June 19 -30 2001 / Zambia: African Circle Part 2
Total Eclipse in Zimbabwe, and Walking in Zambia
Part 2 - Beginning Our Walking Safari in Zambia
6/22 Harare to Nkwali Camp, in South Luangwa National Park in Zambia
new animals seen today:
Impala
Bushbuck
Crocodile
Puku
Green Pigeon
Jacana
Sacred Ibis
Genet
I woke with images of high black sun in my mind. The pink and orange prominences, the radiant pink chromosphere, the passion of light that was the corona--all in my mind's eye.
Now we have arrived at another place, in Zambia, for our second trip, much shorter, and to have much more walking.
It's another flight in a little plane, and new people, perhaps a bit stranger than I had thought at first, and a very exceptional guide named Jason.
We drive from the airport along a very narrow tar road in an open vehicle, with tall grass on either side of us and people walking or biking and carrying big loads, the women, on their heads, in baskets or wrapped in cloth, and many people wave at us. The kids practice their standard English sentences on us, the ones every kid seems to learn in school all over the world these days. “Hello.” “How are you?” “What is your name?” “My name is---.”
The little settlements are a combination of thatched rondavels and a few square buildings. There are piles of uncut thatch sitting around, drying. I see laundry carefully laid out in a dry riverbed.
We move into the park. There is a fire burning around us, and we hear it crackling when it rushes through the tall grass. Jason stops to give us “the fire talk” as the smoke rises around us.
We pass burning elephant dung (they being poor digesters of their food, so it is good tinder and good food for some other animals).
And also the elephants, a small family amid the trees, and a giant aardvaark hole-- I would kill to see the aardvaark! We see impala, a new animal for us, and a tree hung with baboons.
Our little house has a bathroom open to the sky, and also to the baboons we are told, and there will be the elephant and even hippos among us in the night it seems. We are alongside a wide river which is dotted with pinkish hippos on the opposite side (for the moment), and your odd crocodile too.
At lunch, the usual sumptuous lunch, just across the waterway from us, is a small group of elegant bushbuck, with spots and stripes and curving horns, the first we have seen of these, too.
At this place by the river, which moves very slowly, hippos course along ponderously in the brown water, bellowing every once in a while, one animal's bellow seeming to set off a series of comments from others up and down the river.
After a rest, we got out on a late afternoon and evening game run. The other family turns out to be somewhat strange. I finally decide it is the brother who is at the heart of it, and it takes me about 24 hours to decide that he is possibly slightly retarded, and that he has learned social routines and ways with others that are peculiar, but which see him through. I guess with this kind of image in mind I can deal with their strangeness.
Jason, our guide, is deeply knowledgeable and very good at presenting what he knows. He reminds me of myself. I find that after a couple of hours on the trail with him I want a rest, though—it is like eating a very rich big piece of fruitcake, I am stuffed and need time to digest both what I have seen and possibly learned, but more importantly, and more indigestibly, I need a rest from his powerful personality. This response makes me wonder whether I inflicted myself too much on my passengers when I was a tour director. Our guides in Namibia were easy to swallow, like a drink of Gatorade. Jason is like a glass of eggnog.
Anyhow.
We go out, and there are so many things to see and relish, mostly because he is so adept at finding and cherishing them for us. We see Green Pigeons, a bunch of them, exactly the color of the tree they are flying in and out of.
We hear the bark of a bushbuck, just like a dog.
We see a new animal, a Puku female and young, the little one reddish and sleek, the adult kind of your basic stripped-down antelope, but rather fuzzy and dainty-looking.
We get close to six giraffes at dusk, at a small water hole, one bends to drink and as she stands, an arc of water fans from her mouth. There are elephants at dusk, too, and Jason describes one's encounters with them as "cultural exchanges," a notion I dearly love. They are wading and drinking and feeding elephant-hip deep in some water. Also here are a couple of hippos, a sacred ibis, and a few jacanas, all in the same water.
