by Norman Rush
I was leading Baph by a rope attached to his headstall. Mmo was on a halter tied to Baph’s pannier rack. Mmo was the one who was being the most difficult. I thought I could improve things, as I had a couple of times before, by getting between my boys and leading them as a team. So I untied Mmo and in the process lost him. It was instantaneous.
It happened because I had brought only one compass with me and I had developed a recurring anxious need to reassure myself that it was where it had to be, in my left breast pocket. It calmed me to touch my pocket. I let go of Mmo’s rope for just the fraction of a second touching my pocket took. I must have done this before, without incident. Mmo shot away like a genius. I had never seen him move like that. It was fast and purposive. I was paralyzed. I thought I must have done something to him I was unaware of, hurt him. It froze me. What was he doing and what should I do? I had treated him well, I thought. I lost crucial time trying inanely to think what it was I must have done. There was also the feeling that it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t reconsider in a moment and come back. I started after him, but Baph was only willing to walk and there was no way I could see myself letting go of Baph. The idea of tying Baph to a tree and then running as fast as I could after Mmo was not accessible to me.
I even took time to stupefy myself with a moment or two of class rage. I could never have been one of those adolescent girls who deified the horse family. You had to have money for that. If I had ever been exposed to horses for more than ten minutes in my life I might have had a better idea of what to do now or what I should have avoided doing that led my boy to bolt, which might be dooming me. Probably it would be a wonderfully empowering thing for a young woman to get to clasp her legs around a powerful naked male beast and make it do things, jump over obstacles on command, and so on. This could be one of the sources of the self-confidence you envy in rich women, not that the sources of self-confidence in the rich are not as numberless as the sands of the Gobi. I had known a few equestrienne darlings in their little caps who rode in shows. Or rather I had been aware of them. In the meantime Mmo was a hundred yards away, looking back over his shoulder at me.
Finally I did tie Baph up and try to run in earnest after Mmo. It was too late. I was now terrified to get too far from Baph out of fear that something might happen to him in my absence. Each sortie drove Mmo farther out of reach. Baph acted frantic each time I left. Worst of all, I realized that I had no idea what the equivalent of Here kitty kitty is for a donkey. There had to be something that Batswana drovers used. In my state of pride and momentum I had never bothered to ask. This more than anything demoralized me. Even if I got inside his startle zone, what then?
Mmo cantered out of sight. I tried to reconstruct what portion of everything he was carrying. It was some of the feed, some of the water, and my tent. Never do this again, was my main brilliant injunction to myself.
I suppose what I should have done was take Baph and trail along in the general direction Mmo had taken in hopes that he would relent and come back. But this was inconceivable. Mmo was going away from Tsau, not toward it. I had no idea how long such a game might go on, either. In any case I was convinced that I would be unable to plan anything until I got out of the grove and into some less accursed part of the landscape.
After the Gray Place
We got clear of the gray place, as I was calling it to myself, and stopped. I was petting Baph insanely. We had a very modest amount of water left.
I was full of guilt. Whatever risk he had imposed on me by decamping, Mmo was dooming himself. I must have been being too routine toward these animals, not loving enough, not enough in rapport with them. These were beasts of burden whose cargo was my survival. I had failed them, or failed one of them.
Now what would I do, other than what I had been doing, except faster? It was about now that I noticed with disgust a trace of elation in my reaction to what things had come to. Apparently I was furtively pleased that the level of difficulty had gone up. I reject this tendency in humanity. I had always seen it as a specifically male pathology, yet here it was, even if dilutely. A young ne’er-do-well attempts to kill himself by shooting himself through the head and when he only succeeds in blinding himself is galvanized with determination to get into law school, overcome his new disability, and become a millionaire lawyer, which he does. This was the company I was finding myself in in the Kalahari.
Remember the hunchbacks, interpret nothing, I said to myself. You are going to be abnormal until this is over, because no one crossing the Kalahari alone is going to be normal after the second day. I felt superficially better. It helped that we were back in a more standard part of the desolation.
The thing to do was to get to Tsau immediately. This was my new solution for everything. Nothing interested me but that. Ostriches crossed our path several times that afternoon and I barely paid attention, even though this is one of the few birds I have any kind of curiosity about. One reason we had to get to Tsau faster than planned was because my tent was gone, which meant having to stop early enough each night to collect enough wood to keep major fires going throughout the night without fail. Being lax or nominal about this would not be possible. We picked up the pace considerably, and Baph was good about it at first.
We went too fast. Going faster meant needing to rest more. During one rest stop I fell asleep sitting against a tree and was awakened by being jerked over by Baph, to whose halter I had tied my hand. We resumed. I pressed us. I even got Baph to canter for short stretches.
I never whine but was whining then. We aren’t getting to Tsau, was what I was whining. It was as though I thought that by sheer urgency I could force Tsau to rise out of the ground. It irritated me that we would be unable to go in a beeline for Tsau because the remaining water points lay significantly south or north of our route. Why had I let myself make such cursory calculations of how much time would be consumed in deviations from our route?
