by Whatever You Do, Don't Run- True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide (epub)
Years passed, as they so rudely do, and Nick and I found ourselves separated, often for years at a time. He was as in love with Asia as I was with Africa. I spent two months with him in Indonesia while on the way to settle in South Africa, but it was many years until he was able to visit me. By then I was living in Botswana and had become an experienced guide with a certain degree of respect from my peers.
Despite the subservience of always being nice to people, my confidence had skyrocketed. I had found my place in Africa, and for the first time in my life I knew I was good at something. I looked forward to Nick seeing me in this new environment that I had made my own.
One of the directors of the company was at the airstrip with me when Nick was due to arrive. Despite the positive response I usually received from guests, I’d always had the feeling that this guy didn’t like me, which made me nervous around him and more inclined to do things that would exacerbate any idea he might have that I was an idiot. I watched Nick through the grimy window of the Cessna as it taxied toward us. He wetly smooched against the window, and I thought of how much that would impress my boss. When he stepped from the plane, he spread his arms and, exaggerating every word announced to Africa, “I! AM! SO! FUCKING! TIRED!”
My boss raised an eyebrow. This was not the behaviour wanted from someone who was staying at the camp for free when everybody else there was paying more than seven hundred dollars a night. I bustled Nick away and got him back to camp, explaining along the way that he might need to temper his language around the sensitive ears of the paying punters.
Through our youth I’d had many reasons to believe that Nick was somehow blessed—among our friends he was the only one whose parents were still together, he had his fantastic coordination, and he possessed charm and confidence. Now I was amazed at how his luck followed him all the way to Botswana, as the very first animal we saw was a cheetah. As I explained to Nick that this was somewhat extraordinary, and that he would be truly considered a favourite of the gods if he was to see it sprint, the cheetah dropped into a crouch and started stalking some impala at the edge of the plain.
She exploded from her standing position but had mistimed her charge, so the impalas had just enough time to make it to the safety of thick bush, where their pursuer’s speed was moot. Nick’s luck had not run out, though, and as the cheetah turned to settle and recuperate, she flushed an aardwolf from its burrow.
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed, as the hyena-shaped but inoffensive animal ran past us. “This is only the third time I’ve ever seen one of those!”
“Nice,” said Nick. “But I thought we weren’t meant to swear.”
Nick’s plane had come in later than usual, so all the guests were out on a drive when we got in to camp. I gave Nick a quick walk through of Mombo, excited to show it off to someone who knew me from the time when I was just a suburban boy, living behind picket fences and a sturdy tiled roof. As we passed through the office, I heard the guides talking on the radio. From how fast they were speaking and the rapidly changing directions they were giving, it could only mean they were following one thing.
“They’ve got the dogs,” I told Nick, who looked as perplexed as I had wanted him to.
“Is it curable?” he asked.
I didn’t respond, just listened to the radio. From the sound of it, the pack, which had seven dogs in it, was heading right for the camp. It was getting close to dusk, and I knew the dogs liked a drink before they settled down for the night.
“Come on,” I grabbed Nick. “This is something no tourist gets to do.”
He was still jet-lagged and weary enough to follow without questioning, and as I took him out to the back of the camp and the ever-productive waterhole that was formed by washing our Land Rovers, I told him about the dogs.
“They’re the most endangered and least known of Africa’s large carnivores.” I was speaking like a guide to my oldest friend, but I was too excited to drop into colloquialisms. “Most places they’ve been shot out or killed by diseases that they catch from domestic dogs, but we see a fair amount of them here, and following them when they hunt is the most fun you can have in a Land Rover without getting someone pregnant.” That was more like how we usually spoke.
I could hear the vehicles that were following now and knew they would move away before the dogs reached the unsightly back half of the camp where the waterhole was. This left us free to do what I wanted without being observed by tourists.
“Lie down,” I told Nick, and I reposed myself next to his obediently sprawled form. In the dwindling light the silhouette of the dogs appeared, coming at a trot right for us. “Nothing is as successful as these guys at hunting. They’re like wolves. They just run and run and run, until their prey is exhausted. Then they disembowel it, which is messy looking, but more efficient than strangling like the cats do.” I paused, watching as the dogs slowed to walk, sniffing as they approached us. “When the dogs hunt, they kill.” I was loving this, and looked at Nick’s face to see if he was having as much fun. He didn’t appear to be at all enjoying the sight of the seven dogs that were now directly opposite us, sniffing and making the occasional low growl. “Of course,” I whispered, “there’s no record of them attacking people, so this is relatively safe.”
The dogs started drinking, having determined that we were not a threat. I felt Nick relax beside me. I was glad that he had started enjoying the experience, but also took a secret thrill from having seen him out of his element in a place where I was so comfortable.
I had guests arrive the next morning so was busy working most of the time that Nick stayed, but he still managed to get out on a number of drives with me, and his luck continued. He saw abundant lions, had fantastic leopard sightings, drove alongside the dogs as they hunted and got up close to elephants. On his final morning one of the other guides found a cheetah that was well-known to all of us. She had three cubs that were almost fully grown, and all of them were incredibly relaxed around the vehicles.
