A Rock and a Hard Place

by George Zelt PhD

  We sat silent for a moment. African stories were like drawing a figure from a group of stars. You had to want to see it.

  “Do many Bushmen still exist in the swamp?” I asked the hunter. “Are they still nomadic?”

  “When I first came here fifty years ago, there were many, many more than now. Most of them have intermarried with the black people who arrived here after them. A few bands that I know of live to the northwest in the Tsodilo Hills, also called the Slippery Hills. It’s an island of rock that juts out of its sandy grave. The hills are a sacred place—a place where the Bushmen believe supernatural things happen. They think God created all animals there. It’s a very dry area, but springs and seep-like watering holes pop up from nowhere. The Bushmen honor that phenomenon religiously and seem to have settled there now.

  “I think,” he continued, “they would have great difficulty surviving if they had to migrate as they used to. They are a dying race, like the white hunters, and unable to adjust. This final stage comes after they have survived some four thousand years of being chased all over southern Africa by man, leopards, and lions and enduring a terrible climate.”

  “Did you hunt?” I finally asked.

  “For some fifty years I shot big game over much of southern Africa. I guided trophy hunters from all over the world and killed for ivory, too. It hasn’t been easy to hunt, though. In the late 1950s, foot-and-mouth disease broke out repeatedly, halting the cattle industry. In an effort to control the disease, veterinary surgeons had wire fences stretched over enormous distances. Water sources like the Boteti River were cut off. Masses of animals began to pile up before the fence, unable to reach the water. The timeless migration routes were blocked. The days of free-roaming wildlife in that area were finished. It wasn’t the white hunter but the damned cow who saw to that.

  “Cattle overburdened the grasses with regular feeding. Wildlife feed only a few times, if that, in a given area in one year, and then wander. In some areas the grasses have been eaten off and taken over by worthless weeds and thorn scrub.”

  Another environmental disaster caused by humans, I realized.

  “Still, enormous tracts of land remain unaffected,” he continued, “including large portions of the delta itself, which the government has made into game reserves.”

  “The Moremi Game Reserve3 in the delta,” Patrick chimed in.

  “Yes”—the hunter nodded—“and the Makgadikgadi Pans Game Reserve, Nxai Pan National Park, and, of course, to the south, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The old days are gone when I could roam at will. None of this stops the poachers, however. But I’ve had a good life. I’ve a wife or two, children here and there, and I’ve made enough money to live without hunting more. I also enjoy the odd drink.” Patrick understood and motioned for the old-timer’s glass to be filled.

  “I enjoy the silence here, the lack of problems,” he continued. “There are no thieves, and people share.”

  Marcus finished his beer and signaled for another round to include whiskey. “It sounds as if the animals go from one crisis to another.”

  “Only in rare moments can they can relax and feel safe with a full belly and ample water. If it weren’t for the danger and feel of hunger, though, they wouldn’t stay alert and alive.”

  Marcus downed his shot; he was getting quite plastered.

  He wiped his red beard with the back on his hand. “If an Australian bulldog ant is cut in two, a battle immediately ensues between the tail and head. A cockroach can be without a head for several days, and then it starves to death.”

  “An odd contribution, Marcus. What did you do on that farm? Chop animals up?” Patrick asked, leaning over the bar to see him as the rest of us chuckled.

  “Do you think Livingstone had much effect on the natives?” I asked before Marcus could answer.

  The old man shook his head. “But he opened up the route here for the traders and hunters who came and shot the animals. That certainly influenced the natives. They soon realized that ivory was worth beads, cows, and such objects they wanted. Livingstone’s main purpose was, as a missionary, to convert the natives to Christianity. He was no cultural leader, and I doubt he converted many people. Most here will tell you, including the missionaries themselves, that Victorian virtues such as thrift, one wife, and honesty were all—logically—avoided by the natives. Add this to the concept of resurrection and things like equality, and the black man was completely baffled and has basically remained so. Can you imagine an African chief being convinced that those he killed in battle might rise up again?”

