Cry of the Kalahari

by Mark James Owens

  One of our most immediate problems was how to find a vehicle among the population of battered four-wheel-drive trucks that rattled around the town. The best we could afford was an old thirdhand Land Rover with a concave roof, bush-scraped sides, and drab grey paint. We bought the “Old Grey Goose” for 1000 rands ($1500), overhauled the engine, installed a reserve gas tank, and built flat storage boxes in the back. Covered with a square of foam rubber, the boxes would also serve as our bed.

  When we had finally finished outfitting the Grey Goose, it was already early March 1974; we hadn’t been in the field yet, and we had only $3800 left, $1500 of which would be needed to get us home if we failed to get a grant. Every delay meant lost research time. If we were to have any chance of convincing some organization to fund us before our money ran out, we had to find a study site immediately and get to work. So, despite warnings that we would not get through to the north country, early one morning we headed out of Gaborone into the rolling thornbush savanna.

  A few miles outside town, with a bone-jarring crash, we left the only pavement in Botswana behind us. As I swerved to dodge the ruts and chuckholes, the narrow dirt road led us deeper and deeper into the bushveld. I took a deep, satisfying breath of wild Africa; our project was finally under way. The sense of freedom and the exhilaration were almost intoxicating, and I reached across to pull Delia over next to me. She smiled up at me—a smile that washed away the tensions that had built over the long, frustrating weeks of preparation. Her eyes spoke her total confidence that we could handle any challenge that confronted us, and her confidence was itself a challenge.

  Our destination, the village of Maun, lay where the waters of the Okavango River delta reach the sands of the Kalahari Desert, more than 450 miles to the north. There was only one narrow gravel road to follow through a territory that offered little shelter, except an occasional cluster of native huts. Because of the flooding, no one had driven the road for weeks. As we crawled north at ten to fifteen miles per hour, the savanna grew wetter and wetter until we were churning through deep black mud.

  Near Francistown, the last large village on the east side of Botswana, we swung northwest toward Maun, still more than 300 miles away. Whole stretches of the road had completely washed away. In places I waded ahead through shallow lakes more than a mile across, searching under the water for firm ground with my bare feet as Delia followed in the Land Rover. Dodging ruts three or four feet deep, we passed the mud-caked hulks of trucks bellied-up in muck like dinosaurs in a tar pit. They had been abandoned for weeks. Time after time the Grey Goose sank to its undercarriage. Using a high-lift jack to raise it, we piled thornbush, stones, and logs under the wheels. Another few yards and we were down to the axles again.

  At night, slapping at swarms of mosquitoes, we would squat next to a mudpuddle and wash the crust off our faces, arms, and legs. Then we would fall asleep on top of the boxes in the back of the Land Rover. We kept the truck parked in the middle of the roadbed because if I had driven off its crown, we would have become hopelessly mired. We had met only two or three other vehicles in several days, so it was unlikely that someone would need to pass by in the night.

  In the morning we would be on our way once more. Dazed with fatigue, we would spin forward, sink, dig out, and spin forward again. Some days we made no more than a mile or two. But we had to keep going. Though we didn’t talk about it, we both had the desperate feeling that if we couldn’t even make it to Maun, we would surely fail in the field. Yet failure was an option we simply could not afford. We had invested all our savings—our dreams and our pride—in this venture. There was no reason to turn around; there was nothing to go back to.

  Occasionally we saw goats, cattle, and donkeys drinking and wallowing in mudholes along the way. They were the only signs of animal life in the flat monotony of overgrazed thornscrub. It was depressing and disconcerting that we had come all this way to find in these remote areas no herds of wild antelope. Perhaps after all, we had chosen a country in which little wildlife was left. Even then we knew that much of Africa had been grazed to death by domestic stock.

  Eleven days after we had set off from Gaborone, hollow-eyed and covered in mud, we stopped on the one-lane bridge over the Thamalakane River. On its banks was Maun, a village of reed-and-straw huts, donkeys, and sand. Herero tribeswomen had spread their lavish skirts, made of yards of different materials, on the emerald riverbanks to dry, like great butterflies fanned out in a riot of reds, yellows, blues, greens, and purples.

