Mokupi and Dawn were in the process of turning on their tape recorders and video cameras when the leopard made a break for it, bursting through the circle of baboons and heading down Airstrip Island to where Jim and Press had landed in the mokoro and were walking to join Dawn with the speaker. A tidal wave of baboons followed the leopard, racing through the trees and screaming. Jim and Press didn’t see the leopard, but when Dawn and Mokupi joined them a few minutes later, the troop had cornered the leopard again and was relentlessly driving him down the narrow part of the island from bush to bush.
Finally, the baboons again cornered the leopard in a shallow hole under a termite mound. The adult males began running at the hole one by one, trying to drive the leopard into the open where they could jump on him. Realizing how close they were standing to the hole, Mokupi suggested that they move off to another nearby termite mound where they could get a better (and safer) look. This happened over the course of several seconds, but apparently it was a few seconds too long for the leopard: As Mokupi, Dawn, Press, and Jim made their way to the termite mound, the baboons suddenly gave one last group scream and all ran at the leopard at once. Clearly terrified, the leopard let out a huge roar and broke from the hole directly toward where Dawn was standing. Dawn jumped back a few feet, and Jim pulled her behind him as the leopard dashed past them and jumped on Press, biting him in the face, wrapping its front paws around him, and kicking at his chest with its back paws.
Before Dawn and the others could reach him, several of the baboons jumped on top of the leopard and chased him away into the bushes. Dawn didn’t know whether they had killed him. According to her tape recorder, which was still on, it took only seven seconds from the baboons’ scream to the leopard jumping on Press. Though Dawn and Jim were able to help Press stand up, he was gushing blood from his face, chest, and back.
Trying to keep Press as calm as possible, Dawn, Jim, and Mokupi helped him back to the mokoro and took him directly to where our motorboat was parked behind camp, grabbing the shortwave radio along the way and calling down to Xaxaba to have a plane standing by to take Press to Maun as soon as they arrived. They managed to control the bleeding by using Jim’s and Mokupi’s shirts. Dawn said she planned to find a phone as soon as they got to Xaxaba, but when they pulled into the dock they found a truck waiting for them, along with a plane.
Dawn was now calling us from Baboon Camp. She and Jim were back, and Press was safely in the hospital in Maun, though they weren’t sure when or if he would be returning to work. He’d survived the leopard attack, but he also suffered a pretty severe concussion from a leopard and at least half a dozen adult male baboons jumping onto him.
Mom and Dad listened quietly as Dawn told her story. Outside it was an offensively perfect summer day: thick waves of heat rose from the flagstones of our terrace and songbirds chirped as they splashed around in the terracotta birdbath. Up the driveway, our annoying neighbor was using his annoying leaf blower, and Mom’s laptop pinged with the sound of an incoming e-mail. Dawn spoke to us from another planet, where people cared about things like leopards and monkeys, and where bleeding to death in the woods on a Friday was a real possibility.
Dawn said she only had a few more minutes of battery left on the sat phone, and after they’d reassured her that she’d done everything she could do, Mom and Dad hung up, promising to check in again tomorrow to see if there were any updates. By this time, we were actually able to check e-mail in camp—sort of. We used the satellite phone to download messages every few days but had to make sure no one sent us any attachments or the system would crash. We could also only get a strong enough signal by standing on top of the Land Rover in the middle of the plain behind camp and holding the sat phone above our heads, which in 2001 felt like a perfectly normal way to check e-mail.
Press out on Airstrip Island with Dawn’s loudspeaker
After we disconnected, I walked through the house and threw open the front door with a bang. The wooden planks of the porch were rough on my bare feet and very hot from the sun. I hopped from one foot to the other before jumping down onto the lawn, crossing the street, and walking into the field across from our house. A stream trickled to my right, and the sulfurous stink of skunk cabbages rose from the sticky mud in the low-lying areas by the water. Oblivious to the mud, I crossed the stream and climbed up on a large boulder on the far bank. The stone was warm and smooth and I crossed my muddy feet under me, relieved to feel a cool breeze push through the August heat and make it easier to breathe.
