Ill Nature

by Joy Williams

  The original colony of one hundred was captured in India in 1972. The descendants are now a multimillion-dollar business for the owners, one of whom wanted to rename Loggerhead Key, Key Lois, as a tribute to his wife, although why Lois would want an island full of howling monkeys named after her is not known. The state, not keen on having places renamed willy-nilly for uxorious reasons, refused the request. The owner got his way nonetheless with the acronym Laboratory Observing Island Simians, and Loggerhead Key became Key Lois.

  In 1997 the state began formal proceedings to have the monkeys removed, contending that they were destroying mangroves and polluting the waters with their waste. “It’s inconsistent,” a community affairs advocate argued, “to continue allowing the monkeys to pollute the island while the state requires treatment of human waste.” Like, fair is fair. One monkey had the misfortune to escape to nearby Little Crane Key, which is a frigate bird nesting area, and was shot by a US Fish and Wildlife officer. The suppliers of the animals to the labs had always claimed that the monkeys could not escape the island because they “don’t like salt water,” but this poor voyaging primate was identified by his tattoo.

  Safariland

  THE DESIRED ILLUSION HERE IS . . . AFRICA. THE REALIZATION that it is Africa contributes to only part of the effect. For it is not enough anymore that it is Africa, which is, in great part, a sad landscape, scorched, dispirited, full of people and cattle. Cattle and people are just cattle and people, after all. It gets harder and harder to muster up much enthusiasm for them. The Africa of the desired illusion is this: You have entered a portion of the earth that wild animals have retained possession of. The illusion here is that wild animals exist.

  This perception is key to the safari package. People go on safari to gaze at the animals. There are still those who go on safari to kill animals or, as they sometimes like to say, “take them out.” (I was elated . . . it took all five of us to lift the king of beasts into the back of the Toyota. . . .) But these groups are to be avoided. These groups have their own “concessions.” Much of the planning that goes into the safari is choosing the best “concession” and avoiding those traveling in other safari groups. The mystique of the safari is its exclusiveness. This is a once in a lifetime experience. You don’t want to have to share it with a mob.

  Much of Africa no longer provides the desired safari experience. West Africa is cities, people. You can travel thousands of miles without seeing any animals at all. Some baboons maybe. To many Africans, wild animals are a thing of the past, standing in the way of progress—progress perceived to be cows and goats. Grasslands that for thousands of years have supported hundreds of thousands of migrating beasts have turned into desert under the implacable browsing of livestock. Then there are the wars—Zaire, Angola, Uganda, everywhere surly, scattered violence—with soldiers gunning down animals whose hides or horns or tusks can be marketed to buy more machine guns. In South Africa you can safari in Kruger National Park, but it isn’t quite . . . “correct.” Of course, East Africa hasn’t been what it used to be for years. Kenya has been written off by many travelers as being just too silly, preposterous even, its remaining game exhausted, it’s easy to imagine, from being looked at so much. For one reason or another, a great deal of Africa no longer lends itself to the “ultimate” safari adventure. A “new” area of Africa had to be found for the safariphile, had to become, in fact, the Africa for this type of tourist, and in this regard, Botswana agreed to be found.

  Not all of Botswana, of course, just a small part, compactly arranged in the north and including specifically the Okavango Delta, the Moremi Wildlife Reserve, and Chobe National Park. These areas can nicely supply the aura of the Africa of old. The government of Botswana knows what it wants in the way of tourist traffic through these areas—high cost and low density. It wants international tourists with money, and not too many of them, and it wants them touring where they can marvel at the fish eagle of the Okavango (an impressive bird), the big cats of Moremi (for what’s a safari without lions?), and the elephants of Chobe (67,000—the largest concentration in Africa). Why would the safariphile want to go anywhere else in Botswana anyway? Much of the west and the south and the vast central wilderness of the Kalahari Desert is without roads. Little is there at all but the Fence. The veterinary cordon fence, five feet high, made of high-tensile-strength steel wire, 1,875 miles of it. The indestructible, intractable, infamous Fence. The government started erecting the Fence in 1954 to segregate cattle from wild herds and to protect the former from the possible transmission of hoof-and-mouth disease, and has been extending it ever since. Hundreds of thousands of wild animals have died against it in their futile trek toward water in time of drought. The Fence runs everywhere, and where the Fence runs, the wild animals do not. The zebra is extinct now in all of Botswana except the north. The buffalo, too. There are no real free-roaming herds in Botswana anymore; the great migrations are over. The business of raising cattle has had disastrous ecological consequences in Africa, nowhere perhaps more acutely than in Botswana. Once occurring “widely and continuously,” as the guidebooks would say, the wild animals are now broken up into numerous isolated populations. They are “scattered . . . restricted . . . formally present . . . marginally present . . . fragmented . . . markedly discontinuous . . . isolated . . . increasingly isolated.” They are “absent in all of Botswana except the north.”

