Trying to see what the vultures are circling
The baboons relaxed a little as the morning wore on. It was clear from their behavior that they really wanted to cross to Airstrip Island but were nervous about it. They milled around on the shore, grunting to each other and waiting for someone to decide that they were ready to go. This was usually one of the older females, and when Sylvia eventually gave a chorus of grunts and began to cross the floodplain, the rest of the troop followed in a tidal wave of tails, feet, and fur, running after Sylvia as fast as they could and disappearing into the woods. I hated when the baboons did this, since it was impossible to keep up with them and I inevitably got left behind and had to track them to wherever it was Sylvia decided to go. Though Mokupi had taught me well, it wasn’t easy to track running baboons because they kicked up sand and scuffed their footprints in a way that made it difficult to tell how old the tracks were. And, ever since Balo and I had run into the lions, I had to admit I really didn’t like being left alone in the woods.
Mom and Dad were nowhere to be seen, and I guessed that they had either already crossed to Airstrip ahead of Sylvia or were behind me with some stragglers. In any case, I didn’t know where my parents were, so unless I wanted to be alone (I didn’t), I had to run when the baboons ran. I yanked my backpack straps tight and took off with the troop, wading through water that was up to my knees and filled with spiny hippo grass. On the other side of the water, I thought I might have smelled a recent kill but didn’t have time to stop and investigate. On we ran, down the narrow part of Airstrip and through the palm tree grove, all the way to the far side of the island where there was a particularly tasty jackalberry tree. Here, the baboons began to calm down and regroup. Mom and Dad, who had been behind me, finally arrived at the jackalberry tree almost an hour after I did.
We had a normal, peaceful remainder of the morning with the baboons and, as usual, began to walk home around one thirty in the afternoon. The sun climbed high in the sky and my T-shirt clung damply to my shoulders as we walked back toward camp. My legs were crisscrossed with dirt, scratches, and bruises from my sprint down Airstrip Island, and it was so hot by midday that my hair rested on my head like a helmet.
After about an hour of walking, we reached the spot where we’d seen the vultures earlier that morning. I held up a hand and Mom and Dad stopped behind me without a word. Vultures still perched in the leadwood trees all around us, and I sniffed to see if I could smell whatever it was I’d smelled before. There was a metallic blood scent in the air, but it was faint. Maybe the kill had just been a small animal.
“What do you think we should do?” Mom asked.
“There was definitely something here,” Dad said. “But now? I don’t know.”
“The vultures are still here,” I said. “But I don’t see any tracks. The baboons must have run over them earlier.” We looked at each other in silence. Were the predators still nearby?
“It’s probably fine,” Mom said.
“I’m starving,” I said.
“Let’s just be careful,” Dad said. We decided to skirt around the patch of woods and cut through the leadwood trees to a trail that looped around the end of the island. I led the way, with Mom behind me and Dad bringing up the rear. Out in the full sun and away from the woods that smelled like blood, the day felt glorious. A cool breeze whipped through the waving yellow grass and sent ripples scurrying across the floodplains like water bugs in the lagoon. Okavango orioles darted through the trees in flashes of yellow, and Meyer’s parrots shrieked to each other as they flew high overhead, blue on blue against the sky. Deeper in the bushes, flocks of babblers muttered as they picked through leaves on the forest floor. Distantly, a hippo bellowed from the river. I could still hear francolin birds alarm calling, but I didn’t pay them any attention. They alarm called so often it barely registered anymore.
Coming around a blackthorn acacia bush, I pulled up short as a blast of noxious odors hit me like a truck. Mom gagged and took a step back.
“I guess we found the kill,” Dad said. About thirty meters away, under another blackthorn acacia, a patch of wet, dark dust indicated where at least part of the animal had been eaten. I saw a few bone fragments but no hooves or horns to indicate what had been killed.
“Oh God, do you think it’s that baby giraffe we saw here yesterday?” Mom asked. “That would be horrible.”
“Only one way to find out,” I said. “Let me go check it out.”
“You sure?” Dad said.
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said brightly. “If something was still here, we’d know it by now.” I slipped out of my backpack and crept forward quietly, stepping around tussocks of grass and moving slowly closer and closer to the bush and the wet spot.
I was more than halfway to the kill site when a young male lion exploded out of the bush and charged me. I knew it was a male because he had the start of a mane, and also because every single detail of that lion’s appearance seared itself into my brain in one moment of pure terror. I instantly forgot everything I ever knew about not running from lions and stumbled backward, trying to get back to the path or my parents or a tree, though I knew there was nothing behind me but grassy plain without a tree in sight. The lion roared and charged again, tail whipping from side to side and claws extended, digging into the sand.
I stumbled backward again, but this time I felt my leg give way as I tumbled sideways into a warthog hole, wedging my sandal at the bottom. I tried to pull my foot out but it was stuck. I couldn’t move. I twisted my torso around and got one last look at fur and dust and bloody teeth against a perfect Botswana sky before I squeezed my eyes shut and prepared to die. My last thought was that the doctor back in America had been right: I wasn’t invincible after all.