I was angry. Shocked and relieved, yes, but also angry. In my head I could hear the baboons’ screams and feel the vibration in my ribs when the leopard growled. I knew these things; I’d heard and felt them both before. I knew exactly where on Airstrip Island Dawn and Mokupi had been, and exactly which termite mound they had been standing on when the leopard charged. I knew exactly the route they would have taken back to camp, and exactly how long it would have taken them to get to Xaxaba, given the height of the river at that time of year and the location of the hippo pools. If I had been there, I would have probably done exactly the same thing they did—Dawn and Jim had kept their cool and handled the situation perfectly. But I hadn’t been there, and they hadn’t needed me.
I didn’t know much about myself as a seventeen-year-old. I liked being outside, running, and reading. School was terrifying. I didn’t have many friends, and though I had figured out how to wear the right thing at school and not say anything too outlandish, every action was part of a conscious plan not to be seen or reveal anything about who I really was and the gay, wild, loud, Botswana part of me that just wanted to scream. If I knew anything about myself in absolute, clear certainty, it was that when those moments came, when it was just me and the lion, out in the wilds of nowhere in the Okavango, I was the one who could handle it—I was the one who would know what to do to keep everyone safe. I’d done it so many times before: from the boat trip to Delta Camp when I was ten to all the changed tires, lion escapes, and elephant charges that I was sure would have killed a less capable person than even teenage me. That was who I was—the one who would have helped Press up and kept him calm before he could get to the hospital. If there was a place for me in the world, it was right there on Airstrip Island with Dawn and Mokupi. I’d been waiting for moments like this for years, and when one had finally happened, they hadn’t needed me; selfishly, I felt like that last, final place for me to be me had disappeared.
Don’t make this all about you, I reprimanded myself. This couldn’t have less to do with you. You were literally on the other side of the planet when this happened. I was very, very glad that Press was safe. Though I didn’t know him well, he’d always been nice to me and was Mokupi’s cousin. I wondered how Mokupi was handling this situation and whether he was in Maun with Press at the hospital. Did Mpitsang know? Had he gone to Maun to be with Press too? But I was still mad that I had missed it. I scraped the dried mud off my feet with my fingernails and scowled at the bushes around the boulder, feeling even more lost than before.
The next morning, I woke up to a dark sky heavy with rain clouds. The air smelled like metal and made my skin prickle as distant thunder signaled an approaching storm. Though I had a field hockey tournament in the afternoon, I decided to go for a quick run anyway so I could enjoy the slow buildup before the storm hit. That was always one of my favorite times to be outside. I liked the sense of impending doom, which reminded me of the adrenaline spikes I’d always get out with the baboons when trouble was coming.
As the first drops came splashing down, I turned into our driveway and took the steps two at a time up to the front door. I was just reaching for the doorknob when I slipped on some wet moss and fell backward, slamming the side of my face on the flagstone step.
I screamed. Mom came running out of the house holding a dish towel and held it to my cheek as she helped me stand. Blood poured from a long, deep cut under my eye and Mom immediately decided I needed to go to the hospital. My last thought before I
passed out in the back seat of the car was how ironic it was that when my own crisis finally happened, I was holding a Williams Sonoma dish towel to my face in the back of a Volvo station wagon.
When I next opened my eyes, I was lying on a gurney under the bright lights of a very clean-looking hospital room. I was still wearing my wet shorts and T-shirt, and my face throbbed like my arm had when I’d ripped it open on the fence at the ostrich farm. I vaguely remembered parking, talking to a nurse in pink scrubs, and throwing up in the waiting room of the ER until someone helped me onto the gurney. A white sheet was pulled up to my waist and Mom’s purse sat on a chair next to me, though she was nowhere to be seen.
The curtain around my bed swished open and a tall, pretty woman with dark hair entered, carrying a clipboard.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Dr. Blake. So you hit your head, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. I tried to sit up but she put a hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back down.
“Don’t try to sit up,” she said. “That was a pretty nasty fall you took and you need to take it easy.”