  Delia’s eyes were red and her face and hair spattered with grey mud. Her hands were deeply scratched from piling rocks and thornbush under the mired truck. But she grinned and gave a rebel yell. We had made it!

  On sand tracks that ran between rondavels we drove to Riley’s, a large compound including garage, general store, hotel, and bar, where we bought gasoline and a few supplies: lard, flour, mealie-meal, and sugar. Perishables such as milk, bread, and cheese were not available in northern Botswana, and when we arrived even staples were in short supply because no transport trucks had been able to get through in weeks. The people of the village were hungry. We avoided the eyes of the begging children, embarrassed that we had nothing we could give them, yet knowing we were wealthy by comparison.

  Officials in the Department of Wildlife in Gaborone had advised us to ask professional hunters about a good place to start our research. One of the names we had scribbled in our journal was “Lionel Palmer—Maun.” Lionel was well known at Riley’s, where we asked for directions to his home. We made our way along deep sand tracks and through more mudholes until, about four miles north of the village, we found the Palmer homestead. Over the river hung tall fig trees with orange, red, and yellow bougainvillea spilling over their tops. Redeyed bulbuls, grey hornbills, hoopoes, and a myriad other birds flitted about the canopy above the garden.

  Lionel Palmer, deeply tanned, his dark hair brushed with grey, was dressed in baggy jeans, a cowboy shirt, and a bandana. He sauntered out to greet us, holding a glass of whisky in his hand. The oldest and most experienced professional hunter in the area, Lionel held considerable social positon in Maun. He was famous for his parties, where bedroom furniture sometimes ended up on the roof, and once a Land Rover had been hung in a fig tree—and for his capacity for Scotch. Once, after several days of intoxication, he woke up with a stabbing earache. The doctor at the clinic removed a two-inch-long sausage fly—a reddish-brown, tubelike, winged insect—which had taken up residence in Lionel’s numbed ear while he slept off his drunkenness in a flowerbed. For a week Lionel carried the fly’s carcass bedded down in a cotton-lined matchbox, proudly showing it to everyone he met, whether or not he knew them.

  Sitting with us on the patio overlooking the river, Lionel suggested a few areas in northern Botswana where flooding was not too severe and where predators unaffected by man could be found. One, the Makgadikgadi Pans, is a great tract of remote bush veld wilderness more than 100 miles east and south of Maun. The pans are the remnants of an enormous inland lake that dried up some 16,000 years ago.

  “Go ninety-nine miles east of Maun on the Nata road and find a palm tree broken off at the top. Look for an old spoor that runs south from the main track. There’s no sign, but that’s where the reserve begins. Nobody goes out there much—there’s bugger-all there, except miles and miles of bloody Africa.”

  Most game reserves in Botswana are large tracts of totally undeveloped wilderness. There are no paved roads, fast-food stands, water fountains, campgrounds, restrooms, or any of the other “improvements” found in parks and reserves in more developed countries.

  Two days later we found two faint tire tracks at a broken palm, turned off the main road, and left all traces of civilization behind us. Immediately we had a sense of being in Africa, the real Africa, the one we had always dreamed about. The vast untracked savanna, broken only by occasional isolated trees, made us feel frail, minuscule, vulnerable. It was beautiful, exciting—but also a little intimidating.

>   About thirty miles south of the main road, the track we had been following led us to the edge of a vast plain. Then it disappeared. Delia noted our compass heading, the mileage, and a lone thorntree we thought we might be able to recognize again. With no chart or guide, and with only fifteen gallons of water and the barest minimum of essential food, we set off across the Makgadikgadi.

  The savanna was very rough, the grass tall and heavy with ripe seed, and it was hot. We made no more than three miles per hour for the rest of the day. Gradually the front of the Grey Goose was buried under a thick moving carpet of grass seed and insects that completely obscured the headlights and hood. Every quarter of a mile or so we had to brush off the front of the engine and cool the boiling radiator by pouring water over the top.