An eternity later, I opened my eyes. The lion had stopped about three meters away from me and just stood there, growling low and staring at me with his ears flattened against his head. And just as quickly as he’d charged, he turned away and walked back to the bush, where I now saw several other lions lounging around in the shade, sleeping with full bellies. Breathlessly, I twisted my foot around until I could pull my sandal out of the hole and limped back to my parents, who were standing exactly where I’d left them, faces white.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, shocked that I could speak at all, my throat was so dry. Quickly, quietly, we walked the rest of the way down Airstrip Island, crossed to C16 where we’d found the baboons that morning, and back onto Camp Island.
I thought about nothing as we walked. It hurt to breathe, and my legs moved on autopilot. Sweat dripped down my back and the birds sang so loudly I wanted to hold my hands over my ears. Bile rose in the back of my throat and I gagged as I tried to swallow it back down. When we finally reached the shore of Camp Island, I sank to my knees in the dust and burst into tears. My entire body shook and I threw up in the hippo grass, feeling suddenly small and fragile. I wiped my hand across my face and tasted blood—where from, I didn’t know. I pushed my fingers into the ground and took one gasping breath after another as tears dripped one by one off my nose and into the dust. Mom and Dad didn’t say anything, and I was glad. We all knew what had happened. There wasn’t anything more to be said.
When I walked into Baboon Camp, it could have been any other day. Press was sweeping the path and humming to himself. The kitchen door creaked as Lucy closed it behind her and carried a cup of tea to the table. Small purple flowers drifted down from the fig tree, as starlings, orioles, and robins danced through the branches and the occasional vervet monkey passed by, making the branches dip. The sand was soft and cool on my feet, and across the distant melapo, giraffes walked through the water in graceful succession, dipping their heads with each step and carving delicate silhouettes against the bright blue sky beyond. My world was perfect beyond what earthly perfection is meant to be: a magic castle for a brave little princess with a head full of pirates and dragons to live and run and sleep under the stars as the birds fly home to roost an
d the hippos call from the river. But it wasn’t real. And I didn’t belong there anymore.
That fall we closed Baboon Camp.
EPILOGUE
Goodbye, Narnia
I still walk around with my head down. I’m not being unfriendly; I’m just looking for snakes. When a big truck comes around the corner, I still think it’s an elephant and my first reaction is to look for the nearest dumpster to hide behind. I don’t like being predictable; predictability in a daily schedule is how lions know where you’re likely to be when it’s dark outside and makes it easier for them to hunt you. They’re smart like that. Though I will happily spend hours at the zoo, I will never go into the reptile house, and you can forget the lion enclosure. I dream about lions almost every night: chasing me across the lacrosse field, stalking me during a final exam in graduate school, or lurking in my bedroom closet, twitching their tawny ears and growling so low and deep it makes my bones vibrate.
I love it when it rains. At the beginning or end of a rainstorm you can always smell that indefinable and unmistakable scent of rain on dust. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t any dust where you are; that’s one of the magical things about this smell, that it reaches all over the world, even in the places where there is no dust and there are no songbirds to sing when the sun comes out.
Baboon Camp is where I lost my first tooth, shot my first snake, and learned about fractions. I’ve cleaned its paths, replaced its roofs, and moonwalked through it in the slippery mud after rainstorms when the shongololo millipedes come out. It’s where we had Christmas and where we celebrated our birthdays. It’s where I learned to love all the things that make me who I am, and where I learned all those things over again when I made the mistake of putting them away. It’s where I discovered bravery and self-confidence and that a wild imagination is one of the best things a child can ever have. It’s where I learned to sing Christmas carols when I pee to make sure no lions are nearby. I believe my initials are still carved into the fig tree, though I will never know whether the elephants have torn it down.
Home
That’s the thing about Baboon Camp: I’ll never really know what happened to it. It appeared from nothing, a clearing in the trees on an island in the delta that could really have been anywhere. And just as easily as it appeared, it disappeared. When we packed up our tents and took apart the buildings, the grasses and bushes and trees came back, just as they had been before we arrived, and slowly, over the years, all the signs that humans were once there faded away until it looked exactly the way it did before we got there. The impala and giraffes and baboons move through, never knowing that where they now eat and sleep and play with their babies, I once read all of Harry Potter and guarded frozen chickens from a clever baboon. They still see the same sunsets from the same tree where I wove my own bow and arrows and flew a pirate flag I’d sewed myself from one of Dad’s T-shirts.
I think about Baboon Camp every single day, but American Keena has given me some important experiences as well. American Keena has seen Game of Thrones, Friends, and The X-Files, knows not to put metal in the microwave, and has begrudgingly admitted that air-conditioning feels really good when it’s one hundred degrees outside. She loves the snow, the changing seasons, and not having to wash her clothes by hand. She’s proud to say she’s American. And when she puts her nieces to bed, she feels a warm swell of pride when they say, “Aunt Keena? Tell me about the monkeys.” She’s fortunate to still call Nat, Meghan, Katy, and Erika her friends.