  A first-class camping safari takes about two weeks and begins and ends in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Groups move in shifts from east to west or west to east during most of the year, but the dry season, from June through October, is when the congregation of animals is greatest. Each group is discreetly accompanied by a small staff that sets up the tents, digs the latrines, bakes the bread, gathers the wood, and heats the water for the bush showers. All the clients have to do is look.

  In the beginning, the clients look at one another. None appears particularly charming or discerning to the other. This is one of those swift, initial, gloomy insights that is not altered by the passage of time. Everyone drinks for a while at the outside bar. Then they go to the inside bar. This bar is called Totoba, which means “to totter.” On the wall hang old prints showing a variety of animals staggering about, not from the effects of booze, of course, but from having just been shot. Elephants about to crash, zebras in their death gallop, buffalo toppling over Victoria Falls, lions and tigers all at their moment of collapse. The bar is full of guides, mostly from the Zambezi River. They’re having a party, and at midnight they’ll all take their clothes off. This is what they always do. A few minutes after midnight, they’ll put their clothes back on again. This bar is not full of “colorful bush characters” like the bar at Riley’s Hotel in Maun, farther along the safari circuit, but the people here try. “Photographing animals instead of shooting them,” one of these madcap guides confides, “is like flirting instead of fucking.”

  A bit bemused, the clients go back to their hotel rooms, turning their keys in a dozen locks. The key rings are made from the nut of the ilala palm. It looks just like ivory; it’s called vegetable ivory. Tonight is just a room, but tomorrow they will be in the bush, “under the canvas,” on safari. Tomorrow their adventure will begin.

  In the morning the groups split and meet their guides. Group B’s guide’s name is Chunk, say. All guides can’t be called Ian or Gavin or Colin. Group A goes off with their Colin. They will drive in a big open Land Rover to Chobe National Park and camp a few nights in the Serondela area on the beautiful Chobe River. Then they’ll drive to Savuti. They don’t yet know how depressing this will be. The guide knows, that is, but they don’t. It will be a long, hot, and dusty drive to Savuti. They will constantly be fishing around in the cooler for cans of Coke or beer or apple juice or club soda. They will picnic along the way beside a somewhat soiled-looking wetland. They will stop at a village and take pictures of huts constructed out of mud, and Coke, beer, apple juice, and club soda cans. (“Wonderful insulating properties,” Chunk will say when
Group B sees this phenomenon.) Savuti used to be synonymous with the waters of its channel and its marsh. It was a natural concentration point during the dry season for herds of animals coming from the north, south, and east. Thousands of zebras and wildebeests migrated here, their abundance supporting large numbers of predators—lions, leopards, wild dogs. It was a fabulous place. But for ten years the channel has been dry, and now the land is sere and ragged. Only a few old bull elephants and some thin, listless lions still come down every twilight to a single muddy hollow into which a bit of water is pumped by the parks department.

  Group A can’t wait to hasten out of the starved Savuti. The toilets weren’t very nice, and the food wasn’t very good, either. Noodles and ham and corn fritters and fried eggs for dinner. Plus some kind of pink, peculiar, cold dessert. What was that? The cooks must be crazy. Group A is eager to get on the tiny, tippy plane that will get them out of there—a short flight over plains and pans to an airstrip in the Moremi Wildlife Reserve. The Moremi was set aside as a sanctuary by the local tribes in the 1960s when it became clear that hunting was wiping out the animals. There are many small camps scattered here, run by many different outfitters. This camp is called Mombo, and it is a classic bush camp, the folding chairs of the sunset hour facing the creamy, golden veld. They will like Moremi a lot. They will see cheetahs, and cheetah cubs. They will see giraffes. They will go on night drives, which were against the rules in Chobe, through the forests and savannas of Chiefs Island, and they will see animal eyes, thousands of animal eyes shining. They don’t want to leave Moremi. This is the way they had dreamed it would be. They will have heard the groan and cough of lions at night as they lay on their cots, just like they were told they would.