  He struck a match and relit his pipe. “They probably thought the white man’s religion was just a trick to get them to give up their wives. Influence within the tribe was a way to survive, and if you had many wives and dependents, you had a better chance of making it. Also, many wives could grow more food, which meant more food for festivities. Then there were the associated gains. You could marry your children off to other headmen and possibly win their support in the process. As to being thrifty, they had to share some things, like grain and cows. It was expected. Equality was another problem. They didn’t like the idea of Livingstone trying to convince the average person he was as good as his chief. For all that, he wasn’t harmed by anyone. He was more a thorn in the side of the natives, and they were used to thorns. On the other hand, Stanley, looking for Livingstone, shot natives like animals.”

  The bottom line is that the white man measured the natives on the basis of European standards and laws. They had no interest in viewing them as they were with their own culture. Livingstone died at age sixty while searching for the source of the Nile River. His right-hand companion, Dr. John Kirk, came to the conclusion Livingstone was mad.

  I was fascinated that the local people apparently hadn’t changed over the years. “Have they learned anything from the white man?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Many of them travel south to work in the gold mines around Johannesburg. They come back with radios connected to car batteries, which they carry under their arms.”

  _______________

  3Known then as the Moremi Wildlife Reserve and Chobe National Park

  Chapter 16

  Into the Largest Delta in the World

  After taking a final pee at the bar, we stumbled into the sun outside, realizing we were about to penetrate one of the largest swamps in the world while somewhat intoxicated. Nevertheless, Patrick began filling our Land Rover with gas while Marcus began contaminating the immediate air around him with his own gas. His farts sounded as though air was burping from a truck tire.

  The vehicle’s white finish was covered with desert dust and our handprints as we staggered around, leaning on it. It looked like bizarre wallpaper. As Patrick poured water in the radiator then filled our water containers, I caught sight of Marcus gagging a few steps away.

  Climbing awkwardly into the Land Rover, Patrick started the engine, mumbling, “No problem with drunk driving here.”

  With Marcus facedown on the backseat, we followed the sand track to the border of the wetlands. Next to the wood and stone bridge we had passed before, a group of children were playing in the clear water. Their skin was very black and their teeth very white as they laughed and paddled amid patches of green reeds.

  Water lilies, with trailing stems below the surface angled in one direction, demonstrated a slow and gentle underwater current pushing at them. They open their petals in the morning as the sun rises and close them when darkness falls.

  We knew crocodiles were there. The children seemed to have no fear, although we knew from time to time one of them had been lost to a crocodile. It was a bit colder now, and the reptiles had a limited appetite when their metabolism slowed. The people lived with the threat, perhaps like Western people living with the possibility of a car accident.

  A shapeless old woman appeared, collecting Mopani worms from the Mopani trees next to our track. We stopped to watch; she peered into the backseat apparentl
y curious about Marcus. A plug of wood protruded through each of her ear lobes. The worms looked like finger-size caterpillars, and she had a small basket of them. She pinched one at the tail and squeezed out its yellow flesh as if it were toothpaste. The insect’s green innards slimed out on her two poorly manicured fingers; she held the carcass before her open jaws for detailed inspection.

  Just then Marcus sat up—she was blocking the sunlight—and looked directly into her mouth as she bit one and chewed. “Agggggg,” he moaned, then yanked on the door handle and puked outside.

  Patrick immediately drove away as the odor rose. “Can’t very well throw him out of his own Land Rover,” he grumbled. “Better to pull over and just go to sleep.”

  And so we did.

  * * *

  Morning came, and our eagerness returned as we gnawed on roasted corncobs purchased at the bar. Then we drove directly into the swamp.

  It was like entering another world, with trees brushing against the Rover, the demanding sun reaching us only in patches now. Patrick and I lay on a mattress on the roof rack of the Land Rover, surveying the surroundings, as Marcus, still not clear-headed but wanting to drive, moved forward slowly over the rough track.

