Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  “The trip,” she said. “I’ve never been to Maine before. I’ve never even been hiking before.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Montclair, New Jersey.”

  “Never heard of it.” She laughed.

  “Seriously? That’s funny. It’s outside New York.” She gestured with the bag again, this time pointing at a boy across the aisle with dark, floppy hair and glasses. “That’s Jonathan. He’s from New York too. And I’m Erika.” Jonathan leaned across the aisle and held out a hand.

  “Are you the girl from Africa?” he asked.

  “Botswana,” I corrected him.

  “Right. Good. I’m staying near you in case you need to save me from a bear.”

  “Oh, can you fight bears too?” another girl said from the seat in front of me. She was very tall and blonde and just for a second reminded me of Brooke, before I realized that this girl was heavier in the shoulders and looked like a much more serious athlete. She propped her chin on the back of the bus seat and smiled brightly. “Great,” she said. “None of us have the slightest idea what we’re doing, so as far as I’m concerned you’re officially in charge of bear safety.”

  “Okay,” I said. Everyone was being so nice and no one had said a single nasty thing to me yet. What new planet was this?

  Somewhat to my surprise, I was disappointed that there wasn’t more time to talk on the actual hike itself. The Level C hike was actually fairly difficult, and we were up before the sun every morning, walking or canoeing until the sun went down again at night. Everyone was so exhausted that they fell asleep right after dinner, and usually only our leader, Andy, and I stayed up, sitting around the fire listening to the birds and watching the stars glitter overhead. Though it was very hot during the day, it felt no different from Botswana in the dry season, and when the temperature fell at night the air was crisp and cool.

  It took me a full five days to convince myself that there were no lions in the bushes and no hippos in the lakes. Every time we walked through the tall grass of a mountain field, every muscle in my neck went rigid and my eyes darted from side to side, watching for movement against the wind and listening for the alarm calls from francolins or vervet monkeys that meant there were lions nearby. My heart pounded, and even in the cool mountain air, I sweat through my T-shirt almost immediately. Every time we got into our canoes and set off across another body of water, I thought about just how epically stupid it was to paddle through the reeds where at any minute a hippo could rise up and bite our canoes in half. What were we thinking? Did we have a death wish? No one in the Okavango would ever be dumb enough to put themselves in this kind of danger. My jumpiness didn’t go unnoticed, and I finally had to explain to my canoe-mate, the tall blonde girl named Katy, exactly why I was so jittery when we were supposed to be having fun.

  “There are no lions in Maine,” Katy said. “That’s your new mantra. Just repeat it to yourself in your head every time you get freaked out.” And that’s what I did, over and over and over again, as my canoe paddle sliced through the water and I tried to familiarize myself with a whole new world of trees and birds and plants that I didn’t recognize: There are no lions in Maine, there are no lions in Maine, there are no lions in Maine.

  The last night of the trip, we camped on a rocky island in the middle of a lake. The wind had picked up during the day, and the waves on the lake rose almost to the sides of the canoes that rested on the shore. Andy was concerned about us being able to leave the island in the morning and whispered anxiously to someone on the other end of a cell phone he’d been pretending he hadn’t brought with him. He’d been too busy to make a fire, so I had done it, enlisting my new friends Erika and Jonathan to gather kindling, after I explained to them what kindling was.

  “What are you looking at?” Jonathan asked, jolting me out of my reverie. I’d been staring across the lake and watching a dark shape trundle along the shoreline.

  “Oh, there’s a bear over there.”

  “A WHAT?!” Jonathan scrambled backward off his rock and Erika grabbed my arm.

  “A bear? There’s a bear over there?” she asked. I frowned.

  “Yeah, he’s just moving along the shore, doing his bear thing. Why, are you scared?”

  “It’s a BEAR!” Jonathan squeaked again. “What should we do? Where should we go?”

  “Nowhere,” I said, smiling. “Don’t worry. I promise he’s not going to hurt you.”