At this point in the story, you may be asking yourself: What, in the end, happened to Mokupi? No story about Baboon Camp is complete without Mokupi. Sometime in the year after Baboon Camp closed, we got an e-mail from a contact who worked in Xaxaba telling us that one of their staff members had seen Mokupi at a local clinic and that he was very sick.
Dad flew back to Botswana to find him and take him to the hospital. He found Mokupi at a friend’s house, lying underneath a thin blanket, skeletal in his thinness, and coughing. Dad was so upset he did what white people working in Africa should never do: He took Mokupi to the hospital, right to the front of the line of people waiting in the sun, and demanded that a doctor see him immediately. He insisted that Mokupi be tested for HIV—also something he should not have done, but something he couldn’t not do, under the circumstances. Though the doctor didn’t tell Dad what the results were, the number of pills the doctor gave Mokupi to treat his illness was enough of an indication that it was AIDS and that it was very advanced.
I don’t know exactly when Mokupi died, but I remember where I was when Dad called to tell me he was gone. I was sitting on a cafeteria bench in Johns Hopkins Hospital, reading a textbook about the epidemiology of the HIV virus. I was six months into a master’s program in international public health, focusing on HIV and AIDS in southern Africa and what was being done at a global level to address the epidemic. When I hung up the phone, I stared at the maps and charts in my book and saw only the smiling face of my old friend, the man who talked to the baboons every day and whose face lit up when it rained. The last day I remember spending with Mokupi, he led me far away from the baboons to show me a Pel’s fishing owl, one of the rarest birds in the world and one that only lives in the Okavango. It has always been my favorite bird, and when we found not one but two Pel’s fishing owls sitting with a small chick, Mokupi told me it was one of the happiest days he could remember. No one loved the delta like he did.
I now work in global public health. I’ve worked in some of the fanciest, best-equipped hospitals in the world, and I’ve worked in clinics where no one is trained, and old, broken equipment is used and reused because there isn’t any other option. The knowledge that the places with the biggest health challenges are also the places where health care is the hardest to come by enrages me.
Though I live in the US now and go to work every day in a tall, shiny building that smells like nothing, my heart lives far, far away, where the sun is just rising over the swamp and the birds are waking up the forest with their calls. While I miss my wild world with a fierceness that is sometimes painful, what I have learned is that it’s not the place that makes the adventure—it’s the person. No world is free of danger; it’s just that sometimes, the lions walk on two feet and sit next to you in the cafeteria. You may not need to climb a tree to get away from them, but you will always need a strong cup of tea, a calm head, and a plan. Though I still wish that the trees around my house were filled with monkeys, and that the things that go bump in the night could be hippos and not backfiring cars, I know that every time the sun rises, it rises with the same possibility for adventure that it does on Camp Island, thousands of miles away. The wardrobe door may have closed on Narnia, but that doesn’t mean the story is over.
My favorite activity in my favorite place
Acknowledgments
The story of Baboon Camp is one I’ve wanted to write since first stepping off Dan Rawson’s boat in the summer of 1992. “How did you survive?” people have asked us for years. “What was it like?”
I used to say, “Well, that’s a very long story. How much time do you have?” Though it’s been great fun to talk about poisonous beetles and monkey fights to shocked faces over and over again (you’d be amazed at how quickly I can kill polite conversation at a cocktail party), I’m so glad to be able to put these stories down on paper in a more permanent way. Want to know what it was like? Here, read this. It’s all there.
First, thank you to my family. Thank you for sharing quiet afternoons on the river drinking beer, and raucous evenings around the campfire. I know they were the happiest times for you too.
Thank you to Meghan and Nat: my first friends. Thank you for your letters, your kindness, and for still wanting to publicly acknowledge me when I said things like “I’m going to go be a bat!” and ran into the woods. Thank you to Brooke, who—I want to point out—isn’t one person but a combination of three people. I’m glad we all ended up being friends too.
Thank you to Masaku,
Mpitsang, Press, and Mokupi. Our homes in Kenya and Baboon Camp would have been impossible without your help. Thank you for teaching me so much and for showing me how much magic a place can have if you just know where to look. I miss you.
Thank you to all the people who have called Baboon Camp home over the years. We share something that is hard to put into words, but I hope this book can be a comfort to you when you miss staring out across the melapo and listening to the birds.
Thank you to my agent, Jeff Kleinman, for pulling an incredibly disorganized story out of his slush pile and patiently helping me mold it into something book-shaped. I will never be able to express how integral you’ve been in this book’s journey and how thankful I am for your advice. Thank you to the Best Editor of Editors (stet, capitalization intended) Millicent Bennett: your enthusiasm and wise input made this book what it is, and I’m so lucky to have had the opportunity to work with you. Thank you to the rest of the team at Grand Central for all your hard work and tolerance for bad Star Wars jokes: Carmel Shaka, Karen Kosztolnyik, Ben Sevier, Brian McLendon, Anjuli Johnson, Albert Tang, Evan Gaffney, Staci Burt, and Morgan Swift.
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