Fletch, Too

“He’s a nuisance?”

Juma laughed. “Once he rode into Narok on his motorcycle, slowly, slowly, dragging behind him with a rope around its neck a hyena.”

“He still rides a motorcycle.”

“He insisted some people bet him the night before he could not lasso a hyena and bring it into Narok by the second hour of daylight the next day.” Juma laughed again. “Trouble was, no one remembered having made such a bet with him. No one would admit to such a bet.”

“He sounds crazy.”

“It’s all right. No one likes hyenas much.”

There was a particularly loud chattering from the jungle across the river.

“Juma, when Carr took me to Lake Turkana he told me there’s an elephant skeleton, very, very old, buried near there, at Koobi Fora.”

“Of course it’s very old, if it’s a skeleton.”

“The skeleton of an East Indian elephant.”

“Buried in East Africa?”

“It didn’t swim across the Indian Ocean.”

Juma thought a moment. “You’re talking about Carr’s woman.”

“Her name is Sheila.”

“Well, her skeleton will belong in India.”

“She was born in Kenya. In Lamu.”

“All the borders are colonial. Have you thought that? The borders of all these nations were set by the English and the Germans and the French, not by the tribes.”

“I like Sheila. I like Carr.”

“Perhaps while you are here, I will take you to Shimoni.”

“What’s Shimoni?”

“It means hole-in-the-ground. It’s a place on the coast. I have been there.”

“Sheila worked for a car rental agency when Carr first met her.”

“Perhaps you and I will go to a three-in-one hotel.”

“What’s a three-in-one hotel?”

“You have never been to one?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Three in one bed. They are very popular here. I think they are very good especially for a man who must treat one wife at a time.”

“I see. Are you married, Juma?”

“No. I want to go to school. I want to work in television. Don’t you think it would be very good to work in television?”

“Yes. I do.”

“What is your work?” Juma asked.

“I work for a newspaper.”

“Oh, I see. That would be interesting work. Somewhat the same work as television, I think, except no one can see your face. If you are going to tell people something, don’t you think you should say it so people can see your face?”

“I believe it is easier to find out what to tell people if they do not see your face.”

“Oh, I see. Yes, perhaps that is true.” Juma stood up on the rock. “Well, it is time for you to go have your Scotch whiskey.”

“Why?”

Juma shrugged. “You had a Scotch whiskey last night at this time.”

“They adore him.”

“Who?”

“Carr. The women just eat him up.”

Carr was having an after-dinner beer at the lodge’s bar with the two women hotelieres they had flown up from Nairobi. Carr was sitting sideways to the bar on a stool. The two French women stood with their drinks, facing him. They laughed at everything he said.

Barbara and Fletch were drinking beer at a small table at the side of the veranda.

At the entrance to the veranda, a guard with a flashlight and rifle waited to escort the tourists to their cabins.

“Don’t you find Carr attractive?” Fletch asked.

Barbara looked around at the few remaining tourists who had not yet gone to bed.

“Every woman in the place,” Barbara said, “is just eating him up.”

After clearing trails and digging holes and finding nothing significant one more day, Barbara, Fletch, and Carr had flown to Nairobi, refueled, picked the two women up, and then flown west to the Masai Mara.

Sheila said she preferred to stay in camp and dig holes along the freshly cut trails. She promised she would find a Roman city before they returned.

There was no discussion about whether Juma would accompany them. While they were getting ready to go, he simply did not appear.

The two women hotel executives from France were tres chic, tres jolie. They were on a business trip, but they were also having a good time. They handed around a bottle of champagne on the airplane. Carr did not drink any.

They marveled happily flying over the Rift Valley, the Loita Hills and Plains, ecologically the Serengeti Plains. Carr flew as low as he decently, legally could, so they could all see the herds of zebras, elands, giraffes grazing. The older woman, who sat in the copilot seat, snapped photographs from the air with a little camera genuinely useless at the distance of more than three meters. She thought she was getting wonderful pictures. Their first sight of elephants from the air sent them into raptures. In fast, stuttering English they were full of questions for Carr.

The women were warmly greeted by management and immediately taken on a tour of Keekorok Lodge. Even Fletch wondered how a lodge so far in the bush could provide such impeccable food and drink, accommodations and service.

Carr organized a safari guari and driver. That night and the next day, sunrise and sunset, while the hotel executives studied the operation of the lodge, Carr, Barbara, and Fletch toured the reserve.

They were to be at the lodge only two nights, before returning to Nairobi, and then Carr’s camp.

The safari guari was a well-spirited, well-sprung, fairly quiet Nissan van, roofless so they could stand in it, the clean, bush-scented African-air wind in their faces, so they could see all sides at once from an elevation of three meters as they rode along. Carr provided binoculars for them. They learned to brace themselves against the van’s frame so they could use the binoculars reasonably well as they joggled along. They also learned from the driver, Omoke, a Kisi, a new way of looking at landscape, of surveying vast areas quickly, mathematically, with just their eyes, going over it in sideways Z’s, spotting anything moving, anything even slightly outstanding in color. Anything remarkable spotted Omoke would drive to, through the bush, quietly, drawing up and stopping at a decent, noninterfering, nonmeddling distance.

Almost immediately Omoke found for them a lion and two lionesses sprawled in the fading sunlight. The tail and the hind legs of the lion were embraced by the forelegs of one lioness; his head and one shoulder were on the shoulder of the other lioness. Their heads were up. They were looking around lazily, the light from the low sun in their eyes. The bellies of all three were so stuffed they lay on the ground almost separately, like suitcases.

Before sunrise the next morning, Omoke, who saw a landscape differently from any painter, any engineer, found a small grassy depression in the ground in the shade of a bush. Lying in the hollow, clearly exhausted, was a cheetah who, just hours before, had given birth to four.