Kalahari

by Jessica Khoury

  FIVE

  For a while we walked only to the sound of grass crunching beneath our feet, but as the sun rose higher, the birdsong swelled around us. Shrikes and sparrows twittered in the low brush, while hunting goshawks, their pale bellies flashing in the sunlight, cut the sky above. We came across the tracks of aardvarks, honey badgers, antelope, and a lone leopard, but whatever creatures lay ahead of us, they must have heard us coming and disappeared. I was used to walking silently in order to get close to the wildlife, but the five behind me walked with all the stealth of an elephant herd. Not that I minded. The fewer critters we met, the fewer bites and scratches and stings we’d have to deal with.

  The Cruiser tracks were not too difficult to follow. They led west, curving now and then to avoid the larger trees but plowing straight over the smaller bushes, which the vehicle’s bumper would have crushed as it hauled itself forward. The resilient plants simply sprang up again, but the broken twigs around them were a sure sign that Dad had gone this way.

  About an hour into our hike, Sam went still and held up a hand. The others froze. My heart leaped into my throat and I scanned the way ahead, dreading that I’d see poachers armed to the teeth bearing down on us.

  But Sam only pointed to a stand of camel thorn acacias that had retained their dry brown leaves through winter. A pair of giraffes were grazing there, their long, graceful tongues stripping the leaves away regardless of the thorns.

  Kase began snapping pictures. Sam turned to me with a wide, goofy grin.

  “Giraffes!” he said in a loud whisper.

  “Ya think?” Avani muttered behind us, but he ignored her.

  We stood for several minutes watching the pair. Everyone—even Miranda—stared with wide eyes, mouths open, expressions alight. Sam most of all. You’d have thought he was seeing angels fly out of the clouds.

  “Come on,” I growled, and the others stared at me. My surliness was completely undeserved and probably rude, but we weren’t here to sightsee, not anymore.

  “I’ve never seen a giraffe before,” said Sam distractedly.

  “Not even at a zoo?” asked Avani, looking askance at him.

  “Never been to one.” He looked caught in the midst of a dream.

  As we neared the giraffes, they picked up our scent and reeled back in alarm, taking off at a run. Their long legs and loping gate made it appear that they ran in slow motion, and despite their height, they disappeared quickly into the bush. It was as if they’d never been there at all.

  “Wait!” said Sam, throwing out an arm to stop me. “There’s one more.”

  A bit belatedly, a small calf trotted out of the trees and stopped dead in front of us. Its long legs—it was already taller than any of us—splayed wide and the calf snorted, its thick fringe of eyelashes quivering over huge brown eyes as it studied the six creatures who had interrupted its family grazing.

  Sam let out a breath, and his face lit up with that loopy grin again. Even Miranda was smiling, her hands pressed to her lips. Joey, like an idiot, began clucking and calling to the calf, which only startled it into motion, and it raced off to join its parents.

  “Moron,” said Avani in a low voice.

  “Oh, come on. What’s the matter, Canada, did they confiscate your sense of humor at the airport?”

  “You’re so not funny.”

  The giraffe incident seemed to have shaken the silence out of them, and they began chattering like a troop of baboons. What had begun as a risky trek into the wilderness was feeling more like a glorified field trip, with me as the overly stern teacher. I think the others had lost the sense of danger, perhaps unable to believe they were really threatened by anything worse than warthogs and porcupines. Except for Sam, they hadn’t heard the tone in Dad’s voice that had made my blood turn cold; they couldn’t understand that my fear stemmed not only from the gunshots I thought I’d heard, but also from my memory of Mom’s death. It had been one thing to imagine Dad in danger; to know he was in danger was a whole new level of dread.

  The day was comfortably warm, and I could have walked for hours fueled only by my concern for Dad and Theo, but the others began to lag. First Avani, then Kase, then everyone was stopping to catch their breath. Reluctantly, I called a halt.

  “Where are we?” asked Sam.

