by Parnell Hall
In my jeep, Lolita and her mother sat in the seat behind the driver, the older woman travelling alone sat in the middle, and Alice-whose-husband-had-been-trapped-by-an-elephant sat in back.
“Ah, good, you found him,” Clemson said.
“We were playing elephant tag,” I said. “I was going to just move them out of the way, but you said not to, so we went around.”
“Are you going to get in?” Alice said.
I climbed up next to Alice. It was a little harder climbing up into the back. Still, I was glad she’d chosen that seat instead of the one behind Lolita.
The porter who’d come to get me jumped up in the seat beside our driver, confusing me as to the young man’s function. If the other man was the driver, was he the guide?
“All set,” Clemson said. He climbed up next to the woman traveling alone, and we took off, jouncing along the dirty pile of ruts that passed for a road.
The driver turned in his seat, flashed a big smile, and said, “I am your guide. My name is John. That is Daniel. He is our spotter. He will be looking for things I can’t see because I must pay attention to my driving.”
John was paying no attention to his driving, he was looking at us, and we were heading for a large tree.
Clemson didn’t seem particularly concerned. “You are very lucky,” he said. “John is one of our best guides.”
John acknowledged the compliment and managed to miss the tree. We bounced along, looking for game. There was none. Despite what Clemson might say, apparently all the elephants lived in camp.
There were, however, a zillion birds, which John pointed out with great delight. He would slam the jeep to a halt, nearly catapulting us out of our seats, snatch up his binoculars, point, and declare triumphantly, “Lilac-breasted roller!”
At first this was annoying, because by the time I was able to figure out what he was pointing at and aim my binoculars at it, the jeep would have taken off again. Alice, on the other hand, would not only have been able to spot the Northern Carmine Bee-eater, for instance, but would have focused the long lens on it and snapped off a few dozen pix. But after a while, when I was actually finding a White-throated Blue Swallow or two, it was kind of fun.
I still would have traded them all for one mangy lion.
Alice didn’t get tired of the birds, but she got tired of holding the camera. “Is there a sandbag?” she asked Clemson. She had learned online that supporting the long lens with a sandbag was a big help.
“Should be.” He glanced around. “There’s one.”
The older woman sitting next to him fished it out of the well in front of her seat and handed it to Alice.
“Thanks,” Alice said. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Alice.”
The woman smiled. “Oh, really? I’m Alice too.”
“Oh,” Alice said. She smiled, but I wasn’t sure she was happy having someone appropriate her name.
“Hello, Alice 2,” I said. “I’m Stanley 1.”
We laughed good-naturedly and went back to bird-spotting.
Lolita and her mother did not join in the fun. Nor did they seem interested in the birds. Lolita barely raised her binoculars, even for the African Fish Eagle. She seemed moody.
Before sundown we stopped at an idyllic spot overlooking the river.
“Perfect or what?” Clemson said as we climbed out of the jeeps. “We’ll have our cocktails and watch the sun go down.”
The guides pulled out coolers and began setting up tables for a bar in the bush.
“See?” Clemson said. “All the comforts of home. With one exception. There are no restrooms at this particular facility. In the bush we emulate the animals in this respect. We mark our territory. You know about that, right? The animals pee on bushes to mark the boundaries of their domain. It’s called marking their territory. So, in case anyone wants to mark their territory we have a very nice thicket of bushes. You can use that if it isn’t dangerous.”
“How can you tell?” one of the women said.
“We send Daniel in. If a lion eats him, it’s dangerous.”
I was beginning to like Clemson more.
Daniel wasn’t eaten, and the bush proved popular. We used it politely, one at a time.
I marked my territory and returned to the jeep where Daniel had magically materialized a bowl of water and towel to wash our hands. I washed mine and accepted a club soda with lemon.
We had our drinks and watched the sun go down. It was magnificent. Yellows and reds and oranges. A veritable kaleidoscope of colors and lights, sort of the like the sequence at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That, in my opinion, went on too long. The sunset didn’t. It set quickly, with camera shutters snapping furiously. I watched and toasted it with club soda.
