Whatever You Do, Don't Run

by Whatever You Do, Don't Run- True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (epub)

  My pacing led me by the back of the cab, where there was a wheel mounted. Then under the trailer I saw another. Two spare tires!

  I took one off its mounting, placed it under the rear axle, and dug under the crippled tire, which had been brutally mangled when it dragged over the verge. The vehicle sagged, then held, and soon I had a hole deep enough to remove the tire. I went to the cab, grabbed the wrench, and put it over the nut, knowing straight away that it was way too loose. Dick’s nuts at the back were smaller than those at the front. The trailer half had different tires than the Land Rover half had. I looked at the two spares. One was for the front, one for the back. The one for the back, which I needed, was supporting the rear axle. The Madgkadigkadi is an easy place to believe in ancient gods, and right now I knew they were having a grand chuckle at my expense.

  I knew that getting the tire off might prove too great a challenge for me, but it was pointless to even try until I had the right spare ready. I had placed what I now thought of as the not-spare under the main arm of the axle, which is not the lowest point. The differential is about three inches lower, and wriggling under the vehicle, banging and scraping my elbows and wrists, I wedged the spare-spare tire under the differential, then dug out the not-spare again, and thought about my wrench issues.

  “What would MacGyver do?” I asked myself. But having lived in a tent for too many years without television, I had only heard of the show, so drew little inspiration and wondered what even the most ingenious of action heroes could do with only sand and bad-tasting herbs for resources.

  The mosquitoes were now more than just pesky, and I was sure I was getting close to anemic. Perhaps they were getting high on the caffeine in my system and buzzing off to tell all their friends about a great new place to eat, because they were smothering me. They bit my legs, my arms and my face—even my eyelids were swelling.

  Many of the local guides had told me that wild sage is thrown into village fires to ward off the bloodsucking bastards, so I grabbed fistfuls, rubbing it together to release its oils and then dragging the pungent mix over my face and body.

  They kept coming, so I grabbed more branches and shoved them down my shirt, into my sleeves, down the front of my shorts, and even under my sandals (though not even the most hungry of mosquitoes had stooped so low as to lick my feet after twelve hours of driving). I heard a rig coming and thought the driver might by some chance have the wrench I needed. My shyness made me stupid, though, and instead of waving him down, I just stood beside Dick and tried to put on a facial expression that suggested a problem tinged with a world-weary forlornness. Maybe the lights cancelled out the expression, or maybe I just looked as ridiculous as I was being, but the truck blew past, rocking Dick’s front on his springs, his injured half remaining rigid in the sand.

  “Not your fault, Dick,” I said, knowing that nobody would hear me speaking to a Land Rover, and not caring if they did.

  I went back to the wrench problem, exhausted and wishing I was three again so I could just sit, weep, and let an adult deal with it. I tried using my belt buckle, but it broke. I tried packing the wrench I did have with bits of aluminium from the energy drink cans, but it still spun uselessly. I blew dust from my nose, ejecting one or two particularly voracious mosquitoes, and stomped around, angry with the world—but not for long because I knew it was my fault. Dick needed a jack, and I had passed on two opportunities to get one.

  “Bugger-shit-piss-wee,” I said aloud, something my sister used to say when we were kids, again not caring how ridiculous it sounded. “Bugger-shit-piss-wee,” I said again softly. I estimated that I had been working on the problem for about two hours, but it may have been more or less.

  Then I gave up.

  The mosquitoes could have me. And in the morning some driver would find my desiccated form next to Dick, and my gravestone would read: HERE LIES PETER ALLISON. HE WAS RIDICULOUS. The melodrama lasted only a few moments before a particularly painful bite on the nostril snapped me out of it. I looked at the trailer half. The company wanted to use Dick to transport food to mobile safari operators, so it was airtight at the back and insulated.

  I slid the side door open as quickly as I could and clambered in, figuring I would bed down for the night using my shirt as a pillow. I slammed the door shut, sure that in the few seconds it was open not too many mosquitoes could have followed me. But they had, and soon enough I was back outside sinking into despair and madness. The mosquitoes, swarmed, buzzed, dived and bit; I flailed, cursed, stomped and bled.

