A Single Swallow

by Horatio Clare

  The Mousebird was now modelling a sable-yellow leopard-print with matching tyres. Her white undercoat showed it all up to perfection. I was barely half out of her when a white man appeared, raising an eyebrow. He was older than me, quieter, and, I was perturbed to see, was not driving some sort of Landcruiser, which would have instantly given me one up on him, but the slightly tatty kind of estate favoured by nice families with small children. Worst of all, he appeared to have just done the shopping.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hi. Where have you come from?’

  ‘Cape Town!’

  He smiled.

  ‘Not in that, you haven’t.’

  ‘Ah, no – Windhoek . . .’

  We shook hands and introduced ourselves. His name was Mark. His wife was Margie. This was their camp.

  ‘You wouldn’t have any beds, would you?’

  They gave me a mattress in a tent standing on a platform in a low tree down a narrow path, by the river. It was a lovely spot, and it had a snake.

  ‘What kind of snake?’ Margie asked, when I remarked on it.

  ‘Green! Quite small, about so long, thin . . .’

  ‘Oh, it’s probably a Western Green,’ she said. ‘Harmless. What shape was its head? Coffin or diamond?’

  It did not act like a snake. They are supposed to withdraw when they hear you coming, I believed, as I stood on my platform, watching the beast ushering itself into a bush of dry twigs about a yard from the tent flaps. The twigs did not make a sound and the snake stopped, poorly concealed, now you knew where to look. It formed a long coil, with the tail disappearing into the bush and the head pointing back out of it.

  ‘Knob off!’ I hissed. It seemed a silly thing to say even as it came out, not my sort of curse at all, normally, but then I had never confronted a snake before. I made a gesture, some sort of noise, a stamp of the foot and another curse – and it came at me. Well, it moved, and not backwards.

  ‘Er, coffin-diamond?’

  ‘Well, it’s probably a Western Green.’

  ‘What shape do –’

  ‘Diamond. But there are these things called green mambas around . . .’

  ‘Green mambas.’

  ‘Yes, and they have coffin-shaped heads.’

  Perhaps it is inevitable that such a place should have a special dog. Her name was Slim, she was fat and no fan of crocodiles. Her sister, Shady, had been eaten by one. One of her rivals for human affection, a rangy bitch often the butt of the camp’s paint-ball gun, had had six pups in the back office. Three of them went down a rock python.

  In the Kovango River, they told me, lives the Dikongoro. The Dikongoro is a dragon. What does it look like, I asked?

  ‘Well, it has horns like a dragon, scales like a dragon, legs and claws and teeth like a dragon, the tail, the face, the eyes of a dragon . . .’

  ‘The wings?’

  They were not so sure. ‘More like a Chinese Dragon,’ someone said.

  The Kovango River at this point is wide and browny-green. It is warm and silky but you had to be careful about swimming in it, because it was high and strong and hugely deep; after the rains it rises and turns banks into islands, islands into reeds. All the huts near the Kovango here are on high ground or on stilts, and the difference between high ground and marsh depends entirely on the rain that falls in Angola and other places, and so varies from year to year. There are crocodiles and hippopotami in the Kovango, which are two more reasons for being careful and quiet, but the best reason of all is the Dikongoro.

  Why, I wondered, does everyone speak so quietly of the Dikongoro?

  ‘Has anyone seen it?’

  They fell silent. This is the trouble with this dragon, and the rather wonderful thing about it. If most dragons see you, they might eat you. Not the Dikongoro – no one mentioned anything of the sort. But they did say something else.

  ‘If you see the Dikongoro, one of your relatives will die.’

  Really, I said, has anyone . . .

  ‘Yes,’ they said. (And now they whispered.) One or two people living around here did see it, and relatives of theirs did die.

  Really, I said, who?

  ‘There is one guy who works here, whose mother saw it . . . and another woman . . .’

