The Sands of Kalahari

by William Mulvihill

  Africa was his home, perhaps the home of all men. He had been drawn to it out of some desperate need to see it, to look upon the face of his people, to smell, to feel, to touch the great land of his origin.

  “I’d like to dig down in this sand,” he said to the others. “I bet we’d find fossils, old bones, skulls, tools maybe.” He held a fistful of the fine sand and let it run through his long brown fingers.

  O’Brien grunted. “If you feel like digging, dig up some lizards for us.”

  “The earliest men lived around here,” Smith said. “All over this part of Africa. They’ve found bones and skulls of men and of those who came before men.”

  Grimmelmann nodded. He had seen fossil bones.

  “Missing links?” O’Brien asked. He lay prone in the sand, head toward the fire, eyes closed.

  “No,” Smith said. “Real links. Man-apes or ape-men; something between animal and true man.”

  “Like the Java man maybe,” O’Brien said. He had a vague memory of something he read in a college textbook.

  “No,” Smith said. “The Java man and the Neanderthal and the rest were men. Real men. These African skulls they’ve found represent something in between. They are only part human.”

  “Brains like ours?” Bain asked from his bed.

  “No,” Smith said. “Bodies like ours.”

  “I thought intelligence came first,” Grace said.

  “It couldn’t come until we had hands,” Smith told her. “Until we stood upright and used tools. The brain developed afterwards.”

  “I always thought it was the other way around,” O’Brien said.

  Bain worked himself closer to the fire. “One thing that I’ve wondered about,” he said to Smith, “is this: Why didn’t some of these in-between characters survive, why aren’t some of them still around? What happened?”

  Smith smiled. “Remember, I’m no expert. But I’d say that they were killed off, exterminated by the earliest men.”

  “Why?” Grimmelmann asked.

  “Because they were close enough biologically to inhabit the same area, compete for space and food. They fought and man was the victor.”

  “In most cases,” Bain added.

  “In most cases,” Smith agreed smiling. “It’s possible that in some localities whole groups of early men were wiped out by the wilder and more vicious man-apes.”

  They were silent for a few moments thinking about it.

  “That’s one explanation,” Smith said. “It might account for the great gulf between man and even his closest living relatives, the apes, say, the other anthropoids. All we have left of our past is a few bones and skull fragments, and some of the really important ones were found not too far from here.”

  “This is an old place, then,” Grace said.

  “Yes,” Smith told her. “Very old.”

  Bain cleared his throat. “According to you, our real edge over the baboons, say, is physical rather than mental.”

  “It’s the big difference,” Smith said, nodding. “The decisive difference. The brains, the intelligence of the baboons, is stymied by their bodies. They have no real hands so they can’t use tools, fire, weapons. They went up a biological blind alley. We didn’t. We kept getting smarter.”

  “And then turned on the forms we evolved from and wiped them out,” Grimmelmann stated.

  “How terrible,” Grace said.

  “It might have been necessary,” Smith said. “We had to fight our way up, fighting and destroying anything that stood in our way. That’s how we became human.”

  “And inhumane,” Grimmelmann broke in.

  “Exactly,” Smith said. “The paradox called man. The terrible aggressiveness that created us might soon destroy us.” They were silent for a time, each lost in private thought. “These early men,” Grace said. “And later ones. How are we different from them?”

  “We’re smarter of course than the real antique boys,” Smith said. “But no smarter than people in the last Ice Age. The important difference, unlike the one with the animals, is not physical as much as it is cultural. We have laws, codes, ethics. We are concerned with one another.”

  “Some of the time,” Bain said. He thought of Sturdevant. “Some of the time,” Smith repeated in agreement, nodding and smiling.

  “Hell,” O’Brien said, sitting up. “I’m going to bed.”

  He stood up and yawned, moved into the darkness.

  O’Brien trapped a lizard and killed it with a long stick, a hard dry limb from one of the thorn trees that grew in the sandy part of the canyon.

  He picked up the dead reptile by its long tail and studied it for a long minute. There seemed to be different species and the one he’d killed was the most common. The head and body were together only two or three inches long but the tail was closer to six inches. The back and upper parts were light brown, mottled with a deeper hue, and four narrow lines of reddish-orange ran down its back. Its sides were creamy yellow. It was the kind Grimmelmann had roasted on a splint and eaten.

  It was snakelike. He flung it away from him and it fell and lay belly-up in the sand. He couldn’t eat one now; he wouldn’t eat one. The melons and the water were enough and with any luck he might shoot something soon. There were big animals somewhere, animals that came to the pool and drank, gemsbok and zebra probably. It was just a matter of time… .

  He walked away toward the pool, tried to find some of the tracks that they had not obliterated. Zebra were supposed to prefer drinking at night. Maybe he should come back and wait in the darkness. A big animal would give them enough meat for several days, all they wanted—thick, juicy steaks grilled over the fire.

  A knot of hunger gripped him. He walked to the pool and drank as much as he could, lying face down, drinking the water from his cupped hand. He felt faint; his head ached. The dull hunger pain was still with him and he cursed silently.

