White Dog Fell From the Sky (16 page)

“
In vino veritas
.”

“You’re the kind of fellow who
needs the last word, aren’t you.” Ian Henry was silent, and Haddock
disappeared into his tent.

Alice smiled. “
Are
you?”

“I could have gone on to tell him that
I’d once had the honor to enter the kind of trance I was talking about. But I
didn’t.”

“Very restrained of you.”

All three vehicles stopped midmorning by
the side of the road, and Will said he’d like to take a detour to the Makgadikgadi
Game Reserve to check out what was there. Haddock asked if that was part of the
agenda.

“No, it’s not necessary to visit
the Makgadikgadi,” answered Will, “but I thought we were here to learn
things we didn’t already know.”

“Ngamiland is where we’re
supposed to be going,” said Haddock. He turned and headed toward a Land Rover, but
one of his shoes slipped on the sand. His arms windmilled, and he went down on one knee,
as though praying. Alice wanted to laugh, but then she felt sorry for him. Who would
wear shoes like that in the desert?

“Why don’t we just split
up?” said Alice’s boss. “Anyone who wants to take in the Makgadikgadi
can. The rest can go straight to Maun. We’ll meet there.” There was a small
stampede toward the two vehicles not carrying Arthur Haddock. Sam got stuck with him in
the truck, and the rest crammed into the Land Rovers.

As they wallowed up the sandy track in the
Land Rover, Will said, “Between Nata and Gweta is mostly
mopane
forest,
but off the main road … well, if you’ve never seen it, you’re in
for one of the most fascinating sights on Earth. These salt pans were at one time part
of an ancient inland lake. There are remnants of stone age civilizations on
outcroppings. If there’s rain, water forms at the point where the river joins the
Sowa Pan. It’s a nesting place for flamingos migrating from Namibia. I’ve
seen literally thousands of birds there.”

The main road crossed a narrow finger of the
northernmost edge of the Ntwetwe Pan. They turned south at Gweta. On either side lay
alternating dry grasslands and
mopane
trees, opening out occasionally onto
plains dotted with palms. Thirty kilometers later, Ntwetwe Pan appeared. Looking south
was an eerie expanse of white salt and white sky and searing sun.

“Astronauts apparently can make out
the outlines of the old lake from outer space,” Will said. “From close up,
you’ll see where the shore was. You have to be careful crossing. This time of
year, the surface looks completely dry, but the water can be just a couple of
centimeters below the surface. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen
through and had to spend all day digging out.” His face had been sunburned over
and over until his skin was burnished a deep reddish brown.

The pan was terrifying, the horizon white
and fathomless, a savage, demonic, eerie place. So hot you couldn’t breathe. Alice
sat next to Ian. She couldn’t see his face, but he was hardly breathing. One gets
used to a landscape that’s human in scale. There’s a future because it can
be seen, just over the horizon if we choose to walk there, or ride there. But there was
no future or past here. The horizon was unreachable, unknowable, swallowed in white.

“I’d love to go to sleep and
wake up here someday,” she whispered to Ian.

They stopped partway across and got out. Ole
Olsen, a big, strapping Norwegian, was in the other Land Rover. His chest was collapsed,
his chin tucked down as though he’d received a blow. She went over to him.
“Okay?” she asked.

“Can’t get my breath,” he
said. “It’s like we’re on the bloody moon.”

They drank water, climbed into the vehicles,
and retraced their steps back across the pan. Close to sunset, they crossed the Kuke
veterinary fence. Alice wished Haddock had been there to see the devastation. The
carcasses of dozens of wildebeest were piled against the barrier. Will said they’d
been trampled when their herd had run headlong into the fence while trying to migrate
toward the Okavango Delta.

A few live animals grazed on scraps of grass
not far from them. They tore at her heart with their homeliness and simple desire for
water. Their noses were long and wide, their horns unremarkable, their beards, manes,
and tails thin and scraggly. Their legs appeared too spindly to hold even a
drought-ravaged body, ribs sticking through dull fur. A patient resignation clung to
them, like people who’ve lost everything. The oxpecker birds sat on their backs
and necks, picking bugs off.

