Zoo

on foot, back toward the camp.

I kept as low as I could as I skirted the glade. I found the rutted tire trail we’d driven in on and began following it back to the safari camp. Glumly I glanced up at the sun, which was starting to descend toward the salt flats on the horizon. It would be dark in a few hours. I wasn’t looking forward to that.

I picked up my pace. The camp was only about five miles away, but I was looking at five miles through a zoo without cages, where some of the animals seemed to have gone schizoid.

The sun dried my clothes to a crust and then I got soaked again as I waded back through the river ford. I was hot and exhausted and starting to get thirsty, but decided not to drink the water for fear of parasites.

I walked for an hour or so before I spotted the river dock where we’d picked up the Botswanans at the other end of a grassy field. They and their canoe were gone. After almost getting eaten, I didn’t blame them for pissing off. They’d known how wrong things were in the environment. How important it was to get out while there still was a chance.

I headed toward the dock to see if there might be another boat. That’s when I noticed a sudden movement in the trees off to my right. Though there was no breeze, the trees seemed to be waving—undulating—ever so slightly. They also seemed to glisten, as if they were slathered in oil.

I felt something crawl up my ankle.

It was an ant. And not just any ant. It was a Dorylus: an African driver ant. By its badass mandibles, I knew it was a soldier. Some indigenous tribes actually use the driver-ant soldiers themselves as makeshift sutures: their bite is so strong that putting one of them on each side of a gash will hold it together.

That’s what was covering everything: the trees, the grass, the ground. Millions upon millions of driver ants swarmed through the field in a loose black column. It had to be at least a mile long and six feet wide. The ants were the size of a baby’s fingers and the color of red wine.

I flicked off the bug and squashed it under the heel of my boot.

Now, I love animals as much as the next biologist. But I do not like bugs. They don’t do it for me. My subcortex says: Ick. Get ’em off me. I’d always known that entomology was not my bag. And the Dorylus is an especially nasty customer.

The frenzied column of ants connected two dark masses in the field. I realized they were Cape buffalo calves. My guess was they’d wandered into the path of the ants and been overwhelmed. Already dead, with most of their hides stripped, they were now in the process of being consumed by the living sea of bugs.

The Dorylus, or siafu, as it is called by the Bantu, can sometimes have colonies of fifty or sixty million. Like a foraging army, the colonies live on the march, attacking anything they come into contact with, including animals and sometimes children. Death often results from asphyxiation—when the flood of bugs crawls down the victim’s throat. I cringed as I looked at the shiny, squirming black carpet extending into the distance. It was truly incredible.

Then I turned away and went to the river.

Chapter 26

I HAD JUST made it back to the trail when I heard a scream. It was hard to make out over the wind and splashing water, but it was definitely a human scream, coming from the direction of the river dock.

Apparently I was not alone out here.

I heard it again, and then once more as I ran back across the field, away from the ants. It sounded like a woman. I remembered the bloody clothes from the massacred animal-spotting safari and picked up my pace.

I arrived at the end of the dock and stopped short at the edge of the riverbank. There was a white woman with dark hair clinging to a large rock in the middle of the river. What the hell she was doing up there was a mystery. She was wearing khaki pants, but was barefoot. Her clothes were soaked flat against her skin. She clung to the pinnacle of the rock, scrambling for balance with her feet and hands.

I cupped my hands and shouted across the water: “Can you move?”

In retrospect it was a strange thing to say.

She glanced over at me, seeing me for the first time. The look she gave me was as if she’d never seen a person before. I didn’t know whether she knew English or not. Then she let loose another scream, pointing upriver, to my right.

I followed the direction of her point with my eyes and saw what looked like a fifteen-foot-long clump of grayish mud appear on the surface.

It wasn’t mud. This thing had more teeth than the average mud clump.

It was a Nile crocodile: the largest and most aggressive species of crocodile in Africa. As I watched, its scaly, spiny, and very powerful tail flicked, and it began floating out into the middle of the stream toward the woman clinging to the rock. I didn’t know how the hell she’d managed to get herself into this situation, but I ordered myself to help her out of it.

I had four rounds left. Make them count, Oz.

I dropped to one knee and lined up the Mauser’s sights with the crocodile’s paddle-shaped head. I balanced the barrel against my arm, held my breath, and pulled the trigger.

The gun cracked and kicked hard into my shoulder, and I saw a splash in the water in front of the crocodile. I’d missed.

I sighted again and squeezed off two more shots. There was no splash. I’d nailed the son of a bitch, twice. I couldn’t see where, but I’d heard bullets hitting meat.

But it didn’t die. That would have been too easy. All it did was turn toward me with a quick sideways jerk of its surfboard-size head, as if I’d tapped it on the shoulder.

I blasted one more bullet at it and got the sucker right on the crown of its head. That did the trick. It stared out from the muck a moment, then sank and flopped over, belly-up, in the river.

I looked to my right again: a second crocodile, racing downriver in our direction.

Then I noticed the rest of them. In a lagoon some distance upriver was a bask of at least four crocodiles, and another three sunning themselves on the shore. No wonder they were riled up. It looked like the woman had entered a nesting area.

I aimed at the next approaching croc. It was coming at us like an animated hunk of driftwood. I pulled the trigger.

On nothing. I’d spent my last round, and the gun clicked on an empty chamber.

Chapter 27

HMM. THE CROCODILES glided through the water toward the woman while I sat on the bank with an unloaded gun. A lightbulb appeared over my head, and I threw down the gun.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted across the water: “Be right back!”

I turned tail and began running back the way I’d come, into the field behind me.

I peeled off my wet shirt as I ran into thrashing brown grass. Just to clarify: I was about to dive into a horde of army ants with my shirt off. I ran through the glittering black carpet, feeling ants crunch under my boots with each step, to the corpse of the Cape buffalo calf. With my wet shirt I slapped ants from its gnarled, stiffened hooves, grabbed the body by the leg, and began dragging it back toward the river as fast as I could.

The ants went mad. A softly clicking, chattering swarm of ruby-dark ants followed after me. I could see the column shift and darken as millions of insects got new marching orders to deal with the intruder. I saw the message spread through the colony, borne on pheromones from one pair of antennae to the next. The only advantage I had was my legs.

The calf was lighter than I’d expected, as it had already been hollowed out some by the ants. The ants scampered up my arms and I swatted them off as best I could. I had ten or fifteen bites throbbing on my arms and