by Whatever You Do, Don't Run- True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (epub)
If their mother was missing, I guessed it was because she was the female that I had been looking for that morning. And it would create quite a scandal in our lion community, because she was from the south and therefore shouldn’t be with anyone except for one of the three absurdly blond-maned brothers who ruled that area. We called these males the Beach Boys, but if she was this far north she had to be with one of the two brothers who ruled that part of Mombo. These two were big black-maned brutes.
Perhaps she had been driven north by one of the bigger southern prides just as she came into season, and the overpowering urge to mate drove her to briefly abandon her daughters. I imagined that she was now trying to get back to her comfort zone and the forlorn girls she had left behind. In the meantime her mate was going to make sure that no other male went near her while she was in estrus, and so he followed her south. If the Beach Boys caught him there with a female, a détente of many years would be shattered. War would break out.
I was excited, and I tried to transmit this to my guests, who nodded politely but showed as much enthusiasm as if I’d said we were going to have a knitting competition.
We watched the girls from afar, but they were upset, so I let them be and followed the tracks of their mother. Soon enough the track went through two low-growing bushes, before emerging into a natural amphitheatre made by a ring of palms and riverine trees. In the middle was glaring-white sand and the lions we had been looking for, plus the second of the northern boys.
Clearly the female was now out of season, as the dominant of the two brothers was lying inelegantly on his back, legs splayed like a frog in a science project, exhausted after copulating about three hundred times in seventy hours.
The female was snarling at his brother, who was making a whining noise that robbed him of any dignity, and I imagined must mean, “Come on—three hundred times with him. Just once with me, please?”
But she was uninterested. And after about five minutes, I realised my guests were as well, so I decided to see what else was out and about that morning.
We emerged from the ring of trees to a beautiful plain covered in short grass like a golfing green, dotted with antelope and zebra. Straight away I saw that they were all facing the same direction. I sat higher in my seat to see what they were looking at, and in the distance saw three golden forms moving with a discernible purpose in our direction.
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “They’re coming!” I was smiling wide enough to fit a fridge and swung around to beam at my guests, who just smiled back as if to say, “Of course they are, we paid for a show.” The teenage son, however, just looked bored.
The Beach Boys kept coming, their blond bouffant manes pristine and billowing in the light breeze. They ignored the potential food on the plain, just kept their gazes steady and aimed for the circle of trees that we had come from.
“Ooh this is going to be good,” I narrated. “The two groups of brothers have never fought, just stood at the edge of their territories and roared every now and then. But now one of their girls has been stolen. They don’t care that she’s from a weak pride. She is theirs, and they will not tolerate any other male going near her. A male lion’s psyche, in fact most males’ psyches, is a fragile thing and depends on the ability to keep females interested. This is going to cause trouble.” I was bouncing in my seat, swinging from the direction of the Beach Boys to back over my shoulder, as if I expected the northerners to burst out and face the challenge.
“Who’s going to win?” the boy asked. This was a question like who’d win in a fight between a crocodile and an alligator or a killer whale and a shark. There are too many variables to make any answer valid. But I offered my opinion anyway. I thought that the northerners would prevail, because they were huge lions, freakish even. The Beach Boys had numerical supremacy, but they were smaller. One of them was almost a runt. This odd-looking male had noticeably shorter legs than his brothers, and I used to call him the dachshund.
“Okay,” the teen said after my answer, and went back to scanning the sky and surrounding bush for an Xbox.
The Beach Boys kept coming, jumping the channels in their path, shaking their manes, and looking more determined than I had ever seen a male lion look. I wanted ringside seats for their meeting with the northerners, so I raced back into the circle of trees and sat on the far side of the trio. The sated male still reposed, his brother still begged, and the female still declined—all unaware of the trouble on the way.
We waited, and I explained to the guests that this would shake up our whole ecosystem. As lions were the apex predator, if males were driven out in the north or south, hyenas would take over that area until new bosses arrived, and the hyenas in turn would drive out cheetahs and wild dogs and force the leopards to hunt only prey that they could drag into trees.
We waited some more. Then the father of the family asked if the other guides had seen anything interesting, and I realised he was as bored as his teenage son. I felt frustrated at his lack of appreciation and started to doubt my own predictions, as the Beach Boys were taking a lot longer to get to the stage than I would have predicted. But then there was a high-pitched call of “Poh!” from the fringe of the island, and baboons shot from their feeding place on the ground into the palms and ebony trees, where they perched and watched the unfolding drama.
“They’re coming,” I said, breathless in anticipation.
A squat palm bush rustled, and a blond-fringed face appeared. Another appeared on its left, then one more to its right.
The begging northerner shot a fortuitous glance over his shoulder and spotted them. I expected him to raise his hackles or charge them or roar defiantly, braggingly challenging them like, “I may not have had her, but my brother just did! What do you say to that, blondies?”
Instead he slunk low on his belly to his snoozing brother and nudged him with his nose. The sexual conqueror lazily opened an eye and saw the three stalking out of the bushes onto the white sand.