  “How do you know?” Erika said. “I know you know everything about animals but there aren’t bears in Africa.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But that bear is just looking for food. He’s not going to come over here unless he knows we have food, which he doesn’t since Andy bear-bagged it. And even if the bear could smell our food, why would he swim across this cold lake to get it? There’s plenty to eat where he already is.”

  Jonathan climbed slowly back onto his rock and Erika released her death grip on my arm. They were silent for a minute or two, watching the dark shape move along until it disappeared into the trees and out of sight. The stars twinkled and smoke from our campfire rose through air that smelled like stone and pine.

  “Well,” Erika said finally, “you were right about that bear. But where there’s one bear, there are more. Until we get back to Boston, you aren’t leaving my side.”

  “Even after we get back,” Jonathan added. “Who knows what crazy stuff happens in college? We’re going to need you around.”

  “Absolutely,” Erika said.

  CHAPTER 23

  Extreme Driving in a Broken Toyota

  One of the best parts about being in college was how early classes ended in the spring. At the beginning of May I would wrap up my final exams and was ready to head back to Botswana, where my parents would meet me with Lucy.

  Despite the looming dread of my finals and the fact that I was still in a city, I found that I liked spring in Boston. People in New England were always so grateful for the end of the cold weather that as soon as anyone could physically wear shorts and flip-flops without getting frostbite, they all did, and then found every excuse to try to tan themselves on the quad in between melting piles of snow. I thought it was hilarious.

  One by one my final exams passed in a haze of flash cards and Diet Coke until, finally, on a chilly morning in May, I found myself standing in Boston’s Logan International Airport with my dusty backpack, ready to head back to Botswana.

  “Can I check my bag to my final destination?” I asked the gate attendant. “I’m actually flying through Frankfurt and Johannesburg before I get to Maun in Botswana.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said. “Frankfurt, Johannesburg, and back to Boston.”

  “No, Botswana, not Boston.”

  “Right, back to Boston.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not coming back to Boston until September. I’m flying to Botswana, not Boston. It’s a country in Africa.” The gate attendant looked at me blankly.

  “It’s a real place, I promise you,” I said, trying to be helpful. “I go there all the time.”

  “I need to get my supervisor,” she said, and I fought not to roll my eyes.

  Finally, two hours later, I was on the plane and on my way back home, a crisp, fresh new Dragonlance novel in my backpack. As the sun set over Boston harbor and I watched the coast of the US slowly disappear behind me, I closed my eyes and let my head fall back against the seat. I took stock. How was I doing? Physically, I was okay. That was a good start. Mentally, I felt okay too. I had made a couple of friends and discovered that there were some parts about life in the US that made me smile, even though they were hours away from school. It didn’t matter so much that I couldn’t see the mountains and streams and bears every day; even knowing they were there if I needed them was good enough. I took a long, deep breath, opened my eyes, and grinned. Time to forget about all that stuff. Botswana Keena was on her way back home. Hell yeah.

  Though I was still planning to spend a lot of time in Baboon Camp tha
t summer, especially on the weekends, I actually had a side project that would mean living in Maun for part of the time. We still didn’t know where Mokupi was, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in northern Botswana had only gotten worse: in 2002, the World Health Organization estimated that close to 40 percent of people in Botswana were HIV-positive, but that number was probably closer to 50 percent in the Ngamiland province in the northwest, where Maun was. I couldn’t wrap my head around that number. The idea that one out of every two people I saw in town could be sick with an incurable disease was unfathomable to me. I didn’t know a lot of Batswana since we lived so far away from other people, but the few I did know had been friends of mine since I was eight years old. When I read the local Maun newspaper online (Maun had a newspaper now! And it was online!), all I saw were funeral announcements and stories of families driven apart by the stigma surrounding testing for HIV and caring for individuals who were sick. It was heartbreaking and did not at all fit into the image I held in my head of what Botswana really was. I recognized that this was just another example of “real Botswana” knocking on the door of what I had always thought Botswana to be: my idyllic bubble of Baboon Camp’s game reserve, which existed a literal world away from the troubles of the country itself. I very badly wanted to understand this other world. I loved Botswana and its people too much to sequester myself in my magic kingdom and ignore what was going on outside its walls. Inasmuch as it was possible for a white American girl to understand what was going on in real Botswana, I wanted to. And I wanted to find Mokupi. I was worried about his health and every day out with the baboons I missed him.