“I’m fine,” I said, ignoring the wave of dizziness that seemed to follow any movement of my head. I’d been hurt plenty of times before and never needed a hospital. This was all just an overreaction since we were in America and everything was overly dramatic here.
Dr. Blake raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, you’re fine, are you?” she said. “What’s the last thing you remember before I came in just now?” The lights overhead beat a staccato pattern in my brain and I vaguely remembered that I’d always hated fluorescent lights.
“I got sick in the waiting room and someone helped me onto this bed.”
“So you don’t remember the nurse taking you down for an MRI?” I blinked.
“No, not at all.”
“Right, then. How about you do as I say, lie still, and let me take a look at this cut?” She pulled up a stool and began gently applying pressure all around my cheek and eye socket. Though I still thought coming to the hospital was an overreaction, I had to admit it felt nice to be taken care of by a professional, especially one as hot as Dr. Blake. I closed my eyes and sighed.
“So do you go to school around here?” Dr. Blake asked.
“Yeah. But I’m not from around here. I live in a camp in Botswana.”
“Huh. Ever hit your head like this before?” She cleaned the cut with something cool and began stitching it closed. I’d never had stitches before and the tiny tugs on my skin as she moved across my cheekbone felt like the tiny pulls of wait-a-bit thorns.
“A couple of times,” I said. “When I was five, the handlebars came off my bike when I was going down a hill and I knocked out two of my teeth. Then I fell out of the fig tree at our camp once or twice, and when I was twelve, a horse threw me into a fence. I’m not sure if any of those were concussions though because I never went to a doctor.” I remembered from watching ER that doctors needed to know everything about their patient if they were going to correctly diagnose them. My head throbbed and I choked down a wave of nausea. I felt a sudden need to tell Dr. Blake everything she needed to know so she could help me feel better. The lights pounded.
“And this time you were running too fast on wet flagstones and slipped?”
“Yes.”
She chuckled.
“You sound like my little brother,” she said. “Always full speed, never thinking about your own safety.”
I sighed again. Part of me wanted to correct her that I had been being careful, it was just an accident, but I was too tired and sick to care. Everything hurt and I just wanted to go to sleep.
“This isn’t too bad,” she said, closing the stitches with a quiet snip of the scissors. “But you definitely have a concussion. So no running or sports of any kind for a while, okay?” I glared at her.
“I don’t do well sitting still,” I said.
“You’re going to have to try. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my little brother every time he ends up in my ER: I don’t care whether you’re from the suburbs or Botswana or the moon; you are not invincible.”
“It was just an accident!”
“It’s always just an accident. But you have got to be more careful—it only takes one thing going wrong for you to end up in serious trouble.” She was right, of course. It’s what I always thought as I headed out with the baboons: you can be as prepared as you possibly can be, and do all the right things, but there will always be a chance that something bad could happen. In the end, all you can do is your best—the rest is up to chance. I’d just never honestly believed that to be true until the leopard attack on Press.
Dr. Blake’s hands moved softly across my face, cleaning the stitches and sticking Steri-Strips across the cut, while I stared at the equipment on the wall. I’d printed out a glossary of ER equipment and terminology so I could follow what the doctors on the TV show were talking about, and I tried to identify everything I saw in the exam room: Suture tray. Laryngoscope. Bag valve mask. Magill forceps. The equipment was shiny and clean, neatly organized, and ready for the next emergency to roll through the doors. I wondered what the Maun hospital was like, wishing that Press had been able to be treated at a hospital like this one. I’d never been to the Maun hospital but very much doubted it was anything like the one I was in. I was safe here, and was getting the best care I could possibly get. I was suddenly very glad to be in America.
Mom appeared a few minutes later carrying a blueberry muffin and a vanilla milkshake she’d gotten from the hospital cafeteria. Dr. Blake instructed me to stay off my feet for a couple of days, and to my surprise I felt no need to resist. Dr. Blake knew what she was talking about and I did feel pretty beaten-up. When we got back to the house, I carefully took a shower and lay down on the couch with a stack of books. Outside, dark clouds surrounded the house and shadowed the field across the street, but oddly, I felt no need to run. I sank into the pillows and closed my eyes, feeling clean and safe in a way I had never felt before and too tired to examine why.
