White Dog Fell From the Sky (27 page)

And then her skin began to cool. Her eyes
opened and fell onto Ian. No disintegrating heavens, just the two of them camped under a
couple of dwarf baobab trees, the sun coming up warm and bright over the pan, doves
making their mournful sound in the trees. His face was deeply lined, dark bags under his
eyes.

“You’re back,” he said,
holding her.

“What do you think it was?”

“Tick bite fever.”

“How do you know?”

“Between your toes. I found the
evidence last night. There’s a streak of red running up your leg.”

“If it had reached my heart, would I
have died?”

“No. No, you wouldn’t have. I
was going to pack you straight into the Land Rover, but I didn’t know if I could
find my way in the dark.”

“What did I say to you last
night?”

“Best goes unrepeated. You were a wild
animal …”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re all right, my love,
that’s what matters. What do you want for breakfast? I’m thinking we should
eat and then go get a proper antibiotic for you.”

“What did you give me?”

“Erythromycin, I think.”

“You’re not sure?”

“Sometimes I switch the
bottles.”

“Well, it’s
working … and I don’t want to go. Why should we?”

“It seems like a good idea.”

“I don’t want to go
anywhere.”

“All right, but what do you want for
breakfast?”

“A cup of tea?”

“And what else?”

“Some porridge?”

“And what else?”

“That’s it.” She held out
her hand to him.

He grabbed it and grew quiet.
“Don’t ever do that … I couldn’t bear it,
Alice … ”

He turned to go, but she hung onto his hand.
“It goes both ways.”

They stayed there that day and another
night. He made stew, and they sat in the shade on the camp chairs, watching the birds
come and go, the light shift over the pan. “If that tick hadn’t gotten
me,” she said, “we would have left this morning and we would have missed all
this.”

Toward nightfall, she said,
“I’ve been thinking that I’m not going to be able to come with you
after all. My legs are weak as noodles. There’ll be another time. I’d like
you to drive me back to Francistown tomorrow and put me on an overnight
train.”

“I’d carry you up those hills if
you want.”

She touched his lips.

“Or I can drive you back to
Gaborone.”

“The conductor will bring a blanket
roll. I’ll be rocked all night. I’ll call my neighbor and ask her to pick me
up on the other end.”

“I want to drive you.”

“I want you to be doing what you were
planning to do. You’ll tell me about it. Maybe we can meet halfway in a couple of
weeks when you come back.”

“It’s what you want?”

“It’s what I want.”

That night, they lay together in the big tent.
She was still feverish, and when he came into her, she felt his coolness against her
heat. She would have liked him to stay there forever. They moved together gently,
peacefully, stopping, beginning again, her fever knocking down the borders between
them.

They slept, and woke early. Morning Star was
brighter than ever, hope on the horizon, the howl of the hyena banished. Ian drove
across the pan, then northward, back to Gweta and east to Francistown. They ate dinner
together, and he walked her to the platform where the southbound passenger train waited.
“Stay here tonight,” he said, “and let me drive you in the
morning.”

“No,” she said, kissing him. She
let him go, and he put his arms around her again and kissed her harder. She climbed up
the steps into the train. When she opened the window of the compartment to wave, he was
already walking down the platform. He didn’t turn.

In his mind’s eye, he saw her face
flushed with fever, her hair stuck to her cheek with sweat, her eyes swimming. Driving
her back out to the main road, he’d wanted to keep harm from her forever. But that
feeling was mixed with something stronger that had nothing to do with keeping her safe.
Once he’d seen pictures of the living bridges of Cherrapunji in northeastern
India, made from the roots of rubber trees. Some of them were a hundred feet long and
could hold the weight of fifty villagers. The bridges were grown from secondary roots,
using betel nut trunks sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root pathways.
This was how it felt with Alice: a living bridge between them.

He’d planned to leave Francistown that
night but realized his spare tire was in bad shape. God would be unlikely to provide. By
the time he’d be able to find a new tire and get himself organized, he thought he
might as well stay for the night. But it turned out to be a night that would have been
better spent elsewhere.