  He stood up and checked his rifle, began walking toward the opposite ridge. They had to have meat or die.

  Hours later, in the middle of the afternoon, he climbed out of the canyon and walked along on the ridge. He could look down on the canyon now and across it to the cliffs they had descended a few days ago. He thought of the view from the peak and saw himself standing on the middle finger of the great black hand that stretched across the sand. The ridge was two hundred yards wide here, a difficult maze of upended slabs and loose shale that was dangerous near the edge.

  He made his way across the ridge and studied the third canyon. None of them had been down into it; there was this canyon and yet another that they had not been in. And they had not yet explored the base of the central mass or the desert side of the most distant ridge.

  Something moved below. He reached slowly for his binoculars and focused on it. A baboon was scowling at him, jabbering excitedly. He swung the glasses around and saw more of the dog-headed, apelike animals. He had frightened them; they looked toward him and although the distance was too far for human eyes O’Brien knew that they saw him easily. He waved his hand and they scowled and moved around and jabbered to each other.

  He found a place to sit and studied them for a long time. They did not forget him. They watched him too but they gradually relaxed and went on with their foraging. They dug in the ground under the dead grass and turned over loose stones. One of them pulled something from the ground that resembled a carrot. What did baboons eat? He would have to ask Grimmelmann. Did they eat tsamma melons? Was the carrot-like thing fit for humans?

  He counted them several times but they were in constant motion and he knew that his figure of twenty-five was not correct but only close.

  He got up and walked along the ridge toward the peak, looking for a way down. Within a half hour he decided against it; it was too late in the day; he was too tired. He turned back, found the way down into the home canyon and walked across the wide dry plain.

  Grimmelmann was sitting in the shade in the cave entrance.

  “Why are there baboons here?” O’Brien a
sked. He walked past the old man and put his rifle in the niche and came out again. He sat down and took off his boots and let the sun dry his sweaty feet.

  “Why are we here?” the German asked.

  “Because of an accident.”

  The old man nodded. “The same, perhaps, for the other things here. It is not an ideal spot for baboons. The food supply is limited. But it might have advantages too. I do not think there are leopards here and they are the worst enemy of the baboon. Perhaps it is a good place after all…

  “What do they eat?” O’Brien asked.

  “Anything and everything. And I should imagine the ones here eat what baboons in better areas would not touch.”

  “Do they eat melons? Those cucumbers you showed us? The tubers?”

  “Ja,” Grimmelmann said. “All of those. They eat what we can eat and many things we can’t. They are better adapted.”

  “The hell they are,” O’Brien said. “We’re smarter, tougher.”

  “In what way?”

  “I’ve got a gun,” O’Brien said. “They haven’t.”

  “They don’t need guns,” Grimmelmann said.

  “They do now,” O’Brien smiled.

  “I do not understand …”

  “I’m going to kill them,” O’Brien said. “Wipe them out.”

  The old man rubbed his chin and nodded to himself.

  “Sturdevant told me that you can’t eat them,” O’Brien said.

  “I suppose he must be right,” Grimmelmann said. “I never thought of it. They are so human-like … but of course people eat monkeys. I do not know. I do not think I could eat one; not at this point anyway. I see it as something close to cannibalism.”

  “My idea is just to shoot them,” O’Brien went on. “If they eat what we eat they are competitors. I figure there’s only so much food and we might as well have it. Why let the apes eat it when we can stop them?” He looked sharply at the other man. “I can see you don’t like the idea.”

  “I don’t,” Grimmelmann told him.

  “Why not?”

  “I do not like to see slaughter. I have seen enough. All my life there has been killing … I am sick of it.”

  “But this is self-preservation,” O’Brien said.

  “All killing is.”

  “Do you want to die here because the baboons ate what you could have eaten?”

  “No. I want to live. I want to survive and die on my brother’s farm. But I do not want to kill these animals. It is murder.”

  “It’s war,” O’Brien said.

  “I do not approve,” Grimmelmann said.

  The big man got up and went into the cave.

  Grimmelmann watched the evening come, felt the cool air. There was something wrong with all of them, some hunger within them that was unappeased, some weakness or shame. They had somehow failed as people and the hand of fate had given them a chance to find themselves in the purity of time and space that was the desert, the black mountain.

  O’Brien. There was a terrible thirst in him for something he had never found, a seeking that had driven him to Africa.

  There were reasons why all of them were on the plane. Bain was an alcoholic despite his good brain and good manners, a wandering, homeless drunk. Sturdevant was part of the whole dirty mess of South Africa, a transporter of black flesh for the new slavery of the mines. The young Mrs. Monckton was unhappy; she was alone, unhappy, without love. They might find what they sought here, away from the distraction of civilization; there was nothing trivial here, nothing to divert.

  Evening came and they ate around the outside fire. Grace Monckton had made a soup. She filled Sturdevant’s copper kettle with water and added, with Grimmelmann’s approval, various things that they had found during the day of foraging. A smooth oily root that the old man tasted first, a half cup of grass seed, a withered narras cucumber. She boiled this and when it cooled it tasted better than warm water. They ate melons and took turns drinking the weak soup from the kettle.