  Around midmorning of the second day we came to an immense network of saucer-shaped salt pans interlaced with crescents of grass savanna, touches of woodland, and wisps of palm islands. Some pans were filled with brackish, unpotable water and flowery masses of orange, purple, green, and red algae; others were covered with a thin salt crust. We were at the edge of an alien world—no roads, no trails, no people. A shimmering mirage drew the tops of the palms into the sky.

  “Whatever you do, don’t drive across those pans or you’ll go down like a bloody rock,” Lionel had warned us. “The salt crust’ll look firm, but it won’t be, ’specially with all the rain we’ve had lately. Underneath there’s nothing but mud for God knows how deep. Game Department lost a whole truck in one of them last year. No matter how much time you think you’ll save by crossing, go around.”

  While I was skirting these enormous irregular depressions, Delia sketched a map of our route, noting compass headings and odometer readings at regular intervals, so that we would be able to find our way back to “Lone Tree.”

  Itching from grass seed and insects, I drove toward a large pan that looked as if it might contain enough fresh rainwater for bathing. We were coming over the rise above it—suddenly the truck dropped from under us. The chassis cracked like a rifleshot and we were thrown from our seats hard against the windshield. The engine stalled and a haze of dust rose in front of us. When it had cleared, the hood of the Land Rover stood at ground level, buried in a large antbear hole that had been hidden in tall grass. After checking to see that Delia was all right, I jacked the truck up and began shoveling a ton of sand under the wheels. When we were finally able to back out, I crawled under the Goose to check for damage. There were several new cracks in the chassis, one near a motor mount. Another bad hole could tear the engine loose. Still, we were lucky; if only one of the front wheels had gone in, it could have broken off.

  I was sharply aware that if we lost the service of the Grey Goose in some way, our chances of ever leaving the Makgadikgadi alive were not good. I didn’t trust my limited knowledge of mechanics, and we hadn’t been able to afford all the backup spare parts we should have been carrying for an expedition like this. Furthermore, no one knew where we were or when to expect us back. Lionel knew only that we had left Maun headed for one of several areas he had mentioned.

  We didn’t discuss these risks, but they lingered in the backs of our minds. We washed in the brackish water of the pan, and after we had dried in the wind, our faces felt stretched tight, like overblown balloons.

  For the rest of the day I walked ahead of the Land Rover, checking for holes in the long grass while Delia drove. Several times I stepped into rodent burrows, hoping that they weren’t also the home of some poisonous snake. We carried no anti-venin, since it would have to be refrigerated.

  That second night we camped next to a small tree not more than six feet high, the only one for miles around. We had been irresistibly drawn to it and had actually driven quite a way off course to get to it. Though we slept inside the truck, the tree gave us a vague sense of security. Our early primate ancestors would probably have been similarly pleased to find even this mere seedling on a nearly treeless plain, after they left the safety of the forests to venture onto the vast savannas millions of years ago.

  We climbed a low rise late in the afternoon of the fourth day, and I was walking ahead. Suddenly I stopped. “My God! Look at that!” The sounds and smells of animals, tens of thousands of animals, carried to us on the light wind. For as far as we could see, the plains beyond were covered with zebra and wildebeest, grazing placidly near a large water hole. Fighting zebra stallions bit and kicked each other, puffs of dust rising from their hooves. Wildebeest tossed their heads and pranced and blew their alarm sounds. The great herds stirred, and my skin tingled at the spectacular display of life. If we never saw another sight like this, the months of working in a stone quarry and the hawking of all our belongings would have been worth this one glimpse of what much of Africa must once have been like.

  We watched for hours, passing the binoculars back and forth between us, taking notes on everything we saw—how the herds mingled and moved, how many drank, how many fought—as though this signified in some way that our research had begun. We pitched camp near the top of the ridge, so we could watch for cheetahs or lions preying on the herds. When it was too dark to see, we sat heating a can of sausages over the kerosene lantern inside the Grey Goose and discussed establishing our research in the Makgadikgadi.