We have our evening drinks at the edge of this scene, as Mars appears redly and the night odors rise in a silent music. Jason postures a bit, showing off his personality and experience. He has a flirtatious manner with each of us, and I had overheard part of an exchange between him and I think one of his previous passengers, about some possible difficulties in that line on the earlier trip. He turns out to be half Italian and half Brit, born here. He is attractive but too single-minded to be of interest. I sit next to him in the vehicle, and he shares lots of things about what we see, and I suppose I do my own posturing too, but it's not of much interest to me.
On the way home, elephants cross the road in front of us in silence. It is a mystery how such very large creatures can move so silently.
And two porcupines are seen, one larger and one smaller, their eyes glowing redly in the spotlight. They are not as big as the ones we saw being fed in Namibia, and they are both less and more satisfying.
Just as we are nearing the camp, there is a leopard caught in our spotlight, the spotlight carried by a black man who sits in the front seat. The leopard trots down the road in front of us, and stops to turn and look, as cats and dogs will. Then the leopard turns off the road and melts into the grass out of sight. At the same time, a genet is seen, a tiny cat-like animal with a fine spotted coat and a long, darkly banded tail. I am more thrilled with the genet than even with the leopard, because the genet is small and nocturnal and not easy to see. Nobody seems as interested in him as I am, and Jason dismisses him by saying he is common.
Our little hut is open to the air, and in the night there are many wonderful sounds from just outside--elephant passing through and browsing, I believe, and possibly some porcupines too. Lots of things just outside our door.
A single shrill elephant cry rises like light in the darkness.
6/23 Out of Nkwali Camp
new animals seen today:
Waterbuck
Vervet Monkey
White-Fronted Bee-Eater
Cape Buffalo
Honeybadger
White-Tailed Mongoose
Water Dikkop
The morning begins too quickly for me, with a too-noisy small breakfast by the river. An ibis turns and wheels slowly up and down in front of the dawn-lit river, and I can hear the air passing through his wings. Then it is into the vehicle for a game run.
Which turns out to last over six hours, a bit long in the sun for me, but we do see fine things.
Hippos wheeze, grunt, squeal, hum, and roar from the water. There are crocodiles hanging about. There are two elephant in the road, moving as if underwater like the hippos. They contemplate us silently and move off past each other as if in a slow dance, with all deliberate speed, John says.
Jason stops over and over for many fine birds, and has something interesting to say about each of them, very much as I would.
There are baboons on the bridge that leads into the park here, and we spend a long time watching them, as they watch us a bit too.
There are some very dark zebras, whose stripes run not only up into their manes, but also fully down their legs and tails. Their hooves are black and the stripes blend into them. The daughter of the family we travel with, about 23 years old, is in a transport, as the whole family had been over the leopard last night. I see what a difference it makes to have seen each of these animals for this first time already. I am happy for her, but somehow wish, as always, to be alone.
We see a pair of waterbuck, another new animal. They are dark and sullen somehow.
And there are a few vervet monkeys with greenish bellies and sleek tails.
The morning includes lots of looks at butterflies, and a chance to stop and watch their behavior, something I have never had a chance to do any time except when I have been alone.
But somehow it all seems too much, and I am very tired when we finally return after so long.
Just now I have had an hour's nap, and it is quiet in camp for a bit more, and a troupe of baboons has moved into camp, walking ominously purposefully across the grass and toward the direction of the cottages, including ours where John is still resting. Some Brit women are sitting at the edge of the river, and one of them is smoking, so I am going to leave, since I am in the wind line of her smoke. I am not doing very well with any of this!
I am not sure why I am not doing well with this, either with the journal or with the trip itself. I am not comfortable around these people, the boy or young man I think has Asberger's syndrome. He has verbal tics that are very annoying, and coughs constantly, I think another tic. The parents, especially the mother, are guarded, and the daughter is child-like even though she is an adult. I had so hoped they would be pleasantly compatible, but they aren't. John says I expect too much--I don't think he fully understands how difficult it is for me to share any of this with anybody, even with him, let alone a group of people who require my attention even though not directly. Every time the kid growls QUIET WITCHIES or QUIET MINCHIES or whatever it is he is shouting, I have to pay attention.
We go on our late afternoon-into-evening drive.