An hour after dropping off Alice, he bumped
into Gwyneth at the hotel. She was up from Gaborone doing business for De Beers. Her old
demon, depression, had caught up with her. She’d cut off all her hair. She was
into her second whiskey sour, standing disconsolately with her back to a window.

“What are you doing here?”

“Work. What about you?”

“I just dropped someone off at the
train.”

“A woman.”

“How did you know?”

“I can see her on your
face.”

“Have you had dinner?” he
asked.

“No.”

“Want to join me?”

“You wouldn’t rather be alone
with your amorous thoughts?” That was the beginning. The weeping in his arms and
her regrets about her life followed. He preferred not to think about what happened next.
The odd thing was how good it still was with her, after all they’d been through.
How many times had he cursed the day he’d met her, and yet this, these blindly
loving bodies … this remained.

The following morning he was out before
dawn, heading west. He drove fast, trying to outrun the night that clung to him. If
Gwyneth had been a manipulator, he would have known what to do, but she lived at the
mercy of inner hellions that threatened to erase her. He told himself that he’d
been a lifeline last night, nothing more. And even as he had the thought, he knew the
“nothing more” wasn’t quite true. He imagined telling Alice, then he
imagined not telling her, and neither seemed right.

He planned to turn south on a track between
Bushman Pits and Maun, and head toward the southeast corner of the Kuke fence, working
his way west as he cut fence cable. His hope was that animals trapped both to the east
and south might find their way toward the Okavango through at first a narrow opening and
then a gradually widening one. There was no predicting when the rains would come to this
part of the country, or even if they’d come at all.

Etched into the map in his mind, Ian
pictured the northern wilderness of Botswana as a wire prison. The Kuke veterinary
fence, running from the Namibian border across the northern boundary of the Central
Kgalagadi had been constructed in 1958. A similar cordon fence, running along the
international border between Namibia and Botswana, enclosed three and a half sides of a
box. It made him nearly
crazy to think about it. It was no different
from penning wild animals, withholding food and water, and watching them die.

His hands, which rattled on the steering
wheel of the Land Rover most of the day, still shook after he climbed out that evening.
South of the main road under a small clump of trees, he pitched a tent, laid out his
sleeping bag, and built a fire. Dust kicked up by a herd of cattle that’d passed
through, choked the air, and the sun blazed down to Earth, huge and white with a dark
streak across it. He made a supper of beans and a bit of goat meat he’d bought in
Francistown, and ate meditatively, listening to the night sounds. The sky was dead
clear. The cry of a spotted hyena, rising quickly, ended with an exclamation point. He
thought he heard thunder, and then realized it was wishful thinking.

He opened a packet of Marie biscuits and
munched one after another. Without asking to, Alice had called his life into question,
his long held assumptions about what mattered, his independence elevated to a quasi
religion. He was still traveling forward on the momentum of his former life, but the
ground underneath was rifting.

By early afternoon of the next day, he
reached the intersection of the Kuke fence and the Makalamabedi portion. He drove across
the veldt, searching for wildlife and found a mixed herd of wildebeest and zebra at a
distance of several kilometers west, moving slowly in the direction of the fence.
Carcasses littered the landscape, beasts dead from thirst and famine. Among the living
were very few young ones. He parked the Land Rover near the section of fence where he
planned to start, unbolted his license plate, and hid it under a blanket in the
back.

Five strands of thick wire were strung
between wooden standards. He tested the tension on the cable to see whether it was
likely to snap out when it was cut. Probably not. From the backseat, he lifted out an
industrial-sized bolt cutter with solid pipe handles and black rubber grips that his
friend Leonard had lent him. Leonard said it would cut through anything—something like
an eighteen-hundred-kilogram cutting force for a twenty-five-kilogram force on the
handles.