  And then I really did not want to know too much more. It was very clear that as a guest I could certainly ask around and meet local people who had seen the Dikongoro. Indeed, I could and did talk to several of the camp staff whose relatives had seen it, but we did not talk too much about such things. Instead we talked about the dragons themselves. Some said there was one, some said there were many. There is a certain island not far away where the Dikongoro live, and depending on who you talk to, the Dikongoro is either there or not there, and either minds if you go there or does not, and she is either a female, a mother, or she is many. Some even said the island was where the Dikongoro go to die.

  No doubt the story of the Dikongoro is almost as old as human settlement on this part of the Kovango, and the locals among the camp’s staff took it very seriously. The strange thing was the way their belief affected the white staff, all of whom mentioned the dragons, with a laugh, but then dropped their voices and said, ‘But you know they really do believe it. To them it’s absolutely true . . .’ in such a way that you looked uneasily at the river, and a bit of you believed it absolutely too.

  The core of the white staff, three South Africans and two Europeans, were around my age and included Byron, from Pretoria, who was rarely seen in anything but underpants. A birdwatcher, a naturalist, with the muscles of a man and the quick smile of a boy, resplendent in dark curls and blessed with no apparent traces of fear whatsoever, Byron was most happy fishing – in underpants – zipping off into the bush to do something – in underpants – and leading tours.

  ‘Are you coming tomorrow then?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure – where?’

  ‘For a bird walk?’

  ‘Are there any swallows around?’

  ‘Hmmm – maybe, yeah. Up by the village you sometimes see them.’

  I sat by the Kovango and wrote. How does the white man come to Africa? As he always has. As a hunter. As a missionary, evangelising Development in place of God. As an adventurer, seeking near-misses to prove his existence. As an explorer, searching for miracles to take home. As a trader-plunderer, with hard currencies on his side, instead of the rifle’s guarantee. As refugees from the world we have made; as boys, resolved to become men.

  The camp emptied of other guests, and the staff and I had it to ourselves. There was a floating cage on the river, for sunning and cooling off and not being eaten; there was a shower to redecorate; a staff auction to organise; there were meetings held – a post-mortem of a recent canoe trip – and someone had to go to town to pick up some diesel and other treats.

  Mark, whose brain-child all of this was, is keen that guests should not miss the souvenir shop. He is a South African, an engineer who had spent much of his professional life building roads in Botswana, he said, which seemed ironic, given the appalling state of the road to his camp.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But that’s no accident.’

  The souvenir shop’s stand-out item was not for sale: a long polemic on six sheets of paper, pinned to the wall, called ‘Mister Westerner’.

  I had a look, then he summarised it for me.

  ‘It says, Mr Westerner, you are welcome here, but stick your hands in your pockets and keep them there, we don’t want your money, and shut your mouth, and look around and learn.’

  Mark was looking forward to the crash that the world’s media was then predicting that world was about to face. As far as he was concerned, Caprivi and the environs of the camp had been miraculously conserved from the predations of modernity by years of war, and now represented an opportunity for a redrawing of the terms of business between locals and incomers.

  ‘You’ve got kids here who go away and come back and now won’t go near their parents because suddenly they say they s
mell. Who don’t respect their parents because they live in a hut, not a house. Do you know what the Human Rights Act did? It killed the traditional structure of law-enforcement round here – they used to just take you into the middle of the village and hit you with a stick: not any more. So the old respect is going.’

  ‘So what do you do?’

  ‘You give everyone a basic standard of education, to the point where they can make an informed choice: do I want to join the rat race or do I want to stay here? But what you don’t do is tell them that one is better than the other . . .’

  He was planning to defend the area with three strategically placed checkpoints. ‘There will be a hut, with display boards showing how people live here, and something like Mr Westener: we don’t want your bloody aid here, your bloody values! We’ve already got the values of — here!’

  ‘So this is an environmental re-education camp masquerading as a holiday?’