There are elephant about thirty feet away yet they are so silent we only happen to notice them. Their movements are so peculiarly graceful. Economical, deliberate--I guess it is the economy of their motions, the spareness of them, that is the gracefulness.
I am eating way, way too much. They give us five meals a day, all of them full. I am trying not to partake but it is hard, and my plumbing system is pretty well clogged up at this point since it is a long time between proper bathrooms, and I am always in a hurry, and am not eating at my regular times. The food is delicious but there is too much of it too often.
We are shown a fine buffalo skull, and Jason explains how its horns are being eaten by insects. I remember this well from East Africa, and the idea that all should be returned to the ecosystem.
For a long time we watch a group of hippopotamuses in the water, nine of them at least, vocalizing, shaking water from their rounded ears with a spray, rising and submerging, eyes closing shut just above the water as they go down. I wonder why they have to vocalize so frequently.
Just above the purple and pink and brown hippo panorama is a bare tree with six gorgeous white-fronted bee-eater birds, who are red and green and yellow and I forget what else, but absurdly resplendent.
There is a Cape buffalo, our first, grazing peaceably near some pukus, in the low sun. We stop for each animal, sometimes for a long time. The other group has never seen any of these things before, and that's good in a way, because it means we linger for a long time over each. Jason is good at making this feel comfortable.
I love the apricot-colored road, the gray-green trees and the pale blue sky--and guinea fowl cross hastily in front of us. The heavy oaty smell of evening rises thickly around me, and I wish we could just stop, with no animals and no other people, and just let me be, for a time. A baobab tree, gray traced against the sky, gleams in sunset. I ask to stop for a picture. Its trunk is deeply gnarled, from elephants tusking at it, it seems. Later along the way I see others with fresh, white tuskings.
We have "sundowners," drinkies, on a hill, and we look at the very new moon, dull blue with earthshine, its craters on one slender sliver of limb visible just like Baily's Beads a few days ago.
Now it is night time, and with our black man and his spotlight sitting in the front seat of the truck, we pass along the lumpy track in the night. The light reflects off the eyes of a herd of puku, like yellow-green fireflies all on one level. A honeybadger is spotted ahead, at the edge of some grass. He resembles a kind of stripped-down skunk, and he is doing something important, trotting back and forth and back and forth, as if tracking something. I am thrilled to see him, as I am to see any of the little things.
Orange eyeshine reveals, startlingly, a hippo, standing massive and still in the trees. And an elephant and her baby move silently in the dark, and we only see them in the spotlight, never hear them.
A white-tailed mongoose, with his big brush of a tail dragging behind, scuttles across an open place. Ranks of impala eyes glitter at a short distance.
A strange bird, called I think a Water Dikkop, flutters strangely, slowly, like a great white moth caught in the light.
We cross the river in front of our camp on what they call the pontoon. It is a makeshift affair in which our vehicle drives onto a kind of raft, which is then pulled across the river, amid the crocos and hippos, by two small thin black men who sit on the raft next to our vehicle, brace their bare feet against a board, and by clasping a cable strung across the river with an odd wooden object, and stroking, pull us across in silence. Only a few feet of water on either side are illuminated, and that darkly. We could be anywhere, anywhere in this world or another. Maybe it is the River Styx, and they are Charon, and we are on our way out of the human world and into the nether.
On the other side, we approach camp by crossing a thick, swirling line of army ants, on their way to something good. I look at them through the binoculars and wish I hadn't.
And then we return, have drinks, have dinner, and I escape to our little hut as quickly as is decent. I sleep well in these kinds of places, under my big mosquito netting, with my hot water bottle at my feet, the duvet lying pleasantly heavy on my body, the bed firm beneath me, as alone as possible.
I shall be very grateful to see the films and pictures of this trip, to try to engrave its images--and even some sounds!--more strongly upon my mind's precious eye.
6/24 Nkwali Camp to mobile safari camp
new animals seen today:
Sink Frog
Saddlebilled Stork
Pied Kingfisher
A hyena has been at the breakfast milk jug before dawn, leaving his pawprints and carting off and destroying the jug. I did not hear him; I only heard some munching in the night, and hippo songs.
