Baggs scowled. “Exactly what is the purpose of your stay, did you say?”
“I’ll be helping with the upcoming elephant census.”
“Helping how, exactly?”
“I’ll be flying the plane.” I looked at his blank face. “You really haven’t heard from WIA yet, have you?”
“Sir Craig Phipps from the Joburg office?” Baggs spat.
“Yes. He placed me here on a month contract. Aside from the census, I could help out in other ways. Fly the area. Look for carcasses. Assess mortalities. I’m a biologist by training.”
“You’ll need ministry clearance before you can have access to any information from this office.”
“Of course. Craig has already requested it.”
Baggs eyed me suspiciously. “You do realize, Ms. Sohon, that we have a very different problem than East Africa. All well and good for them to keep burning tons of ivory in an attempt to convince the world to stop selling, but they don’t have any bloody elephants left. In southern Africa we are overrun with the buggers. And in many cases, if elephants aren’t seen as a benefit financially, we’d have bloody cornfields in the place of elephant habitat. The money made from legal ivory sales is vital to our conservation efforts. We have gone to great lengths to monitor the legal trade.”
“If we can’t stop the poaching and smuggling, what good is monitoring the legal trade?”
“We have a very good handle on the smuggling.”
“I’d like to ask you some questions about that.” I assumed he had been told about what I had seen on my way to Susuwe, as he seemed to get even more defensive.
“Questions? I need to see your clearance before I can answer any of your questions.” He shrugged. “Ministry rules.”
“Of course. I’ll make sure you get that as soon as possible.”
A slight breeze carried a pungent smell from the pile of rotting animal parts in the corner. I tried not to cough. “The WIA Hong Kong office had the DNA tested from the ivory confiscated in that last big shipment found in Singapore en route to Guangzhou. Some of the ivory was definitely from Zimbabwe, Angola, and Zambia. And Craig has reason to believe it is being run through the Caprivi. If we can stop traffic through this corridor, it would make a big difference, regardless of whether you are for or against the legal sale of ivory.”
“We’re talking a couple of tusks in the kind of busts we do around here. The bigger stuff is happening in East Africa, not here.”
“A lot of ivory can fit in the trunk of a car, you know.” I couldn’t resist the jab.
Baggs got up and paced the room aggressively. “Exactly what do you mean by that, Ms. Sohon? You said you were a pilot, not a bloody detective.” He pointed a finger at me. “Let’s get one thing straight. This is not a playground for American pilot-cum-reporters trying to win the Pulitzer. I don’t know what WIA thinks they’re up to in sending you here, but I know your type.” He hesitated and then growled, “You didn’t take any pictures, did you?”
“Pictures?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Last thing we need is an image of the crime scene on the front cover of The New York Times: ‘Zambian Witch Doctor Runs Amok in the Caprivi, Slaughtering Elephants and Stealing the Brains of Its Citizens.’ ”
“No, I didn’t take any pictures.” My cellphone was broken, and I had been too flustered to think about taking photos anyway. If a lion and the rangers hadn’t shown up, I assumed I would have recovered my composure enough to have done so—for Craig’s eyes only—but I broke my phone before that could happen.
“Bloody well not have.” Jon smoldered. “Listen, I’ve seen enough of you bloody Americans coming over to Africa to try to save us. You people and your big foreign aid budgets just make things worse.”
Baggs suddenly looked bored and sat down. He wiped his hands down his brow. “Bloody darkness,” he mumbled as he looked past me with faraway eyes. “Africa teeters on a precarious edge. She’s breathtaking and revolting—deadly and mysterious with an uncertain end—an end that will find us all in hell riddled with Ebola, I promise you.”
There was no reasoning with this man. I didn’t know what could have happened in his four decades of life to make him this cynical. I felt like a springbok lamb in the mouth of a sated jackal too stuffed to eat any more.