  He laughed. ‘Look, I’ll show you something.’

  It was a tree stump.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘. . .?’

  ‘I say it was the tree of knowledge. And when I came here I cut it down.’

  All the other trees and the grass needed a lot of river water pumped up to them, and soon he went off to see about it.

  Byron appeared in his underpants with Cristoph, who was as tall and lean and black as Byron was brown: they were like brother warriors; they looked as though they could run all day, catch their supper and disappear into the vastness without a care.

  ‘Bird walk?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Might get a bit wet. OK?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And it’s still very hot. Have you got sun cream?’ Margie asked. She would be coming with us. She was wearing her sun hat. We set out.

  We left the camp and bent left, following a path through tall golden grasses. We passed huts and a stockade; a village grouped around a great tree. Soon the path was twisting gently through reeds. Byron and Cristoph veered off to the right.

  ‘Stay that side if you like,’ they said. Now our path ran through shallow water, while theirs plunged them in up to their thighs.

  ‘Blacksmith Plover!’ they cried, shooting out hands like spears.

  ‘Right! Lovely!’

  It was a golden evening. The water was beautifully cool, and in some places my feet plunged into black silky mud, cut with sharp reeds. Byron and Christoph were in quite deep now, splashing confidently.

  Byron paused: ‘Crocodiles?’

  Cristoph laughed. They shook their heads and plunged on.

  ‘When the rains come there will be hippos and crocs here,’ Margie said, as various ducks, geese and waders got up, were named by the men, and disappeared. She told stories of expeditions with Mark. Their favourite place was Mana Pools, she said, a reserve on the Zambezi in Zimbabwe where she once looked up and saw a leopard gazing down at her from the branch of a tree.

  ‘Mark and I have a deal, which is if one of us is killed by an animal, no one is to kill that animal.’

  ‘Even if it’s a croc?’

  ‘Of course!’

  There was a commotion in the reeds. Suddenly Byron and Christoph came haring past us, crying out.

  ‘Great Snipe!’ they shouted.

  The bird looked like a fat woodcock. It burst from cover only moments before the hunters went hurdling after it. They marked its flight and charged at the spot where it went down. We were all in up to our thighs now, there was no path and no boundaries, just trees, outcrops of higher ground and the evening light playing over all like the wind. I was carrying my shoes and giggling at things.

  ‘What is it?’ Margie asked.

  ‘It’s those two – like mad hunting dogs! And I was just thinking I got a text message from my brother today he said hi hope you’re having a great time Mum says make sure you tuck your trousers into your socks.’

  Suddenly there was another double cry from Cristoph and Byron. This time they were frozen, not running, and both pointing at the killer. The peregrine’s belly was gold as the grass; it came in straight and fast and low and our cries made no impression on it. We watched it go all the way we had come in seconds, twist and disappear. We grinned at each other, speechless.

  The walk took us in a slow curve to higher ground, then back towards the river and the camp. A line of quiet cattle followed a drier path. We stopped to watch them as they came, gently swaying along, attended by a very small boy who smiled shyly. The cattle’s heads nodded gently as they walked and their hooves made hardly any noise on the path. The peace and ease of the beasts and their guardian were infectious. We stood still as they passed, as though witnessing something as old and simple as can be imagined, a pre-pasturalist scene, from a time when our forebears and their flocks were nomadic.

  I set out to emulate our expedition at the same time next day. I hoped to see swallows, and Byron said there were hobbies, a fantastically manoeuvrable falcon which hunts swallows, which I longed to see – but my main purpose was to prove to myself that I could just go for a walk, somewhere in Africa, and not get eaten by anything. I circled villages, listened to children singing in a school, and eventually found myself a mile from the camp under a sky which had turned suddenly black.

  ‘This place!’ I muttered, hurrying back as fast as one can without running.