There is a frog in our sink, a sharp-looking gray-green one, and I manage to wash up without disturbing him. It's not the same one lives behind the mirror, because that one’s still there.
We discover a family of lions just outside camp, as we start off for the next place. The family of people we are traveling with is deeply thrilled, as they have not seen them before, and we spend over an hour with the lions, Jason showing off just a tiny tad by taking us very, very close to the lions, who, as lions are wont, do virtually nothing. They are resting quietly in the early morning sun, four adults and three cubs. Jason is called on his radio by camp, and tells them about the lions, and pretty soon another vehicle pulls up beside us. Only the cubs seem at all interested. One of them gets up and snuggles with mom, rubbing her cheek with his: "Cub Lion: His Mom." There are some impala and puku near by, and when the cub stands up they begin their alarm calls. The impala make a breathy snort, the puku a sharp short bark! and they all do this over and over until they are satisfied that nothing is coming to them from the lions.
A small herd of elephants appear across the grass from the lions. As they enter the grassy place, they stop and sense the lions, and the lions sense them. Lion heads raise, eyes open, and elephants stop in their tracks. Impalas begin to chuff in alarm. The elephants pass by though without incident, and everybody goes back to resting. At this point we are within about forty feet of the lions.
We use the "pontoon" ferry again to cross the river and we are on our way.
A huge tortoise shell is found, broken and empty but still lovely. It’s passed around among us. At least these people do not make stupid comments about it the way the other group would have done, but instead look it over thoughtfully.
Jason stops at an enormous termite mound, the biggest I have seen anywhere in Africa or Australia, I would say about fifteen feet tall. It is perhaps a hundred years old or even more. Elephants come and scrape on it, and things dig in it, but it survives. It is a tad unsettling to think of those countless millions of termites just under our feet, and we all thinking we are the lords of the dirt!
I take a picture of a dead leadwood tree, which Jason says, in his nicely soft way, might have been standing there dead for a hundred years. He says that when it is burned in a fire, it leaves no ash. That is something strange. How can that be? All of the tree goes into the air?
And back onto the apricot road, with lime-colored grass on the side, and rosy puku crossing.
We stop at a water or mud hole to see some elephants partaking, including one very tiny one, his mother protective of him with reassuring pats of her trunk and gentle urgings forward through a deep muddy place. He struggles a bit then emerges triumphantly onto more solid ground. I can imagine him saying, “Look at me, ma! Watch how I can do this!"
We take a lot of pictures of a gorgeous huge bird, a saddlebilled stork with black and white big body, red legs, and enormous black, red, and yellow bill. He is rummaging for food and grazing in a shallow pond a few feet away and we can watch him so intimately through the binoculars Why should he be so brilliant when others are brown and grey? Why should he be so large when others are so tiny?
Whoops! stop, there's a young elephant in the road just ahead, better sit here in silence a few minutes to let its mother know we are not harmful. We ease past, and there they are, the two of them, ten feet form the road. They let us by calmly.
I very much like what Jason has to say about reading animal communication and responding in bodily ways.
At our "tea" stop (with cokes, sandwiches, cake, tea, coffee--) there is a small pond thing, quite covered with what do they call it? pond cabbage or something, looks suspiciously like an invasive to me, but I am told not. In the trampled mud at the edge of the pond a lot of butterflies are puddling, brown-veined white ones, fluorescent orange and white ones. An ant of truly heroic proportions is hustling from one butterfly to another as it lands in his hunting ground, trying I assume to catch one, which it certainly looks as if he could. But he doesn't succeed, at least not while I am watching.
Then we pass through the alley of tsetse flies, John and I in the back getting attacked the most, and arrive here at this camp.
There are tidy little bamboo "chalets" with clever appointments, and we have lunch, and are given the walking safety talk by Jason, for we are to have our first little walk this afternoon after tea. We will have an armed escort, who walks first, then Jason and then us. Mercifully for me, we are to walk in single file and silence.
After quiet time, which for me is an hour of sleep and an hour of writing in here, we assemble for our walk--after tea, of course, which is augmented by cookies.
