I had been in the air about three hours when av-gas fumes suddenly flooded the cabin. A thin stream of fuel was trailing along the underside of the port wing root and over the rear window. My stomach went hollow. The previous owner had agreed to replace the rotten rubber fuel bladders inside the wings, and I had foolishly accepted his word that this had been done.
The stream seemed to be growing now, spreading from just outside my window farther out along the wing, flowing over the flaps and spraying into the slipstream. The port-side fuel gauge was flickering lower. I fumbled for the fuel selector and switched it to left, hoping to burn as much of the escaping gasoline as I could before it was gone.
I didn’t know if the fuel in the starboard wing would carry me to camp; I did know that the slightest static spark could turn EWG into a fireball. I opened the windows to let more air circulate through the cabin.
At the same instant the leaking fuel bladder split. Green gasoline gushed from the wing and ran along the fuselage and off the tail wheel. I quickly switched the fuel selector to the starboard tank and banked the plane right and left, looking for a place to land. There was nothing but thombrush and small trees below. I tried to broadcast an emergency call on the radio, but all I heard was static. I was too low for my transmission to carry very far, and it was unlikely there was anyone within hundreds of miles to hear my call, anyway.
The fumes were getting stronger and my head had begun to ache. I trimmed the airplane for level flight and rummaged around inside, trying to see if fuel was leaking into the cabin. The carpet inside the rear cargo hatch was wet. High-octane gasoline was seeping through the hatch and into the battery hold behind the jump seat. Though I had already turned off the master switch, the risk of an explosion and fire were magnified. Worse, there was nothing more I could do about it.
I took the plane down to just above the savanna, so I would have a chance to crash-land and get out if a fire did occur—assuming EWG didn’t just blow up. As the minutes passed, the fuel gauge needle for the damaged tank quickly dropped into the red, then finally came to rest against its peg. The stream of gasoline under the wing narrowed as the ruptured tank finished emptying its volatile load. With the danger of an explosion reduced, my main worry was whether the other tank had enough fuel to get to camp. I figured and refigured until my pencil lead was a nub. With almost half an hour to my estimated time of arrival (ETA), the gauge began to flicker just above EMPTY. Finally it settled onto the mark and stayed there. Each minute seemed like an hour, and I kept waggling my wings to see if there was enough fuel left sloshing in the tank to make the gauge flicker.
Make sure all electrical and fuel systems are switched off, unlatch the door, and attempt the landing with the control column all the way back . . . The procedures for an emergency landing kept running through my mind, over and over.
I gripped the control wheel hard. My neck was stiff from craning to recognize some feature in the flat, homogenous bush savanna below. A dozen times I imagined that the engine was changing pitch and that I could feel a strange vibration. There was still no good place to land if it quit.
Just before my ETA, I squinted past the whirling propeller. I was sure my imagination was playing tricks again—a round, slate-grey depression with a frazzle of white cloud hanging low above it, took form in the mist. It was just to the right of my course. I held my heading, afraid to make a mistake and waste precious fuel. But suddenly the shallow riverbed of Deception Valley flashed underneath.
I throttled back and sailed over the wet, waxy surface of Real Deception Pan. The fuel gauge was solid red. Let the engine quit—now I could land and walk to camp!
There had been a lot of rain, and several dozen giraffe stood in the pan, peering curiously at what must have looked to them like a huge bird sailing past. I drifted slowly up the valley above herds of springbok, gemsbok, and hartebeest grazing on the lush green grasses of the riverbed. Then I was over Cheetah Pan, the Midway Islands, Jackal Island, Tree Island, Bush Island, and finally camp. All the water holes along the riverbed were full, but the surface of the airstrip we had made—months before we even knew we were going to get a plane—seemed firm enough for a landing. The stall warning bawled, my wheels bumped, and I taxied to camp. Echo Whisky Golf was home in Deception.