Ian opened the jaw of the thing, positioned
it around the bottom wire and pushed the handles together.
Snap.
The wire
coiled back
on itself in two directions. He moved up to the next cable
and did the same. All the way up through the five cables. Would the ends of the wires
injure animals? He thought it best to cut through close to the standard and coil the
loose ends of wire around the adjoining post as best he could.

He moved to the next post. He told himself
he’d do five standards, or twenty-five cables, and rest. Twenty-five more cables,
rest. After a hundred cables, he’d drink some water. He made it through only
seventy-five before needing water. He paused and went back to wrap the wires around the
posts. By the end of the day, he’d averaged something like eight posts an hour.
Nothing brilliant, but the pace was manageable. Close to fifty standards by six
P.M.
About 150 meters. It wasn’t a large enough opening to make
a real difference, but if a herd traveled along the fence looking for a way through,
they’d find it here.

On the third day, he came back at six in the
morning and found evidence that a small herd had passed through to the other side—hoof
prints of wildebeest and zebra, possibly steenbok. As he moved west, he found more
carcasses of wildebeest, and farther along, part of the carcass of a giraffe that must
have died or been killed in the night. Three cape vultures circled, their white bodies
glowing in the sun, dark tails spread and black wing feathers stretched out like
fingers, feet dangling oddly, like something dead. Their wingspan was at least
three meters wide. As they descended, their bodies tensed; their feet became suddenly
poised and muscular. They landed, and two of them hopped, hissing and cackling to the
carcass, naked throats extended, their black beaks lethal as the bolt cutters Ian held
in his hand. At the outskirts, slightly away from the carcass, one waited, its neck S
shaped. After a time, they took off, trailing death, climbing on warm thermals.

He set to work again, still moving west. The
bolt cutter was doing a number on his arms and shoulders after only a couple of
days’ work. The pain disgusted him. In his twenties, he could have worked three
times this fast and not felt a thing.

He opened another forty-five standards
before noon, dropped the bolt cutters where he stopped, and walked to the Land Rover to
get
the billy can for tea. The work made him ravenous; he’d be
running short of food within a day or two and needing to return to Maun. He lit a fire
and boiled water, opened a tin of sardines, and made a sandwich of fish and bread. A few
wildebeest, with a young one trailing, moved along away from the opening he’d cut.
They looked weak enough to push over. Ian put down the sandwich and tea, ran around
behind them, and waved his arms, until they turned around and walked in the other
direction toward the opening in the fence. He urged them along until they went through.
Water was eighty kilometers away.

On the fourth day, he was clipping and
sweating and didn’t hear a Land Rover come up behind him until it was almost on
him. A red-faced man leaned out the window. “What the hell you think you’re
doing, mate?”

“Cutting wire.”

“I’ve got eyes. What the bloody
hell for?”

“Notice the animal carcasses? They
can’t get to water.”

“Well, see those cattle over there?
Those are part of my herd. That’s my living. Hoof-and-mouth will wipe me out in a
matter of weeks.”

“No one’s studied whether the
fence prevents the spread of hoof-and-mouth.”

“Study? What the hell did they put it
up for if it didn’t help? Look, mate, this isn’t a conversation. I’m
telling you. Get out.” He lifted a shotgun. “You’re destroying
government property.”

“If you want to look at it like that,
it’s been good chatting. What’s your name anyway?”

“You think you’re pretty smart,
don’t you? You won’t get it from me.”

Ian picked up his bolt cutter and billy can.
“Well, I’ll be off.” Without turning, he walked the few yards to his
Land Rover, picturing the back of his head in crosshairs. He heard the sound of the
other vehicle leaving and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck.

On the way back to the main road, he
thought, that guy was trying to make a living, so why didn’t he give a damn? But
some wildebeest and its calf trying to stay alive, he’d risk his life for. He
bumped over the veldt, avoiding an anthill. He knew the greed, the small-mindedness of a
man, that was why, but animals, they don’t take more than they
need. He stopped, replaced the license plate, and bumped down the rough track.

He guessed he was finished here. He’d
head south of Sehitwa, west of the Mabele a Pudi Hills, where the fence was about the
same distance to water.