by Tony Park
Sam cursed, silently, and slithered backwards, using heels and elbows to propel himself. He’d fallen over the nylon guy rope of his own tent. He rolled sideways and in through the open door. As he zipped it shut he wondered what else he could do wrong today. At the rate his luck was holding out he would be lucky if there wasn’t an Egyptian cobra under his sleeping bag by now.
The elephant approached. Sam lay in the bottom of his tent, in the middle of nowhere. ‘May as well go out an Emmy winner.’ He switched on the camera and waited to die.
SEVEN
Stirling snatched up the vibrating mobile phone, cutting off the ringtone, a woodland kingfisher’s call, which seemed absurdly frivolous given the magnitude of the disaster unfolding around him.
‘Stirling, it’s Wayne from Mack Air, howzit?’
How did he think it was? Stirling had spent a sleepless night making and taking calls to and from the United States about the missing production crew. That morning an aerial search of the concessions to the south of the Moremi Game Reserve had finally found the charred and twisted wreckage of the helicopter that had been carrying the Americans. The initial report had come from the pilot of a light plane who had spotted the smoking wreckage and someone waving a shirt to attract his attention. There was nowhere near the crash site for the fixed-wing aircraft to land, so another helicopter had been scrambled from Maun Airport.
‘Give me the news, Wayne.’
‘The rescue helo landed fifteen minutes ago. John Little, the pilot, is in a bad way – he’s in a coma and quite badly burned. One of the American guys, Ray, the cameraman, has a broken arm and the other one …’
‘Gerry.’
‘Right, Gerry, is a bit bruised and probably has concussion. The woman … sheesh, that woman. She’s threatening to sue everyone in Maun and wanted us to fly her back out to the bush this afternoon. She’s already found herself a replacement cameraman. Man, she’s a piece of work that one.’
‘Tell me about it. What about their star, Sam Chapman?’
‘Not on board. They’d dropped him somewhere in the bush and we’ve still got three aircraft out searching for him.’
‘Why?’ Stirling asked. ‘Didn’t they have a GPS coordinate or grid reference where they left him?’
‘GPS was left in the chopper when they all evacuated and it was burned to a crisp. Cheryl-Ann’s given us a description of the area, and we know it was in the hunting concession on the edge of the game reserve. The researchers down there know the general area where he was dumped and they’re sending out vehicles to look for him. Sam has a sat phone, but Cheryl-Ann’s was destroyed in the crash as well.’
Stirling shook his head. He felt bad for the pilot and now he had something else to worry about when it came to Sam Chapman. He felt an attack of guilt when he recalled thinking to himself that he hoped something happened to the TV star during his ‘survival’ filming. ‘Where are they all now?’
‘In the Maun hospital. We offered to call MARS and have them evacked to Jo’burg, but Cheryl-Ann insisted they all stay local so they can get back to work as soon as possible.’
‘Thanks Wayne. Do me a favour; call me and give me a heads up when Typhoon Cheryl-Ann is headed my way.’
‘Will do. Bye.’
Stirling put the phone in his pocket and turned at the sound of footsteps on the wooden floorboards outside the camp office. Tracey stood there, chewing on the fingernail of her right index finger.
‘Any news?’
He relayed Wayne’s update. ‘Chapman’s out there in the bush somewhere, all alone. He’s an expert in survival, according to the commercials on DSTV, so he should be fine for a night or two until they find him.’
Tracey’s lower lip started trembling. ‘Oh, Stirling, I feel just terrible about all this. About what happened between you and Sam, I … I just …’
As angry as he was with the American, Stirling couldn’t rid himself of the nagging suspicion that Tracey had not been completely innocent. If it turned out that Chapman had tried to force himself on Tracey, then the man would wish he had been on board the helicopter and died. But Tracey was young and she might simply have been mildly infatuated with the Coyote man and his star status. The question was, had Chapman taken advantage of her naive adulation, or had Tracey gone after him?
She started crying and he pushed the suspicions aside. He closed the gap between them and wrapped his arms around her. ‘Hush, my babe. Everything will be all right. You’ve had a rough couple of days.’ He kissed the salty tears from her eyes.
