Sand rivers (18 page)

The dancers dispensed with Western dress in favor of bare torsos and skirt-like kangas, and because their songs and dances differed, as did their use of Swahili, the Kenyans danced first as a group and the Tanzanians second. The Kenyans were led by Mwakupaulu, the assistant cook, who took the woman's part by tying up his kanga around his neck in bibi-style. and using pleats to achieve an effect of big loose hips and breasts. Mwakupaulu kept time with a rattle made from a coffee tin filled with pebbles, while Kazungu played a tom-tom drum fashioned that afternoon from impala hide and hollowed wood, and John Matano, the truck driver, played a sort of triangle made by striking two wrenches together. The lead singer was Charles Mdedo, the versatile mechanic who also helped in the mess tent and the kitchen, and Mzee Nzui lent dignity to the business by shuffling mightily back and forth and pounding the rhythm into the earth with a staff longer than himself that made him look like some ancient prophet from the desert. The one Kenyan dancer who did not have his heart in the ngoma was Kirubai, who moved vaguely back and forth, avoiding the gaze of the pleased audience by staring straight upward into the starry night, as if studying bats. It was assumed that Kirubai felt shy, self-conscious, but even though there was good feeling in this camp, 1 had to wonder if the ngoma might not strike a hunter of elephants as undignified, even demeaning.

PETER MATTHIESSEN

At the start, Charles Mdedo made a brief warm speech of welcome, saying that the staff had been very happy on this safari and wished to sing their guests a few songs to make us happy, too. The first song was a song of celebration of the happy safari, the second was a dancing song that would ensure our safe return journey, and the third was a hunter's song (nothing at all like the hunter's song that Kirubai had sung out in the bush) in which, having courteously warned the audience not to be surprised or afraid of what was coming, the Kenyans came forward and picked up the apprehensive David Paterson in his camp chair and carried him high around the fire, in celebration of the tasty buffalo he had helped to shoot. David, a bright and energetic person who had been very good company on this safari, was as enthusiastic about the hunter's dance as he had been about the hunting, and carried things off with high spirits and good-humored shouting.

The Tanzanian part of the ngoma was commenced by Mzee Saidi, who told the audience how honored he and his people had been by our kind visit, and how grateful they were to Bwana Niki for having brought us: the guests were coming here, and too soon they were going, and these dances and songs would express the sincere thanks of all the staff. Being younger, the Tanzanian dancers were most lively. The first dance was a traditional dance of the Ngindo, the second was a dance of thanks made up for the occasion, and the third was Kwaheri nenda Salaama, Goodbye, Have a Safe Journey Home.

Now Goa came forward and repeated Saidi's sentiments in his deep, shy voice, staring intensely into the face of Brian Nicholson; he said he was sorry that what Bwana Niki had accomplished here with the Game Department had gone all to pieces, but he wished us a safe journey, and hoped we would come back again. Brian made no speech of acknowledgement, but afterward, without drawing attention to himself, he went over and thanked the staff for the ngoma. "It is nice to be back here and work with you again; you've been doing a good job, and I want to thank you," he told them. "And now I've asked you to do something difficult, as in the old days. In a few days some of you will walk out with loads on your heads on a real foot safari: it's good to know there are still some real men left in Tanzania!" The Africans laughed, very pleased with the whole evening, and not less so when another case of beer was ordered with which they might finish the ngoma.

One day down near the airstrip by the Mbarangandu, a lone bull elephant was seen wandering slowly back and forth along the river, as if it had lost its last sense of direction; when Hugo approached, it actually drew near the car-"but not at all in an aggressive way," he said. "It had what looked like a spear wound on the side of its face, and was holding its ears back tight against its neck in a strange manner, and it seemed to me that

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its jaw was swollen. Then it wandered away again to a small pool where it sprayed a little water on its head and beneath its ears."