The mist vanished from his eyes as he stood up again, pulling a floppy cap down over his ears, making him look like a naïve boy, were it not for the carved lines of a complicated man’s face. He sighed. “Hopeless.” He looked at his watch and tugged down his uniform shirt jacket. “Pleasure chatting with you, but I must go now. I’m afraid I have a meeting with the governor.” He pointed to the three tusks next to his desk. “The game guards found the induna’s son burying these in his backyard last night.”
I looked at the tusks. “Shouldn’t they come in pairs?”
“Usually.” Baggs squinted. “Perhaps UNITA soldiers got there first.”
“UNITA? Didn’t they disband after Savimbi’s death?”
“Apparently no one told them that.”
“Where did he find them?”
“On their owners, I suspect.”
“Their owners?”
“You know, those charismatic megafauna wandering out there, remembering things.”
“Oh, you mean you think he’s a poacher?”
“What kind of degree did you say you had?”
“I have a Ph.D. in wildlife management. I specialized in population viability of large game in Yellowstone.”
“Yes, well, perhaps it would have been more useful to have had a degree from the school of hard knocks.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m sure the induna will turn the ivory over to Chief Bwabwata, who will no doubt have some claim that the property should remain part of the Bwabwata throne.”
I struggled to get out of my broken chair, trying to follow what he meant.
I could see that he sensed my confusion and was enjoying himself. “Yes, a chief’s privileges do tend to get in the way of law and order around here. Pleasure meeting you.” Baggs waved me out of his office.
I said good-bye to Draadie, knowing that Baggs was behind me. “Do you happen to know where I can find a working phone?”
“Post office.” Draadie spat a piece of pastry toward me as she spoke. “But they’re closed for month’s end.”
“Yes, they’re out delivering coffins.” Baggs giggled behind me.
I ignored him. “Anywhere else?”
Draadie shook her head.
Baggs followed silently behind me as I walked quickly out to the parking lot.
As I approached my car, I heard him snicker. “Nice choice!”
I slowed down, desperate for a change in the dynamic between us. “An old friend.”
Baggs walked over with a big grin on his face. “Your elephants will use this as a soccer ball! Von Scheffel would approve. But watch out for Biggles. He’s likely to take offense at anything made in Germany.” He looked at his watch again. “Hippo Lodge has a nice lady’s rump on their lunch special. Assume that’s where you’re staying?”
“No, Susuwe, actually.”
“Susuwe! Heart of darkness out there. I’ll give the manager at Hippo a ring. Far more suitable to sup at the swollen teat of the Zambezi. Lush lawns, guinea fowl at your feet, beautiful. All the foreign aid folks stay there.”
“No, really, thank you, but Susuwe will be fine. Closer to the elephants.”
Baggs squinted. “I’ll speak to the guys at WIA. See what we can do. And remember. Don’t get your hopes up….God’s country is full of broken dreams.” He got into his diesel 4x4 truck and drove off in a dusty plume.
Chapter 5
I opened the door of my baking-hot VW, rolled the window down, and jumped in. “Damn it!” The scalding vinyl seat seared the backs of my legs. I jumped up, grabbed an old shirt from behind the seat, and placed it under me. I sat back down, slammed the door, and started the engine.
&
nbsp; I had said all the wrong things in that office and needed a conversation with Craig to clear the air. My next stop would be the cellphone shop to purchase a new phone.
The Beetle bubbled to a noisy start and bumped through the deep potholes and out onto the main dirt road, which looked to be in a perpetual state of construction. African music pulsed through boom boxes, while women washed laundry along the side of the dusty road. Others carried bundles of firewood on their heads. Oxen tended by small boys pulled sleds along the sandy track next to a small section of tarred road. It seemed that the modern world hadn’t come knocking on this rural door just yet—except, of course, for the radios. And the abundance of litter—faded soda cans, rusted-out tins, old tire rubber, and an inordinate number of empty plastic bags. The beginnings of a cash economy blew about in the breeze.
I banged my hand on the steering wheel in frustration. Meeting Baggs was the wake-up call I’d needed. It was clear that he didn’t want a nongovernmental organization such as WIA interfering in his elephant business. He had to be pretending that he didn’t know how bad things were.