I was not the only one not snapping pictures. I noticed Lolita talking to the older of the two men. He didn’t seem particularly interested. Or it might have been his sunglasses—he hadn’t taken off the aviator shades, even though it was getting dark. But he wasn’t bending down or leaning in to talk to her. I wondered if he was gay.
I didn’t see Mommy. She must have been in the bush marking her territory, creating a rare window of opportunity. I was surprised the young stud hadn’t taken advantage of it.
Turned out he had. As I watched, he came back from the bar with two glasses of wine, one of which he handed to Lolita. In the gathering dark I could see her eyes light up as she accepted the wine. Subtlety, he managed to squeeze himself in between her and the other man. And he touched her occasionally. Nothing overt or suggestive, like an arm around her waist or her shoulders; he would just lightly touch her elbow while making a point. He did it several more times before Mommy returned from the bush to intervene.
Even as he turned away, I could see the smug smile on his face, and I realized what he’d been doing.
Marking his territory.
8
NIGHT DRIVE
DANIEL HAD A SPOTLIGHT. IT was handheld, and he swiveled it in all directions as John bounced the jeep along.
For a while we saw nothing. Then we began spotting deer. The first indication was the gleam of their eyes as the spotlight hit them. Daniel never kept the light on their eyes, however; he always moved it quickly away. That seemed very respectful of Mother Nature and all, but I wondered how we were ever supposed to see anything.
Eyes gleamed closer to the ground. The beam stayed on. John slammed the jeep to a stop. “Genet!”
I thought he said genek and would continue to mispronounce the animal’s name until someone corrected me. The genek or genet was a small furry animal with a black-and-gold spotted coat and a very long tail.
Daniel kept it in the spotlight until it ran into the bush. No one snapped pictures, there wasn’t time.
“What’s a genek?” I said.
“It’s like a mongoose,” Clemson said.
That might have been more helpful if I’d ever seen a mongoose. Fortunately, one showed up not long after the genet. He too was shy about performing in the spotlight, so the glimpse was brief. It was also disappointing. The mongoose looked like a less colorful genet. I seemed to remember they killed cobras. If so, they probably did it just to get noticed.
Minutes later the beam picked up another genet.
“Genek!” I cried, demonstrating my keen eyes and bad ears.
“Genet number 2!” Clemson declared as it scurried off into the darkness. “Mowangi saw nine last week. We might beat that!”
I was sorry to hear it. A fierce interest in how many genets we might see seemed like a ploy to distract us from the fact we weren’t going to see anything bigger.
Wrong again.
We bounced around a bend and there was a hippo.
It was huge, though not like an elephant. Of course, I was seeing him from the highest seat in the jeep. If you haven’t seen elephants on the ground, trust me, the experience is not comparable.
At any rate, the hippo didn’t seem bothered by the light. He was, after all, a hip
po. He stood there calmly, while the cameras clicked.
“Is that unusual?” I said.
“What?”
“To see a hippo out of water.”
Clemson shook his head. “They come out at night to eat.”
“What do they eat?”
“Sausage fruit,” Alice 2 said.
I knew about sausage fruit. John had pointed it out earlier on the afternoon drive. They grew on trees, and they looked like huge salamis, only of a greenish hue.
“How do they get them?” I said. “Bump the tree and shake them down?”
“They climb the tree.” John said it with a straight face.
It took my mind a moment to process the fact he was joking. I must have looked pretty stupid.
“They cannot get them down,” John said. “They find them on the ground.”
I didn’t recall seeing any on the ground, but given my recent track record, I wasn’t going to say anything.
We found two more genets. One I mispronounced. The other someone else saw first. Whether they mispronounced it or not, I have no idea.
We drove along, spotting small creatures and hoping for another hippo.