Tracey buried her head in the wiry hairs above the V of his shirt and spoke into his chest through muffled sobs. ‘I feel awful. Maybe I led him on just a teeny bit …’
‘No, babe. If that bastard can’t tell the difference between your friendly personality and a come-on, I’ll teach him when I see him.’
‘Don’t … please don’t hurt him, Stirling.’
He lifted her chin with his finger. ‘Tracey, is there something you need to tell me?’
She bit her lip and shook her head. ‘Can’t we just forget all about it? I love you Stirling, and only you.’
‘I still want to break every bone in his body. Slowly.’
Tracey smiled through her tears. ‘It was just one of those things. Perhaps we’d both had a bit too much to drink, but I just need to know that you still love me, Stirling.’
‘I do, babe. Of course I do.’
‘I’m so glad, Stirling.’ She placed her head back down on his chest. ‘The lodge needs the business, right?’
He nodded, reluctantly. It was true that the documentary shoot would be good PR for the camp at a time when business was slowing, so if there was a way to get past the incident with Chapman – and that was up to Tracey – then they might be able to salvage something from the mess of the last few days. He couldn’t stay mad at the beautiful, sexy young woman in his arms. Perhaps he was partly to blame for Tracey’s behaviour around the lantern-jawed pretty boy. ‘Do I pay enough attention to you, Tracey?’
‘Of course you do, my big, tough safari guide. Sometimes it’s hard for me, though, being stuck out here in the bush away from everything.’
‘I understand, my babe. Maybe we can get away down south to Jozi or the Cape after we get rid of the Yanks.’
‘That would be lekker, Stirling,’ she said into his chest. ‘Also, maybe you want to come take a look on the computer. I just found the most divine gold bracelet on eBay. Come, see!’
For a moment, Sonja thought she was lost.
She checked her GPS and saw that she was thirty-one kilometres south-east of Xakanaxa as the crow flew. It was where she thought she was, but the countryside here was alien to her.
Where there should have been a channel of cool, clear water there was just a cratered pathway of dried black mud. Elephants had sucked and trampled the last of the moisture from this place, leaving nothing but the deep imprints of their circular feet, which had set like fossilised dinosaur footprints. Occasionally, in past years of very severe drought, this distant offshoot of the Okavango had dwindled to little more than a metre wide, yet it had always flowed, right through the dry season, providing a transfusion of life to the game that usually roamed here until the rains came again.
She looked around. Not an animal in sight. At this time of year, in early October, there should have been zebra, waterbuck, impala, kudu and wart-hog queuing for their ration of water, tentatively sniffing the air and looking around them for evidence of predators.
Sonja scanned the tree line. It wasn’t lions keeping the other game away from this badly healed scar on the earth’s surface, it was men. ‘The dam,’ she said. In between assignments she caught up with news via the internet and she’d read reports of doom and gloom from various environmental groups about the damming of the Okavango and the impact it was creating already, despite having only recently been completed. Although the waters of the delta flowed in her own blood and the place was the home of her soul, she had been scept
ical initially about the impact the dam would have.
Perhaps she’d been fighting on the side of greedy and corrupt governments and taking tainted money from oil and mining companies to fight their clandestine fights for too long. She’d believed the spin doctors from the Namibian and Angolan governments who assured the world the dam would have no lasting impact on flows in the delta’s game reserve, no detrimental effects on man or beast. Sonja was Namibian-born, after all, and she couldn’t begrudge the poor people of the country their right to clean water and electricity.
She shook her head. Perhaps this unseasonal lack of water was just an anomaly, caused by some other natural event. The Okavango Delta sat on a major geological fault between two tectonic plates deep below her feet. Earth tremors were common, although the thick cushion of Kalahari sand masked the presence of all but the most severe. Sonja did remember a waterhole, a favourite place for her and her father to go game viewing, drying up, overnight.
‘Earthquake, my girl,’ her father had explained when she had asked where the water had gone.
‘Did the ground open up and swallow it, Pa?’