The center of Katima boomed and throbbed with African music, as if welcoming all of those paychecks that would be spent over the next two days. I found the cellphone store in a freshly built mall with a Pick ’n Pay and many storefronts with signs announcing that they were “coming soon.” The phone store was closed. It was three o’clock and stores were supposed to stay open until at least four. The sign on the door read “Closed for month’s end. Stock taking.”
I couldn’t spend the entire weekend without communication. I was going to have to find a working radio.
As I drove on, I saw a sign for a deli and was curious to see what they sold. It was tucked behind a second grocery store in the older part of town, the cancerous new sprawl budding out from the edges of the old center. The town was growing so quickly that there were no signs indicating which cluster of shops was which, or how to navigate the sandy track in order to find buildings that were behind buildings behind yet even more nondescript cement buildings.
I parked in front next to a short, portly Portuguese man scolding a boy in tattered clothes. He seemed oddly slow in manner, but he managed to grab the boy and duct-tape him to a pole outside the shop. He hung a sign on him with the word THIEF penned angrily in red.
The man sensed me behind him and turned around. His mood changed immediately from rage to intrigue. “Sorry, ma’am, just doing my part to keep the streets clean and the people honest.” He reached his hand out to me. “Alvares’s the name.”
“Hello. Catherine Sohon.” I reluctantly shook the man’s hand, trying not to seem flustered by the struggling youth in the background. “Is the deli in this building?”
“Right through here.” The man led me through the entrance. “Just opened up last week, in fact. The doc has everything flown in fresh from Italy.”
I thanked him and went off down an aisle, listening to him complain to the woman at the cash register about the robber he had just apprehended.
An inordinate amount of dust had already collected on the week-old shelves. I picked up a bag of tortellini and my mouth watered at the prospect until I saw that the bag was riddled with beetle larvae. I dropped the pasta and left the deli empty-handed.
Alvares called after me. “You should come around Hippo Lodge over the weekend. Nice lady’s rump on special.” He smiled.
Remembering Baggs’s recommendation, I turned around and smiled. “What qualifies it as a ‘lady’s’ rump?”
“Eight ounces instead of twelve. Excellent quality here in the Caprivi.”
“Thanks, I just might stop by,” I said, knowing that would be the last thing I’d want to do over the weekend. But given my one opportunity to call Craig, I knew I’d make an appearance there eventually—maybe after my reconnaissance flight first thing in the morning, since there wasn’t anything urgent I could report from the crime scene, other than what Gidean had told me about the witch doctor’s potential involvement. That and the fact that I may have some samples for genetic analysis, pending Baggs’s approval.
Outside, across the small sandy mall parking lot, was a giant, almost empty warehouse called the Dollar Store. As I entered I was greeted by what looked like several generations of a Chinese family. They were busily stacking shelves with merchandise of all kinds.
Plastic trinkets of dubious quality lined the vast shelving. Craig had told me that Chinese merchants were sprouting up successful businesses everywhere you turned in Africa and asked me to keep an eye on the Dollar Store shop owner. Although clearly profiling, Craig told me that the Namibian Major Crimes Directorate, or what he called the MCD, were suspicious of all Chinese shop owners and exporters, but they didn’t have any evidence of ivory smuggling to act on yet.
After poking around the rather uninteresting aisles, I decided I wasn’t likely to stumble upon anything of note at that moment. I needed to get to the hardware store for a bag of nails so I could hang things in my barracks. Nothing fancy like expanding screws or hooks, given the condition of the walls. Nails would be enough to hang my mugs to deter the cockroaches and keep my wet towel off the floor.
As I prepared to leave, I couldn’t help noticing Alvares standing at the back of the store talking to a Chinese man next to a door marked “Manager’s Office.” My eye was drawn to the heated exchange. The Chinese man was shaking a finger at Alvares. They both appeared very angry, but the Chinese man seemed to have the upper hand.
