Wild Life

by Keena Roberts

  “You want to help me make Easy Mac for the kids?” she asked. Before flying out, I’d e-mailed Tico and Lesley to ask what I could bring them from the US, and Easy Mac was at the top of their list—impossible to get outside the country and something every American kid wanted. It was the ultimate cultural touchstone for anyone who wanted to be reminded of America, right down to its last delicious, fatty bite. After the day I’d had, the idea of sitting down with their kids and sharing some Easy Mac sounded both completely bizarre and immensely comforting.

  “I sure do,” I said.

  In the weeks that followed, I developed a new routine: Up before the sun in the icy winter morning, I headed off to Botshabelo Ward to pick up Mma Lesedi, sometimes dropping Tico and Lesley’s sons at school on the way. Then Mma Lesedi and I would circle through the wards on the outskirts of town, picking up the children to take them to the center. Though I worried that I would spend all my time ferrying children around, it turned out that only a handful or so actually attended day school at the center; many of the children’s grandparents thought it was unnecessary for the children to be taken somewhere else to play when they already had full-time care from their grandparents at home. Mma Lesedi didn’t seem to mind since it meant fewer children for her to watch, and it meant that I had more time to drive around town interviewing health-care workers about HIV/AIDS.

  I hated driving around town. Maun’s road system was certainly better developed than I remembered, but only in the sense that more roads were paved. The complete disregard for traffic laws made it impossible to predict what other drivers were going to do, and I seemed to be the only person in the entire city who looked both ways before crossing an intersection. I only partially trusted the ancient Toyota to actually move fast enough to avoid being flattened, and the clouds of smoke and dust that billowed behind the trucks made it extremely hard to see. My car had no airbags and no rearview mirrors since the baboons had ripped those off, so I already felt vulnerable and exposed next to the massive cross-continent trucks shuttling between South Africa and Zambia. Every time I clambered through the back and settled into the driver’s seat, I felt like a Star Wars fighter pilot preparing for a final run on the Death Star, but without a friendly droid in the back to reassure me that, yes, I probably would be alive by the time I got to my destination. And whenever I got where I was going, I collapsed in my seat, drenched in sweat, hands shaking, and wondering why I thought this would be a good idea in the first place.

  My beloved Hilux in its younger days

  The interviews did not help improve my mood. Many health-care workers were too busy to talk to me, which I understood, and those who did have time painted a bleak picture of treating HIV and AIDS patients in the area. No one wanted to be tested in the first place, since most people equated getting tested with being diagnosed (though to be fair, the odds weren’t exactly good). And since there was no lab to conduct blood tests in Maun, all the blood samples had to be flown to either Johannesburg or the capital of Botswana, Gaborone, which took an average of three weeks. By the time the results made their way back to Maun, most patients had been lost to follow-up or were impossible to reach because they didn’t have phones or permanent addresses. Of the people who did get tested and were diagnosed with HIV, only a very few agreed to take the medications, despite the fact that the government provided the medicine completely free of charge. Antiretroviral medications had to be taken in a complicated cocktail of pills several times a day and supplemented with a healthy, balanced diet in order to be maximally effective. Many patients didn’t see the point of the pill regimen, and even fewer had watches with which to track what pills should be taken when. Hardly anyone could afford healthy fruits and vegetables, though I did hear that the Ministry of Health was so desperate to get HIV patients to eat a healthy diet that the government sent a fruit basket to every patient who agreed to take the medication. Every clinic was full, every health-care worker was overworked, and everywhere there were posters from the Ministry of Health championing safe sex and condom use. Everyone was trying so hard, but from the number of minibuses at the clinics and endless lines of patients waiting to be seen, it was clear that the effort wasn’t working.

  Every night, after I took the children and Mma Lesedi home, I drove back to Tico and Lesley’s house in a fog of dust and truck smoke, my eyes red with grit. Most nights, Lesley was reading on the porch when I drove in, and after I washed my hands and got a beer, I sat silently with her on the porch step, trying to square the desperation of the sick town with the quiet bellows of the hippo in his pool near the Old Bridge. Baboon Camp had always felt like another planet when compared to America, but that made sense to me since the differences between the two places were so extreme. What I didn’t understand was how it could be possible that sitting on Tico’s porch, a mere one hundred kilometers from the beauty of Baboon Camp, there could be such hopelessness and despair. The birds and trees may have been the same, but nothing else appeared to be. This was real Botswana, not my tent next to the mangosteen tree or reading in the sun while guarding a frozen chicken. That was an impossible place where no one else lived because it’s not how real people live. It was too pristine, too precious. It was too perfect to exist. But I had grown up there, and it felt real to me. None of it made any sense.

  As the days went by in one never-ending cloud of dust and lines upon lines of patients at the clinics, it became clear to me that running away to Baboon Camp was an escape that existed only for me and my family, not for anyone else in the world, even the people who actually called Botswana home. The reality of the country’s people and their future was here, in the HIV support groups and the patient nurses working night and day to get people the care they needed, not in a camp in a game reserve where only I, an American, was privileged enough to live. Reality seemed very close and Baboon Camp so impossibly far away.