The jeep stopped. And there was something different about the way it stopped this time. Instead of slamming to a halt, it glided to a halt very quietly.
John held up his hand as if to forestall questions. He pointed to the bushes and whispered, “Leopard!”
Sure enough, there in the bush, in the indirect light of Daniel’s beam, were glowing eyes. As my vision adjusted to the light level, the animal took shape. I could see the ears, the nose, the mouth. The black, mottled spots on the yellow coat.
I wondered if there was enough light for Alice to shoot. Alice might have wondered too, but it certainly wasn’t stopping her. She fired off shot after shot.
The other jeep glided to a stop next to ours. That was a surprise. First to see it, and then to realize it hadn’t been with us since we left. Of course there was no point following right behind us, Daniel’s light would drive away the game, making their spotter’s light moot. But like magic they showed up the minute there was a leopard.
The young man was standing in the jeep. I wondered if that was so he could see better, or to let Lolita see him better. She looked over and he waved.
The leopard took off. One minute it was there, the next it was gone.
Clemson muttered something under his breath.
“I thought it was going to come out,” Alice 2 said.
“It was,” he said.
John and the other guide began talking to each other in Swahili. At least I thought it was Swahili. It turns out there’s hundreds of dialects, and I had no idea which one this was. But I gathered from the body language that John shared Clemson’s opinion that it was the arrival of the second jeep that had scared the leopard away. Though I’d have given some credit to the young man’s cheery wave. I’m sure neither of the men said so. The guests can do no wrong.
We drove off, leaving the other jeep behind. We saw some more genets, but after the leopard they seemed tame. Even John lost his enthusiasm pointing out genet number 5. As the number increased, the exclamation mark seemed to fade away.
It was getting cold, and I was glad to have my fleece. I pulled it out of the backpack, put it on.
Alice shivered.
“Want a fleece?” I asked her.
“I’m not going to take your fleece.”
I pulled it out of the backpack. “You want yours?”
“I told you not to bring that.”
“Yeah, but you married a moron who can’t do anything right.”
Alice accepted the fleece grudgingly. She wasn’t about to concede the right to blame me for bringing it.
Two genets, one mongoose, and a Spotted Eagle Owl later—the owl, I thought, was a particularly good find, sitting motionless in a tall tree, its camouflaged feathers almost indistinguishable from the bark, only its bright eyes giving it away—John pulled the jeep to a stop, pointed, and said, “Two!”
I was not impressed. Two more genets might bring us closer to the magic number, but I had no money down on the proposition, and whether we exceeded nine genets on our drive was not a real nail-biter for me.
When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. Daniel wasn’t swiveling the light at escaping genets, he was aiming it into a gulley that ran across the field perpendicular to the road.
I followed the beam of light and gasped. It was far away and hard to see, but there did indeed appear to be two leopards down in the gully.
Before I could raise my binoculars, the jeep took off, leaving the road and bouncing across the open field toward our quarry.
“It’s not two leopards,” Clemson said.
I gasped. Clemson was right. It was one leopard, and what looked like a large, ferocious wolf.
“Hyena,” John said, turning around in the front seat.
I got the impression our guide resented Clemson usurping his authority.
I also got the impression we were going to die as the jeep hurtled toward the gulley.
John turned just in the nick and brought us back from the brink. He snatched up the microphone from the jeep’s radio, pressed the button, and said something in dialect.
The jeep slowed and we coasted to a stop not ten yards from the leopard and hyena.
They were not alone. There had a deer with them. The deer was not a friend. The deer was dead. His belly had been ripped open, and blood and entrails were oozing out on the ground. The hyena, his mouth already red with blood, was ripping at the flesh.
The leopard crouched in the shadows a short distance away.
“The leopard killed the impala, and the hyena stole it from him,” Clemson said.
Ah. So the deer was an impala. I was glad I hadn’t called it a deer. “Why doesn’t the leopard take it back?” I said.
“You see the jaws on the hyena?”