It was reported that the cheetahs weren’t doing much, so I took my time getting there, spending some time with reliably amusing baboons and always impressive giraffes. All the other guides had left when I arrived where they had been watching the cheetah. And despite their assertions that she was lying flat with the cubs and wasn’t going anywhere, I couldn’t see her. There were tracks for all four cheetahs walking farther into the open plain, but I couldn’t see them anywhere out there either. I followed the tracks and saw that the cheetahs had made an abrupt turnabout and headed into the treeline. I was scanning these with my binoculars when I heard a telltale snort.
“Watch this!” I shouted, as a herd of impala thundered out of the bush, into the plain. I knew the antelopes had made a mistake. They should have stayed in the trees, where their leaping would have kept them safe from the cheetahs’ straight-line pace. Instead they were now running in the open, following a line that would take them a few yards in front of the bonnet of our Land Rover. The cheetahs burst out behind them and were easily overtaking them. The impalas started to jink and sidestep, hoping the pursuers would overshoot the mark, but they had come too far into the open. The mother cheetah tapped the ankle of an impala, and as it rolled, she gripped its throat with her teeth.
The dust settled, and the excited cubs gave out little twitters as they tried to help, making attempts to strangle the already dead impala’s leg, ear and hoof. The mother allowed their experiments as she recovered her breath, panting deeply to get oxygen into her system and reduce her lactic acid buildup. After a few short moments, she stood up and hauled the carcass under the nearest bush, a low and prickly acacia. The entire action had taken only a few minutes, throughout which I had said nothing.
“That was spectacular!” said one of my guests. But the rest said nothing, just sat looking shocked. While many people came to Africa in the hope of seeing exactly this sort of thing, others found a kill distressing, and I waited nervously for the others to digest what they had seen.
“Wo
w,” Nick said quietly. Then he added more emphatically, “Fucking WOW!”
The people in the car looked at him like he was mad, then caught his infectious excitement. I watched it spread from one person to the next. Then they were all talking at once.
“Did you see how fast . . . ”
“And then it stepped like this . . . ”
“Fast, man, that was faster than a car!”
“Poor thing,” said another, dampening the mood.
“Yes, but as this young gentleman said, fucking WOW!” replied an older man who up to that point had been very staid and conservative. Then they were all talking at once again, and laughing, and I knew that it would be the highlight of their trip. I gave Nick a wink, and he grinned wildly back at me.
After the drive, I grabbed Nick and said, “We’re skipping brunch.”
“Why?” he asked, quite reasonably, as the omelettes were very good.
“We’re going to do another thing that no tourist gets to do.”
We drove back out to the cheetahs, who were still feeding on the impala. Periodically the mother would sit up and scan the surrounds, wary of hyenas, lions or a leopard, any of which would steal the meat from her.
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” I instructed. “We’ll get out on the opposite side of the Rover and crawl under it until we’re about ten yards from them. I don’t want to freak them out by going up to them together, so we’ll take turns crawling closer. You’ve got your camera, right?”
The look Nick was giving me was the sort you give to someone who is dribbling as they speak. “What?” I asked him, wiping at my face.
“You are kidding, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m serious. It’s safe, trust me. We’ve spent months getting them used to us.” From his look, I must have still been dribbling. “This is one of the few times someone will offer you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that really is once in a lifetime. I don’t know of any wild cats, anywhere else in the world, that you could do this with.” He still looked uncertain. “Trust me,” I repeated, and got out of the car and started a gentle slither toward the feeding cheetahs. They ignored me, until I was almost on top of them, when one of the youngsters jumped up and hissed at me, stepping closer and snarling again, this time in my face. I knew there were no confirmed records of a cheetah attacking a person in the wild, but it is still terrifying having a big cat show you its teeth at close range, no matter how cool I was acting in front of Nick. The cheetah backed off and playfully cuffed his sister, then kept eating. The mother cheetah sat up, looked around, and in a way that I always found fascinating, looked everywhere but at me, as if she was pretending that I wasn’t there or found me so uninteresting that she couldn’t bear to look at me.
“You getting photos?” I asked.
“How do you work this radio, so I can call for help when they attack you?” was Nick’s reply. I guessed the young male cheetah’s approach had looked worse than it was.
“It’s fine—he was just playing.”
Nick took some photos of me, then I gently coerced him from the vehicle. He was shivering, even though it was a mild morning. “It’s okay, they won’t hurt you. Even if they come close, it’s just play.” He gave me the look again, and this time I checked my face. No dribble. He crept closer, then whispered over his shoulder, “You know that I just saw these things rip the throat out of an animal?”
I didn’t point out that it wasn’t actually that dramatic, that the skin on the impala’s neck wasn’t even broken. I just nodded to him and gave gentle waves, fanning him forward.
He reached a point and stopped. His body was taut, and something about him seemed entirely unfamiliar. Once or twice in the years we had known each other, I had seen Nick out of his element, but it was only a flicker before he used a chameleon-like ability to adapt to his surrounds and the people within it. But now he was afraid, something I had never seen. “Stop,” I said. “I’ll get some shots of you there.” His posture showed relief, then with visible reluctance he turned his back to the cheetahs and looked at the camera. His face was grim. “Try and smile,” I said. “Your mother will prefer it.”