  CHAPTER 24

  Blood and Dust and Botswana Sky

  Dad wasn’t spending much time in Baboon Camp either that summer. While Mom and Lucy kept the camp running, Dad was flying back and forth to the capital, Gaborone, to give a series of presentations on his and Mom’s work in an attempt to convince the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) to extend the project.

  The DWNP had no real objection to my parents’ work itself, but since the beginning of the project in 1992, the DWNP had been pressuring my parents to move Baboon Camp to a location outside the Moremi Game Reserve. No other camp in Botswana was located inside a game reserve, including the tourist lodges, and we’d only been able to set up Baboon Camp because it had already been established by my parents’ predecessor, Bill Hamilton, and was basically grandfathered in. Even Tico’s wild dog research camp wasn’t in a game reserve, and his research was much more high-profile and fancy than my parents’, since for some reason people tend to think that wild dogs are more charismatic and sexy than baboons.

  In theory it wouldn’t have been terribly difficult to move Baboon Camp, since “outside the game reserve” was as close as across the river from where it already was, but logistically it would have been a long, expensive mess. The area on the opposite side of the river was unleased as far as we knew, but at any time it could be rented by a tourism or hunting company that would also have to sign off on our location. More importantly, we’d already looked pretty hard and couldn’t find any islands that would have been suitable for a campsite. A proper site had to be close enough to the river to allow easy access to the baboons, permanent enough that it wouldn’t flood every year, and have enough big trees to provide shelter for the camp. All the structures would have to be moved and rebuilt, and a channel would have to be created to link our lagoon with the new campsite on the other side. We would waste a huge amount of time looking for the baboons since we wouldn’t be close enough to hear where they were in the morning, and we would be way too far away from camp to do anything if someone was attacked while in the field, as had happened with Press and the leopard. No one wanted to move, but
it was starting to become our only option if we wanted to continue our work.

  The pressure from the DWNP was one reason why the time had come for my parents to make a decision about the future of Baboon Camp, but another was that my parents were having a problem with their research grant. The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been the biggest funding source for my parents’ and their postdocs’ research for many years. Keeping Baboon Camp operational required a lot of money; in addition to paying the postdocs’ salaries, it had to support two cars, Mokupi’s and Mpitsang’s salaries (and later Press’s), all the equipment and data analysis in Botswana and the US, as well as expensive travel to and from camp.

  In 2003, the NIH initially decided to renew my parents’ grant, which was excellent news—and what prompted Dad’s trip to Gaborone to talk about whether the camp would have to be moved. Dad had just returned from his trip, however, when we got the news that the director of the NIH had instead decided to rescind their grant. He declared that research with the baboons was not “translational,” a jargon term that meant it wasn’t directly related to the development of a new human product—in this case, some kind of pharmaceutical product or therapy that could then be licensed and sold for a lot of money. Scientific studies into the evolution of human behavior fell outside that category, and my parents’ grant was canceled. Just like that, their funding was gone.

  I don’t know how my parents felt about losing their grant. I only heard about it through an e-mail from Lucy, since at the time I was in Maun trying not to die. I never asked them, but I’m sure it was frustrating and demoralizing though not entirely unexpected, given the US administration’s stance on research that didn’t have a clear end goal, such as it was. Speculative research—or, science purely for the general sense of advancing human knowledge and learning a little more about why we are the way we are—had always been a difficult sell to most people, particularly when taxpayer funding was involved. What upset me about this news was that their research was translational, if you actually let them explain it: through their research with vocalizations and hierarchy manipulation, they added a crucial puzzle piece to the story of how humans developed awareness of each other as individuals, and how having to keep track of who everyone was and how they related to each other in a community as large as a baboon troop is one of the reasons our ancient relatives had to develop such large brains.

  Many times I’d overheard my parents say self-deprecating things about how silly it was to study monkeys when other people we knew were doctors or lawyers or doing other things to actually help people, but they worked so very hard at it. Despite the fact that their work was highly technical and involved a lot of data, in my mind they had always fallen in the same category as painters or singers or writers: creative, thoughtful people whose passion helped make us become smarter, better humans. We needed those people just as much as we needed anyone else.

  There was also a third reason why my parents had to finally sit down and think about the future of Baboon Camp: walking around with the baboons was becoming much, much more dangerous. There had always been the risk of running into lions and buffalo, but by the early 2000s the main danger was the elephants. Botswana had experienced an explosion in the elephant population since we arrived in the early 1990s, particularly in Chobe National Park and the Zambezi basin to the northeast of the delta. As the number of elephants grew, they began moving south into the Okavango, where before they had been only in small numbers. It was relatively rare to see an elephant when I was little, but by 2003 we saw them every single day. And not just isolated males, but giant cow-and-calf herds of mothers and babies too. Cow-and-calf herds are vastly more dangerous than lone males because the females charge humans to keep them away from the babies. The herds are enormous, and there is no way to skirt around them to keep up with the baboons. If the baboons went into an area where there was a cow-and-calf herd, we had to end the workday and go home.

