Jim cut three potential sticks yesterday at great hazard to his hands. Buffalo thorn acacias are vicious and you can’t get anywhere near the wood without sacrificing your hands and arms to a thousand and one scratches. Buffalo thorn acacias are also known as “wait-a-bit” trees because all their thorns are hooked and are hard to remove once they’ve gotten stuck. Today he took me back to the tree he found on the other side of the island to get a stick for me. I had to climb very slowly to get through the thorns to the right branch, and another half hour or so to saw it off the tree with the knife I had carried up in my mouth. I was very, very cut up from the thorns when I got back to the ground, but it’s a fun project to have in the afternoon (though I already cut myself pretty badly trying to get the bark off).
There were so many clouds out today that we barely saw the sun. Mokupi says that clouds in June mean that a lion has been born. For us it means that the solar panels don’t get enough sun during the day and we can’t have lights at night.
When Mokupi arrived at work the day after Jim and I made the walking sticks, he told us we’d chosen the wrong species of buffalo thorn and the wood would never hold up to the water crossings. He took us out to the other side of the island and identified the right kind of tree, but it turned out to be much thicker and harder to climb. I was small enough to mostly slither under the big branches but I had to hold my knife in my teeth and getting all the thorns off the limbs was quite difficult. The toxins in the thorns leeched into my hands and by dinnertime they were so swollen it was hard to hold a fork. The walking stick was well worth it, though; it was beautifully strong and smooth once I scraped the bark off. Mokupi told me that the Zulu in South Africa believe that a buffalo thorn acacia will protect you from lightning if you stand under it in a storm, so I carved a big lightning bolt down the side of the stick as a reminder.
What my feet looked like after a day out with the baboons
July 1, 1998
Keena’s Journal
Going out with the baboons was super entertaining yesterday. For a long time they stayed on Camp Island, moping around in the woods. Nutmeg, who is a crazy, irrational freak show of a monkey even on her best days, was acting extra weird. She was racing around twenty feet from Mokupi screaming with her tail in the air. Mokupi was wearing a ski mask because it was so cold and all you could see were his eyes. This was a problem because with baboons eye contact is a threat and the only part of Mokupi’s face that was visible were his eyes. Anyway, Nutmeg sat in a bush yelling herself hoarse until the other baboons decided she might be onto something and started screaming at Mokupi too. He didn’t wear the ski mask today and Nutmeg ignored him.
It wasn’t always exciting going out with the baboons. Some days, the group wouldn’t move at all—just sit in the trees and eat. These days were incredibly boring, since all we could do was sit on a log and wait for them to come down. It was impossible to track what an individual was doing that high up, so on slow days like these, I chatted with Mokupi.
Despite the many years I’d known Mokupi, we’d always had a relatively superficial relationship. When he and Mpitsang arrived in the morning, they only sat around long enough to have their breakfast before Mpitsang would start collecting firewood or cleaning the paths and Mokupi would leave with my parents to find the baboons. When they came back in the early afternoon, he and Mpitsang left to go home almost immediately. There was never really any time to sit and chat beyond pleasantries, and though I thought he was friendly and liked him well enough, it was only when I began going out with the baboons and spending more time with Mokupi that I realized I didn’t know much about him at all.
I asked him about his family and learned that he had a wife named Rhombe and two children who lived back in his home village of Etsha. He saw them every time he took leave and at Christmas. He said he preferred working in the delta to working in Maun, though Mpitsang found Maun more exciting because there were more people. Beyond that, Mokupi didn’t seem to want to talk about his life, and that was fine with me. I respected that it might be odd for him to share personal details with the young, white, female daughter of the American couple who employed him, and I was acutely aware of the differences that already existed between us. I remembered what Masaku had told me in Kenya about not being Maasai, and tried to continue to respectfully acknowledge those differences in Botswana as well. If we couldn’t talk about our personal lives, I wanted to find some other area of common ground we could use instead and was relieved to see exactly what that was on the first day I went out with the baboons.