“My mother always thought you were a bad influence. Showing her photos of this would only confirm it.”
“Right,” I said, and clicked the shutter, capturing Nick with the spotted cats behind him and an expression on his face suggestive of constipation.
On the drive back, after a bit of silence, I said, “You know, I wasn’t a bad influence. I was only ever there when you got in trouble because I was trying to talk you out of something. You should tell your mother that.”
“Before or after I tell her that you tried to feed me to some cheetahs?”
We drove on, and I reflected on the pleasure that I had felt from seeing Nick in a situation where he wasn’t totally confident. I wondered if there was something wrong with me for enjoying so much seeing him look less like a god and more like a mortal. Then I realised there was nothing wrong with how I had felt. Seeing Nick vulnerable hadn’t made me respect him any less, or change the value of our friendship.
In fact, I liked him even more.
Bad Actors
When you work in any form of tourism, you come to understand how the stereotypes of certain countries form and can dread encounters with people based solely on their nationality. As a safari guide, however, you spend more time with individual clients than you would working in a hotel, so you get to see beyond the arrogance of the French, the volume of the Americans, the snobby reservedness of the English, the drunkenness of the Australians and the utter lack of humour of the Germans. It teaches you not to judge someone just because of where they are from, and to stop refusing to guide New Yorkers. Not all people are defined by the place they are from. On occasion, though, an individual appears who seems determined not to break the mould in which their nationality is cast, but to reinforce it.
Such a man was Spiirubaagu, as he came to be known on his brief safari in Northern Botswana. He epitomised the image of the Japanese tourist who always has a camera in his hand and will take a photograph of anything. I pitied whomever would be forced to endure his slide shows as he snapped away at the tent he stayed in, the bed in his tent, the wardrobe in his tent, the zipper on his tent, the luggage in his tent. These were just the shots taken while inside, and he took painstaking care in setting up each shot, ensuring his focus and subject were just right.
It was actually rare for us to have Japanese tourists at our camp, mainly because the Japanese usually travel in large groups and want their own food, and we only had twenty beds and cooked whatever we could get flown in from the nearest town. Yet once or twice a year, a group of intrepid Japanese would arrive. And as I spoke a little of the language, it was inevitable that I would be allocated to guide them.
The first sign that something was wrong was the way the plane landed. The pilots in the Okavango are good—really good. They land and take off more times in a day than almost any other commercial pilots in the world, and they do it on dirt strips with unusual crosswinds, sporadic dust storms and the more than occasional animal that wanders onto the field. So it struck me as odd the way the twin-engine whumped down, hitting hard onto the strip and not bouncing back up like a light aircraft should. It taxied over, and the pilot shook his head at me through his window.
Then came the second sign of problems brewing. First out of the plane were two twenty-something girls who had obviously thought long and hard about the suggested khaki-coloured clothes for safari and had rejected the prospect. They were arrayed in a clash of canary yellow and a shade of pink so lurid it could make Barbie puke. Most animals are colour-blind, so it wasn’t really a problem, but I was always nervous about people who were defiant in a place where the wrong behaviour could get you eaten.
As the seventh person exited the aircraft and started hauling out his gear, my foreboding increased. Any travel agent stresses to a client that they will be travelling in very small bits of moto
rised tin, and their luggage weight should reflect that. In fact, it is set at a strict twenty-five pounds. But looking at the camera bags and tripods being wrestled from the cargo area, I could tell that this guy had gone well over that. There was only one way he could have achieved this, and it would have involved a feigned or real misunderstanding of English when the pilot protested.
“We almost died.” It was the pilot, his New Zealand accent being pushed through clenched teeth. “We were overweight, because every time I tried to take a bag out, he just said ‘Hai’ and shoved it back in. Then, in midflight, he started taking photos, which was no problem, but when I pointed out some hippos, he leaned over the top of me and shoved me into the controls.” He gave a hiss to show how stupid this was. “Not one of them screamed when we went into a dive. What sort of people are they?”
He wasn’t looking for an answer, so I didn’t give him one. We both knew anyway. These sort of people could be from any country. They thought that Africa was a theme ride and didn’t take its dangers seriously. They were a hazard to themselves and to anyone who had to keep them out of harm’s way—like me.
I looked at the vehicle, which the group had swarmed on to take their seats. It now bristled with tripods and lenses. They looked back at me, smiling.
“Ikimashoo ka?” I asked. “Shall we go?”
There was a flurry as it dawned on them that I had spoken in their language, which rose to a hubbub before settling down to polite introductions.
“And you must be Spielberg,” I said to the one with all the camera gear, including an expensive-looking video rig. Su-pee-ra-bar-gu is how it is pronounced in Japanese, and they all laughed. It’s the sort of inoffensive joke you are always making when people are paying for you to be nice to them. Spiirubaagu just smiled, and without preamble said, “I would like to film a lion killing something.”