  Then, as if an invisible forest curtain suddenly rose, they came. Like World War II kamikazes taking aim at ships, they descended on us in swarms: silent, light-footed tsetse flies. Each was the size of a corn kernel with wings. They had engulfed us unawares, until their painful red-hot needles stabbed into bare flesh. A black cloud of unrivaled passion, they attached to us like frenzied lovers. Exposed hands and faces were not enough for them, we soon realized—they even bit through protective clothing.

  “Give it stick, Marcus!” Patrick screamed, hanging downward, looking at our driver. “They’re tsetse flies!”

  We swatted at all angles, trying to protect ourselves.

  “Hell!” Marcus shouted as he pushed the gas pedal. The draft quickened, and the flies were unable to land—though some had already dug into our shirts and hair.

  “One is down my back!” Patrick cried as he twisted, trying to reach it.

  I hit him hard with my palm as we bounced along.

  “Shit, man!” he called, losing his balance and falling toward the edge of the roof. His arm dangled next to Marcus’s face.

  Marcus hit the brakes. “What the hell is happening? Is a monkey on the roof?”

  Patrick and I lurched forward as the Rover halted and the flies landed again.

  “There’s a monkey driving, for Chrissake!” Patrick yelled, still hanging over the side and holding on while being bitten by the flies. “Don’t stop, man, don’t stop!”

  Marcus, now also being bitten, hit the gas again, causing Patrick and me to jerk backward, and we were now barely able to hang on to the metal roof rack.

  “Keep going! Keep going!” Patrick yelled in agony, his face flat against the mattress. We sped forward just fast enough to keep the flies off and still negotiate the track.

  A mile or so later and rather suddenly, the flies stopped, as did Marcus. “Jesus, what was that about?” I said weakly. I looked at Patrick. We were lying flat and still holding on, for fear Marcus would race forward again.

  “If you mean Marcus, he seems to like the brake and gas pedals,” Patrick said weakly. “Otherwise, we passed through a fly belt. They spray the swamps for the fly but leave a protective perimeter.” He opened his eyes and slowly raised his head.

  Marcus got out and looked up at us; the red spots on his face meant he’d also been bitten. “Little savages,” he growled, then he gagged viciously several times.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. “Are you still sick?”

  “One flew into my mouth when I yelled up to you. It’s in the back of my throat.” He bent over, hacking.

  I jumped down and started slapping Marcus on his back to help him clear his throat. The flies weren’t dangerous, I told him, unless they carried parasites that cause the drowsy sickness. The parasites come with the blood they ingest from an infected host, and then they pass that on to whatever they bite next.

  The chances that we’d become infected were slim. There had always been controversy concerning spraying. If there were no flies, the local people would bring in cattle, which would eat everything and turn the land into a wasteland. Fences, buildings, and cultivated land were next. The tsetse fly helps Africa remain Africa. The fly belt is like a cattle fence.

  “It’s as if there’s a peanut in my throat,” Marcus grumbled, climbing on the roof.

  “I assume it’s dead?” Patrick asked.

  “What do you think? It’s shimmying up and down?”

  A bit later, as Patrick slowly drove along the ribbon-thin grass-covered track, I peered into a stand of tall Mopani trees we passed. There, with his trunk moseying up and down a tree, stood a huge elephant.

  “Look at that, Marcus!” I grabbed his sleeve and pointed. Neither of us had ever seen a wild elephant before. I tapped on the roof, and we rolled to a stop to watch the massive animal in silent awe. He was a marvelous piece of equipment, pulling branches down to feed. He pushed his massive head against a tree and uprooted it.

  “It’s as though he was nudging a stuck door open,” Marcus replied.

  Able to reach the tree’s branches now, the elephant began stripping them of leaves and bark using his all-muscle trunk as if it were a backhoe. He stuffed it all in his mouth and then turned to watch us. His ears stayed back, flat against his side, suggesting, I presumed, that he wasn’t overly concerned. He defecated without pause, and vapors rose from the pyramid pile—a monument to the deceased tree.

