“Good. I can’t have our top goal-scorer getting slower.” I grinned. Katie was also the assistant coach of the varsity lacrosse team. “Now go put on some sweatpants before you freeze to death.”
We repeated this pattern every day as the winter months stretched on and on, darker and colder than the darkest and coldest day in Botswana and with no animals in sight. Every day, I avoided Nat and was relieved to see Brooke start leaving him alone and go in search of weaker prey. Every day, I sat alone in my corner of the library, looking out the window and watching the branches of the bare trees dance in the wind against a perpetually slate-gray sky. And every day, I met Katie in the weight room and went running down suburban streets sparkling with Christmas lights, knowing that no matter how little attention I paid to where I was going, there was zero chance that a lion would jump out and attack me. It felt wrong, somehow, to let my guard down that completely after years of living on high alert for danger. But there’s nothing here, I told myself. Nothing here is scary. Nothing here can get you. It’s all safe, and gray, and fine.
Finally, spring arrived. Crocuses and snowdrops pushed through the melting snow and I was surprised to find myself smiling as I saw them blooming on the sides of the lacrosse field. Maybe there is something in America that is nice.
The months of running under Katie’s guidance paid off. I was proud to find I was still one of the fastest girls on the varsity lacrosse team that spring, always vying for second fastest behind Brooke with one of the nice girls from my European history class named Maggie. I didn’t mind battling Maggie for second place, especially since every day we silently pushed each other to be faster. We both ended up passing Brooke on one glorious spring day, which was made even sunnier by the fact that Brooke looked as if she’d swallowed a bug. That one’s for Nat, I thought as Dad drove me home. Told you the monkey would get you one of these days.
Dad slowed the car at the bottom of the long driveway that led up to our house.
“Would you mind getting the mail?” he asked. I climbed stiffly out of the car. Dad continued up to the house. The legs that had finally carried me to victory over Brooke appeared to be rebelling against the extra effort I put in that afternoon and were refusing to work properly. Every muscle ached as I hobbled over to the mailbox, and I absently wondered how I was ever going to run tomorrow if it hurt this much today. Something soft grazed my shins and I looked down to see a big black cat weaving back and forth between my feet. I smiled and reached down to pat her.
The same cat had shown up at our house a few weeks earlier, filthy and hungry and with no collar to indicate where she’d come from. Lucy and I fell in love with her immediately but knew we couldn’t keep her on account of Dad’s terrible cat allergies. He loved cats but said that ever since he spent a week in a tiny apartment in Nairobi with a friend and her six cats, he wasn’t able to be around a cat without sneezing. We didn’t officially adopt her, but we fed her every day on the porch and gave her a bath in warm water we carried out to the garage. She liked to follow me around when I was outside and sometimes let me pick her up.
The cat had jumped up on the mailbox and was rubbing against my hand when I heard a car slow on the road behind me. I turned around and saw a middle-aged man with brown hair lean over and open the door of a rusty red car. A few empty fast-food boxes fell to the ground and the stench of body odor and old food poured out. The cat and I wrinkled our noses.
“Hey, come here,” the guy called. I glanced down at my legs and thought it was unlikely they’d ever move again.
“Can I help you?” I answered.
“Yeah, come here,” he said again. I took a few wobbly steps forward, the cat behind me. The guy’s eyes were unhealthily bright and I noticed he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. “Is that your cat?”
“Um…not really,” I said, stopping a couple of feet from the open passenger-side door. “She just showed up a couple of weeks ago and we’ve been feeding her.” He leaned farther across the passenger seat.
“That’s my cat,” he said. “I’ve been looking for her.” Really? I thought. But she’s so clean and friendly and you’re kind of gross.
“Oh, she is? Sorry, we didn’t know.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Come here and give her to me.” I picked up the cat and placed her gently on the passenger seat, where the guy grabbed her and tried to move her to the back. She hissed and wriggled out of his hands.
