Mortals

Leopards were nocturnal but rarely did they attack man. The implication seemed to be that any predator that was nocturnal could be forgotten about because at night the traveler would be sensibly sealed up in a vehicle or a tent with a floor lining. Also, leopards were in decline and were scarce, very scarce, in the dry parts of the Kalahari, which seemed to Ray to be all of it, that he had seen. And Cape buffalo were placid animals not interested in humans. But it was advisable not to be caught in the path of a stampede, and the same was true for all of the larger ungulates. Ray agreed completely.

Lions, again, were nocturnal hunters, but best of all they were very lethargic during daylight hours. Although if you stepped in amongst them while they were at rest the chances were that you would be eaten.

“Have you found about snakes as yet?” Keletso asked.

“Nearly there.”

Here was yet another reiteration of the warning against ever taking food into your tent. Even normally man- aversive animals like caracals would claw their way in if they smelled food. Chacma baboons were distinctly no problem unless teased. He came to the snakes section.

Only six types of snake were depicted, in a set of crude sketches. None of the drawings resembled the creature they had killed. Two of the sketches were identical, an obvious error.

He was up to a sentence he loved. It should be remembered that only half the snakes natural to Botswana are poisonous. And more good news was that one of the commonest snakes, the shaapsteker, even if it struck you would only leave you with a severe headache, so weak was its venom. There were no cautions given about checking under vehicles in the morning. Keletso seemed relieved. They had done everything they should have. They had avoided overhanging branches and they always made a sort of fuss and racket wherever they walked. They had the three antivenins listed, hypodermics, everything.

Keletso seemed morose. He wanted Keletso to cheer up, but he couldn’t think of how to make that happen. Death-thoughts were poisoning the atmosphere. Death where is thy stingalingaling was from something Irish, but what? What he really wanted was to tell Keletso how unhappy he was. But of course he couldn’t do that. Soon enough he was going to have to send Keletso back to safety. It was almost time to do that. And until then he would need Keletso to think all was well with him. Otherwise he would resist. So he had to cheer up, himself.

He wanted to be light. He said, “When I get back to the States and somebody asks me what the main thing I learned in Africa was, it’s going to be never to take food into your tent, not under any circumstances.”

“Ehe,” Keletso answered, blankly, unresponsively. He hadn’t thought it was amusing, it was clear to see.

It was like a marriage, in some ways, with Keletso. Because in marriage when one partner was radiating dejection and discontent it turned life into a waiting period, a null time. There were times in a marriage when for one reason or another it was impossible to just wait for the mood to dissolve on its own. Action had to be taken. They were in a perilous place and action had to be taken. The problem was to know what would work. One route that was blocked with Keletso was humor. What did the Batswana find funny? What?

He was at a loss. He did know they thought it was funny to say of a man married to a harridan that he ate his overcoat. That gave Ray nothing. And he had been told that they thought it was funny to say that the penis was always landing up in trouble because it had only one eye. That was all he’d been able to glean. American jokes eluded the Batswana, was his distinct experience. It was conceivable that a whole people would find nothing funny in the jokes of their what, their oppressors, their colonial masters, their laughing masters, among whom he would be included, of course. It was possible there was nothing universal about humor.

Being read to was something Iris loved. It was almost magical, the effect it could have on her spirits. Undoubtedly what was happening when she was being read to was that she was regressing to experiences in her childhood that had been consistently pleasant. It was excellent to have pleasant tracts of childhood to regress to. He must have some. Of course he did.

They were proceeding slowly over level ground, so reading something aloud to Keletso wouldn’t be impossible. He pulled his sack of reading matter out of the back and sat with it on his lap, planless until the uneasy thought came to him that it was past time to dispose posthaste of all his Kerekang briefing materials. They were a liability, a potential threat to his imposture, should he and Keletso have to endure some hostile scrutiny, which could happen. He couldn’t believe that he had let it go for so long. Now he was anxious. He had to jettison this material as soon as he could manage it, and in some way not too peculiar and alarming to Keletso. They were getting closer to the epicenter of the trouble. It would be natural to slide the material into a cooking campfire. But they had been using the Coleman stove for cooking. Ray didn’t want to leave the material intact out in the desert. He knew there was a solution and that he was magnifying the problem out of anxiety. Ray had dispensed with campfires in the interest of maintaining general low visibility. He liked campfires.

“The kippers are finished,” Keletso said, gloomily.

Keletso loved kippers. They were a delicacy to him. Sometimes he would eat them twice a day. They were low on pilchards, too. The tinned fish was running out. He’s collecting grievances, Ray thought. That was a process that could get out of control and that he needed to interrupt.

There were three issues of Kerekang’s Kepu/The Mattock in his net bag. He extracted them. They were crude things, cyclostyled. He should just crush them up and bury them off in the bush when they made the next rest stop. An odd feeling of resistance came over him at the thought. He didn’t want to do it.

He strongly didn’t want to do it. He was surprised. He felt incapable of doing it. What was it, though? And then he knew. Kepu contained the only poetry in the iron bubble. Iris had forgotten to be sure his Modern Library Milton was in his reading midden. There had been the TLS back issues. But he had gotten rid of the TLSes as he’d finished them, not that he usually read the contemporary poetry they contained, but with the TLSes in the vehicle there had been poetry of some sort within reach.

Kepu was full of poetry. Kerekang was mad for it. His taste was for nineteenth- century English poetry in general, but he restricted himself to social protest verse in Kepu, with a heavy reliance on William Morris. Every selection was presented bilingually. When had the man had time to do all this translation work? What Kerekang felt about poetry, Ray thought he understood. It was a bond between them. I am an adolescent, he thought. He didn’t want to be in a situation where he couldn’t lay his hand on poetry. He realized that he always assumed poetry would be in his vicinity, somewhere, in the normal course of life. And now he had no choice but to destroy his copies of Kepu. You are being a child, he thought. He couldn’t remember who it was who’d said that poetry was as essential to civilization as hot water. With poetry it could be one poem one couplet one line, even, and you were immortal forever. For just one poem it would be Chidiock Tichborne, to name just one. It could come down to that, one little line of letters saving your name forever. People would want to know what you looked like, forever. That was what his brother was straining to do, generate just one sentence, one paragraph, one glorious thing. He wasn’t close. He would fail. He said to Keletso, “Rra, do you like poetry at all?”

“Ehe, the most when it is from the Bible.”

Ray looked for something to read aloud to Keletso. He paged through Volume One, Number Three, of Kepu. There was a William Morris verse.

He would read it to himself first.

Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,