It was astonishing how comfortable Mokupi was in the delta. I knew the delta stretched as far as his village of Etsha to the west and that he’d grown up spending a lot of time poling mokoros and exploring the islands and melapo, but I didn’t fully understand his skill and how advanced it was compared to my parents’ until I saw it for myself. Mokupi moved easily and smoothly through floodplains and islands. He never seemed to get tired and, most astonishing of all, never got lost. We could be standing in a grove of some trees I didn’t recognize, miles and miles away from camp, and he would turn to me and say with a big smile, “So Keena, where is home?” and I’d realize I had absolutely no idea where I was. Still, somehow, Mokupi knew and would lead us back to camp without a moment’s hesitation. He knew the name of every plant and every bird, and the tracks of every animal. He put my Fact-File to shame, and when the full weight of his knowledge became clear to me, I wanted him to teach me everything.
I tried for a time to get Mokupi to teach me Setswana too, but I was terrible at the local language. Setswana is a complicated dialect that involves using a set of clicking noises on top of syllables. Xaxaba, which we all pronounced “ka-ka-ba,” should really be said with a click on top of the “ka”s. I thought I could sort of say it correctly, but Mokupi would fall over himself laughing at me. It seemed to me that no one could really learn Setswana unless they grew up speaking it, and eventually I gave up. Instead, I asked him questions about everything we passed, saw, and smelled, and since he didn’t seem to mind my constant questioning, I started bringing him flowers, berries, and feathers that I found as we walked along so he could tell me what they were.
One hot, slow afternoon I was sitting under a jackalberry tree with Mokupi watching the baboons pick through elephant poop. Elephants eat palm nuts, and as they digest them they soften the hard outer core, making it easier for the baboons to get to the white center of the palm nut. They pop these into their cheeks and suck on them for hours like jawbreakers. I was bored, so I picked up a smooth, red palm nut and began drawing on it with the Sharpie I kept in my backpack for DNA samples. Though Mokupi and my parents had a pretty good idea of who was related to whom in the baboon troop, they were always on the lookout for a stray tuft of hair, or sometimes a drop of blood on a leaf, that could be collected for later analysis to confirm these relationships. I carried sample bags and a Sharpie so I could collect a sample if I found one and write down which baboon it came from.
“What should I draw?” I said out loud, mostly to myself.
“What is an animal you have in America that I don’t know?” Mokupi asked, sitting down on the log next to me. I grinned.
“We have bears,” I said, but Mokupi shook his head.
“I know what a bear looks like! Try again.”
“A wolf?”
“I know that one too! Try again.” I tapped the cap of the Sharpie against my teeth.
“How about a beaver?” I said.
“Yes, draw that!” Mokupi said. “And tell me what it is and what it does.” So I sat on the log and drew a beaver on the palm nut, complete with a dam and some half-eaten trees, and spent the next hour chatting with Mokupi about all the things I knew about beavers from my Wildlife Fact-File. And even though nothing technically “happened” that day, it was still the most enjoyable day I had spent out with the baboons.
Mokupi watches a water crossing.
As much as I loved these slow days, I craved
the exciting ones like a drug. Though it didn’t happen all the time, there was no greater feeling than staggering into camp after a six-hour walk with the baboons, sunburnt, bleeding, and exhausted, having dodged yet another elephant or snuck through the woods to avoid a pride of lions. Every night I fell asleep listening to the sounds of the night world around me and every morning leapt out of bed, ready to start another day and have another adventure. I tried not to think about America, my friends, or the fact that high school was fast approaching. Instead, I savored each day like the first sip of a cold beer by the campfire and told myself to remember every moment so it could get me through another school year in the US.
One morning, we woke up to find the baboons already in camp, huddling in small groups in the early morning cold and looking very spooked. Balo and her daughters were actually sitting on the tarp outside my tent when I unzipped it, and my first reaction was to say, “Balo! Good morning. What are you all doing here? What happened?”