The tents had been flattened by a heavy storm. Water and mud stood everywhere; I needed Mox. After propping up one end of the tent and chasing a six-foot banded cobra from under the bed, I took a short nap on the soggy mattress. Then I refueled the good tank from a drum of av-gas we had previously hauled to camp; I would fly on that one fuel bladder until I could replace the damaged one. Because I didn’t know my way around the Kalahari from the air yet, I felt a bit uneasy about this, but I couldn’t wait around for a new fuel tank to be ordered from the United States. I climbed back into the plane and flew to Maun.
While we were in Johannesburg, Mox had enjoyed village life to its fullest. I found him sitting beside his rondavel, his head sagging between his knees, trying to recover from his latest drinking bout. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary, and he had a bad cough from smoking the harsh stemmy tobacco he rolled in strips of brown paper bag. Walking on unsteady legs, he fetched his kit and threw it into the back of the truck I had borrowed.
When we arrived at the village airstrip, he must have realized he was about to be my first passenger, because he sobered up within seconds. He tried to explain that he had never been in a fa-ly before, and I tried not to understand, knowing that if he refused to go I would have no other way to get him to camp. He bumped his head on the wing, and before he could focus on what was happening, I had him belted in and we were taxiing for the takeoff. I shoved the throttle forward, and Echo Whisky Golf lunged ahead, gobbling up runway. No bush plane is quiet, especially not on takeoff, and this one roared like the very devil. Mox’s eyes bugged out of his head and he clutched at the seat, the door, and the dash. I kept shouting, “It’s go siami! Go siami!—It’s okay! Okay!” and suddenly we were airborne and climbing away.
I throttled back to a cruise climb and banked to establish my heading. When Mox saw his village and the river quickly growing smaller, a wide grin broke across his face and he began pointing to the huts of friends along the water. I showed him the controls and demonstrated their effects, every movement of my hands and feet producing a different sensation. With each new maneuver, a laugh caught in Mox’s throat. In fact, he took to flying so completely, and was so proud of the status it gave him among his tribesmen—all of whom depended on walking or donkeys—that some of the hunters nicknamed him “Neil Armstrong.”
Mox and I spent the next three days cleaning camp. At 1:30 A.M. of the third night, I was awakened by the sound of the Land Cruiser’s engine. By the time I had pulled on my clothes, Delia and Roy were coasting to a stop near the tent. At first I didn’t recognize our truck—with its lumps of dried mud and grass, it looked like a poorly formed adobe brick.
Roy and Delia crawled slowly out of the cab and stood in the glare of the headlights, their hair matted with mud and grass-seed, eyes sunken with exhaustion. After our happy, if grubby, reunion, they explained that the four-ton fuel truck from the Wildlife Department was hopelessly bogged in mud sixty miles east. It would have to be dug out if we ever hoped to get all fifteen drums of fuel to camp. Furthermore, they had had to offload all of our groceries to lighten the Land Cruiser enough to get through the muck. They had left behind bags of flour, mealie-meal, and sugar, cases of canned food, and the new tents and the equipment for the plane, all of it stacked on the wet ground near the trailer they had been pulling.
For the next five days, dawn found Mox and me bouncing through tall grass and bush savanna, headed for the mired fuel truck. Together with the driver of the four-ton Bedford and his assistant, we shoveled tons of mud away from the undercarriage and hauled in rocks to put under the big wheels, but the soft ground swallowed up everything, and whenever we had the truck ready to back out, a rain shower made the ground like grease a
gain. Each night we rolled a drum or two of fuel across the bog, loaded it into our Toyota, and headed back to camp. The drivers had made a camp near the truck, and we left extra food for them.
On the fifth day, we arrived at the marsh to find the fuel truck gone and most of our aviation fuel lying on the ground. We never saw the truck again, and that was the last time the Wildlife Department ever offered to help us transport av-gas to camp.
Trying to get the rest of the fuel to camp on one last trip, Mox and I loaded ten of the last eleven drums into the back of the Toyota and onto the trailer and chained the last one onto the front bumper. Then we set off for Deception Valley.