Will told the group, “They depend on
seasonal migrations for survival. During drought season the herbivores move toward
sources of surface water. After the rains, they move back to grazing in and around the
central Kalahari. Because of these fences, they’ve been cut off from sources of
water and food, and squeezed into areas that are overgrazed by cattle. The herds die of
starvation if they stay near water and die of thirst if they move to better grazing. By
some estimates eight hundred thousand wildebeest died at Lake Xau in the year after the
fences went up.

“The fences were meant to stop the
spread of hoof-and-mouth disease in cattle, but there’s no evidence that
they’re effective against it. Hoof-and-mouth is airborne, carried by birds and
wind, so how would a fence stop it? It’s a crude attempt, unfounded in research, a
holocaust for wild animals. Of course this has been devastating for the !Kung San as
well. As wildlife is dying, so is their food supply.”

That night, they camped in a grove of baobab
trees. Ian wanted to introduce the group to a man he knew, one of the San people. He set
out in one of the Land Rovers across the bush to where he thought he’d be.
“It’s the drought,” he said when he returned to the campsite alone.
“They’ve moved on, I don’t know where.”

Ian, across the fire from Alice, had begun
drinking steadily. When he heard the maniacal, barky laugh of a hyena, he said to her,
“They chew your nose off at night, you know, if you’re sleeping out in the
open.”

“Come on!” She was in no mood
for it.

“Really, I knew a bloke camping
outside Molepolole …”

“Get out.”

“Hey, lovey,” he laughed,
“why don’t you just lighten up, enjoy the night?”

“I’m not your lovey.”

“I didn’t mean anything by
it.”

She looked at him, thought about how
he’d sat motionless in the face of that endless horizon earlier in the day, hardly
breathing. It occurred to her that the sight had frightened him. She got up, threw a log
on the fire, and left. Walking outside the circle of light made by the few lanterns in
the tents, she leaned against the back of one of the Land Rovers. She didn’t want
to be wasting her years, poised for a fight with any man who looked at her wrong. She
set out for a walk, but once the light had vanished behind her, she stopped in her
tracks. There was no moon yet, she had no flashlight, and the darkness was total. She
retreated. In the hugeness of that silence, every rustle felt like a menace.

The next day, they came across an
adolescent elephant, walking slowly away from them, up a track beside the boundary
fence. He felt along the wire every now and then with his trunk, searching. Will had
seen him before, he said, trying to find a way through. He’d been separated from
his family by the fence. It was one of the saddest sights Alice had ever seen.

On the south side of the Okavango, one of
the Land Rovers ran out of
gas. Every vehicle was fitted with an
auxiliary tank, so when the primary tank ran out, the line was switched to the other
tank automatically. But it turned out that the line to this second tank was blocked. The
two drivers, Motsumi and Shakespeare, talked in Setswana; then Shakespeare rinsed out a
plastic sugar bag and siphoned fuel out of the second tank into the bag, and poured the
fuel into the working tank. He did this several times; they drove another five
kilometers, and the Land Rover ran out of gas again. In a clearing surrounded by
mopane,
they finally stopped to camp.

They decided that Shakespeare would drive to
Maun the next morning for a replacement line, while the rest stayed behind. Once he was
in Maun, he’d let Sam and Haddock know they’d been delayed.

Within an hour, a huge dinner was ready. She
sat next to Ian, chewing a mouthful of beef, tough as a buzzard. Even out here, in the
middle of nowhere, the “professionals” were divided from the cooks and
drivers, who sat on the far side of the fire, their backs to the dark bush. Ian,
absorbed in his tin plate of meat, rice, gravy, and pumpkin, was happy as a child when
he discovered that someone had thought to bring ginger biscuits for dessert. It was only
when he’d downed four or five that he seemed to notice anything around him. He
turned to her. “I’m sorry about last night. I was a bit cheeky.”

“Never mind.”

“So, what are you doing
here?”

The question irritated her. She
couldn’t help it. Most expatriate wives came to Botswana as appendages, existing
for the purpose of organizing dinner parties and entertaining their husbands’
colleagues. No one expected a woman to have a brain in her head. “I could just as
soon ask you the same question.”

“No offense intended,” he
said.

“You know, you’ve met me
before.”

“I have?”

“My office gave you leave to do the
research you’re conducting. I guess our meeting wasn’t all that
memorable.”

“I’m grateful for the permission
granted.”