  So, I was going to spend two months in Maun, volunteering at an orphanage for children who had lost their parents to AIDS, and interviewing health-care workers and doctors about the country’s response to the epidemic—what was working, what wasn’t, and what their concerns were for future intervention efforts. At this point there were dozens of aid organizations working in Maun, and their programs overlapped so much that there was a great deal of confusion among the district health officials as to who was doing what, where, and with what resources. When I went to the district Ministry of Health office in Maun to introduce myself and ask for permission to volunteer in town (since I had no official affiliation and no work permit), the district official told me that if I could even put a list together of what was going on in Maun it would be a tremendous help.

  Mom and Dad said I could use our old Toyota truck for my project, since it was now a “town” car, being too beat-up and structurally unsound to make the drive from Maun to camp in one piece. I had to sit on a cushion to reach the pedals and figure out how to drive a stick shift on the opposite side of the car from our Volvo in the US, but after lurching around the parking lot of the Maun Airport for a while, I decided that I had it well enough figured out. The fact that it had no windshield wipers or door locks was a small problem, but something I would just have to deal with. I had also convinced our old friend Tico, who I had met more than ten years before on our first boat trip to Baboon Camp, to allow me to camp out at his house. He kept a few cots available for the transient graduate students who worked at his wild dog research camp.

  Every morning as the sun came up, I had a cup of tea with Tico and his wife, Lesley, and set off into town, starting at the orphanage where I volunteered. Though the orphanage was technically funded by a much larger nongovernmental organization, it was clear that no money had been allocated for the center; the building was half constructed and had no running water. The electricity was sporadic, though that wasn’t surprising since electricity was spotty all over Maun. No staff was there on the first morning I arrived, and after making a few calls to the NGO that was supposedly funding them, I learned that no staff had arrived because they had no transportation to the center, and even if they got there they had no way to pick up the children from their relatives’ houses. A sleepy-sounding finance officer said they were discussing whether they had the resources to purchase a bus or a van, but that decision had been put off until the chief financial officer returned from vacation in four weeks’ time. Until then, if I wanted the center open, I had to go pick everyone up.

  Fine. I asked where the staff members lived.

  “The lady in charge,” the sleepy finance officer said, “lives in Botshabelo Ward down a long road and behind a house with a tin roof.”

  “Do you have an address?” I asked. “Or maybe a phone number where I can reach her?”

  “If you want to phone her,” the man said, “you will have to purchase a mobile phone for her since she does not have one.”

  “So you don’t know how I can reach her and only kind of where she lives?” I asked.

  “The people over there, they know her,” the man said. “You can ask.”

  Off I went. Dodging herds of goats, cows, and donkeys, I swerved through town, holding my breath at every stoplight as cars and trucks careened through with no regard for signals or staying on their own side of the road. Overlander trucks teetered on tiny wheels and the minibus taxis raced between them at top speeds, with ticket collectors hanging out the window yelling for stops and fares. By the time I finally reached the center of town and found a cheap electronics store, I was drenched in sweat and covered in dust. The driver’s side door didn’t work properly since one of the baboons had snapped off the door handle, so whenever I stopped I had to climb in and out through the back seat, which was harder than I expected.

  I bought a mobile phone and a SIM card and asked the clerk where I could find Botshabelo Ward. Without looking up from his own mobile phone, he gestured vaguely toward the airport and said I could ask someone over there.

  I parked behind the airport and approached two elderly gentlemen sitting under a mopane tree in white plastic chairs.

  “Dumêla borra,” I said. “I am looking for the lady who works in the orphanage over by the Matshwane School.”

  Incredibly, the men knew who I was taking about and summoned a small child who agreed to take me to the lady’s house.