We had just crossed into the game reserve, twenty-eight miles from camp, when, with a shriek of tearing metal, the truck leaped into the air and began to roll onto its right side. Mox was thrown to the floor, and my head slammed against the roof as I fought to regain control. I managed to keep us upright, until the truck smashed through a grove of thick brush, slewed heavily around, and heeled over onto its left wheels. The fuel drums shifted at the same instant, and I thought we were going over. I cut the steering wheel hard left and jammed on the brakes. We came to a stop in a shower of sand, leaves, and broken branches.
Dazed and bruised, I stuck my head out the window. At the end of a long, deep furrow a mangled fuel drum spewed high-octane fumes and gasoline into the air. Muttering in Setswana, Mox pulled himself up from the floor. Eyes white and round, hands shaking, he reached for his pouch of Springbok tobacco and tore a strip from a brown paper bag. “Nnya! Petrol—mellelo—fire!” I shouted and grabbed his hand.
The drum on the front bumper had come unchained and we had run over it. Luckily it hadn’texploded. I slapped some putty into the fuming hole, rolled the drum off the spoor, and picked up the battered exhaust line that had been ripped off the Toyota. After straightening the truck’s buckled shock spring with a sledgehammer, we limped off toward camp, Mox drawing deeply on a wrinkled fag.
I would have to fly Roy back to South Africa the next morning, so early that night, Delia and I collapsed onto our cots, and Roy bunked down on the dry spot he had been using on the floor of the supply tent. Mox had a brand-new tent of his own that we had brought from Johannesburg.
We were not quite asleep when lions began roaring from the airstrip. We jumped out of bed. Maybe it was the Blue Pride! But we had not seen them since Bones was shot, and since Rascal and one of the females had watched the shooting, we worried that they might no longer accept us.
At the airstrip, instead of the Blue Pride, two young males we had never seen before lay in the middle of the runway squinting at the spotlight, their blond, patchy manes like the peach-fuzz beard on a fifteen-year-old boy. They were carbon copies of each other, and we speculated that they were brothers. One had a distinct J-shaped scar on his right hip. Totally unconcerned with us, they began bellowing again, making quite a respectable racket.
We drove back to camp somewhat disappointed. As I flopped onto my cot I thought to myself, surely these two youngsters didn’t intend to take over the Blue Pride territory. They could never take the place of Bones.
16
Kalahari Gypsies
Mark
Like the river, we were free to wander.
—Aldo Leopold
IT WAS one thing to write the proposal, but quite another to actually find lions, put collars on them, and then track them over tens of thousands of square miles of Kalahari wilderness. January 1978 had come and gone by the time we had the plane and its fuel in camp. We had no idea how long it would take us to collar the lions, but we were racing against the coming dry season, when they would disappear into the vast bush savanna away from the fossil rivercourses, for eight months or more. Major international conservation interests had invested in our project, and now it was up to us to demonstrate that what we had set out to do was, in fact, possible. If we failed, we were not likely to get more financing.
Our plan was to immobilize and radio-collar lions and brown hyenas along the full length of Deception Valley, as well as some lion prides in the Passarge and Hidden Valley fossil river systems to the north. The immediate problem was how to find these roving predators in such a remote area and then get to them on the ground for the collaring. Our only chance of spotting them would be to catch them on the open grasslands of the riverbeds in the early morning.
Each dawn for the next six weeks, we roused ourselves for a quick bowl of uncooked oatmeal and powdered milk. Then, our pockets stuffed with sticks of biltong, we hurried to Echo Whisky Golf, standing cold and wet with dew in the pale dawn.
“Switches on, master on, throttle set.” Delia shivered behind the foggy windshield.
“Contact!” I spun the propeller and stepped back. A puff of white smoke, a sputter, and a roar—Echo Whisky Golf came to life.
Boeing, a springbok who used the airstrip as the center of his territory, pawed a spot on the ground, urinated on it to freshen his midden, and trotted casually to one side as we taxied into takeoff position. He had become so tame that we had to be careful not to run into him during takeoffs and landings.
On takeoff, camp flashed by and we could see Mox stoking the fire, smoke curling through the trees. We cruised slowly north above Deception Valley, our foreheads pressed against the side windows as we looked for lions on the fossil riverbed.