  Another truck came by, which would prove to be the last one of the night, and this time I cast shyness aside and stood right beside the road, waving my arms, this time with an unfeigned look of desperation on my features.

  The truck blew his horn and blew past, and I realised that the driver would have seen what looked like a very animated sage bush with pasty white hands growing from it. In a superstitious country like Botswana, he’d probably go straight to a witch doctor when he got to Maun and ask if there was a curse on him.

  The wind from the truck almost blew me off my feet, but for a few seconds it did clear the air of mosquitoes. Then I heard a buzz, then another, then more, and I had an idea.

  I ran. I ran from the mosquitoes, away from Dick, and down the road. Then I stopped, gasping, and enjoyed a brief respite as the mosquitoes sought me out. Then the buzzing came again, and I ran back, putting my hand on Dick’s hood as I drew breath. Somewhere a zebra called, and it gave me heart, as animals always do.

  I ran away again and again, my sprints getting slower and not as far, and heard the zebra again. I touched the ground, pushed off, ran into the night, and paused, registering that the zebra had just given an alarm call.

  Suddenly Dick looked very far away, and I strained my ears to hear over the already swarming insects. The zebras again gave the strange whistle that indicates they have seen danger, but in the best of circumstances I can’t get a fix on where sound comes from, and it wasn’t the zebra’s whereabouts that I needed to know anyway. Lion? Leopard?

  Whatever you do, don’t run, I thought to myself, and in a moment of fatalism sprinted back to the crippled vehicle, throwing open the side door, but stopping before I went in. It was pitch-black, as clouds had blown in, drowning the stars. Cats could see in this darkness, but all I saw were shapes that could be sage or anything else. I got into the trailer half, sliding the door to a chink and watching through it to see if anything came.

  Nothing did, and after immeasurable hours that felt like the sun had fallen away into space never to come again, the darkness weakened. Unseen birds warmed their throats with chirps and cackles, then burst into full song, smothering the sound of insects that had been my only companions all night. The sun cracked the wide-open Madgkadigkadi, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and soon after a small car came down the road and stopped for me.

  In Maun, I told Alan where Dick was and was given an adjustable wrench, jack and a skinny man from the Herero tribe named Gideon to drive me back. We changed the tire with remarkable and anticlimactic ease, and I looked for the tracks of a predator but found none. Damn zebras, I thought, grumpy with fatigue.

  Gideon drove off, and I got back into Dick and took him the last hundred or so miles into Maun, where I was put onto a plane and flown into camp because one of the guides was sick. I was ushered straight into my regular Land Rover (which had no doors or windshield—and mercifully no trailer), took an afternoon safari that I mumbled all the way through, and then fell asleep at dinner as a guest was talking to me.

  A few months later someone told me that a driver had gotten Dick stuck in a sandy track, and an elephant had taken offence, ramming and piercing the radiator with his tusks. Piet, the cranky Dutch mechanic who looked after our company’s vehicles, declared him dead, and he was scrapped for parts.

  I didn’t care if it was ridiculous, it made me very sad.

  Ya-ya and Tsetse

  I was driving some “Ya-ya” Germans.


  I always knew I had Ya-yas almost as soon as they stepped off the plane, because when I said, “Hello, my name is Peter, pleased to meet you,” they would just say, “Ya-ya” and thrust luggage into the hand I had offered for shaking.

  When I drove back to the camp with Ya-yas and would ask if they had been to Africa before, they would answer, “Ya-ya.” Hoping it was only a language barrier that divided us, and not just rudeness, I would do a test.

  “What colour is the sky?” I would ask.

  They would look up, bemused. “Blue,” they would answer. And inevitably someone in the back would add, just loud enough for me to hear, “Dummkopf.”

  “Ya-ya,” I would say, knowing I was in for a tough few days.