‘It just shifted a little, like this,’ he held out his hand, palm down, and waggled it slightly, ‘and this water has drained away, somewhere else.’
‘Ag, shame,’ she had said. ‘The poor animals, where will they drink?’
‘God gives as he takes, Sonja. Somewhere nearby some other animals are now drinking water where yesterday there was none. Good things can come from bad in nature, if not in the life of humans.’ At the time she’d wondered at his last remark. As an adult she could replay that little vignette and spot the clues, the signs she had missed as a child. When her father looked away from her, out over the dry expanse where the water had been, he was not ignoring her or avoiding her questions, he was remembering something he’d done, probably someone he had wronged. The Americans had coined a term for it in Vietnam – the ‘thousand yard stare’. The eyes of a man fixed on nothing, but seeing things too terrible to speak of. She’d seen it in the eyes of pimply-faced soldiers, barely out of their teens, on the streets of Baghdad, and in the Blackhawk pilots flying over the dusty nothingness and pitiless mountains of Afghanistan.
Sonja and her tired old horse, that she had named Black Beauty even though the mare was a mangy chestnut brown, had crossed many channels that only flowed with water after the summer rains, and she had thought nothing of finding them dry, but what she saw here was not normal. ‘There should be water here, old girl,’ she said to the horse. ‘Sorry. You’ll have to plod on a bit further.’ Sonja smoothed the horse’s flank and stilled the snorted protest.
She had spared the horse as much as she could. After leaving the main road and the old man in his zebra-skin cowboy hat, she had deliberately headed the wrong way: east, towards Zimbabwe. Once she was deep into the bush, out of the man’s sight, she had wheeled the horse to the right and carried on south for a kilometre before crossing the road again and heading west, towards the delta.
Finding the horseman where she had was fortuitous for she was not far short of the cut line which ran west from the main Kasane to Nata road, into the delta. The cut line was an extension of the cleared area that ran along the southern border of the Moremi Game Reserve, where a veterinary fence separated wild animals from domestic cattle.
The vet fences were a controversial feature of the modern-day Botswana landscape. Crisscrossing the country, they were erected to cordon off sections of the country from buffalo, which can carry foot and mouth disease, in order to comply with European Union regulations regarding meat exports. Sonja knew from her youth that some of the fences, such as the one bordering the Moremi Game Reserve, were useful, as they also stopped cattle and humans from straying into wildlife areas. Others, such as the Kuke fence that cut across central Botswana and the northern border of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, had been an ecological disaster. The Kuke fence had stopped seasonal migrations of animals from the south to the north. During years of particularly bad drought, like in the 1980s, an estimated 300,000 wildebeests, 260,000 hartebeests and 60,000 zebras died because the fence stopped them reaching water.
The horse had responded immediately to Sonja’s tender touch. Her guess that it had not been well treated by its previous owner was confirmed not only by the ticks and fleas in the mare’s coat, but also by the presence of a stone under a poorly fitted shoe. Sonja used her Leatherman’s pliers to pull out the nails and remove all four shoes. She filed down the hooves and left them unshod as she knew the horse could easily handle the bush without shoes. In a quiet corner of a cattle farm she found a dip with water still in it and coaxed Black Beauty in. Once in, the mare enjoyed herself. Later, Sonja risked stopping at a cluster of cattlemen’s huts and at the village store – a hut selling odds and ends – she was able to buy some Sunlight soap, a few carrots and some mealies. Beauty relished the food treats, and with directions from the teenage girl running the shop Sonja was able to find her way to a nearby waterhole.
The water was far from pristine, but it was free of the chemicals in the cattle dip and Sonja could join the horse in the water. Sonja made sure the dressing on her leg was well sealed, then stripped off. The horse tossed her head in pure joy as Sonja massaged her flanks with the soap. Sonja laughed as the mare splashed her and nudged her until she fell. It was almost like being a kid again, but the ache in her leg reminded her they had a long way to go until they were both out of danger.