With Echo Whisky Golf, the days were gone when we groveled like turtles, slowly dragging the metal shell of our Land Cruiser laboratory and home wherever we went. Now that we could see beyond the next rise, our view of the Kalahari was no longer limited to a few square miles of savanna. We soared above the sinuous channel of the ancient river, casting our long shadow across the browns and greens of the sandveld at dawn and dusk. From the air we discovered and named new pans and oxbows—segments of fossil river channels cut off ages ago by ridges of shifting sands. Hidden Valley, Paradise Pan, Crocodile Pan—they had been there all along, lost beyond the dunes. Recently there had been heavy rains, and now the riverbed was dressed in green velvet, a sparkling necklace of water holes along her length.
From the beginning, Echo Whisky Golf made it plain that she did not like life in the bush. Her alternator burned out, and for more than two months, until we could get parts to fix it, I had to start the plane by hand. The engine would run on the current from its magnetos, but without electricity from the battery, we could not use the radio and our compass was out.
The Kalahari looked featureless and there was only one tiny area around camp we could recognize. We followed the fossil river valleys to keep from getting lost, but they were shallow and indistinct in places; at times dark cloud shadows, like inkblots, disguised them in the desert topography. As for the compass, we found out just how badly it was behaving on our first flight to Maun together: We arrived over Makalamabedi, instead, a village more than forty miles east of our course.
When flying far away from Deception, we always carried food and survival gear stowed in the plane’s aft baggage compartment. We seldom knew which direction from camp we would be, at any particular time, or how long we would be gone, and there was no one, other than Mox, with whom we could leave a flight plan. I was irritable much of the time, in those early days with Echo Whisky Golf, but now I realize how much stress I felt from flying an aircraft with so many mechanical difficulties in such a remote area. If we had gone down somewhere, our chances of rescue would not have been very good. And there was always the danger of holes. We often had to land and take off in tall grass, where a badger’s excavation, a fox’s den, or a springhare’s burrow could easily have broken off one of the plane’s wheels. Later, however, I learned a technique for spotting holes, by flying low while running my wheels lightly over the ground—“feeling” the surface before landing.
“Lions—there, in that tree island!” Delia shouted above the engine. I banked the plane steeply and we swept low over the flat-topped trees. Below us a pride of lions was sprawled near a hartebeest carcass about half a mile off T
au Pan on Hidden Valley. I throttled back and pulled flap. We skimmed the top of a nearby tree, and after Delia had dropped some toilet paper into its branches to mark the spot, I took a compass bearing on a big forked acacia on the pan, and we set course for camp.
We packed the truck with camping gear, food, water, darting equipment, and cameras. Delia then drove off in the direction of the lions. I watched the truck until it was lost in the wavering heat mirage; it was the first time she had driven into the Kalahari alone.
Several hours later, when she should have reached the general area of the lions, I took off and flew along the course she had taken, searching the savanna for the white speck of the truck below. I finally spotted it, crawling like a beetle through the bush. Though she wasn’t far from our rendezvous at the forked tree on the riverbed, Delia was off course. Unless she changed direction, she would miss the valley altogether. I dropped low and flew just above the truck, directly toward the tree. She stopped, took a compass bearing on the plane, changed course, and drove on. Satisfied she was going the right way, I flew to the trees where we had found the lions earlier that morning. The hartebeest remains were still there, but the lions had gone. I started making slow turns over the area, hoping to find the pride.
Delia arrived at the tree and began driving the truck back and forth along a relatively smooth section of the pan to make a landing strip. Then she walked up and down with a spade, filling in holes and knocking down the worst nodes of clay and the taller grass bases, which could damage the plane. When she was 300 yards from the truck and satisfied that the strip was safe, she turned to walk back to the Land Cruiser. Glancing up, she found the lions: They had moved from their carcass to the trees along the edge of the riverbed. She had been so busy filling in holes that she hadn’t seen them coming. Now, strung out in a line, they were headed straight toward her, the nearest one not fifty yards away and moving between her and the truck. With no other cover for miles around, she stood rooted to the ground. We could usually trust the Blue Pride, but these were strange lions, and this was almost certainly their first encounter with a human.
Cry of the Kalahari Page 26