  We were in a spot that looked like nearly any other in the Kalahari; the landscape out here could be dangerously monotonous, devoid of landmarks by which you could orient yourself. I had a map in my backpack, and I pulled it out and spread it on the ground.

  “We’re west of the camp,” I replied, circling an area on the map. “And a little bit south.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The sun. And the nests.” I pointed to a nearby Terminalia tree, at the pod-like nests of woven grass that hung from the branches. They looked like Christmas tree ornaments, some of them messy globs woven by the younger birds, others tightly knit orbs made by the expert weavers—the latter were more likely to attract females. “They indicate the compass points, and I’ve been keeping an eye on them while we’ve walked.”

  “What are they?” asked Sam, holding up a hand against the sun as he stared at the nests.

  “White-browed sparrow weaver nests,” said Avani, before I could say a word.

  I frowned. “No, actually. The sparrow weavers make those bushy nests, pushed back into the branches. Like those over there.” I pointed to a nearby wattle tree, its branches thick with bundles of grass. “The hanging nests are made by southern masked weavers.”

  “Um . . . pretty sure you’re wrong,” said Avani.

  “Pretty sure I’m not,” I muttered. As she consulted her guidebook, I continued, “They build them in the lee side of the tree, safe from the wind. The wind here blows from the east, so the nests are on the west side of the tree.”

  They considered this thoughtfully for a moment.

  Then Joey said, “They look like balls.”

  “You can’t be serious,” Miranda sighed, burying her face in her hand.

  “Dude, don’t they look like balls?” Joey looked to Sam for support, but Sam just looked away, shrugging.

  “I’m just saying,” said Joey, “I mean, we were all thinking it, right? Right, guys?”

  We walked on, and he gave up badgering us for a response. I glanced at Avani and noticed she’d shut her guidebook and was pointedly avoiding my gaze, her lips pinched together.

  I watched carefully every time someone took a drink of water or ate a muesli bar. I hated to be a tyrant, but we couldn’t afford to have anyone run out. I’d made each of them take as many bottles of water as they could carry, and we’d split the muesli bars between us. We each had five—enough for one, maybe two days. But it was the water that worried me most. The Kalahari climate was so dry you could almost feel the air sucking the moisture from your body, and our bodies each needed at least a gallon of water a day to stay hydrated out here.

  The sun rose; the sun fell. As it began to sink toward the horizon ahead of us, the trees turned into black silhouettes. I took out the radio from time to time to call Dad, but I heard nothing in reply. The silence did little to soothe my nerves. I didn’t say it to the others, but I knew we should have found something by now. Dad had said he was fifteen miles from the camp. We were approaching that fifteenth mile now if we hadn’t passed it already, but there was no sign of Dad, Theo, or the poachers besides the monotonous tire tracks. Dismayed, I began to rule out the possibility that he was on his way back to the camp, safe and sound. If he were, we’d have met up with him by now. He could have gone back by another route, I told myself. But my hope was soon swallowed by my mounting dread. My thoughts spiraled like water down a drain, circling and circling only to inevitably end at the same conclusions: He and Theo were either injured and unable to radio, captured . . . or dead.

  As evening grew closer, I knew we would have to sto
p soon to set up camp, but I pressed on, telling myself, Just a few more steps, just to that tree, just a little farther. . . . Then, right when I was about to call it a night, Dad’s tracks changed.

  At first, my heart leaped with relief: The tracks had doubled, almost as if Dad had turned back and driven toward camp. But when I bent down to look closer, I saw that both sets of tracks led in the same direction—and the second, fresher set did not belong to the Land Cruiser. I traced it back until I found where it branched away, leading north. This must have been where Dad found the poachers.

  Or . . . no. This is where the poachers found Dad.

  My skin turned to gooseflesh as a chill ran through me. They were following him. I hadn’t been certain of it from his garbled message the night before, but seeing it written so plainly in the sand was like dreaming about a monster only to have it later appear in the flesh. It gave physical form to my worst fears. I realized I’d still been holding out hope that Dad’s message had been a mistake, and that even now he’d be back at the camp wondering where we were. Now I knew it was a lie I’d been clinging to, and that he’d definitely run into trouble.