Her route took her through empty, dry country to the north of Nxai Pan National Park and the south of Chobe National Park, with its huge herds of elephants and the healthy prides of lions that preyed on them. Even though she was outside these parks, she knew there could still be lions in the area, so each evening she made a boma of wag-’n-bietje to keep Beauty safe while she grazed.
They were up before the dawn; Sonja, stiff-legged, bathing the puckered bullet wounds and changing her dressing, and Black Beauty neighing and protesting against the saddle, although Sonja knew it was just for show. The horse had bounced back quickly and they made between fifty and sixty kilometres per day. Sonja walked for an hour at a time, to spell the horse and keep the muscles in her injured leg working. It was a hot, at times uncomfortable, journey but they were making progress.
Occasionally she saw game; a lone oryx, a small herd of zebra and some far-off springbok. Sonja had long since finished the last of the bottled water from her pack. When they came to a waterhole, Sonja would watch it for a while, then walk the muddy banks to check for the drag marks of crocodiles. Once satisfied the water was safe she would let Beauty drink and then scoop water in a canvas filter bag shaped like a pointy-toed sock. The stitching at the bottom of the bag trapped the coarse particles of mud and other muck from the water, which Sonja later boiled in a tin billy over a fire in order to purify it.
Sonja pushed thoughts of frosted cans of Coke and chilled glasses of Cape sauvignon blanc from her mind. When she rode she sat side-saddle with her injured leg crossed over the good one and removed the dressing to let the sun and air aid with the healing. There was no infection, which was good, though she kept taking the antibiotics Chipchase had given her.
Sonja thought about her phone conversation with Emma. She hoped that despite her daughter’s teenage angst she was keeping up with her studies and continuing to do well. Emma was the one good thing left in her life, even if the cheeky little cow hated her. Sonja felt guilty, as usual, about not spending enough time with Emma, yet ironically she knew that she was usually at her most content when she was alone, like now. This was no holiday, but she found herself calmed by the long ride. Sonja thought about the three men in her life to whom she’d been closest. It was probably a good thing Martin had had a wandering eye and an off and on gambling problem, though Sonja couldn’t help but remember his prowess as a lover. She’d not had better since the time they’d spent together. Also, she thought Martin would have made a good dad for Emma. The pair still got on well whenever they met.
After Chipchase’s probing there was no way to keep Danny Byrne’s handsome, boyish face out of the shadows at the edges of her memory, but she mentally eased him back into the gloom with thoughts of the future. She wondered what Stirling looked like now, after so long, and felt her anxiety and excitement rise in her chest as she allowed herself to think about their coming meeting.
Sonja walked towards the setting sun, with Beauty following contentedly in her footsteps. The moon was rising behind her, its pumpkin orange a pale yet stunning reflection of the sun’s crimson. The country here was flat, open grasslands, tinderbox dry and begging for the water that might now never come.
Her arms and legs were brick red from the sun, and the evening cool, when it finally came, was like a reunion with a long-lost friend. Sonja spared the batteries in the GPS and navigated by the stars. As darkness descended the sky lit up and it was easy to believe she and her horse were the only two living things on the planet. When at last fatigue overtook her, she tethered the horse and rolled out her sleeping bag. She was almost too tired to make a fire, but she knew if she did not boil the water she had collected that day then she would have nothing to drink when the sun relaunched its offensive on them in the morning.
Routine, she thought. Roll out bed, make fire. Boil water, decant. Eat, not because she was hungry, but because she had to. Clean and oil rifle, clean and oil pistol. It was like being in the army again. Routine, routine, routine. The orderliness, the mundaneness of it all gave a sense of personal control and discipline to a life that would otherwise be one of pure chaos.
Sonja chewed a stick of biltong and washed it down with lukewarm water while she watched the fire – African television they called it here – and waited for the billy to boil.
The flames were mesmerising and they took her back to Danny Byrne’s living room in his cottage in Northern Ireland, where the pair of them had sat naked, wrapped in a blanket, and gazed at the glowing coals in his hearth. What had she done, and why had she done it; she had asked herself that over and over. It was impossible to extinguish the memory, or forget the guilty warmth that had radiated out from within her.