That night or early the next day, the elephant sagged down and died against the green grass bank between the plain and the white sand of the river, and a day later, more than three hundred vultures had assembled, including one huge lappet-face and a few white-headed vultures, which we had not seen before in the Selous, and even two beautiful palm-nut vultures, which may have joined the madding throng for social purposes, since they are not known to consume carrion. The first to arrive shared the carcass with hyena and lion, but perhaps these animals were already well-fed, for as the hordes of dark birds circled down out of the sky the carnivores withdrew, and the elephant disappeared beneath a flopping mass of vultures that stained the river sands all afound a dark gray-green.

The elephant carcass was inspected before the birds reduced it to a cave of bones, and as it turned out, the left ear it had held so close was protecting a great infected wound that maggots had eaten out down to the bone; there was also the separate wound on the left side of the head that looked as if it might have been made by a spear. The game scouts say that local poachers of the region don't use spears, only arrows tipped with Akokanthera poison and old musket-loaders armed with poisoned shot; they thought that the larger hole looked like a musket wound, and this opinion, which Brian Nicholson endorsed, was lent support when Philip heard a shot back in the hills. Not that the two episodes were related; the elephant's putrefying wound was some weeks old.

But Kirubai thought that the two wounds were caused by tusks of another elephant; sometimes, he said, bull elephants will fight so violently that tusks are broken, and an elephant may wander around for months with such a wound before it dies. As a former "poacher", he had not seen much evidence of poaching, at least not here in the far south of the Selous; he doubted very much that poachers would have overlooked the five valuable tusks that had been found while we were here. (Alan Rodgers estimates that if ivory collecting were efficient, the Reserve might produce some twenty million shillings worth each year from tusks of animals that die naturally.) With the tail hairs Kirubai made a traditional bracelet for Karen Ross, and although Karen dislikes ornaments made from animal parts she will keep this bracelet because it was made by Kirubai at Mkangira.

Though Bakiri Mnungu w^ent along with Bwana Niki's view that this elephant was a victim of the poachers, he also agreed with Kirubai that there was no real evidence of poaching in this part of the Selous; on the other hand, he had seen too many dead elephants. No, elephant numbers had not been much reduced, in his opinion, but on the other hand, nobody had been out to look at them in recent years, so who could say? In the old days, there was none of this sitting around at the game post, the scouts were off on safari all the time, sometimes for two or three

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months, getting to know the bush. There was no poaching then to speak about, Bakiri said: we reported the presence and abundance of game, we made note of water locations and put up signs, and we made fires in the first part of the dry season. All the roads and all the vehicles were in good shape, and because of the regular burnmg of long grass, the animals could be seen and counted, and everybody knew just what was what. Now everything was Au/fl - dead - and nobody went anywhere or looked at anything.

Not long after the death of the elephant, five game scouts turned up at Mkangira, having made a five-day walk in from Liwalc; their instructions were to rebuild the fallen game post, then await a hunting safari that was supposed to enter this region some time in October. Brian Nicholson just shook his head, perhaps suspecting that this show of efficiency had been put on for his benefit, or that the Game Department wished to keep an eye on us; he spoke sarcastically of these brave game scouts performing their daily patrol between their cooking fire and our kitchen, and one day, as the scouts - who were outside - just stared at him, he made their polite welcome an excuse to enter their small stockade without permission, as if carrying out an official staff inspection.

When the airstrip repairs were completed, Bakiri Mnungu did not have much to do, and spent a lot of his time out at the game post in the company of these Ngindo game scouts. Since our walk up the Luwegu, Bakiri had been very friendly, bringing fresh tamarind pods to our tent because he knew that we liked the astringent taste, and one morning as I walked past the post on my way to the north plain beside the river, Bakiri called out to me to come and join the scouts in their breakfast of uli gruel, or "porrigi". Because 1 had eaten, but mostly because of my poor Swahili, which I thought would make our conversation painful, 1 declined, continuing on my way with a grin and a wave. Immediately I felt vaguely depressed. Probably 1 had been impolite, and also selfish; the exchange that would have been painful for me might well have been entertaining for the game scouts, who were always amused and encouraging about my Swahili and in any case would have carried me along out of kindness and courtesy. Going on my way alone, with my white man's private notebook and binoculars, I knew I had missed a warm and vital chance.