  This particular group of Ya-yas was one of the worst. No matter what I showed them, they would sniff, say “Ya-ya,” and look around as if waiting for something more spectacular. We saw cheetahs, we saw leopards, we saw elephants, giraffes, hippos, zebras, hyenas, kudu, baboons, monkeys and more birds than I could list. At each they would sniff uninterestedly and say, “Ya-ya, but vere are ze lions?”

  And that was the problem. My fellow guides and I were having an unprecedented level of difficulty finding the biggest of Africa’s cats. The normally rarer cheetahs seemed to be on every termite mound, and the normally shyer leopards were caught crossing almost every open plain. But for a first timer to Africa, and some veterans, nothing matters until they have seen a lion. And the Mombo lions, all eight prides of them, were hiding.

  I tried my best to entertain the group with stories of the animals they were seeing. I made jokes, I told funny anecdotes, they looked at me with disdain, I shut up.

  On the last day with this group, I believed they would be my first guests ever, after many hundreds of game drives, to leave without seeing lions. I made a plan, which promised high reward, but, like every promise of such a nature, involved high risk. We would go to Boro West.

  To the south of Mombo Camp ran a long spine of sand. It was an extension of the Kalahari into the oasis of the Okavango, and if you drove it, you were guaranteed to see little except spiky grass and the occasional ostrich. In the lush wetland that surrounded us, the desert patches held little attraction for the wildlife, so they avoided it.

  At the end of the road, though, was Boro West. The most beautiful place I have ever seen, it is only accessible for a few months of the year, when the water levels drop. It is a plain of the most verdant green, dotted with the occasional rain tree spreading its even branches and offering shade. On the lawnlike landscape, thousands of antelope graze, as placid as livestock, content with their abundance. The scene is occasionally punctured by a deep green clump of date palms, and under one of these clumps, if you look hard enough, you can always find the Boro lions.

  They are the laziest of a lazy species. With food so close by, and water never more than a thirty-second stroll away, they only bother with a territory of three hundred yards by three hundred yards. They don’t even hunt. They just wait under the palms, and eventually an antelope will walk close enough for them to whip out a claw and drag it in.

  This was what I would show the Germans, I hoped.

  I explained the blandness of the drive and the probable reward at the end.

  “Ya-ya,” they replied.

  I drove faster than I usually would, past the animals that we had already seen many times, feeling I was neglecting the less glamorous but still worthy species like tsessebe, bushbuck, buffalo and warthog.

  “Ah, warzenschwein!” they said at the last. For reasons I will never understand, every German visitor I’ve ever guided has been excited by the sight of warthogs, and then, more mystifying still, has counted them. “Ein, zwei, drei, vier . . . ”

  When they were done tabulating, we passed through the territory of Martina’s Pride, but she was nowhere to be seen. We crossed the Simbira Channel and drove onto the Middle Road to Boro, and the blandness began.

  The wheel whipped in my hands, requiring strength to control as the vehicle forged its way through the deep sand ridges.

  We drove on and on, the landscape monotonous, the dust cloying. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stiffen and knew it was the Ya-yas radiating boredom. There was really nothing to show them, but I want people to love the environment, no matter how dull, so I stopped and swung my legs through the cavity where the door would normally be. Gingerly I put my sandal on the ground, then lifted it and showed the sole to the Germans. It was covered with seeds, each with four vicious spikes that gripped into the rubber. Normally these embed themselves into animals’ hooves and help spread the species. I explained this, and told them that in summer the plant, called the devil’s thorn, carpets the Kalahari with exquisite yellow flowers.

  “Ya-ya,” they said and looked away. Show us the bloody lions, was what they really meant, and I wondered if even then I would see them smile.

  The Land Rover plowed on and reached the sandiest of points, where little grows except the occasional bedraggled acacia tree. I was about to warn the Germans that this was a likely place for tsetse flies when one bit me. The bite is like acupuncture, but without the remedial benefits. It is a short, shocking pierce that always draws blood and usually a collection of swear words. This fly bit me with a particular viciousness, through the shorts and on a delicate place that no man likes to be bitten.