  But too soon they must leave. It’s part of the plan, the experience. They must go farther into the delta, into the subtle, silent country of the Okavango, a great watery wilderness tangle of lagoons, twisting channels, and thousands of islands, some sandy and fringed with phoenix palms, others cool and dark with ebony trees and fig stands and forests of baobab. They will fly over this trackless expanse—hard to grasp but beautiful, they’ll agree, original. Hazy and green, white flocks of egrets and storks wheeling below the droning airplane, gray droves of elephants resembling thickets of trees, red antelope dashing through silver water. They will land at a village called Jedibe, which they will be told means “ostrich shit” in the local language—difficult to believe, but they won’t dispute it—and they will be transported from there in dugout canoes called mokoros to their camp in the delta’s panhandle. They will also be told to call the native guides, the polers of the mokoros, Trust and Pilot and Clever. The name of their cook at camp is Warm, for heaven’s sake. This is silly, but Group A will accept this and smile distractedly. They’ll have a lot to remember the next few days as they are poled interminably about in the mokoros. There are 550 bird species in Botswana—so many that they even have their own book, by Kenneth Newman, called, not unreasonably, Birds of Botswana. This book is referred to over and over again in the many hours spent in the mokoros. Floating the Okavango is as peaceful as a coma must be, and it is only the scream of the birdwatchers that disturbs the limpid calm. “Malachite kingfisher!” the initiated will call out. “Lesser jacana! Red-shouldered widow! Paradise flycatcher! Wattled plover! Sharp-billed honeyguide,” a perhaps over-initiated birder will cry, “ Birds of Botswana, page two hundred and ten!”

  They are poled about at lily-pad level through towering papyrus mazes. There is little aquatic life below the papyrus, for light can’t penetrate the packed, rotting roots, and the water is acidic and low in oxygen. Any creature larger than a rat would sink through the floating mats. In fact, the papyrus swamp is preferred habitat for very few species. The birds have to fly elsewhere in the delta to feed. There are, however, two medium-size antelope that live on the delta’s tiny islands, and it will take Group A days before they can pronounce their names with any confidence. These are the lechwe and the sitatunga. Even when these names are mastered, Group A will have great difficulty in telling the creatures apart because though they are very different in appearance, they are seldom seen. They are heard, sometimes, vanishing, and the polers confuse things further by sometimes calling out “Lechwe!” and sometimes “Sitatunga!” It wears them out in Group A trying to be the first to identify something or to even remember what someone else has identified. Even at breakfast there’s no peace, for the “Heuglin’s robin!” and the “grey lourie!” are chattering away. One bird calls, “Go away go away go away,” and the other says, “Don’t you do it don’t you do it don’t you do it,” and there will always be someone who won’t know which bird says what. They’ll be glad to bid farewell to the mokoros and get back on the bush plane again, first to Maun, a gritty, messy abattoir town, and then back to Victoria Falls.

  They’re off safari now, their concerns elsewhere. Should they go to the Falls Crafts Village and watch Makishi tribesmen stilt-and-pole dancing? They’ve heard it’s breathtaking. Should they have their fortune told by the n’anga in the zebra-skin skirt? Should they dare to eat crocodile thermidor?

  All the while, Group B has been having the same experience, but in reverse. They begin with the mokoros, which have about them, actually, very much the feeling of eternity. They see the sun rise from the mokoros, and they see the sun set from the mokoros. Sometime in between they stand around the enormous termite mound in the middle of camp. There are four hundred species of termites in Africa, and although they don’t have their own book, they are responsible for making many of the islands in the delta. The fungus-growing termite makes the largest mounds—big ragged castles that are as startling in the landscape as giraffes or baobab trees. The termites are constantly in the process of building their “termitaria,” growing their elaborate fungus gardens in arched chambers, and lovingly tending their huge queen and her consort, who live in a royal cell at the center of the mound. This is explained somehow by Chunk, but the group finds it difficult to appreciate the magnitude of the process. Instead they take pictures of the mound from every possible angle. They take pictures of the mokutshumo tree, the motsaudi tree, the mokoba tree, the motshaba tree. At night they sit under the sausage tree and shine flashlights at the big dog-faced bats that come to drink nectar from the dishy red flowers. Later, they retire to their tents and spray the air with cans of Doom Super and Peaceful Sleep so that they will not have to hear, in the words of the old Boer explorer Laurens van der Post, “the mosquitoes singing their wild pagan hymn.”