  There were increasingly more buffalo and lions too, as well as more hippos in the river. Even on a day when we didn’t run into elephants, we were almost guaranteed to run into lions or buffalo or both—sometimes at the same time. Seventeen hippos took up residence in the lagoon in front of camp, and it was so dangerous bringing the boat in and out of the river that we moved it to the other side of the island where there were fewer hippos and they were less likely to attack us as we drove by. Every night, lions called from the laundry area and buffalo shuffled around in the water by the fig tree. One night, a pride of nine lions killed a buffalo behind the shower, only fifty meters or so from my bed. The screams of the dying buffalo and the sounds of the lions crunching bones kept me up for hours as I lay in my cot trying to convince myself I didn’t need to pee.

  Since the very beginning of the project, people had asked my parents why we didn’t carry guns when we went out with the baboons. All the game reserves in South Africa and many in Botswana require that armed rangers accompany any guests on foot, and people were shocked and horrified that we would wander around on foot so far away from camp without a car nearby and without any gun at all, much less one capable of taking down a buffalo or a lion. And it’s true: as sensational as the stories of escaping from buffalo and lions are in retrospect, it was incredibly dangerous to do what we did and to do it every day for so many years.

  Dad always said there were two main reasons why we didn’t carry guns, and the first is that we weren’t trained to. No one had any military experience, and if we wanted to be serious about using a gun to protect ourselves from animals as big as lions, we would have needed some really serious weaponry, not something that could be comfortably carried on our backs as we walked. I met rangers in South Africa who said their AK-47s were essentially useless against animals the size of buffalo and lions, so I could only imagine what kind of gun we would have needed.

  The second reason we didn’t carry guns is that if we got to the point of needing to defend ourselves with a gun, it was already too late. When we ran into animals, we did so because we stumbled upon them (or they on us) on foot, within a matter of meters, not kilometers. We would be intently following a baboon or catching up with the rest of the troop, round a corner, and BAM, there would be the elephant, buffalo, or lion immediately in front of us. Even if we had a gun, we wouldn’t have time to use it before the animal got to us—we’d need to find a tree and climb up as fast as we could or it was all over.

  The best way to keep this from happening was not to get ourselves into this situation in the first place. When we were with the baboons, this was relatively easy: there were so many baboons that there were eyes everywhere. If lions were around, we would probably know because the baboons would tell us—that is, if they could see the lions themselves. They wouldn’t necessarily alarm call to elephants or buffalo, but those were easier to spot than lions. For this reason, we felt much, much safer when we were with the baboons. Even so, I got to be highly attuned to signs that dangerous animals might be nearby, even tiny changes like in smell or birdsong. It was when we were walking out to the baboons in the morning or home in the afternoon that we really felt at risk. We tried to be loud and vigilant, but most of the time it didn’t matter: we either saw the threat from a far enough distance that we could figure out how to get around it, or we didn’t and we had another near-death experience that left us shaking all over and somewhat hysterical for the rest of the walk.

  This kind of thing was happening much too often now, and it wasn’t like in America, where you could make safe decisions like driving more slowly or looking both ways before you crossed the street. At a certain point, it didn’t matter how careful you were; there was absolutely nothing you could do about a lion appearing in the bushes right next to you.

  In the back of our minds I think we always knew how dangerous the research really was. After more than ten years in Baboon Camp, it was statistically astounding that the worst thing that had happened to anyone in camp was Press’s leopard attack. Given the frequency with which we
saw snakes, elephants, buffalo, hippos, and lions, and the sheer number of times we would get back to camp and say, “Whew, almost didn’t make it,” I think we all began to believe, deep down, that maybe our luck was running out. Maybe next time would be the time when someone died. Going out with the baboons used to be my favorite thing in the whole world, but as the near misses grew more and more frequent, even I began to feel tense and uneasy away from camp.

  One hot day in late August, I went out with my parents to find the baboons on the far side of an island called C16 behind camp. Press had fully recovered from the leopard attack (now almost two years in the past) and was back at work, but didn’t go out with the baboons anymore, as per his request. So, that morning, it was just my parents and me. We found the baboons sunning themselves in the woods, but they seemed unusually jumpy for what was typically a quiet time of day for grooming and socializing. Wondering what was making the monkeys so anxious, I climbed up a termite mound next to a big male baboon named Betelgeuse, who was staring into the woods on the other side of a small floodplain. I didn’t immediately see anything, but the krak-krak-krak of francolin alarm calls meant that something was over there, and Betelgeuse knew it. A few vultures circled overhead, so I assumed that something had been killed in the woods overnight and the surrounding wildlife had just found out about it. That didn’t necessarily mean whatever killed it was still there—that depended entirely on the predator. A leopard would have dragged the kill somewhere else and hyenas would have gone back to their den. Lions, on the other hand, often ate and then slept by their kill, guarding it from scavengers like jackals or hyenas or the circling vultures. They might still be there. Silently, Betelgeuse and I scanned the shoreline, looking for movement. We saw nothing.