  “Sarah?”

  I turned to see Sam making his way toward me.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, his brow furrowing.

  I pointed to the tracks.

  “See these prints?” I circled a small, almost imperceptible line of impressions with my finger. “These are korhaan and sparrow tracks from this morning, when the birds come down from the trees to look for food. Under those are these brown hyena prints, crossing over and under the tire tracks. The hyenas are nocturnal, so that dates the vehicle at late last night, about the time Dad called.”

  Sam looked up at me. “You can tell all that?”

  “Bushmen are the best trackers in the world,” I said. “I learned from them.” I bent low to the sand, squinting at the faint impressions. “There aren’t any tracks between my dad’s truck and the one following him, which means they were close on his tail, but not so close that he’d see them yet. They were following slowly, maybe waiting to see where he was going before . . .” I stopped, shook my head.

  “Before they caught up to him?” Sam asked gently.

  “And when they did . . . Sam, what if those were gunshots we heard?”

  “Do you really think they’d try to kill them?”

  “To protect themselves, yes.” Though that was an extreme measure, even for poachers. “Or maybe they only wanted to scare Dad off. The shots could have been to threaten him, nothing more, like an elephant flapping its ears to scare away a predator. It’s just for show.”

  “Makes sense. We’ll find him. Look how far we’ve come already.”

  “Not far enough.”

  Sam said nothing, just studied my face with his green eyes. His hair—the same color as the golden Kalahari grass—was tangled and windblown, shaggy like the mane of a young lion coming into his prime.

  The others grumbled at having to resume our hike so soon after we’d stopped, but I pressed on relentlessly, doubling our pace. With the spoor of two vehicles to guide me, it was easier to track, so I focused on speed. With each step, my dread grew until I felt like I was dragging it behind me. I replayed his leaving in my head as though somewhere in the memory I could find a sign that everything would be all right.

  I noticed another set of prints had picked up the trucks’ tracks and followed them as relentlessly as I was. These prints confused me: They belonged to an adult male lion. He was alone, and his prints were deep and elongated, accompanied by a spray of sand behind each one, which told me he had been running, and had been following the vehicle tracks yesterday. Strange. Male lions are notoriously lazy, and if they aren’t hunting or mating, they’re almost always sleeping in the shade. This one wasn’t pursuing prey—there were no other animal tracks in front of his. Why was he following the vehicles’ tracks, and with such haste? It didn’t make sense.

  I remembered what Dad had said when he’d taken off after the poachers—they were hunting a white lion. Was this the lion? The tracks would make sense if the poachers had been pursuing the animal, but I was certain that the lion had come after the trucks, as if he were pursuing them. It should have been the other way around: Dad following poachers following lion. Instead, it was lion following poachers following Dad. No matter how I looked at it, the order of prints just didn’t seem to add up to any reasonable explanation.

  Reluctantly, I stopped just as the sun began to drop in the sky. It hung above us as if tempting us onward, a prize that would always be out of reach.

  But as the others sat down and groaned in relief, I called for them to get up again. My eyes had fixed on the ground, and my pulse sped from what I saw written in the sand.

  “You’re a machine,” complained Joey. “How are you not dead from exhaustion?”

  “Look,” I said, pointing at the ground.

  They all stared at me blankly. Frustrated, I knelt and pressed my hand to the tracks.

  “My dad finally realized they were following him. Right here, do you see it? He accelerated and so did they.” I stood up and jogged ahead, eyes scanning the sand. “He began swerving, probably trying to go head-on with them, but they stuck close to his tail.”

  I wove in and out of the brush, my eyes reading the prints as easily as if they’d been words on paper. “Look at this! He tried reversing into them, but they swerved around and—” I froze, my eyes fastened on a Terminalia tree. Woodenly, I put out a hand and touched the trunk, rubbing my thumb over a jagged scar in the bark.