From my place beneath a big tamarind near the Mbarangandu, on what I thought of as the "northern plain", I could see for several miles up both the rivers. Where the currents met, the waterbuck moved out across the sand, the bucks sparring half-heartedly as the does, paying no attention, moved on past. The other evening, on a social impulse, the solitary wildebeest that lives on this northern plain joined the waterbuck as they galloped toward the river. The heavy waterbuck drag their hooves as they run, and they kicked up the white sand in a fine display, while the

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wildebeest, bringing up the rear, merely rocked along with a spirited whisking of its long tail. Crossing the shallows, the waterbuck sent the spray flying, but the wildebeest, feeling water beneath its feet, ricocheted off with the weird kick and buck peculiar to this species, then high-tailed back to the dry ground on its own side of the river. There it resumed its solitary life, which risks the attention of the lions, since solitude in a social species is often sign of illness or decrepitude. But perhaps the lion were distracted by the wart hog and kongoni on the plain, which were followed about these days by their new young.

By early September, in the diminishing rivers of the dry season, all but three hippos that resided in a deep pool under the south bank had abandoned the shallow Mbarangandu for the Luwegu. At this season on the Luwegu, a clump of hippo heads broke the bknd surface of the river every half mile, with two herds very close to the river junction, and there was no time in the day when one did not hear them. The waterbuck also seemed to like the confluence of rivers, where the broad sand bars afforded them safety from the lions, and numbers of water birds came there, too, including a big flock of African skimmers. When not flying up and down with their long lower bills stuck ifi the water, eyes focused on the little fountains they create for the small fish and other creatures that they live on, the skimmers sometimes soared in pairs in wonderful courtship gyrations on the blue sky, or mobbed the kites and herons that dared to fly across their delta. They seemed to live peacefully enough with kingfishers, and also with the sandpipers and plovers. In recent days, the African shorebirds had been joined by Palearctic migrants from Eurasia: greenshanks and the little stint, and the marsh, green, and curlew sandpipers descended from night skies to rest on these warm margins.

Standing barefoot on white African sands, smelling the damp algal smells, the mineral rot of driftwood, I studied the tracks of hyena and lion, hippo and elephant, the foot-dragged prints of waterbuck, the ancient hand-prints and serpentine tail furrow made by crocodile, to name just those 1 could see from where I stood. The air was filled with engaging dung smells and the protest of hippos and "yowp" of monkeys from the trees across the river.

Although buffalo and elephant were here at Mkangira when we arrived and on the second day a rhino was seen by the Nicholson family on an outing after tea, these large beasts soon vanished from the region; unlike parks animals, they avoided the presence of man. But after the middle of September, as if anticipating our departure, a herd of several hundred buffalo came down to the south bank of the Mbarangandu, and the next day two rhinos appeared in the same place; elephants reappeared on the northern plain, and a loose herd of eight bulls, including one with a large single tusk, could be seen each day out near the repaired airstrip. Discovering the dead one by the river, these elephants stayed near it for a

PETER MATTHIESSEN

day or two in answer to some elephantine instinct, perhaps more akin to respect for death than man chooses to think, ahhough the dead kinsman was now no more than a hollow gray mound of hard-baked skin, a sagging armature of bone.

Almost every night restless lions could be heard on both sides of the river, and sometimes leopard, and invariably hyena; because of the smell of the buffalo and impala that were killed every few days to feed the camp, the hyenas were bold nightly visitors, skulking about the kitchen area and between the tents, leaving behind the strange long prints that like the rest of their appearance is more suggestive of the dog than of the aberrant cat that they really are. One night another hyena clan made its own kill on the far side of the Luwegu, filling the night with excited whoopings that turned to high eerie giggling and laughter. Out there in the dark where the hyenas were tearing the wide-eyed victim into pieces, those crazy noises would be ringing in its ears.

The brown flood sparkling under the moon was perhaps two hundred yards across, yet it was shallow enough for a man to wade the chest-high water were it not for the big crocodile that had showed itself now and again in recent days and took most of the languor out of bathing. Between bird calls, in every silence, came the soft wash of the two rivers, pouring away to the north and west to meet the great Kilombero that comes down out of the Nyasa Highlands on its way to the Rufiji and the sea.