  “Thank you!” I called as the child led me away down a winding path between the houses.

  “We know you!” the men called back. “You are from the baboons!” and they burst out laughing. I was shocked that they recognized me.

  “You know the baboons?” I said, and one of the men waved his hands.

  “Yes, we know the baboons!” he said. “And you, we know you. You are the girl with the baboons!” I laughed and waved back as we walked away.

  It turned out to be quite a long walk to Mma Lesedi’s house, and when I did finally get there it was already early afternoon. She was glad to see me, if a bit confused, since she had been told that the center could not open until they secured the funds for a vehicle. But if I had one they could use, she said, then she would get to work immediately.

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “you will come get me and then we will fetch the children from their grandparents’ homes. Then, we will take them to the school. And when school is over, you will take them home and then take me back here to my home.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But my car isn’t in the greatest shape and I can’t take more than two or three kids at a time.” She said that was no problem; I would do as many trips as I needed to do. And if I wanted to speak to other health-care workers or doctors, I could do that either before I picked everyone up in the morning or after I dropped them off at the end of the day. That sounded like an awful lot of driving to me, but I signed up to volunteer, and if this is what they needed me to do, then that’s what I would do.

  It was dark by the time I drove back to Tico’s house. He lived on the outskirts of town, past the beginnings of what was to be a soccer stadium. Tracks led off the main tarmac road in every direction—deep treads in the dust that would sometimes be reshaped or redirected during the day, depending on how many cars had driven down them since the morning. The track to Tico’s house left the tarmac road at a sharp left after a donkey crossing sign and wove through the mopane t
rees toward the river. I had to write on the back of my hand all the turns it took so that I would not get lost. Very few houses were lit and the headlights of my car dipped through clouds of mosquitoes as I lurched down the track. My back ached with the strain of hunching my shoulders and my palm was slippery against the gearshift. Everywhere there was dust, dust, dust: down the neck of my shirt, up my pants, and in the back of my throat. My eyes were full of the stuff.

  Finally, a small, cozy house pulled into view. I parked behind Tico’s Land Rover, the vehicle bristling with antennae for tracking radio collars on wild dogs and dented on one side from being charged by a hippo many years before. Tico thought it was a cool story and had never gotten the dent fixed, which I appreciated. It still looked as badass as it had to me when I was eight years old, and though I’d never said it out loud, I still secretly thought that Tico might really be Han Solo. One never knew.

  On the porch, Tico’s wife, Lesley, sat in a canvas chair, feet propped up on a wooden stool, reading a book. Winged termites circled the lights overhead, and distantly I could hear their two sons playing with Legos at the back of the house. Something fell over and there was a shriek followed by laughter. Outside, the cool night air vibrated with the sounds of frogs, crickets, and owls. Down by the river, a hippo bellowed. There weren’t as many hippos in town as there were up in camp, but Tico said this one had established a territory down by an area they called the Old Bridge and refused to move. I wondered if Tico ever thought about the hippo charging his car and if it made him respect them just a little bit.

  “How’d it go?” Lesley asked. I sank down onto the porch step and wiped a gritty hand across my forehead.

  “Fine, I think,” I said. “Tomorrow’s going to be pretty different. And probably the day after that too.”

  “I bet,” Lesley said. Lesley worked for Tico’s project too, but her research was about working with local communities on ways to coexist with wild animals instead of hunt them. Predator species like lions, hyenas, and wild dogs were often poisoned by locals who thought the animals might be a threat to their livestock. In the time I had known Tico, he had lost at least three dogs to poisoning, and in every case the social structure of the group had been completely shattered by the loss of that individual; it took years for them to rebuild their pack society. It was Tico and Lesley’s hope that by getting local communities invested both financially and emotionally in the well-being of the wild animals, they would see that tourism and conservation were legitimate ways to earn a living that didn’t come at the expense of an endangered species. It wasn’t easy work though, and Lesley was often shouted at or threatened by farmers who’d lost livestock and didn’t want her or her agenda anywhere near their properties. I thought she was the coolest person on earth.