We set out at about 4:30, when the sun is already quite low. I am deeply happy as I drop in the back of the little line, and we go off across the mowed area in front of camp. We are accompanied by Isaac, a dark, dark man with tiny sharp features, a khaki uniform, and a rifle slung over his small shoulder. Isaac leads, then comes Jason, and then the rest of us. The troubled kid makes one of his loud ejaculated phrases as we start, but then, at some cost to himself, is silent the rest of the time.
We see those gorgeous bee-eaters gathered in the top of a dead tree, flying like swings in great easy arcs. There is buffalo dung, says Jason, there amid the glistening grass. Vocalizing hippos spout and roll on the near horizon, and we see a weighty buffalo femur that has been gnawed, freshly and whitely, by hyenas.
We pass through grass that is taller than we are. Although I am watchful and alert, just like the pukus, I also feel very safe. At this level I feel like just another one of the animals, and I am so happy when some guinea fowl scoot across our path just ahead, but seem uninterested in us. For finally we are moving at their level, at their speed, in their kind of silence.
Dark birds fly up at the last minute, started by our virtually silent approach. We see a Water Dikkop, with lime-colored legs, and I learn that is the bird that flew away like a huge butterfly, last night.
We are passing close to the water now, and Jason warns us that if a hippo makes a fake charge at him, just to keep on walking. There is a pleasant tremor of fear at this, and as we walk by, indeed the hippo rises up noisily and roars at Jason, but it doesn't amount to much. Just near the hippo we stop to discover a crocodile tail, all we can see of him, reflecting the slanted sun. Jason tells the story of the large tail he saw last year. "Must be dead," he thought, and shied a rock at it to see. Nothing. Shied another. Still nothing. Tossed a small pebble in the direction of the head: ROAR HEAVE CHARGE
Fluttering above the water is a pied kingfisher, who dives smartly into the water a couple of times and gets something he makes off with.
We walk on an animal path. It is in places white between two black burned sides, although it is only animal-wide. No plants grow in it to make ashes and cinders. I am just behind Jason who is behind Isaac; at one point I see Isaac test a lump of buffalo dung with his foot, to see how fresh it might be and therefore whether the buff might be about.
It is after sunset now, at 5:40, and the light is dropping away. We arrive at an overlook of hippos. There are at least twenty-seven of them in the water that is safely below us. A delicate sliver of moon hangs over the hippo pool, which sounds like some kind of great factory of some sort, hissing and groaning and bellowing and sloshing with hippo noise. Jason makes like a hippo--he has a fine repertoire of animal sounds--and the hippos respond to some extent, but I think they are amused instead of alarmed.
We are out just an hour and a half, and then back to camp. I would give anything to be out here just with one other person, but it is ok. Over drinks in the dark, around the campfire, the other man tries to make interesting conversation, but he is so unctuous--could he be a former minister of the gospel??--that I can hardly take it. He seems to feel that everybody needs supportive comments, like How wonderful that you're writing, why, you are almost writing a book, and other stuff of the sort. Hopelessly, gummily sweet. y u k
So there is dinner, and then I take a shower in the dark, in my little open-air shower in its bamboo room, say goodnight to the nice little gray frog in the sink, and tuck. The sleeping here is profoundly satisfying and I have been dreaming great things. The other night I dreamed all night, I am sure, of dancing with John.
6/25 a day out of this camp
new animals seen today:
Francolin
Little Bee-Eater
This morning we set out at 7:00, again with Isaac and also this time with our "tea-bearer" (At least Jason does not call him a "tea-boy" again as he did the other day). We swish through the tall grass that meets over our heads. Some clumps of it have been chomped to the ground by buffalo. The light comes in from the rising sun at our side, and the grass rustles as we pass.
Jason shows us lots of tracks. I have trouble with tracks, remembering them and even seeing them, but I like seeing where the porcupine has just dragged his quills as he bobs along. There are lion, leopard, cunning elephant shrew tracks. There are zebra, buffalo, impala, and aardvark tracks, gerbil tracks and warthog tracks and hippo tracks. Elephant tracks. And dung of all these animals. Elephant dung is remarkable for the amount of completely undigested plant material that's in it. Leaves, twigs, fruit, bark. Why should they have to eat so much only to take so little from it? I say that this must be economical for them, and the man, Bob his name is, who's a teacher of biology of some kind at some kind of college, in his yukky way says oh no, it doesn't have to be adaptive. I counter that at least it has to pay off in economic terms. I don't think he understands what I mean, but I certainly don't care. I just think it's an interesting question, why the elephant eats so much and uses so little of what it eats.