I casually sauntered down one of the side aisles, slowly approaching the office in the hope of catching the gist of their conversation. But just as I got close enough to hear, the two were interrupted by a worker. They went inside the office and closed the door. I ended up buying a straw hat and quickly leaving, heading to the hardware store.
At the hardware store, a cheery salesman reported that nails had been on back order for over a month. He suggested checking back in two weeks, when the next delivery truck was scheduled to arrive from Johannesburg. I made do with some screw hooks, hoping the rotting vinyl-covered pressboard would tolerate the three turns on the hooks. If so, they would be better than nails anyway.
When I left the building, I passed a lumberyard where a bustling assembly line was hard at work. The banging and clapping of nails into pine filled the air. I looked closer and got a chill when I realized that the assembly line was making coffins—many, many simple pine coffins of all sizes. Hence the run on nails. I couldn’t help wondering why so many coffins would be made all at once like this. Surely only one or a few coffins would be needed at any one time.
I checked my watch as I got back into my car. It was still early enough to stop by the airport on the way back to the ranger station. I wanted to check out the WIA airplane that was supposed to have arrived that morning. I had flown plenty of Cessna 182s but I wanted to see what condition it was in. And I was eager to see the area from the air the following day. I didn’t like to fly a census without doing a reconnaissance first.
Chapter 6
After an uneventful night and morning, I went to Mpacha airstrip and did a preflight inspection on the WIA Cessna. I walked around the plane, checking the tires, wings, struts, prop, and fuselage. I was pleasantly surprised that it was in pretty decent shape.
I pulled a stack of documents from a clear pouch that was attached to the cockpit wall. I scanned the airworthiness certificate, the radio station license, and made sure the registration certificate was current. There was a pink temporary registration, good for ninety days as of the previous week. Given the meager budget, I was surprised to see that Craig had just purchased this aircraft from a private tour operator based out of Maun.
I reviewed the operating limitations in the pilot operating handbook, as well as the document showing the current weight and balance settings of the aircraft. In a small aircraft, these settings were especially important, particularly in the wildlife business. I learned this when I had to carry the tusks from Shingwedzi, a big tusker t
hat was one of my study subjects in Kruger. I hadn’t seen him in some time and assumed he had passed away, as he had been getting thinner and thinner. We ended up flying over his carcass during a census. We were able to land in an open area nearby to collect his tusks.
He appeared to have died of natural causes, and based on the fact that he was on his sixth molar, I estimated him to have been about sixty-five. His tusks added what we estimated to be an additional two hundred pounds of weight to the aircraft, more at the back than front, and I had to recalculate the weight settings in order to take off and land safely.
I sat in the pilot seat and checked all the switches in the cockpit to make sure they were in the right position and switched the battery on to check the fuel gauge. Outside, under the wing, I used a small clear syringe to draw a little fuel from the wing-mounted tank and check the fuel quality. Once I was confident that everything was in order, I bounced down the runway and took off on my reconnaissance mission at one o’clock, a little later than I had expected, but I spent the time I needed to in order to get comfortable with this new set of wings.
Flying over clusters of reed-and-thatch villages surrounded by crops nestled within large tracts of forest, I realized just how few people lived in the region next to the park; most of the dwellings stood alongside the road and along the river with very little in between. From this height, I could also see the narrow swath of cleared vegetation that functioned as an international border ahead to my right—the cutline for Zambia.
I descended and banked left when I reached the shimmering river. The Kwando looked as though it wound on forever, flowing from Angola in the north down to the infinity of the delta in Botswana. Under the hot, cloudless sky, I followed the snaking river south for a bit, passing an oxbow lake with a herd of buffalos drinking along the sandy shoreline.
I descended farther and banked north as a large hippo lunged out of the water at me, displaying his formidable canines. After passing over more floodplain and open woodland, I came to a dense grove of acacia shading groups of elephants dozing in the heat of the day. There were so many elephants, I was counting in batches of twenties and fifties and got up to several hundred before the forest opened up and I was out over the floodplain again.
Ivory Ghosts Page 4