“Guess I’m glad you found her then,” I said, not feeling glad at all. The guy made no move to close the passenger door.
“That your house up there?” he asked, gesturing up the driveway with his chin.
“Yeah.”
“Your parents home?”
“Yeah.”
“Get in. Let me drive you up there so I can thank them for looking after my cat.”
For a split second, I considered taking him up on it. My legs ached horribly and I really did want a ride up to the house. Though it was spring, the wind was chilly and I was shivering.
“Come on,” the guy said. “Just get in.” From the back seat, the cat looked out the window and hissed.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Come on,” he said again. “Just get in and I’ll take care of you.”
“No,” I said again and took a few steps backward. I didn’t like the way his eyes glittered or the way the cat’s ears were plastered back against her head. I’d seen enough fucking pissed-off lions to know that was one unhappy cat.
“Bitch,” he said. He slammed the passenger door closed and tore away, leaving me standing in the cold.
“The weirdest thing just happened,” I said after I finally made my way up the driveway and into the house with the mail. Mom and Dad were unpacking groceries in the kitchen and Lucy was doing homework at the dining table.
After I told them what had happened with the guy in the red car and the cat, Mom dropped the broccoli she was holding and immediately pulled me into a tight hug.
“Oh, Keena,” she whispered, hugging me even tighter. This was unusual. Mom wasn’t a very physically affectionate person and I could never remember her hugging me like this. She seemed deeply upset, which scared me too.
“What?” I said. “It was just some creepy old guy who thought we had his cat.”
“No. No, it wasn’t,” Mom said. “Not when you’re a sixteen-year-old girl in a lacrosse skirt.”
“I don’t get it,” I said again, failing to see why what I was wearing had anything to do with it. “I wasn’t in any danger, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Mom’s hands were shaking.
“Keena, let me just tell you this,” she said, holding me at arm’s length. “In all the years in Baboon Camp when I’ve sent you down the river in the boat by yourself, or out with the baboons with the lions and elephants and buffalo, you have never been closer to being killed than you just were this afternoon in our driveway.” I made a face.
“What?” I said. “No way.” How could that possibly be true? How could this gray, monotonous world of “fine” ever be more dangerous than Botswana?
My mom was very quiet for the rest of the evening. After dinner, we heard meowing outside and saw the cat pawing at the screen door on the porch. Without a word, Mom let the cat into the house and presented her with a bowl of leftover chicken pieces from our dinner.
“Thanks for your help out there,” I said to the cat as I ran a hand down her back while she ate. “Guess I really don’t know how to take care of myself as well as I thought I did.” She purred.
At the time, it hadn’t occurred to me that the guy could be a predator, but something about him had warned me off immediately. I just hadn’t had my guard up since I didn’t think I needed to be careful in America. What danger could a dude in an old car possibly pose to someone who was used to lions and elephants? A lot, as it turned out. America was turning out to be more dangerous than I had always assumed it to be. Could it be that Botswana Keena was needed here too?
CHAPTER 17
> We’re Just Going to
Make a Run for It
My junior year of high school passed in a blur. All I did was work. Nat and Meghan effortlessly set the standard for academic achievement with A after A in every class they took, and I was determined not to be left behind. Though it took many late nights and early mornings frantically reviewing flash cards before tests, I managed to keep pace with them until at last the year was almost over. We wanted to get back to Botswana as quickly as possible that summer since my parents said they had “more work to do than ever,” but because of my final exams, we weren’t able to leave in May as we often had in the past. I was bored and tired and so desperate to get back to Botswana that I decided to ask my teachers if I could leave early. All my teachers and the headmaster were very much opposed to this plan, since it meant missing out on three weeks of studying before the exams.
“Are you sure you want to risk it?” the headmaster asked. He had called me into his office to discuss my proposal before deciding whether or not he’d let me go through with it. I was pretty sure he would be on my side—he was a nice guy, as far as I knew, and I thought my proposal was more than fair. And why should I waste any more time in the US than I absolutely had to?