Jason knows a lot and shares it well and appropriately, but I know a lot too and enjoy that I can share a little of it, and that I know some of the stuff before he tells it. He explains that a big palm forest might mean that many elephants lived in that place a hundred years ago, and spread the palm nuts around. I like that idea, the tying together of the plant landscape with the animal landscape.
The early sunlight is gently reflected in the braid of the river bed streams, their sand pocked with prints. Many have passed there last night, and many nights and days before.
We find excellent small things, spiny caterpillars on a dusty bush, some excellent butterflies. Dung beetle holes. It seems after he has rolled the ball of dung, the beetle covers it with a thick layer of clay (or maybe the clay accretes) so it is about the size of a tennis ball or larger, then buries it after laying eggs in it. The larvae hatch and apparently mature underground, eating the dung ball, and dig their way to the surface when they are adults, making a surprisingly large hole as big around as a golf ball.
We look cautiously into a deep warthog hole and see where aardvarks have dug test holes, looking for insects. We see the inside of a termite mound, a bit, where it has been opened by some predator and then resealed with a new wall, and there are some of the tunnels.
I love how we walk in silence, and hear little, then there are bird alarm calls as we approach, just as if we were a snake or something. I love being able to hear these things. You can't hear them in the vehicle, or at least it's not as apparent that you are the caused of them, from the vehicle. I love feeling that in a little way, I am a part of the landscape rather than sitting on top of it. We walk like an elephant parade, our shadows in line on the sandy soil. All that's missing is for us to be trunk to tail.
Here is some bracket fungus, some that's like our turkey tail, and some lovely red ones. Jason finds praying mantis egg chrysalises on some tall grass.
We have our tea stop by the partly-dry river. The sand is pinky-beige (Mother would have loved it, and I love it), with reflections of the pale sky here and there where there are small pools.
The boy keeps on manfully, though he has had a deep cut from some grass that just about does him in, and I know he is at his limit. I wish this family had not inflicted him on us, or that we had at least had some warning. Much of their energy, and thus of the group's, is directed toward keeping him in reasonable control.
Here is a great tree, a legume says Jason but its extravagant flowers do not seem so. The stamens protrude boldly from the flower, which has a faint scent, and I spot a fluorescent RED insect among its flowers, hunting for pollen on the ends of those big stamens, or perhaps nectar.
Jason coaxes a funnel spider out of its doorway briefly. I love how the funnel spiders use the deep elephant track holes in which to make their webs.
A couple of francolin rise and beat thumpingly at our near approach. They are so well-concealed in the grass, and rise so close and alarmingly, that Jason calls them heart-attack birds. He and I have had some good conversations together, and seem a lot alike. It seems he had a problem with a woman in his last group throwing herself at him. He says it's the first time it's happened, but I bet not. He is very attractive and has that easy, flirtatious manner about him that Tom has. I tell a little bit about Bill Baker, and he wants to know his name, because it seems his ex-girlfriend is a wildlife artist who knows some of them in Kenya. But he doesn't recognize Bill's name. I just hope Bill isn't in the dogfood business right now!!
Just before we reach camp again, at noon, we find some leopard droppings and in them, a tiny impala hoof part.
And so to lunch, and a sleep, and now out here, pretty much by myself in the breeze, under an enormous tree, surrounded by the sky, the grass, of Africa.
It is very fine to sit here by oneself in the slowly dropping heat, with the light beginning to slant, and the best part, or one of the best parts, of the day just arriving, with nothing but the "Quick Father Drink Lager" bird (whose right name I still haven't learned) call and the rest is silence.
We gather for our afternoon walk. All the members of the family are hacking and coughing now, the kid having given them his cold, and he chatters away in his attempt to be normal. He is quite adept at imitating what he hears, and what others do. I think he does pretty well, but his verbal tics are loud and horribly irritating. I wish maybe once, maybe just for an hour or so, it could be just John and me. I remember our magical game run in Kenya, when it was just John and me and young Chris, and I think John the driver, and Bill.