I heard, more than saw anything. The hyena was biting down. Bones were crunching.
“He could snap the leopard in half. And the leopard knows it.”
The other jeep slid to a stop in back of ours. John must have called them.
Spotlights lit up the scene. Cameras came out, exposures were discussed, shots were taken. I even got out the video camera. I wasn’t sure if there was enough light to film, but it was worth a try.
A commotion from the other jeep turned my head. Apparently the young man had gone a little heavy on the sundowners. He was giving the driver a hard time for stopping behind our jeep, where he couldn’t see as well.
The other passengers in the jeep seemed torn between being embarrassed by this display, and wanting to have a better view. After a few moments the beleaguered driver started the motor, drove around us, and parked the jeep right in our path.
Clemson was furious. He didn’t say anything, at least nothing we could hear.
The proximity of the jeep didn’t scare the hyena away. From the look of things, nothing short of a bomb blast was going to scare the hyena away. The leopard retreated a short distance, but hung out hopefully.
We hung out too, our vision partly impaired, and rooted for the leopard.
Eventually it managed to slip in, steal away with what appeared to be the stomach. It dragged it out of sight of the hyena and began ripping it apart. Even in the dark, it was incredibly messy and gross.
Shortly after that, we headed back to camp. According to Clemson, the scene wasn’t likely to change, and it was time for dinner.
I was surprisingly hungry.
9
MALARONE
ONE PROBLEM WITH GOING TO Africa is you can get malaria. Mosquitos carry it. I learned that the hard way. No, not by being bitten. By making an injudicious remark. There were flies buzzing about the jeep, and I said, “Are those tsetse flies? It would be just my luck to get malaria.” Alice jumped all over me. Tsetse flies don’t carry malaria. As any four-year-old knows, they carry sleeping sickness. I was not in a position to poll fou
r-year-olds on the validity of this assertion, which I sincerely doubted—not that tsetse flies carried sleeping sickness, that four-year-olds knew it—so I let it go, as I let go more and more subjects in my declining years.
Anyway, the thing about malaria is you don’t want it. You take pills so you won’t get it. Or if you do get it, it will be mild. The pill you have to take is Malarone, and it’s not like a vaccine you take once and you’re good to go. You take pills every day of the trip, and you start two days before and end two days after, just to bookend your malaria, so to speak.
Malarone is not a high-profile drug that advertises on TV, you know, with the couple doing yard work around the house and the voiceover, “You’re in the prime of your life and she’s looking awful good, and you’d like to be set to go, but, hey, you’ve got malaria. What a bummer. Don’t let malaria slow you down. Ask your doctor about Malarone. Malarone can keep you malaria-free so when she’s ready, you’re ready. Malarone: it keeps you good to go.”
The commercial, of course, would come with the usual horrifying disclaimer, inevitably suggesting far worse results than the condition it was called upon to treat. “Warning. Consult your doctor before taking Malarone. Not all patients on Malarone are necessarily fit for sexual activity. Discontinue immediately in the event of seizure, stroke, or heart failure. Patients on Malarone may experience drowsiness, itchiness, rash, irritability, and diarrhea.”
Of course, I’m making all that up. Of those symptoms, the only one I can attest to is diarrhea. Which is why I didn’t go on the afternoon game hike. I figured there were no bathrooms in the bush, and there was some territory I just didn’t want to mark.
Alice was gung ho for the hike. It was, after all, what it was all about. After a full day of seeing animals from the jeep, she wanted to see them up close.
It was the following day. We’d spent the morning on a game drive, uneventful, had our last lunch at elephant camp, and headed out for bush camp.
Bush camp was just what it sounded like, camp in the bush with no amenities, just small, double-occupancy tents with the sides rolled up during the day because of the heat and mosquito netting on the sides because of malaria. There was no electricity or plumbing, just a single communal outhouse in a rectangular tent slightly larger than an upright coffin. Clemson pointed it out, referring to it proudly as the straight-drop toilet.