She couldn’t tell whether he was being
ironic or not. “To answer
your question,” she said,
“I’m helping to work out compromises between the !Kung San and the
Department of Agriculture. Agriculture holds all the cards. I’m one of several
people trying to even the deck.”

“I wish you good luck with that. As
you already know, I’m just a useless toiler. What I do will make no difference to
anyone but myself.”

“I don’t agree.”

“How would you know?”

“I read your proposal. People assume
that San paintings are nothing more than primitive daubing, with the occasional
brilliant rendition of a sable antelope or giraffe,” she said, “worth
something only because they’re so old. But to bring that disappeared world back to
life, to try to discover something of the people who inhabited it, what could be more
important than that? It might make someone think again before they destroy a
culture.”

“Do you know the work of Lucy Lloyd
and Wilhelm Bleek? Without Lucy, a whole language would have been lost
forever.”

“It’s lost anyway.”

“Aren’t you the gloomy
one.”

“Not always. What got you going on all
this?”

“I grew up in Manchester, one of five
kids,” he said. “My mum was a housewife, my dad repaired refrigerators. My
dad loved books. He’d read to us at night. He wasn’t big on story books. He
went in more for real life. He was daft on history, on anything to do with far-off
places. Once, he brought a book home on the Bushmen. I was the youngest—three of my
brothers and sisters had already left home. Just me and my sister Mary still there. The
book had all sorts of pictures—Bushmen sitting under rock shelves, Bushmen hunting
eland, a picture of the ruins of a Christian mission. I understood, looking at that
photo, that things disappear. Someday I’d be gone, my mum and dad would be gone,
my sister Mary, the sitting room, the electric fire, the settee. But it wasn’t me
or them I was really thinking of—it was those short men crouching in the desert with
their bows and poisoned arrows.

“‘Where are those little men
now?’ I asked my father.”

“‘Dead.’”

“‘All of them?’”

“‘It was years ago those
pictures were taken.’”

“‘And what about the paintings
on that rock?’”

“‘They’ll still be there,
I reckon, if the rain hasn’t washed them away.’”

“‘Sure? You mean, if we went
there, you and me and Mum and Mary, we could see them?’”

“‘Your mum would never go on
such a trip. But when you’re dead and gone, those pictures you draw now, if
someone thinks to look after ’em, it’ll be as though part of you’s
still here.’

“That’s when I caught the bug.
I’d always wanted to be an artist. I had a knack for it, but compared with a real
professional, I wouldn’t have made the grade. Through luck and a little elbow
grease, I was given a scholarship to Cambridge. Studied anthropology and fine arts and
fell into this. What about you?”

Most of the group had drifted away. It was
just Sam and Motsumi tending the fire. “What about me? I’m from the Midwest.
My mother and I lived close to the river that borders Ohio and Kentucky, just the two of
us. My father drowned when I was four. He was a cop. Apparently he was trying to arrest
a man running across the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge. It was around one in the morning. He
jumped over a railing after the guy and they figure he didn’t realize there was a
break between the road and the pedestrian walkway. In the dark, he thought he was
jumping onto the walkway, but he landed in the river. The water was so cold it took
three weeks for his body to surface.”

Across from them, Sam pushed a large log
into the center of the fire. It flared and sent sparks toward the stars. “Do you
remember him?” Ian asked softly.

“Not really.” Not memory, but
imagining the ice floes far below, the shock when he hit, every fiber of his body broken
with disbelief.

“I used to like swimming in very cold
water,” he said and stopped. “I’m sorry, that was a right stupid thing
to say.”

“It’s all right. What did you
like about it?”

“I guess the simple surviving of it.
Mind you, I don’t have a
self-destructive nature. Nor did I have
one then. It was something else. Heightening life, I suppose.”

He was quiet a moment, looking upward.
“Have you read van der Post? He talks about how every human on Earth has a longing
for the vast. How does he put it? As the natural coherence of the world vanishes,
there’s a guilt that grows great and angry in the basement of our being. The beast
wants its day. And culture wants to desensitize us to what we’ve lost.
That’s why Bushmen are all but stamped out. They’re a direct threat to a
‘civilized’ culture that’s inherently unstable. All you have to do is
look at one of their paintings, and you know what we’ve lost. They’re alive
to the tiniest gesture: the way an impala turns, the way an antelope lifts its
head.”