“You know that the final grades from your junior year are pretty important when it comes to applying to college,” he went on. I said I understood but pointed out that the Advanced Placement tests for college credit were given a month before classes at Shipley ended. For those students that took them, these tests also served as their final exams. Since I was taking five AP courses that year out of six total subjects and would take the AP tests before I went to Botswana, there was really only one class exam to take early.
“I’m sure that this is what I want to do,” I said. I felt a little guilty for causing such a fuss over something that didn’t seem like a big deal to me, but honestly, I wasn’t all that concerned about my final grades. Yes, I wanted to do well, but my heart wasn’t in my schoolwork, and I had a secret plan brewing that would make all of that college stuff irrelevant anyway.
My parents were having a hard time finding research assistants to work in Baboon Camp—a critically important issue because we needed other researchers to run the camp while we were in the US. Every two years, they looked for a new postdoc (sometimes two) to work with them, and every time they posted the job announcement, weeks would go by without a single application from a viable candidate. It wasn’t that students didn’t want to work with my parents—many of them did, especially since my parents were very well-known in their field by this point. But the list of job requirements for working in Baboon Camp was long and very difficult to meet by anyone who was just coming out of school. My parents wanted someone who already had their PhD, had experience doing fieldwork somewhere in Africa, came with a spouse or partner who could keep them company, knew enough wilderness skills to keep the camp running, was cool enough under pressure to handle lions and hippos, and who met my parents’ rigorous standards for scientific aptitude. Mom and Dad were incredibly meticulous when it came to conducting their experiments, and they weren’t comfortable leaving their study site in the hands of anyone who didn’t operate to the same degree of maniacal precision that they did. Even when they included candidates from Europe and South Africa, it was an incredibly small pool of people to pull from. I never remembered a time when there had been more than two or three people in serious consideration for the post, and I’d been involved in choosing almost every one.
But this year, their advertisement had received only two applicants, mostly due to the fact that all the postdocs they knew who might have been a good fit were either already in a teaching job or abroad doing fieldwork somewhere else. By the end of April, they had lined up a couple who was available to come to Botswana in six to eight months, but no one who could be there on time to take over when we left in August. That was when I came up with my new plan: if my parents couldn’t find anyone to take care of Baboon Camp in between postdocs, I would ask to do it.
I knew college was important, and I knew that I would eventually end up going since Mom and Dad would force me to, but I didn’t see why that had to happen so soon. Plenty of British kids I knew took time off between high school and college, and plenty of them worked in remote locations doing something unusual and exciting. How lucky was I that I already had such a place ready and waiting for me? And I wasn’t worried about the science part of it either. I knew I could keep my parents’ data collection going. I could recognize the baboons better than anyone except Mokupi, wasn’t afraid of the other wildlife, and didn’t mind being alone either, so they wouldn’t have to worry about anyone keeping me company. The camp would be taken care of, their data collection would continue, and I would get to put off college. Everything would be perfect, and best of all, I would be happy. I just had to convince my parents.
Eventually the headmaster agreed to let me go. I took my final exams in early May and my family prepared for another four-month-long stay in Baboon Camp. All through the flights to Europe and South Africa and finally to Maun, I doodled in my journal, planning boat trips I would take up into the north of the delta and the running trail I would clear around the border of Camp Island, and calculating how long my books would last before I had to start rereading them. I drew detailed columns of how I would ration out my food and medicine and decided that this would be a great opportunity to begin harvesting fruits and mushrooms from the forest the way that Mokupi did, if he would show me how.
I stepped off the boat in Baboon Camp full of renewed determination: I wasn’t going to let even the slightest thing faze me this summer. Snakes? Lions? No problem. My parents may have already known I could take care of myself in the wilderness, but I was going to show them just how capable I was before asking them if I could stay. No anxiety here. Captain Keena, Pirate Queen of the Delta, was back, just a little older and just a little taller.