  Actually, they don’t hear mosquitoes at all, and this may have less to do with their personal cans of Doom Super than with the accumulation of chemicals that the government has been dumping on the Okavango for years in its effort to eliminate the tsetse fly. Chemicals are considered a great advance over earlier attempts at eradication, which included cutting down the trees to deprive the fly of cover and killing buffalo and kudu to deprive it of food. A chemical “cocktail” of deltamethrin and endosulfan is being used these days, sprayed from planes in a fine, low-volume mist. Even now, as Group B lies under the canvas in the delta wilderness in what they’ve been told is the last of old Africa, a plane flies over, misting. Not that they miss the singing of the wild pagan hymn. In fact, if they had to contend with mosquitoes as they were being poled about in the mokoros, they believe they would go out of their minds. They don’t even want to take pictures of the mokoros anymore, they want to do something else, they want to see the Bushmen. They’ve been told they have the option of flying to the Tsodilo Hills in the bush country on the northwestern edge of the delta to see the descendants of the original inhabitants of Africa. They want to see them, the Bushmen, and those rock paintings that are twenty-five hundred years old. But Chunk says that it’s not an interesting cultural experience anymore, that it’s disappointing, that the Bushmen wear Levi’s and Reeboks. “Modern Bushmen are a waste of time,” Chunk says. So they don’t see the Bushmen.

  Chunk suggests that the day be spent in
stead searching for a Pel’s fishing owl or a pangolin, a rare anteater with a tiny head whose large brown scales are composed of gluey-looking hair. The creature is rare because it is so “highly regarded” by the Africans, who believe that its hairy plates bring luck in love. A search for something that there is very little likelihood of finding elevates the purpose of any journey, and even this diffident group is beginning to suffer from a certain absence of purpose. They will not see the owl or the pangolin, but when they finally put the mokoros behind them and fly over the delta (agreeing that the overview is the best view) to Moremi, they will clamber into 4-wheel-drive vehicles once more, and see lions and wild dogs and even a honey badger, which is supposed to have a snarl more hideous than any other sound in Africa. They won’t hear it snarl, unfortunately, but they will see lions mating. They will park very close to these mating lions, as a matter of fact, and luckily the lions won’t be doing it in the shade, but right out in the sun. The pictures will come out even better. They will see lions with a warthog kill, though what they’d really like is to witness a kill. A lion slamming a zebra up against the Land Rover or tearing out an impala’s throat right before their eyes. That’s what some people observe on trips like this, they’ve heard. So, it’s possible they could witness such an ultimately African event. But they won’t.

  Still, they have a real sense that they’re on safari now. A native guide accompanies Chunk in Moremi—his name is Ishmael. He’s observant, he’s an excellent tracker, he knows all the signs. He would never confuse a giraffe’s feces with a kudu’s, as many people would. He can tell the difference between a zebra’s and a warthog’s, and that’s not easy either. Group B goes for walks with “Ish,” and he points out all these things. They see porcupine quills without the porcupine, a neat bundle of them, and Ish says, “Lion.” They see bone-white dung, and Ish says, “Hyena.” If the dung is long, it means the animal hasn’t had water for a while. If it’s black, it means the animal’s consumed a lot of blood. It’s almost relaxing, learning all this esoteric stuff—they’ve heard that safaris are good for relieving stress. They get up each morning half an hour before first light to be driven around for five hours, then after brunch and a nap and a tea, they are driven around again. Sometimes, just when they’re getting ready for their naps, Chunk will say, “Ish has seen some vultures, guys, let’s go!” and they will pile into the truck to see something it’s all over for, whatever it was. “Mongoose,” Ish says. “Steenbok.” Chunk drives right up to everything—aardwolves, monitor lizards, trees full of bee eaters. The only thing he doesn’t drive up to is another guided safari vehicle, particularly if it’s stopped. It’s the rule: if one group is looking at something, the other group can’t look at the same time.