  I wondered how many seeds were in the pile and if a new tree would grow from it. That was one way the forest replaced the trees that the beast knocked over.

  “He seems relaxed,” Marcus suggested, observing the steaming pile.

  “He has learned to eat and shit at the same time, unlike most of us,” Patrick whispered up to us.

  “It’s remarkable there’s no fence around him,” I said quietly. “He is free, absolutely free.”

  “An elephant his size has to eat five hundred pounds of greenery a day,” Patrick whispered up to us. “He doesn’t digest all of it. That’s why he’s crapping so much.”

  “Why don’t you leave him a few of your old potatoes?” Marcus suggested. “They might even taste okay to him after a meal of bark and leaves.”

  “Why not leave him your underpants, Marcus? There’s probably something green growing in them.”

  Patrick started the engine. It sounded curious in the forest world, like a clashing of cymbals in church on Sunday. The elephant’s ears came forward a bit as we crept away. “I hope he doesn’t chase us,” I said to Marcus. “They can run about twenty, twenty-five miles per hour, and with his long trunk and us up here, we would be like low-hanging fruit.”

  An hour later, as we turned a corner, we saw the large backside of a massive, armor-plated black rhino ambling down our track, almost prancing with power. Patrick immediately cut the engine, and we stayed still. The black rhino, we all knew, was an inquisitive, irritable, dumb, and excitable animal that will charge at the slightest provocation. Some say that an earful of ticks will drive the animal mad; and it won’t run from an enraged elephant as all other animals do.

  We lay quietly, watching, wondering what he would do. He solved this by shuffling partially around and looking in our direction. Peering over his thick horn, turned upward like an erection, his accentuated hard barrel of a belly swayed to a stop. He couldn’t see more than fifteen or so paces ahead of him. The breeze was in our face.

  “He’s blinking and thinking, like an old boxer that’s been hit too many times,” Marcus whispered.

  “He can hear us,” Patrick added.

  I wondered, lying on the roof rack, if my friend had a plan should the great rocklike hulk turn and charge us. The rhino was like a small locomotive, and we were a carriage on his tracks. Nothing would turn him once his whistle b
lew.

  He could run some thirty, thirty-five miles per hour at top momentum, I figured. That might be our maximum rate, too, on this pitted and twisting track . . . and we would still have to turn the Land Rover around before we could try to get away. Not enough time? Patrick wouldn’t play chicken with the monster, would he, and try to make the beast back down? I looked at Marcus and he at me.

  “My Land Rover,” he said with wide eyes.

  Oh shit, Marcus was thinking the same thing—rhinos do not back down. No matter how tightly we hung on, we would rocket off the top if the rhino hit us.

  Five minutes passed with no movement except the rhino turning his head slowly from side to side as his little eyes stared at the car, wondering . . . Then he slowly turned, lowered his head, defecated digested bark and twigs, and moved off into the trees.

  “I think he forgot about us,” I said.

  “He has a small brain,” Patrick yelled up to us.

  “What did you plan on doing if he came for us?” Marcus called down, partially hanging over the side. “Beep the horn over and over and flash the headlights?”

  “Probably just turn on the windshield wipers and wait until you started gagging again. That would turn anything,” Patrick, sticking his head out his window, yelled back.

  We continued. Sudden movements flashed in the forest as hoofed animals and others foraged.

  In the 1970s, there were some crude, ill-defined areas in the forest for travelers who wished to camp. We settled down in one rough clearing for a peaceful evening of frying steaks.

  Our campfire was tiny compared to the one we had on the Makgadikgadi Pans. The shadowy forest canopy made it seem even less significant as it hung black and thick, obscuring starlight. The rising smoke appeared ghostlike when wind rustled the trees. Light melted away a mere step from the fire.