I walked slowly through the baboons toward the kitchen, trying to listen for whatever had them so scared. I was pouring my tea when I heard an animal scream from the direction of C5 Island, followed by a growl and a flurry of territorial lion roars. Several baboons squeaked and Balo alarm called from the tarp, even though I know she couldn’t see the lions. They were clearly traumatized.
The baboons didn’t leave camp for the rest of the day, and all morning we could hear the lions calling from C5. During lunch, which we ate sitting on the floor of the kitchen so the baboons wouldn’t see us, we heard lions purring and growling from much closer, which made everyone freeze, sandwiches halfway to our mouths.
“How close do you think they are?” Dawn whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go see.” Mom, Dad, Lucy, Dawn, Jim, and I walked slowly and silently out toward the car park. Mokupi and Mpitsang had gone home when we realized we wouldn’t be leaving camp for the day and no work was going to get done. The rest of the group stopped at the car park, but I kept going, wanting to see exactly where the lions were and what they were doing.
“Are you going to be okay?” Dad called softly.
“Oh yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said, my blood racing. This is what I lived for.
I crept down the road, straining to listen for anything that might tell me where the lions were. When I got to my tree with the perfect view, I stepped out of my flip-flops and slid onto one of the lower branches, about ten feet off the ground and above a cluster of sage bushes on the edge of the plain. I hadn’t been there more than thirty seconds when the lions emerged out of the woods to the left of my tree, no more than a stone’s throw away. They were HUGE. There were two males, one of which had a black mane, meaning he was particularly healthy and well-fed. If possible, the four lionesses with them were even bigger. I don’t think I had ever seen lions as big as these were, and when they began moving out of the woods and onto the plain, I could hear their paws slap against the hard dust as they walked. I watched them cross the plain and disappear into the woods on the far side of the island before climbing back down and going back to camp.
Even though they were well-fed and didn’t appear to be hunting, the lions didn’t seem sleepy either. The baboons had moved into the jackalberry trees behind camp, which put them between the lions and us, and in clear view of the lions as they moved through the woods. Every so often we’d hear an eruption of baboon alarm calls and then the lions roaring to each other. No one really wanted to take the car and drive out to see what was going on, since it sounded like the lions were just being territorial and the baboons were reacting to it, but by late afternoon, the yelling was so incessant that we piled into the car to figure out what the hell was going on.
What we found was a standoff: half of the baboon troop was still on Camp Island while the other half had crossed to Airstrip Island. It looked as though the whole troop had been moving to Airstrip but found the lions camped out on a small island in the middle of the molapo that the baboons usually used as a bridge. Every time one of the lions moved into view among the bushes, the baboons would shake the tree branches and alarm call. Someone from our car shouted, and when the lions realized there was a car nearby, they stood up and ran toward Airstrip Island, scattering the baboons that remained on the shoreline. We saw one male lion make it to the tree line, followed quickly by one of the females who was carrying a baboon in her mouth. We couldn’t see who it was, but by the size it was probably a subadult male or female. I hoped it was Heloise, that little bitch. She scratched me once and we’d been enemies ever since.
August 23, 1998
Keena’s Journal
We came down to Maun yesterday and had a great night with Tim and Bryony at the ostrich farm. As a special surprise before we fly back to America we’re going to Jack’s Camp for the night and I am so excited! Jack’s Camp is a lodge in the Makgadikgadi Pans to the south of Maun. It’s the off-season for tourists and Tim has been given a free night’s stay there since he once lent them his plane. I can’t wait to see the pans!
