vocalizations, varying intensity and pitch, telling everyone what to do.
Chapter 17
A CHATTERING FLOCK of storks burst from a treetop as we drove through a field some three miles or so north of the camp. They were marabou storks, distinguished by their wiry white hair, featherless pink necks, and tuxedo plumage—carrion eaters often found with vultures around carcasses. Undertaker birds, they’re called. Abe grimaced up at them. He was projecting a cool facade, but I could tell he was worried, which made me worried.
Actually, I had already been worried.
Since we’d landed at the deserted camp, I’d found myself thinking about my first trip to Africa. It was a grad-school field trip to the famous rock beds of the Karoo desert region in South Africa, which showed one of the world’s clearest geological snapshots of the history of life.
What I kept thinking about was a layer of sediment from two hundred and fifty million years ago that was completely empty of fossils. The lack of fossils in the rock was evidence of the Permian–Triassic extinction event— P–Tr, in geology shorthand. P–Tr, or the Great Dying, was the biggest and baddest of Earth’s major extinction events. Ninety percent of all species on the planet rapidly perished. It took many millions of years for the earth’s biodiversity to recover. There have been five such major extinction events; statistically, we’re about due for one.
The K–T event, the one that killed the dinosaurs, was almost certainly caused by an asteroid impact. But we’re still not sure about P–Tr. Some theorize that the P–Tr extinction was caused by volcanic activity. Or maybe an asteroid, or cosmic radiation. But no one really knows exactly why almost all the animals, vegetation, and insects in the world suddenly died.
It was the mysterious nature of that ancient total global ecosystem collapse that made the present HAC activity so unsettling. An animal’s behavior is the result of millions of years of evolution, thousands upon thousands of generations of adaptation. This evolution happens in response to changes in the environment. The environment changes, and some animals adapt to it, some don’t. To suddenly observe such anomalous behavior in wildly different species of animals all over the world wasn’t just alarming, it was unprecedented.
I opened my camera case and began to ready my video camera. I clipped in the battery, polished the lens, strapped on the shoulder mount.
As we rolled deeper into the Okavango Delta in search of the missing tourists, I was suspecting more strongly that some kind of macro-level environmental disturbance was underway.
I’d clacked in a new mini DV tape and was switching on my pricey-ass Sony image stabilizer when there was a commotion behind me. Abe’s two Rhodesian ridgebacks started barking like hell. Then, in an instant, my camera was no longer in my hands and something hard and cold was pressed against my throat and collarbone.
One of the men in the back was holding something against my neck, which I guessed was a machete, as that was what the other man had against Abe’s neck.
Abe brought the truck to a careful stop and began speaking in Setswana to the man holding the machete to his throat. Abe’s negotiation skills seemed to be all that stood between me and a severed jugular. My heart was going like a jackhammer. I could feel every hair on my arms standing straight up. The man holding the machete to Abe’s throat kept shaking his head and gesturing back in the direction behind us. Abe kept talking. The man shook his head.
“No-no-no-no-no-no-no,” he said. “No, mon.”
The man lowered the machete in order to hop out of the car. He held the machete pointed at Abe, but was only half paying attention as he worked with the other hand to liberate the Winchester from the gun rack. Abe reached into the inner lining of his utility jacket and his hand came out holding a nasty little snub-nosed .38 Special. Abe put the pistol barrel between the man’s eyes: they crossed just as Curly’s do when Moe pokes him in the nose. The man took his hands off the rifle and lowered the machete.
Then the guy behind me removed the machete from my neck. The men and the teenager exchanged glances, shrugged as though they’d just lost a bet fair and square, and hopped out of the truck. Without another word to us, they started walking away, back in the direction we’d come from. The dogs growled and barked after them, but Abe whistled them silent. Abe was red-faced and shaking. At first I thought it was from fear, and then I realized it was mostly anger.
“Cowards!” Abe yelled back at them between his cupped hands. “Boogie shite-asses! Scoundrels!”
He spat brown juice out the window, wiped his face on his sleeve, cursed under his breath, and released the clutch.
“Superstitious traitorous idiot boogie sons of bitches,” he muttered, half to me and half to himself, maybe half to the dogs. “It’s just us now, gents.”
I leaned back in my seat and wiped sweat off my face as I closed my eyes. My pulse was still hammering when I turned and lifted the camera off the seat behind me.
Maybe Natalie had been right about my coming here to Africa, I thought. A cubicle in an air-conditioned office building wasn’t looking quite so terrible to me right about now.
Chapter 18
A COUPLE OF miles farther north, we came upon some salt flats forked by a river delta. The scenery beyond them was breathtaking. An endless patchwork of more grassland and salt flats ran as far as the eye could see. I could understand why rich European and American tourists came to the Okavango Delta for safaris. The landscape was spectacular.
The trail we’d been following passed through a ford in one of the river deltas.
“Jesus, are you sure—” was all I could get out before Abe impassively stomped the accelerator and plowed us headlong into swirling water the color of chocolate milk. The water came up to the truck’s door handles. I was expecting the motor to quit at any moment. I mentally prepared myself to go swimming. We got wet.
“You New Yorkers,” Abe said, pushing us through the flood with his hand on the clutch and his foot on the gas, getting us through it with a mix of horsepower and will. He jerked his hat brim at the snorkel on the side of the truck. “Got it handled, man. Leave it to Beaver.”
We slogged through to the other side and up the steep, muddy bank onto a plain of tall, light green grass, maybe about three or four acres wide. A path of tire tracks cut straight across it toward a lagoon that sparkled like silver, where a herd of seventy or so Cape buffalo were shouldering each other in a shallows.
“Look sharp,” Abe said, pointing to the herd. “We’re getting close now. Those are the buffalo the lions hunt.”
I almost dropped the video camera when Abe stomped the brake and brought us to an abrupt stop halfway to the lagoon. At the other end of the tall glade of faded grass, an open Land Rover exactly like ours, with the name of the safari company on the side, was parked by a sausage tree.
Abe took a pair of binoculars from one of his kit bags and stood up on his seat. He slowly swept the glasses over the grassy plain. Then he lowered the binoculars, draped the strap over his neck, sat back down, and drove cautiously across the clearing toward the empty truck.
We stopped beside the vehicle and got out. Something shiny caught Abe’s eye. He bent down to the ground and lifted something from the grass. I zoomed in on it with the camera.
It was a woman’s gold Cartier tank watch. It looked as out of place here in the African veldt as a shrunken head would have on a plate at the Four Seasons. The alligator strap was encrusted with blood.
We got back in the truck and kept bucking and rocking over the grass. We weren’t talking. There were clothes littering the ground around the empty truck and the trunk of the sausage tree, scattered among the grass and dwarf savanna shrubs. Blood-stiffened scraps of shirts, pants, a woman’s sneaker, a fanny pack. Bits of fabric blew across the fields. There was a piece of what looked like a Hawaiian shirt stuck in the tree, fluttering on a