  I did the worst possible thing. Instinctively, I swatted.

  Only later did I imagine what it must have looked like to the Germans. They would have seen me turn to say something, my face would have contorted in pain, then I would have punched myself in the delicates. With no door to support me, I fell out of the car, and its reliable diesel engine kept it puttering along in the deep tracks for another thirty yards before it stalled.

  In the meantime I lay writhing in self-inflicted, tsetse-assisted agony, each writhe letting more devil’s thorns enter my skin. I finally stood, plucked thorns from the side of my scalp and legs, and carefully checked my rear before sitting back in my seat. The Germans had remained sitting straight ahead through my entire performance.

  I can proudly say that within a few minutes my risk paid off, and we found the Boro Pride. But nothing made me happier than when I had sat back down and saw why the Germans weren’t looking at me.

  They were smiling.

  A Friend in Hand

  As a safari guide I was in constant contact with people. For most of my waking hours, I was with clients and it was my job to be “up,” a constant source of information and entertainment. Despite this, it is a strangely lonely profession. The tourists I spent most of my time with were not my friends, and rarely became them. They were in my life for two days, maybe three, and whether I had liked them, or they me, it was too brief to form a bond.

  I did draw close to my colleagues, as was inevitable. They were the only people near my age that I encountered, and we all shared a love of wildlife and conservation. But I missed some of my old friends, the ones who had known me since I was a shy schoolboy.

  I have known Nick since we were ten. We met when my parents moved again and I started a new school. We caught the same train home together in the afternoon and started talking about the things boys talk about, such as fighter planes, whether a lion or a tiger would win a fight, and whether Mad magazine was funnier than Cracked. After just more than a year, we started attending the same high school and this time rode the same bus. Our friendship firmed, aided by the proximity of where we lived. From the age of twelve we started a tradition of creeping from our homes to meet at midnight, never to do anything malicious or even devious, just to talk. While any of the Africans that I know would laugh at the idea of my childhood being difficult, it was certainly not a happy one, and it was on these walks that I told Nick of my concern about my father’s drinking or that my stepmother was more than a little imbalanced. He rarely offered advice, which was okay because he gave the one thing that I needed—a sympathetic ear.

  Our friendship grew stro
ng enough that Nick took the hallowed place and official title of “Best Friend,” a position that I had never realised was so good to have filled. We were confidants and brothers, helping each other with things like getting after-school jobs and speaking frankly for the first time about the most fascinating animal of all—woman.

  This was a subject on which Nick was clearly the master, and I the bumbling apprentice. We attended a boys’ school but caught a public bus that was also a ride for girls who attended many different schools. Watching them get on and off the bus, I would fantasise about speaking to them—just talking—and imagine that I would have things to say that were witty and charming and would make me intensely attractive. The hole in the fantasy was that I had no idea what these words could possibly be, and the very thought of speaking to a girl without a prepared dialogue made my armpits sweat profusely, something undesirable even in a fantasy world.

  Nick had no such qualms. He approached girls (for that was what they were, we were only in our early teens) with the same confidence that he approached all life. Nick was the sort of guy who you could throw any object to and he would snatch it effortlessly from the air, and do so with a casual flair. To someone as unathletic as me (I once fractured my collarbone while jogging), this imbued him with almost magical abilities. He was like one of those characters in Greek myths who came about after a god hit the booze and procreated with a mortal.

  I used to watch him with a confusing mixture of envy and awe as he casually approached a girl, any girl, and said, “Hi. How are you doing? I like your Walkman. It’s cool.”

  What panache!

  There was no way I could emulate him. I was cripplingly shy, and if I had tried such a thing it could only end in disaster. I could imagine the scenario and was sabotaged even in my daydreams. “Hi. How are you doing,” I would swallow loudly. “I like your ears. They’re cool.” A blank look would greet this. “I mean your earplugs. I mean headphones. I’ll go away now.”