May 10, 2001
Keena’s Journal
Dad is sick with some kind of “achy” sickness and Mom’s feet are red and swollen after a bad tsetse fly attack, so no one went out with the baboons today. Lucy and I drove the boat down to Xaxaba to get all the supplies we couldn’t fit on the plane on the way up here. Most of the stuff is clothes and boots we brought from the US for Mokupi and Press, but the managers at Xaxaba asked if we were starting a colony. It is so windy that the tent sides are buckling in on themselves and there are leaves and dirt everywhere. My eyes are filled with dust all the time and we can’t keep it out of our food.
June 13, 2001
Keena’s Journal
Lucy and I tried to play Frisbee golf this afternoon in the woods behind the laundry area. We made a course all around camp and designated various places we had to hit with our Frisbees as the “holes.” I was walking out to the Land Rover (we have a new fancy Land Rover in camp now and the Hilux stays in town as our town car because it’s too beat-up to handle the roads up here) when I stepped on a thorn. A mean, nasty, evil little (well, BIG) thorn. Lucy helped me peel off my flip-flop since the thorn had pinned it to my foot and we saw that the thorn had gone really far into my heel. I could feel the pain from the toxins all the way up to my knee and I couldn’t put any weight on my leg.
We tried to pull out the thorn but it snapped in half and left a big piece of itself inside my foot. It was so deep I couldn’t reach in to pull it out with my fingers. This is bad because puncture wounds get infected easily if you can’t get in there to clean them out. Mom gave me the bottle of rubbing alcohol and her set of sewing needles to try and tweeze out the thorn, but I had to eventually switch to my knife to cut a hole deep enough to get to it. It was so horrible. My foot was bleeding so much I couldn’t see what I was doing and digging deeper and deeper into my heel with my knife hurt a lot. I just sat there on the tarp outside my tent trying to keep everything clean and wiping the knife with rubbing alcohol. I sweat through my T-shirt and got blood all over the tarp. I actually feel a bit sick. But the thor
n is out and everything is clean so that’s really all I can do.
I was just back on my feet one early morning in August when Mokupi and Press arrived at work and said that a very large herd of buffalo was moving onto the island from the melapo to the south by C5 Island. Mom took the car out to investigate and saw more than 150 buffalo (she guessed) crossing into the woods from the melapo on the far side of the island. We decided to go out with the baboons anyway, and Dad gave me his usual list of baboons he needed focals done on for the day, the twenty-minute follows where I wrote down everything the baboon did and everyone they interacted with to get an idea of how they spent their day and with whom.
We took the long way to the other side of Camp Island, moving through the woods along the shore by camp and toward the water hole crossing to the north, to a smaller island named C15. We were hoping that the buffalo hadn’t gone that far onto the island yet and that we’d manage to cross to C15 just ahead of them.
Eventually we ran into the baboons on the far side of C15 and they were not happy. Since it was still pretty early in the morning, that level of jumpiness meant that there had probably been a leopard hanging around their sleeping site the night before, and it usually took them a while to calm down after a scare like that. It was freezing cold and they usually would have been sunning themselves on termite mounds or snuggling together to stay warm, but not today. They were all grunting nervously and milling around in the bushes. Even the adult females looked anxious, which is unusual considering they were usually the calmest of all the baboons.
Dad and Mokupi went off with one group to practice a playback experiment and I started doing a focal follow on my old friend Balo, who was sitting in the sun with her daughters Barbara and Domino, my favorite baboon of all time. Domino had an adorable hair flip at the back of her head and walked with a saunter you could pick out miles away. She seemed to like me too, and would sometimes sit on my feet if she was feeling brave. Even though I knew it was ridiculous, I often wished she could talk. I think we would have been buddies. Maybe I could have confided in her about this whole high school and college situation.
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