Camping that night was macabre, What my map led us to was an abandoned cattle post, probably German, dating from the early protectorate and obviously derelict for years. There were tumbledown pens and stall fencing, a burst and heeling dip tank, piping, remnants of buildings, and at the center of the complex an ox pump, meaning a butterfly-shaped iron rig which two oxen could be harnessed to and then driven to turn, goaded to plod endlessly in a circle to raise the water. The nails I occasionally kicked up were antique. On the face of it this should have been a more sinister venue than the gray place, but it never registered that way with me. I was totally absorbed in hurrying.
I was manic. I threw myself into wrenching half-buried timbers out of the ground and dragging old planks and poles from the farthest reaches of the property to heap up in piles in a rough circle around the pump. Most of the wood went into a central dump which I would sleep next to and from which I would chuck replenishment into the barrier fires from time to time. What was left of the place, I virtually razed. This was arson, not camping. I hope the site had no historical value. Nothing could slow me, not even my cold fear about water. I had decided early on that very far down the well shaft something was glinting that must be water. How I would get it remained to be seen. The apparatus was rusted rigid, completely inoperable. But that problem was for the morning. Even when I sensed I had enough wood I went for more. I put off eating. I had failed to bring gloves of any kind, so in short order my hands had become rich with splinters I would have the pleasure of dealing with later. I know what I was doing. I was overpreparing the event because I dreaded my next task, which was to inventory my supplies and face what Mmo’s defection had done to them.
I laid out what was left. I thought we would survive if Tsau was where I estimated it to be. Food for me was more than adequate, especially now that I was so anorectic. Water was the dilemma. I had two plastic five-gallon jerricans, one empty and one a third full of water that was reserved for Baph. I had two canteens, one full. There were enough oats for two skimpy feedings for Baph. If we got there, he would arrive hungry.
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I had started a new journal, in a separate notebook, in Kang. That was gone. This meant I had no sure fix on the date. I hadn’t paid attention to the date on the page I had written my farewell-to-Kang entry on. But all my Tswapong and Gaborone journals were safe.
A perfect index of the shape I was in was my reaction to losing my mirror. All my toilet articles had gone with Mmo. I couldn’t stand it. It felt like I had lost my left hand. I would have traded my first aid kit for my mirror and my comb. It was irrational. How could I look at myself, check myself, before I got to Tsau? I would need to look at myself. It was urgent because I knew that through fear and exertion, weight was dropping off me. I was certain I was in ketosis, since I was living on protein and water—pilchards and water, tuna and water, ghastly Vienna sausages and water. When I lose weight rapidly it shows first in my face, then go breasts, hips, middle. This was why I needed a mirror. I felt stabbed in the back by life, by my foul luck. Now I was supposed to present myself to Denoon with only the vaguest notion of how I looked, and uncombed. I was wild. I thought of trying to devise a comb out of the nails in the sand.
So I lit the fire. It was a spectacle.
Baph was exhausted, clearly, because he got down on his knees as soon as we stopped. I slept half on top of him, or half slept, after pulling a tarp over us both.
April nights in the Kalahari are cold, but we were hot. I got up three times to renew my paean to heat, light, and destruction. I burned everything. Even as day fell I threw more into the display.
The Well
The day began with the ordeal of fishing up water for us.
This was by the spoonful, almost.
The casing the ox pump shaft went down into was about eight inches across. There was a clearance of at most three inches between the shaft housing and the casing wall once I had battered and levered the shaft over as far as I could through brute force. My canteen was too fat to slide through the gap. I was stymied. I needed a thing, ideally, like a bayonet case that I could reel down to get water by increments.
What I did was pound, crush, and crimp my canteen cup into a travesty of itself, beating the side in and folding the bottom up over it and praying to god I wouldn’t pierce or break it. It was thinner than a pack of cigarettes when I was done with it, and it would hold about half a cup of water. I had dropped a ten thebe piece down the shaft and concluded that the water was forty or fifty feet down. I had a hundred feet of nylon cord. I made two holes in the rim to thread the cord through.
On my first try, the cup, crushed and compressed as it was, seemed to take a long time to immerse, even though I jiggled the line vigorously once it was in the water to tip it. So before the next descent I attached a sinker made of odd bits and pieces of iron fitments I scavenged from the area, and then we were all right.
It took hours to fish up enough water to fill all my vessels. I had to be in an excruciating position to do it. My knees and back were agonized. Whoever said he had measured out his life in coffee spoons was talking about me that day.
I made Baph slake himself before we left. That was difficult because I discovered a rent in the collapsible canvas bucket he very much preferred to drink from, which meant holding the rent pinched closed while he took his time, which could be done only by my assuming a position specially created to torture my already excruciated back. Finally we could go.
Walking erect was bliss for a while.
A Nadir
What transpired next survives in my mind as a medley, more or less. I was beyond writing things down. I may have had two identical days or I may have imagined one of them.
