Sand rivers (17 page)
Off the track ahead, a kudu cantered back into the scrub before stopping in a screen of thin gray saplings to inspect us; she seemed to know how well these saplings blended with the thin silver stripes on her pretty flanks. Certainly she would never be seen by passers-by in these sere woodlands of the dry season, and I wondered how many of these creatures watched us pass. Then leaf shadows shifted, a huge gray kudu bull was there beside her, big pink ears twitching with apprehension in the soft autumnal light, and through binoculars 1 could make out a second female, then a third, a few steps back in the brown sun. Hugo tried to come up closer, but the animals overcame their curiosity and withdrew into the wood.
One day Hugo, Rick, Karen, Maria, and I walked perhaps ten miles up the Luwegu until we found a place we liked on a black granite outcrop that rose from a rock ledge overlooking an harmonious bend in the river. In a simple fly camp without tents, we spent two quiet days watching the river, fishing and bathing, observing the local hippo herd, and walking out
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in the cooler hours to see what we might see. Here, flaked implements of early man could be found on almost any outcropping of rock, and petrified wood, in shards and sections and whole mineralized logs, was littered along the elephant paths and through the grass. At dark, after a simple supper and a bottle of wine, we listened to the night sounds and stars and the soft murmur of the river, and at daybreak came a strange ancient chorus made in the simultaneous needs of frogs and scops owls, hippos and ground hornbills, counterpointed by the deep tearing coughs of a restless leopard.
On this brief safari, we were escorted by Bakiri Mnungu and three young Ngindo. Years ago Bakiri Mnungu had been one of Bwana Niki's porters; he was later made game scout, then a head game scout, a title that had now been changed to "game assistant", perhaps because there was no scouting any more. From his firstr days with the Game Department until Brian departed in 1973, he had worked under Bwana Niki, and he was proud of this: "He taught me everything," Bakiri said. (Bakiri also remembered lonides, who, he told us, invariably wore long pants with many patches and a hat of many colors, also patched, and never went anywhere without a walking stick: because the Old Bwana was known to be wealthy, the Africans cotlld never understand why he dressed like a poor man, Bakiri said.) Bakiri is a small, friendly, humorous man who is almost always cheerful, even under stress; one day when shouted at by Philip Nicholson, he merely laughed at him and said, "You're just a young boy, you don't know how to curse an old bird like me." Like all of the Africans, Bakiri understands that Philip, who is young and excitable, has somehow gone astray between cultures and customs and generations in the new Africa; the very fact that he feels free to dispute with them points up the fact that Philip is socially involved with Africans in a way that previous generations were not, and he spends a lot of time at the kitchen fire.
Leaving Mkangira, Bakiri had been extremely upset that due to his own miscalculation about personnel, he was asked to carry a load and not a gun. In a fine tantrum, he cried out that the news of a game assistant carrying a porter's load would ruin his name for ever at Kingupira. However, he shortly got over this, and said so - "I am over it" - picked up the load and then took the gunbearer's place at the head of the procession, although Rick and I were carrying the guns. By the end of the day, in giving orders through Bakiri, Rick had patched up the game assistant's authority, which Bakiri himself emphasized that evening by disdaining to speak to these young Africans of his own tribe who had dared to laugh at him; instead he marched up and down the bank, guarding black and white alike from attack by savage beasts. Next day, on a walk further upriver with Maria, I permitted Bakiri to come along to guard us, and as usual he was lively and helpful, despite a tendency - perhaps left over from the nervous days with Bwana Niki - to load up his gun rather too
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quickly when elephants appeared. Bakiri said that Bwana Niki was a real fundi (expert) when it came to elephant hunting. "Bwana Niki would go so close, he would brush the ear back before he pulled the trigger," Bakiri said, laughing aloud in the memory of his own nervousness, about which he is not in the least sheepish; on the contrary, he declared that he always did his best to stay as far behind Bwana Niki as possible.
"It is terrible since Bwana Niki left!" Bakiri suddenly cried, with a yelp of agonized laughter. "Look at my clothes, nothing but holes! He used to issue us new uniforms, we were very smart, and now I have to hold the ammunition in my hand because all my pockets are broken!" Bakiri plucked sadly at the ragged clothes that were so unseemly in a game assistant. "Every day I was happy because we went here, there, everywhere. Now we don't go anywhere, and we get hardly any money, so I can't retire. 1 had a big belly - now look at me! 1 call him Baba - my father - because he was a father to me. It is very bad here since he left."