  The storm drove spears of lightning into the land on the other side of the river. A girl was heading for cover 30 yards to my right and we slowed and smiled when we saw each other, pretending not to be scared, and there was a crack like cannon fire, an arrow of bright electricity, at least one of us shrieked and both fled. I paused again, later, just by the gateway to the camp. Just before dark is the time to see birds of prey, Byron had said, and he was right. I had watched a Fish Eagle earlier, up river, beating low and magnificently heavy not far away, but this was like glimpsing death.

  Suddenly it was there, twisting and flickering in the dusk. Its wings were like sickled scimitars, black against the gathering dark, and it flew in a careless, chaotic way, like a malignant swallow, as if it did not care at all which way it fell next. Then it was gone.

  ‘Bat Hawk!’ said Byron enviously, back at the camp, as we pored over one of the bird books. I was delighted, and shaken. This thing eats bats! And yet, and yet, what I really wanted to see, the bird I had been looking for, was the Hobby. In Europe swallows do not have many predators. A Peregrine is fast enough to take them, but peregrines are more likely to hunt larger prey: pigeons are their game. The Sparrow-hawk is not fast enough, though they occasionally catch swallows by surprise, and the Goshawk is confined to forests: the one raptor which routinely hunts swallows, and even swifts, is the Hobby, migrating on the tail of the tide of swifts and swallows, from southern England and northern Europe down to the southern fringe of the Sahara. This beautiful falcon has long wings, a dark back, a handsome black moustache, and red feathers around its thighs, as if it were wearing scarlet shorts. But in Africa the swallow’s problems multiply. As well as peregrines and migrating hobbies, there are African hobbies, eagle owls and bat hawks. Then, crossing the swallows’ line of travel is the track of Eleonora’s Falcon, an elegant, dark-backed bird which migrates between Madagascar and the Isles of Mogador off the Moroccan coast, as well as along the North African littoral into the eastern Mediterranean. Matching the speed of the sea wind, Eleonora’s falcons hang together in hovering flocks, a curtain of hunter-killers, waiting for exhausted migrants. Add the rain, the deserts, road traffic, storms, human hunters and adverse winds, and the swallow’s journey begins to resemble a giant chessboard, crowded with mortal dangers.

  The immediate change that camp wrought in me was to do with fear of the threats that might attend my own journey. Knowledge of what snakes were in the reeds, of how animals behaved, of where the Dikongoro lived, of how quickly cerebral malaria can take you, an understanding of all the places in which death lurked and the myriad ways it could strike did not allay f
ear. What blunted it was seeing people disregard fears, laughing, as if they had accepted in advance whatever price Africa would ask of them.

  In London the restaurants were booked solid. The London Eye was probably glowing pink; no doubt with a bit of planning and cash you could have rented a pod, complete with roses and champagne. Happy couples were kissing each other and more needful ones were texting. In Caprivi the bush telegraph had been busy with news of the evening’s entertainment. Of particular interest, as far as the staff were concerned, was the question of who the Overlanders were being guided by.

  ‘Who’s coming?’

  ‘Two Lucys!’

  ‘Juicy and Posh?’

  ‘No, just Juicy, and another one.’

  In swallow terms, St Valentine’s is a festival of human courtship, display, pair-bonding and copulation. Swallows compress into days a ritual which western human culture has stretched into years. Arriving at their European breeding sites, which – depending on their time of arrival and the ferocity of the competition – may or may not be where they themselves were born, males select and defend a territory and await the arrival of females. With the coming of the females the males begin their display flights; soaring and diving above their territory, singing and flaunting their tails. If and when a female is drawn to him, the male will land, fan his tail, give his enticement call and point out his suggested nest site with pecking gestures. If the female is unimpressed the male will need to suggest another site, quickly, or find another mate. On average a female will find a partner within three days of arriving; males are likely to court two or three females before wooing one. While just over four days is the average time it takes him, up to thirty-one days of trying have been recorded, before, finally, one bird succeeded.