I have made my notes, about which to write more, on the walk this afternoon, but I am still missing the essence of all of this. I am very glad this was not our first experience of Africa. I'm not sure why. Although we are at last on the ground, at the animals’ level, somehow this experience is less intense for me than the great sweeping landscapes, the low horizons, of Kenya and Tanzania. I am getting to smell more here, and hear more here, and see more small things here-the butterflies and tiniest insects, the plants, the dirt itself, the sounds we make walking over and through the landscape--even the sounds of animals, of the air through birds' wings, the sounds of animals chewing and munching--
I think it really is that I have now had a lifetime of experience, I am now nearly 63 years old, and have a lifetime of experiences to savor, the ones I was calling to mind's eye the other day--and so the newness of certain things is worn off, or that excitement is not present. I think I think of deeper things now--of the miraculousness of it all, that we and all these creatures and objects should be here on this planet, possibly alone in all the creation alive. Am I harder to please, to amaze? Maybe so, but that makes it my obligation to pass my experiences back into the world. And that is what I am doing, in my little work, and in my presence.
On our evening walk we began with a wonderful fragment of jawbone of hippo, with a bit of tusk in it. The molars were robust and polished and impressive, although Jason said it was probably a young one. Big enough for me.
Very soon we found elephant tracks in the sand, and I took a picture of one, that strangely simple round print with its distinctive pattern of criss-crossed lines, like an elephant finger-print. The low light makes blue shadows in the footprints as they cross the sand, and I can smell the elephants. We stand silently as our scout Isaac approaches the elephant a bit more closely. A stork flaps noisily overhead in our silence.
We get a bit closer to the elephant, but Jason decides the wind is wrong and so we veer off in another direction. I love leaving the animals to their own devices, and we to ours.
In the sandy ground behind the elephant are some kalanchoe plants, taller than we get at home at the florist's, and a fine pale tangerine color. I want urgently to take a picture for Alyson, because I know it's a flower she knows and likes, and I have been thinking of her, my dearest child--I have been thinking a lot about my dear daughters, my lost grandson, and I miss them all. I feel lonely as I often do in travel.
In a dead tree ahead we see the Little Bee-Eater, this one green with a brilliant yellow bib. We cautiously taste the fruit of a tamarisk plant, which is piercingly tart and raises the saliva. We pick our way across a bed of elephant terrace. That is what I am calling it in my mind, the places where the elephants have walked in the mud, and the mud has dried, leaving a mosaic pattern of deep holes and ridges for us to negotiate. Elephants just go where they want, but we have to be careful.
Somehow overlooking the riverbed we are pausing and it comes up about Zan and her baby who died, and John says we have one grandchild. I say no, we have two, and tell briefly about Wilder, but when I talk about him I have tears, and the girl offers me a Kleenex (as if a Kleenex will make me feel better, but she means well), and I say, I have a hankie, and John hugs me and says, She has a husband. How powerfully he sums up all that is between us. I’ve been thinking of him as my Elephant, so tender and caring of me.
Just at sunset, in the dry pink sand river, two elephants. We are downwind of them. One has just emerged from the woods. He looks over and sees us, and turns to face us, studying the situation. After a moment he decides we are harmless, and shakes himself, raising a cloud of dust. We pass the hippo pool again, the one where Jason received the half-hearted charge, and this time the hippo gives a PRODIGOUS gape of threat, opening his jaws a full 150 degrees and showing all of his fat teeth. Just behind him is a heron roost tree, dotted with white birds, and there are Guinea Fowl all over the landscape as the light fades.
Back in camp, froggie is in the sink, this one very tiny with big reddish eyes and a softly patterned skin. I am careful not to get soap or toothpaste on him when I wash up. There is an interesting discussion over drinks at the campfire, about politics in Africa, in which it is revealed, not surprisingly, that Jason knows a great deal about all this and is articulate indeed about it. He is a man of many parts I should say, and probably the best guide we have ever had on a trip.