By this time Bakiri was his old self again, curious and enthusiastic, helping Rick by weaving fish line out of ancient rope, entertaining the bored porters, and standing guard with his gun in the shade of a big ebony while we lolled in the warm shallows of the river. The day before a young crocodile had surfaced suddenly at Rick's feet while he was fishing from a rock, and Bakiri declared that from now on, this ledge camp would be known to local Africans as The Place Europeans Were Threatened by Crocodiles and Then Went Swimming.
Brian had described how, on the Ruaha River, Bakiri Mnungu had once warned him about an approaching hippo when he was standing on a log at the riverside. "I looked up and saw this little thing coming downstream toward me, just the snout, and I thought it was a hippo, too, but when it submerged, I suddenly got this funny feeling and jumped back off that log. Two seconds later, this big croc surfaced right where I had been, and not finding me there, disappeared again. So old Bakiri prevented a terrible loss to the world." When I asked Bakiri if he remembered this episode, he laughed and nodded his head, but claimed no credit: Bwana Niki, as he recalled, had been sitting on a log beside the river, and when the crocodile had surfaced right in front of him, the Bwana had run.
Next morning a leopard was seen by Bakiri and one of the Ngindo - despite all the leopard sound and sign, the only one that was actually sighted during our expedition to the Selous. Plains game and elephant and buffalo came to the glades in a large grove of borassus, not far upriver; on two occasions we saw kudu from our ledge, coming down to drink from the brown flood. Here was a chance to move slowly and quietly in awareness of the small sounds and smells, the rocks, trees, insects and small vertebrates - a small and smelly turtle, interfered with in its doughty course along the bank, and also the great river turtles from which the sun glanced as they slid into the currents; the odor of a certain
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mint, a cat-piss stink so strong that, meeting it suddenly in a close place, I actually stopped short and had a look around; the sick sweet smell of shiny Strychnos fruit and the fragrance of wild jasmine and caper blossoms and gardenia; the notes of color in a yellow hyacinth, red indigofera, blue commelina. We learned to listen for the sharp snap of sterculia pods, twisting wide and broadcasting their bronze shiny beans as they sprang free of the tall white trees on the high bank. Maria and I made a collection of the beautiful red-black "lucky beans" of the pod mahogany, and Hugo discovered a miraculous false flower made by a cluster of gaudy tree hoppers, red, turquoise, saffron, and white: the unopened white buds along the plant stem taken over by this lively flower were the insect's larvae, covered in a fuzz of long white hairs, and under the leaves of the tree above, hundreds more of these buds were shedding the white hairs of the pupa stage, as a spfay of colorful blossoms came to life.
On the day of our return to Mkangira, Bakiri Mnungu pointed out the big tamarind with its dense shade and thick horizontal limbs where he had seen the leopard the day before, showing us exactly how the chui mkubwa, the Big One, had shot down the tree, hitting the ground just here - hapa! - and whirling off in a yellow'^Dlur into the thicket. Two days before we had seen Sykes monkeys in this place, which may have been its attraction for the leopard, and today we discovered what we thought at first was a dead hippopotamus, embedded in a shallow stagnant pool behind the river. The poor creature lay immobile in thick muck not deep enough to protect it from the sun, its whole shoulder and neck laid wide by a massive tear, and its broad back lacerated by a skein of claw marks; its eyes looked glazed as, very slowly, it turned its head to stare in our direction. While we deliberated whether or not it should be shot, it clambered unsteadily out of the water into the darkness of the river thicket where, according to Bakiri, it fell down. Reporting this, Bakiri laughed, not out of callousness but in that nervous release that is brought on by grotesque events. And we were depressed, wishing we had put the poor animal out of its misery, for in leaving the pool it had revealed an even more hideous wound in its right hind quarter, a great loose mouth of discolored flesh so rotted out with putrefaction that the tissues had all fallen apart and a rush of water came sluicing out, leaving an awful stink of death in the heavy air. We stared helplessly at the dark cave of branches where the hippo had disappeared; there was no sound.
