops and jogged slowly down the road toward the plain. I knew the landscape well enough to know where I could get a good view of the plain without compromising my safety, and crossed over a small salt pan toward a leadwood tree that was my favorite vantage point over the interior of the island. I thought I might have heard buffalo in the woods nearby but didn’t pay any attention to them, distracted as I was by the hyenas and their kill.

  I climbed into the tree and saw four or five hyenas loping around something on the ground just at the edge of the island where the molapo met the shore. It didn’t look very large, and I was about to climb down and go back to camp when I heard lions roaring, followed by the outraged yelping of hyenas. Six enormous lionesses had appeared seemingly from nowhere and were running at the hyenas, trying to drive them away from what remained of their kill. This, again, was a very rare sight to see; everyone seems to think that lions are noble hunters and hyenas are lazy scavengers, but more often than not the opposite is true, and when we did come across lions with a kill, it was something they’d stolen from hyenas.

  Please don’t sink our water pump!

  I watched for a few minutes until the hyenas trotted off and the lions settled down to eat and then walked back to camp, thinking what an amazing day I had just had—and the sun hadn’t even fully come up yet.

  When Mokupi and Mpitsang arrived an hour or so later, they said they’d accidentally scared a big herd of buffalo onto Camp Island from the south. The moment we left camp, heading north in an effort to skirt around the buffalo, we ran smack into them feeding in the same clearing where the baboons had attacked the leopard. We circled around the herd very slowly, going through the molapo where the water was deeper and it’s harder for the buffalo to run, and ended up on a small island near where I’d seen the hyena kill earlier.

  I climbed up on a small termite mound to see if the lions or hyenas were still around and if it was safe to walk in that direction, since the baboons were on the island on the opposite side of the molapo. I didn’t see anything, so I slipped out of my backpack and walked slowly over toward what remained of the kill, which looked now like a smallish wildebeest. I was about twenty feet away from the kill when three huge lionesses exploded out of a bush to my right and ran toward the shore of Camp Island, in the direction of the buffalo herd. They hadn’t been that close to me, physically, but my hands shook like I’d been zapped with the stun gun and I immediately broke out in a cold sweat all over my body. I tried counting to ten, and then twenty, but it was only when I’d stood still, watching the lions run away, for more than ninety seconds that I felt steady enough on my legs to walk back to where Mom, Dad, and Mokupi stood. From their angle, they hadn’t seen the lions at all and just thought I’d been standing in the molapo looking at the dead wildebeest. I thought about what Dad had said about “too much excitement” and decided not to tell them about the lions in case they said I wouldn’t be allowed to go out with the baboons anymore.

  But the baboons had seen the lions, and even though (as far as I and the baboons knew) the lions were still on Camp Island, the baboons decided that’s where they wanted to be too, and made an extremely deepwater crossin
g back to the edge of Camp Island near Baboon Camp. No one liked making this crossing; it was too close to the river, and though the melapo were too weedy for crocodiles and hippos, the water was much deeper than the usual places where the baboons crossed, and everyone had to swim the distance—humans included. I swam with my backpack on my head and tried to keep pace with Domino, a juvenile born last year and my favorite of all the baboons. She gave me a funny look as we swam along together but didn’t seem to mind the company.

  As soon as we all reached the shore of Camp Island, we heard vervets alarm calling—and a lot of them too. I assumed they had seen the lions as well, and was about to suggest we go home a different way, when Mokupi, who was standing on a termite mound, shouted, “Leopard! Leopard! I see it!” I was up that damn termite mound so fast, but I didn’t see the leopard.

  My heart didn’t stop pounding for the rest of the day, and it was only when I was lying in my bed under the stars that I allowed myself to replay the events with a critical eye. Though every time I started at the beginning and tried to make it to the baboons, I never got past the part with the lions exploding out of the bush before my eyes would begin to tear and my heart would thunder in my ears.

  August 29, 1997

  Keena’s Journal

  We thought the baboons were on the peninsula of C5 Island, so we went there this morning. As we walked along the shore we found deep footprints from a lion running and giraffe footprints running in front of them. Midway through the mud area between palm groves, the footprints sprang claws and we started hearing the francolin birds alarm calling. Mokupi and I decided we wanted to find the lions immediately (predictable), so Mokupi left the path and led me into the deeper woods. We had circled about six feet from where we had originally been standing when we found the kill: a gigantic giraffe. It was barely eaten, and from all the tracks it was clear that the lions had momentarily left while we were in the area but were still very close by. They left huge bite marks on the giraffe’s neck and for some reason had buried all the insides in a huge mound of dirt. We left pretty quickly, given how close the lions must have been, but we didn’t see them.