  O’Brien told them about the baboons, about his plan to exterminate them. The others listened and nodded.

  “Whatever you decide won’t change things,” Grimmelmann said. “You will not bother them too much.”

  “How’s that?” O’Brien asked. He saw the old man smile and it made him angry.

  “You can’t wipe them out,” the German said. “They are too intelligent, too fast. When they learn that you can kill them at long distance they will stay out of range. You will only wear yourself out. The baboon is too smart to allow himself to be exterminated. Do you know that the Egyptians used them to perform menial tasks such as gathering wood? That they were only replaced when war prisoners became easier to secure? Their intelligence is almost human. One of the Egyptian gods was a baboon.”

  “You better forget it,” Bain said. “Save your energy and the ammo for something better.”

  O’Brien smiled and let the subject drop.

  When Pearl Harbor came he was halfway through college, restless, failing two subjects, playing football. It was a big, mediocre university which had been founded in the closing years of the last century by a half-dozen self-made intellectuals and scholars backed by some of the big mining fortunes of California. It was a success. In the raw, half-frontier days of the early 1900’s it instructed, educated and refined two generations of Western elite and they had gone forth enlightened and proud.

  But the First World War ruined the university. The anti-Boche propaganda found a target in the core of the school and dozens of the best teachers were forced out. A few years later many others were harried and forced to resign because of the Red Scare. The complexion of the institution changed; liberalism and inquiry fled, to be replaced by regionalism and rote. When football came it achieved national recognition for the first time.

  He went there for two reasons. His grandfather had donated a quarter of a million dollars to it in the early days, and he wanted to play football. There was no need for him to study because his family was worth twenty million dollars; they owned newspapers and ranches and urban real estate and a small percentage of Standard Oil. And he didn’t want to go east. He hated cities and good clothes and books. He hated other rich people. He stayed in California and went to the big university and played football; he took all the snap courses and wore dirty sweat shirts and old slacks. He sometimes went for days without shaving. He was a fine athlete.

  He enlisted in the Marines the day after Pearl Harbor.

  They shipped him east: to boot camp on Parris Island and then to Quantico, where he was turned into an officer. For the first time in his life he lived in an environment that was all-satisfying because it was totally competitive, wholly physical; where the weaklings were weeded out and sent away; where the hardest became leaders. He finished OCS at the top of his group and was sent to the Solomons.

  He had a rare quality for a junior officer. He was a creative soldier. Within the framework of authority he exercised a special autonomy over his men; he saved them and protected them. They mistook it for love and returned it with a fanatical devotion. He sensed when an order to advance was ill-advised and doomed to fail and he held back until the edge of danger had been blunted. At other times he acted on his own intuitions and once probed so deeply into the enemy area that a general advance was ordered, resulting in a great saving of lives and time.

  He was wounded once and spent a restless week in rear echelon sitting in a makeshift hospital, staring at the sagging green canvas overhead. He went back and led a night patrol to the edge of a Jap airfield and won the Silver Star. In the final big battle he became company commander and was wounded again by a mortar shell.

  There were other campaigns, other islands, long years of dazzling white sand and spidery mangrove roots and tender coral. He remembered some things more than others: dead gyrenes floating together with the gulls flying overhead, Japs in the jungle night yelling obscenities about Babe Ruth and Roosevelt, the first prisoners who looked pathetic and silly, the Jap o
fficer he’d shot who turned out to be an ex-Californian.

  A world of light and dark, dead and living, retreats and advances. He turned down a promotion, a staff job. He stayed where he was until the war ended. Company commander. The best in the division.

  Long before dawn, while it was still cold and black, O’Brien got up silently, took his rifle and walked out of the cave.

  The old German was a fool. The baboons had to be wiped out. They were competitors.

  He was a hunter and they did not understand him; they did not know what hunting was, the waiting, the planning, the thinking. They did not know… .

  The rifle reassured him in the darkness, the wonderful feel of it, the balance, the potency. A beautiful rifle that he had cleaned carefully the day before, loaded now with clean bright ammunition waiting to seek out and kill at long range.

  He was going to shoot a baboon and eat it. Smith’s open disgust at the idea did not make sense. If one ate lizards to survive, then one could eat baboon meat. This was no time to be squeamish.

  There was an excitement in him, something he did not fully understand but which exhilarated him. The mountain was a great challenge; it could kill him. Everything else had been easy. Football, the Marines, everything; even the war had been easy because you weren’t alone, your fate was tied up with too many others and the element of luck was too great. Here it was all in the open. There was the mountain and the desert and him.

  Light streaked the sky. Perhaps thousands of years ago men walked across the valley at dawn with throwing sticks and flint-headed spears; the men who had made the flints they found, they were hunters and then the land must have been different, fertile and filled with game as the Sahara had once been. Prehistoric men. But that would be the wrong term, for all the men who had ever lived and hunted in the valley were without history—the flint makers and the Bushmen and the Bantu if they had ever come. They were all wild hunters without a written language or the time to toy with symbols and invent one, savage men who spent all their time gathering food. Like them.