Brian had said that lion killed hippo regularly along the Kilombero, although he could not figure out how it was done; in his opinion, a lion's teeth were simply not long enough to bite through a hippo's heavy hide and still penetrate deeply enough to kill it, and he suspected that the creature must die of shock or heart failure, as the green pigeon is said to do sometimes at the sound of gunfire.
Not far downstream, the death smell came again, this time from a
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hippo's carcass, swollen a pale purple, that was stranded like a huge rubber toy on a hidden bar out in mid-river. Downstream of the hippo was the dark green-gray head of a large crocodile, and the head left a wake in the brown current as it drew close to the carcass. The crocodile was in no hurry, and probably it had already tried to open up a hole in the tough hide and was now waiting for the hippopotamus to soften. When it lifted its spiny back and tail out of the water, we could see that it was ten or twelve feet long, and now the big head was elevated, too, with the teeth protruding from the long saurian smile; the smile begins in a small loop beneath the brow knob that contains the crocodile's modest brain and stony eyes. Nearing the carcass, it sank from view to take a bite, then surfaced again, approaching the white pasty throat, as a Goliath heron and a palm-nut vulture crossed the foul air, oblivious, and trumpeter hornbiUs came to the wild date palms by the river, and a pied wagtail tipped and chirruped on a river log greased with primordial mud. Other crocodiles rose and sank away, and all but the first were the off-yellow color of the froth that floats along these rivers; the snouts and eyes appeared, like branch tips, then withdrew again.
Upriver, the mangled hippo had made its way into the water. Immediately it found itself challenged by a bull from a nearby herd, which came for it almost submerged, in ominous silence. The day before, I had seen a hippo flee the water and take refuge in the bush of the far bank when the dominant male came at it from the nearest herd, but this one was too weak to retreat; it merely backed a little, groaned a little, and its antagonist, perhaps detecting from its smell that it was no threat, did not bother to attack the dying creature.
Although we have seen a number of scarred hippos, most of them losers in the constant fighting among bulls, it seemed odd to find a dying and a dead one so close together; perhaps both of them were casualties of the same fight. At the junction of the Luwegu with the Mbarangandu, another dead hippo lay in the shallows by an ancient tree that jutted a long serpentine head out of the flood like a great python. Next morning, this hippo was soft enough to eat, and a whole squadron of spleen-yellow crocodiles floated downstream of it, the wakes of their lumpy heads running together in the river current. A bigger croc had hauled itself out on to the pale hulk, staring blindly into nothingness with every appearance of well-fed satisfaction, and another large individual was feeding, sinking beneath to seize and roll and twist off chunks of the flaccid carcass, then thrusting its long jaws into the balmy river so that the morsel could fall down its throat to be gulped and swallowed.
For several nights, a large six-foot shining black snake - the white-lipped cobra - appeared in the vicinity of Mzee Nzui's cooking fire, a long neat pyramid of ash which rose from the ground as the days went by. Mzee
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NzLii demonstrated how, on its fourth appearance, the snake had shd out from beneath the big tin storage chest in which he baked his bread (the tin chest was placed on moderately hot embers, with more embers heaped on top), and spat venom on the arm of one of the young Ngindo. This time the cobra refused to retreat, and was killed with a shovel. However, Mzee Nzui was still nervous. He had never seen a snake behave that way, returning again and again to a crowded place, and with such boldness, and wondered if it might not have a mate. Teased about his nervousness by Rick and Karen, he laughed with them, but not for very long. "I am an old man with two wives and eighteen children," he said, "but I wish to see the world to its finish!"
One night after supper, an ngoma or dance was presented by the staff to express their approval of the safari. This traditional event, a gesture of hospitality and greeting and anticipated farewell, is of somewhat suspect spontaneity, since the singers and dancers are paid servants of the audience. But Rick Bonham declared that the ngoma had been the Africans' idea, he had not suggested it, and anyway, it was quite clear that staff morale had been high right from the staft, a tribute not only to Karen and Rick but to people like Maria, who had interested herself in all the staff activities, and talked and laughed with them, and shared with them the visitors' ideas of what we hoped would be accomplished by a safari that was their safari, too.