  “This is where they shot at him,” I whispered. The bullet hole was too neat to have been from my dad’s gun. This looked like the mark of something deadlier, something intended to kill people, not animals—maybe an assault rifle or a pistol. I remembered the popping sounds that had come over the radio to drown out Dad’s voice—gunfire after all, and not static as I’d hoped. This must have been where Dad called me.

  “But they missed,” said Sam. “Right?”

  “I don’t see any blood,” I said, my voice shaking.

  “Let’s keep going,” he said.

  The lion’s tracks were everywhere too. It seemed confused by the tangle of car tracks and had padded this way and that.

  “So weird,” I muttered. “It’s tracking them like a bloodhound.”

  I grabbed my flashlight, though I wouldn’t need it for another hour or two, and set off after the tracks, telling the others to wait and keep an eye out. The possibility of us finding the poachers instead of finding Dad was becoming a growing problem. If they’d caught up to Dad—I didn’t want to consider it, but I knew for our own sakes I had to—where would they go next? Would they suspect us to be out here, or would they think Dad and Theo were alone? If they suspected Dad had radioed someone, would they go so far as to search for us? The thought made me feel sick. But I couldn’t imagine them wasting more time out here, so far from the rhino and elephant herds they no doubt were hunting. They could be a hundred miles away by now, across any of four different national borders, if they weren’t still hunting Dad and Theo. No, the greatest danger to us now was the bush itself, and that at least was a danger I felt somewhat qualified to handle.

  Sam caught up to me, panting, and wordlessly stayed by my side as I zigzagged through the bush, my eyes pinned to the ground.

  “I figured two pairs of eyes were better than one,” he said genially.

  He was right. He saw it before I did and grabbed my arm, stopping me in my mad rush, and said my name so softly I almost didn’t hear it at all.

  “There,” he said, nodding ahead.

  He was right. There was the Land Cruiser, sitting silently in the grass, silhouetted against the scarlet sky.

  My heart nearly exploded with conflicting relief and dread. I broke into a sprint, kicking up clouds of sand.

  “Dad!” I yelle
d, my voice hoarse. “Theo!”

  When I reached the Cruiser I vaulted inside, noting the bullet holes ripped into the metal panels. The canvas roof was bundled in the back, and the cab was empty. The keys were still in the ignition; the engine had been left on but must have stalled at some point. The front bumper was pressed against a tree, and mounds of sand behind the wheels told me it had run nose first into the trunk and was left with its wheels churning for some time afterward.

  My head roared as time seemed to collapse on itself, back to the moment I’d found my mother in the Jeep. It was a familiar scenario: the car smashed into a tree, the keys in the ignition. The only difference was that she’d been in the car. I scouted around the Cruiser and climbed onto the spare tire on the back to look inside. It was empty. No Dad. No Theo.

  I was vaguely aware of Sam opening the door and catching me as I fell out of the cab. He lowered me to the ground and held my trembling shoulders as I mumbled, “No, no, no,” over and over again.

  He said my name softly, insistently. “Look at me, Sarah. Sarah, please. I’m here, I’ve got you, just calm down. Sarah.”

  Gradually, my eyes, feeling feverish and raw, focused on his.

  “He’s not here,” I said.

  “I know. That’s a good thing, Sarah.”

  “It is?” My mind felt slow and dull. Thinking was like wading knee-deep through sand.

  “Yes. Listen, if they’d shot him, they’d have left him here, right? There’d be blood, there’d be something to tell us he was hurt. But he isn’t here, which means either they took him alive or he escaped into the bush. Don’t you think it’s more likely he and Theo ran off? Lost them on foot? When he called you, he said he was trying to lose them. That would have been easier on foot.”

  I thought about it; it seemed to take ages to slog through the facts as Sam laid them out. “Maybe. Maybe they tried, and the poachers caught up with them and—”

  “Stop it. You’re a researcher, right? You work with facts, not conjecture.”

  I stared at him dumbly.