And ran.
Perhaps his testosterone was depleted by the past few days’ activities. He didn’t even hesitate, taking off so quickly that his brother was left behind before quickly scurrying after him.
They ran by us, ears flat, tails streaming, shoulders pumping. The Beach Boys came roaring after, right toward us, and the scene of them charging remains to this day the most awe-inspiring sight I have ever seen.
The female who had helped start the clash (and whose pride would be renamed the Matata Pride or Problem Pride forever after) wisely shot off in the opposite direction. I turned the vehicle to pursue the pursuers, launching out of the ring and into a landscape of plains dotted with trees and crisscrossed by gently flowing channels. The lions leapt these, barely visible ahead of us. The northerners had departed with such speed that they were out of view. Two of the Beach Boys were bare specks, but despite the blur of his little legs, the dachshund was only a hundred yards ahead of us.
With the whine of the turbo ringing loud, we overtook him, splashing through water, crashing through bush and jerking with startling and unusual violence at every gear change. “Mechanical problem!” I shouted into the wind made by our passage, which I would later realise was untrue. In my excitement I had pushed the floor mat up and pinned the accelerator flat, so at each change of the gears, we shot forward like a rocket blasting off.
The whiplashed tourists were at last smiling as we snapped ahead. I felt victorious, but then realised that it was not the animals but my wild driving that they were enjoying, as they gave out a whoop after we splashed through every waterway.
The engine glugged after these soakings, and I checked the speedometer. We were doing over forty miles an hour, but were barely gaining on the furious Beach Boys. With no restraint I yelled over the radio to the other guides that if they wanted a spectacle they needed to move at a speed disregarding safety, but they were off looking at other things.
Finally, after a distance of three miles, I admitted defeat. My indomitable Land Rover was
no match for the speed and fury of cuckolded lions. And at an impenetrable strand of acacia bush (by now we had moved far from the wetland area and were in a section of Kalahari bushland), I stopped the car and suggested we wash down any dust with a coffee.
I grinned through the first few minutes of our break, not really listening to what anyone was saying, until I hurriedly forced everyone back into the vehicle at the appearance of the dachshund, still running at his top speed. He let out a wheezy roar, letting his brothers know that he was still backing them up, and whirred away into the thorn scrub.
“Go get ’em boy,” I said.
Back at camp I regaled any staff member who would listen about the best sighting I had ever had. I was on a high, hopping from one foot to the other as I approached the brunch table.
The father of the family broke away from the group of guests that he had been speaking to. I imagined he must have been telling them about the spectacle he had witnessed and wasn’t Africa grand and so on. I beamed at him as he approached.
“Pater,” he began. (He had misinterpreted my Australian accent at the start of his stay and called me Pater from the beginning.) “Those others saw a leopard this morning. And a cheetah.”
My smile wavered a little. I didn’t think guests should be allowed to speak to each other after drives. But it would be hard to build a fence between them, so management always vetoed my suggestion. I thought of telling him that if he visited Europe he wouldn’t try to see every museum in a day and what he just witnessed was less than a once in a lifetime experience. But I was sure it was unnecessary. He must understand the value of seeing such a chase.
Then he said, “It looks like you’ve got some catching up to do.”
The World’s Worst Bathroom
For a few months I had the world’s worst bathroom. My tent was meant to be upgraded, and as a result had been picked up and put down about twenty yards away from where it once stood. This would not have been inconvenient, except that the bathroom section had stayed behind. My new canvas house was to be built abutting it. But the builder did not show up for more than a month. Then when he did arrive, he got malaria within a week and left, and I found myself making midnight dashes to take care of the most private of business.
The reason I was forced to leave my run so late was that one side of the bathroom, the side that I looked out to whilst enthroned, was open to the African air. If my tent had been the last in the line of staff housing, it might have been more acceptable to sit there during daylight hours. But it was the first house, and every other guide and manager had to pass it to get home.
So every night I would wait until I heard conversations cease and watch for lights to go out before scanning the surrounding bush with a flashlight, ascertaining whether the eyes that reflected back belonged to harmless creatures like bush babies and porcupines or more deadly creatures like lions and leopards.
If the coast was clear, I would dash, wearing only shorts and sandals, check for scorpions under the seat (you only need to forget this check once to have it seared into your consciousness—and backside), and do what business needed to be done.
On occasion if I had waited so long, or had been struck by one of the many stomach ailments Africa has, I was a little too perfunctory in my search with the flashlight. Shortly after checking for scorpions one evening, I realised that I had missed something substantially larger. As I sat down, hobbled by my hastily unbuttoned shorts, a buffalo stepped in front of me, close enough to kick if I swung my leg out (which I had no intention of doing). It was as oblivious of me as I clearly had been of it only moments before when I scanned with the light, and it just stood, methodically chewing cud.
I didn’t dare make a sound, and I felt the vulnerability that made our forebears first cover themselves with skins and fig leaves. Then, against my will, I made a noise. To my astonishment, the buffalo took off, galloping away into the darkness, frightened by an unfamiliar sound.