  We went on watching the herds all the next day and into the evening. Then reality returned: Our water was getting low. Frustrated, anxious to get some solid field work done, and hating to leave the zebra and wildebeest, we began the long drive back across the plains. Following the reciprocal of compass headings and using the schematic diagram Delia had made of our course eastward, we would return to Lone Tree, get our bearings, then drive on to the Boteti River, thirteen miles farther west, for water.

  For two days we retraced our course, but somewhere we went wrong. A great salt pan, unfamiliar to us, a dazzling white depression more than a mile across and miles long from north to south, blocked our way. Standing on the roof of the Land Rover and scanning with binoculars, we couldn’t see any way around it.

  After driving north, and then south for some distance along the bank, I decided to see how firm the surface was. I was more and more concerned about our dwindling gasoline and water supply. Perhaps with caution, we could drive across the pan instead of laboring over miles of rough terrain to skirt it. I dug a test hole with the spade. The clay beneath the salt crust seemed surprisingly dry and solid, and no matter how hard I jumped on it with my heels, I could barely make an impression. Next, I slowly drove the front wheels of the Grey Goose onto the pan; the crust held firm. Finally, I brought the full weight of the truck onto the surface, which was as hard as concrete pavement. So in spite of Lionel’s warning, we decided to make the crossing.

  Starting the run, I accelerated quickly. By driving fast in four-wheel drive, I hoped to skim over any soft spots we might encounter farther out.

  I bent over the steering wheel, scanning the white salt crust ahead for dark patches, a sign that the pan had not dried out completely. But there was none. It was like driving over a billiard table, and I began to relax. Then, about 800 yards from the edge, we saw some timbers and poles sticking at odd angles from a depression in the grey, cracked surface. We got out to investigate. What could have made such a hole? And where had the timbers come from? There were no tracks or any other clues. Puzzled, I looked into the deep, ragged pit, to the place where the ends of the posts converged and then disappeared into an abyss of mud. My throat suddenly tightened—someone had tried, unsuccessfully, to save his truck. I glanced quickly at ours.

  “My God! The truck’s sinking! Get in—hurry—we’ve got to get out of here!”

  Its wheels were slowly settling through the salt crust into a pocket in the softer clay beneath. The surface was giving way; in seconds our truck would break through.

  I tried to drive forward, but the engine stalled. The wheels had sunk too deep. Working frantically, I restarted the motor and jammed the gearshift into low-range four-wheel drive. Spinning and throwing
clay, the Land Rover churned forward until it heaved itself up onto the firm surface again. I quickly shifted to high range for better speed, spun around, and raced to the safety of the grass bank at the edge of the pan. We sat staring at each other and shaking our heads in dumb relief. I was furious with myself for having tried to make the crossing, but I had endangered us even more by stopping the truck in the middle of the pan. After consulting our sketch map, we headed north. It took an entire afternoon to drive around the rest of the pan.

  On the morning of the fourth day of the return trip, we finally reached the west edge of the Makgadikgadi plain, and slipped beneath the cool, refreshing canopy of riverine forest. Spider webs were drawn like fishing nets from tree to tree, and their hairy black-and-yellow architects scrambled over the hood of the truck as we ploughed through heavy sand toward the river. Kudu watched from deep shadows.

  At last we stood on the high banks of the Boteti River. Deep-blue water gently caressed its way around the lilies, hyacinths, and other water plants nodding in the sleepy current. At the top of a tall fig tree, a pair of fish eagles threw back their heads and called to the sky. We ran down the steep bank and plunged into the cool water.

  Climbing the riverbank after our swim, we saw something red lying in the grass. It was a fifty-gallon drum—a great find! We had looked for one in Maun, but they were almost impossible to get in northern Botswana; everyone needed them. By lashing this one to the top of the Land Rover and filling it with water, we could greatly increase our range and endurance while searching remote areas for a study site. The drum looked sound enough. We never stopped to wonder why it had been abandoned.