Tim and Bryony’s house was always filled with random stragglers passing through town, and since there were no spare bedrooms on this particular visit, I ended up unrolling my sleeping bag on one of the living room couches—the same one I’d recovered on after my horse injury. In the morning, the four of us and the four Longdens set off for Jack’s Camp. I was in a car with my mom and Bryony; we kept falling behind the other car in our convoy because we had oil problems, and then part of one of the wheels came off, but after five or six hours, we made it to the salt pans. Bryony told me that the three pans that make up the Makgadikgadi Pans—Sua, Nwetwe, and Nxai—used to be one ancient lake called Lake Makgadikgadi, but as the lake dried up, all the minerals became concentrated in a smaller and smaller area until it created the salt pans. Now they are mostly empty salt flats in the dry season, but in the rainy season they fill up with water, and lots of tiny shrimp are born from eggs laid in the salt the previous year.
Jack’s Camp was closed for the season, but Tim was owed a favor by the camp manager and had been given access to the camp for a night. Once we’d parked the cars and set up our tents, Chris, the manager, led us out to a row of ATVs on the edge of Nwetwe Pan. This was the real deal, and what we (at least Lucy and I) had been waiting for ever since we heard we were going to Jack’s Camp. We wrapped kikoi cloths around our heads to keep out the dust, and after Chris showed us how to operate the ATVs, drove off into absolute nothingness. Chris instructed us to leave eighty-meter gaps between each ATV and not to leave the tracks or we’d squash the shrimp eggs. The salt flaked off the pan in white slices that looked like shaved coconut and the air smelled crisp and tangy. It was impossible to imagine that in a few months the pans would be full of water, shrimp, and flamingoes. The salty expanse stretched to every horizon and though I tried to describe it to myself as I drove along, I couldn’t find the words. I felt like I was on the moon.
Chris drove us to a row of chairs randomly placed in the middle of the pan and made us drinks from a cooler strapped to the back of his ATV. As the sun went down over the white, bare nothingness, I sat on my ATV drinking a gin and tonic and smelling salt, dry grass, and the wind. One by one, the stars popped out of the purple-black sky and the sun burned the salt all shades of red and orange and yellow. It was the happiest moment of my life.
Only a week later we were, somehow, back in America again. After I dragged my duffel bag into the laundry room and kicked off my sneakers, I sat down heavily on the floor of my room and tried to center myself in where I was and what I was doing. How was it possible that only a few days after sitting on my ATV in the salt pans I was back in the steamy August heat of Pennsylvania, getting ready to start my freshman year of high school? Planets weren’t supposed to shift this quickly, and the whiplash in my brain stopped it from processing properly. I tensed every muscle in my body and tried relaxing them one by one, just to check in with myself. Feet. Knees. Stomach (churning but okay). Elbows (partially
functioning; the damaged one was never really the same again). Shoulders. Head. I opened my eyes. What did I hear? A lawn mower. Cars on the road. Mom and Dad talking downstairs. Someone was on the phone. I sighed. Well, I guess I’m here again, I thought.
CHAPTER 14
High School Water Hole
Dad always told me that I wake up as if I’ve been shot. I’ve read that this is how doctors and military personnel operate since they have to learn to sleep when and where they can and be ready to go immediately if there’s an emergency. I’m no doctor or soldier, but years of sleeping in my tent did train me to wake up to every rustle and snapping twig nearby. What if it was a lion? A hyena? I had to be ready.
But when we returned to the US in 1998, I started having a terrible time waking up in the morning. When Dad would stand at the bottom of the stairs and call, “Girls? It’s time to get up,” I’d roll over and scoot backward under my covers to the bottom of my bed, like warthogs do when they enter their holes. I didn’t see the point in getting up. Gone was my excitement, that adrenaline rush I got in Baboon Camp from knowing that the sun was rising on a day filled with adventure and possibility. Well, it wasn’t completely gone, I had to remind myself. It was still there, just on the other side of the world, where I wasn’t. I was stuck in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I had to get up and go to high school.
The Upper School, as Shipley called its high school, was housed in an old manor house with brick walls and large white windows that never opened. The manor house hadn’t been renovated before it became a school, so classes were held in what used to be bedrooms, down tiny, cramped corridors that could only be reached by twisty staircases in the building’s corners.
Wild Life Page 17