Ploop, ploop!
Scars
“But Rich, you’ve got to have some scars,” I said, appalled. “It’s almost rude not to.” It seemed incomprehensible to me that a guy could live twenty years and have never seen a doctor to get sewn up. These days, in the era of the Xbox, I could understand it. But we were of the BMX and skateboard generation and had constantly crashed and fallen off fast-moving objects. At least I had, but then again, I’m markedly uncoordinated. Maybe it was Richard’s athleticism that saved him. He was always beating me at mini-basketball, which we played sitting on the kitchen floor during breaks from study. Maybe it was because he didn’t want the fuss that is inevitable when you bleed profusely. He was quite shy and soft spoken, but it still didn’t seem right to me not to have a few scars.
“You’re lucky,” he said slyly. “Chicks dig scars.” It was the sort of thing he said as a half-joke. He had a longtime crush on a girl named Rebecca, and I and a few of his other friends could not believe how long it was taking him to make a move. We were past the two-year mark, and counting.
The setup we had at the time was very convenient. Richard’s parents were overseas for a year, leaving him an apartment that was far superior to what most students had. He was in his last year at university, and I had returned to Australia to finish high school at a day college. We both had the same aim—to get back to Africa and work as safari guides. Richard was born there and had volunteered a few holidays for a safari outfit, while I had a year’s experience already but had promised myself that I would finish school one day.
So we studied, ate pizza and sat on the floor throwing an undersize ball at an undersize hoop. One weekend, the phone rang. It was Richard explaining that he was in the hospital. Excellent—he’ll get some scars! I thought. Then I heard the story.
He’d been tripped, by a girl, while playing netball. For those unfamiliar with the sport, it is like a cross between fast-moving basketball and slow-moving tai chi. You can pass the ball, but you are not allowed to run with it. It’s a popular sport with girls’ schools, because the liability is so limited.
Yet somehow in this softly played game, Richard had broken the larger bone in his thumb, thus successfully one-upping me (at this point I’d had almost a hundred stitches in my life, but no breaks). It was such an awkward spot, the hand required surgery, and Richard was left with a purple and ropey keloid scar on his hand. It was very eye-catching, and for the sake of Richard’s pride, I felt it needed a story.
“You cannot, under any circumstances, tell the truth about this,” I told him. “You must, I repeat must, tell people that you sustained the injury in Africa. Everybody knows that you spend a lot of time there. Tell them that a lion came at you and took a swipe. You fended it off, but one claw hooked you in the thumb. Then, because you are a conservationist, you put it in a sleeper hold until it was unconscious and then walked away.”
“I couldn’t tell a lie like that,” Richard said.
“Well you bloody well should.”
Richard was often asked about his scar. And within moments of his mentioning netball, people’s eyes would crinkle around the edges, and you could see they were trying not to smile.
A few years later Richard and his fiancée (hooray!) Rebecca ended up working for the same company as me in Botswana. We rarely saw each other, as the camps we worked at were only accessible by air, but we often spoke on the radios, which were our umbilical cords to the world. Every now and then we’d bump into each other at an airstrip as we came or went from our leave, or we might spend a night or two at the other’s camp.
It’s a strange way to maintain a friendship, and I was sometimes in as frequent contact with my sister in Sydney as I was with Richard and Rebecca.
When the radio call of an incident came through, my leave was just starting and I was visiting a camp called Xigera. Robyn, a Canadian girl who was working there, came to tell me that Richard had been attacked by a lion.
“Nah,” I dismissed it, “It was just netball. Glad to hear he’s using the story tho
ugh.”
It took some convincing, but eventually I went to the structure that served as an office, and the usually crackling and ceaseless chatter of the radio was absent. This was unheard of. With almost twenty camps around Northern Botswana all using the same frequency, there was always some manager on the radio insisting that eggs get put on the next flight or requesting a seat on a plane out to see the dentist or asking for a guide because theirs was sick. But now there was only the hiss of empty airwaves. Every now and then it would burst into life as someone spoke of medevac planes or where the bloody hell was the nurse, and I knew Robyn had been telling the truth. I was desperate to speak to someone to find out what was going on, but knew that all I would do was hinder the arrangements that were being made. It was only much later that anyone could find out what had happened.
The night before, the lions had been roaring in Savuti Camp. Guides always feel that the lions are conspiring against us when they do this, because as the sun comes up they always manage to disappear into bush too thick to follow, leaving your many guests disappointed and convinced that you have absolutely no idea what you are doing. After the guests have been woken up (if they haven’t spent the night alert and in unnecessary terror), they will say as they sip their coffee, “That was lions, right? Outside my tent! Right outside my tent!”
One of the other guests will pipe up and say, “No, actually the lions were right outside my tent.” If you are feeling finicky, you can explain that a lion’s roar travels up to four miles, and that the lions they heard were actually a few hundred yards away at the closest. Generally, though, you let them have their fun as you try to coerce them into the vehicles, knowing that every wasted moment puts the lions farther away from you.