We went until late. When we stopped I had the strength for only one small fire, so we slept between it and a termite mound, which I thought I had heard lions disliked. I slept tied to Baph, as per usual. He was becoming very acclimated to fires, I observed. This time he stood all night. I remember this night scene, with the firelight flickering on the termite mound, happening twice, which is not possible.
In the morning I woke up with two songs I had forgotten I knew fresh in my consciousness—The Old Triangle, three verses, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone, all verses. They were both good trek songs.
The terrain was harder. We had to negotiate a sequence of lines of small dunes running straight north-south. The interdune valleys were gravelly, with occasional tracks of metallic-looking grasses growing in tufts. Now that we were regularly going uphill I had to pull Baph, whereas before he had been willing to go up or down anything with alacrity. My lips were puffing up because one thing I had kept in my toilet kit instead of my first aid kit was the zinc oxide. This brought on another, but weaker, episode of mirror anguish.
After the dunes the flatlands resumed, stretching away into the glare. Where was Tsau? Tsau should appear. It was built around and halfway up a substantial green koppie three hundred feet high and noted for its conicality. At the least I should be able to see the line of low red hills Tsau lay just eight miles beyond, or the sand river that cut through them and swung close to the base of the Tsau koppie.
East of us the ground was gray and yellow, mottled, with patches of thick shoulder-high brush we preferred to circumnavigate. To our north there had been fires recently. We began to encounter charred brush and prongs of black, burnt ground. The sky was a burning white, like the inside of an abalone shell.
Naturally when a windstorm came it would be from the north, plain grit and sand not being annoying enough for us: we would have to have ash and smuts too. Baph noticed that it was coming before I did, at least this is how I interpret his sitting down, like a person, on his rump. There was a dark blur to the north, moving. I could make out dust devils here and there. I put my back to the oncoming blur and hugged Baph’s head in an attempt to shield his muzzle. The blast reached us.
Fortunately it was brief, if stinging. I tried, when I was brushing myself off, to be fastidious and flick away the dots and particles of ash on my clothes lest I mash them and make myself look camouflaged. But it was unavoidable. I brushed Baph off and dabbed his eyes clean. They seemed to be discharging. In fact he looked unwell. It was no surprise that he refused to move when I pulled on him to come. I didn’t persist. This was serious. After one more bout of pulling as hard as I could made not the slightest difference I sat down with him.
This was my lowest ebb. Baph had to get up. I couldn’t carry the water cans.
I had to remobilize. Venting was no use. I need a bath, I shouted, and Never do this again, but it was pro forma.
Then I impressed on myself that if I died there, no one in his right mind would regard it as a tragedy. I would be in the category of an aerialist falling to her death. Or I would be entitled to the species of commiseration people get who show up at parties on crutches but who got injured skiing at Gstaad or some other upper-middleclass earthly paradise. It would be sad but not that sad.
Enfin I made Baph get up by stabbing, or rather stabbing at, his hindquarters with a ballpoint pen—not drawing blood, but stabbing harder than I would ever have credited myself with being able to do. I still flinch at myself.
He got up and was angelic.
As we went I decided to wipe the peanut butter off my lips. The smell was making me nauseous. I had been using the peanut butter as a surrogate for my zinc oxide. I decided my lips were burned and swollen beyond repair anyhow, and for a split second I was able to feel glad that there was no mirror to see them in.
Night came and the idea of camping was unthinkable because, as I saw it, only impetus could save us. We had to reach Tsau. We would go with the water we had and forget about the last water point.
So long as Baph would walk, I would walk. That was another reason to keep going: he was proceeding at a dragging pace. And the final reason for continuing was that a vulture couple had picked us up during the day and was following us. This was not what we needed. And vultures leave you alone during the night. They go someplace and roost. There was a chance, I thought, that something more attractively prot
omoribund than we two might detain them on the morrow.
That night at last I became my body, my body and my breath, in about the way I assume the counsels of perfection I’d gotten from the lion man had meant I should. Walking was painless. I had no punitive ideation all night, none. It was very cold, and even that was pleasant. Undoubtedly this state was something devised out of the chemistry of threat, like Livingstone going into a religious rapture when a lion got him by the shoulder.
Tsau Appears
I assume I was in a fugue state until the moment the next afternoon when the reddish hills that were proof you were within eight miles of Tsau appeared. Appeared is the only word for the experience. They were not there and then they were.
Internally I experienced something like a profound but subaudible chord being played. And then I was alert. It was like falling back into my body from a height. Everything hurt at once: my insides hurt, my hands were pulsing with infection from unextracted splinters, my tongue for some reason felt like balsa, as did my lips. Baph stank, which I had not been noticing, and he was breathing in an alarming way.
Even now all I remember from the night before is walking through the dark through an intermittent, patternless wind. A couple of times, depending on the angle of the wind, it seemed to me that I heard, coming from a great distance, a sound like glass being struck. I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that this was an anomaly like the phantom gunshot I’d heard earlier.
The hills appeared, and the sand river that was guaranteed to meander straight to the outskirts of Tsau. Shortly I was at the hills themselves.