CHAPTER 19
The Infection Rate Reaches
36 Percent
I thought a lot about Press, the hospital, and Botswana in the days following my fall. I wasn’t supposed to do much besides nap and read when my head felt up to it, so I stared out the window and watched the leaves of the oak trees rustle in the late summer breeze. The temperature had mercifully dropped after the rainstorm and it was quite comfortable with the window open. Mom tentatively suggested studying for the SATs during my downtime, but after I shot her a glare that could have frozen water she retreated and said reading was probably just as good a use of my time.
Before flying back to the US that summer, we’d spent a couple of days in Maun with Bryony and Tim at the ostrich farm. This was unusual, since aside from the trip we’d made to Jack’s Camp two years earlier, we never really spent any significant length of time in Maun or at the ostrich farm. Whenever we came back to Baboon Camp, we would immediately take a six-seater plane up to Xaxaba and then boat up to camp; we never stayed in town. Beyond seeing the progressive upgrades in size and efficiency at the Maun airport, I wasn’t at all aware of what was actually going on in town. Anything I heard about changes going on in town, I heard through gossip from either Mokupi or the managers we saw at Xaxaba when we went to pick up our monthly shipment of fruits and vegetables. On holidays, sometimes Tim and Bryony would come up to visit camp with their daughters, Maxie and Pia.
Though we didn’t see them often, I thought Tim and Bryony were some of the best people I knew, and despite the challenges of living in a town with few stores and no reliable doctor, they loved Botswana and, for most of the time I knew them, never thought of living anywhere else.
They were different during our last visit with them though. Bryony locked the doors at night and brought the dogs inside. Tim kept a rifle in the kitchen and hired several extra men to walk around the perimeter of the farm at night. He said a couple of his ostriches had been kil
led in the week before and eaten—he thought—by refugees coming in from Zimbabwe. Maun used to be a very safe town when we first arrived in 1992, but by 2001 we heard that the crime rate had risen dramatically, and Tim said that almost every day there were stories of carjackings, break-ins, and robberies. Most of Tim and Bryony’s friends had installed fences around their houses and all had hired watchmen to keep an eye on their properties at night. More than a few had left the country entirely, heading for Cape Town or Mozambique, where they said it was safer to raise their children—including Henny the fearless bush pilot and Desmond the driver of the Leopard-Spotted Lorry, who had been key players in my boat trip to Delta so many years before.
Everyone in Maun, locals and expats alike, blamed refugees from Zimbabwe for the rise in crime. Robert Mugabe’s oppressive regime and the incredible inflation in the country drove many Zimbabweans, both white and black, out of the country. Botswana was one of the easier places for them to get to, since refugees could pass through the Hwange National Park or across the minimally secure border crossing at Pandamatenga, where Lucy had lost one of her first teeth on our way to visit Victoria Falls. When the police in Maun did one of their periodic roundups of Zimbabwean refugees, they bused them back to the border only to see the same people turn up again in Maun a week later. It was impossible to stop the influx of people, and the government admitted that immigration control was not actually one of their priorities, given Botswana’s rising problem with HIV/AIDS.
By the early 2000s, Botswana was in the epicenter of the rising HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly 36 percent of Botswana’s tiny population of less than two million people was estimated to be HIV positive—though the government admitted this estimate was rough, considering so few people would agree to be tested for the disease. Since HIV was first detected in the country in the 1980s, the government’s emphasis had been on getting as many people tested as possible so it could get an idea of the scale of the problem. It had even entered into agreements with the Gates Foundation and the pharmaceutical company Merck to get people tested and into treatment with antiretroviral medications that were subsidized by the government and its partners. The government was internationally praised for having the right plan in place to control the spread of HIV, and it was widely expected that the country’s incredible dedication of resources would prove to be the example for other countries on the continent on how to handle the disease.
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