Sand rivers (23 page)

SAND RIVERS

them - swarm over everything." RecaUing how back at Madaba the siafu had driven Tom Arnold from his tent one night, Brian grinned. The only thing that could stop these siafu was another ant, the sangara, a very swift yellow-brown species which he had pointed out at Kingupira; they appeared to run nimbly over the backs of the slower siafu and spray the line with some sort of formic acid.

On the first day of our journey Brian had mentioned that his red sneakers were giving his toes hell and cramping his feet too, but he ignores my suggestion that he put on socks or plasters - "No room", he says - and he has no other boots or shoes to take their place. I have no spares either; in the cause of traveling light, we are sharing one small duffle that contains everything we have brought, including flashlights, Brian's cigarettes, and my notebooks. Yesterday Brian was obliged to bandage his little toes, and this morning, after ^e first two hours, he borrowed my knife and cut holes in his sneakers to keep them from doing him any further damage. As it is, we shall have to quit in the early afternoon, and tomorrow - a day early - we shall leave the Luwegu and head east toward the Mbarangandu, before the distance between rivers grows any wider. This isn't because of Briaii^s feet, or because we have not seen animals - the plains game were all there this morning as well as a number of elephant and buffalo - but because of that burning, which we have assumed was done by poachers. With the sight of that fire-blackened land, of that transgression, a sense of the vast silent Africa, "the Old Africa", was dissipated, and the Mbarangandu will be our last chance to restore it.

This afternoon we take shelter from the sun in a bush orange grove by the Luwegu, drinking our tea and chewing on the long hard strips of buffalo biltong. Eventually the biltong proves too tough for the false front tooth I had installed eighteen years ago to replace one broken on an expedition in New Guinea. The damned tooth shatters to pieces in my mouth, and I spit it out in consternation; as in New Guinea, I am pretty far from help if the thing acts up. Brian is not the least bit sympathetic; in fact he laughs. "Makes you look tough," he observes, "like you really mean business." And he removes his own false teeth, leaving gaps on both sides of his incisors that give him the aspect, as he says himself, of a huge rodent. Turning his back, he suddenly whirls and stares at me over his shoulder, letting the two rodent teeth emerge on his lower lip. "This is your captain," he says, and bursts out laughing, claiming that he does this sometimes with strange passengers in his airplane. Though I doubt this story, it doesn't matter, since he has me laughing, too. "If you hadn't been going at the bloody biltong like a hyena, instead of chewing it off in delicate bits like me, it would never have happened," Brian says, and we laugh anew.

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A light unseasonal rain that fell last night is attributed by the Warden to the bush fires that in these months are set all across Africa in the miombo belt, from southern Tanzania and northern Mozambique to the coastal forests of Zaire and Angola. The morning is heavy and humid after the rain, and two of the porters, complaining of headaches, are given aspirin. Behind their round dark aching heads, a flight of egrets passes down the early river.

During the night, a small leopard made off with one of Kazungu's sneakers, which on this foot safari have replaced the green Wellingtons he was wearing for a while as a precaution against cobras. As the only staff member with shoes (although Goa uses rubber sandals that make a faint snick-snick as he goes along) Kazungu is understandably upset, but the cat prints are clear in the damp sand, and he soon locates the spat-out sneaker a short distance back in the thickets.

This morning we abandon the Luwegu in order to cross the ridges toward the east and explore an unnamed sand river that comes down off a high plateau. On the north end of that plateau, high above the dry savanna woodlands all around, is the large pan that the Warden remembers as "crawling with elephant" and other animals. He is eager to revisit the nameless plateau and its pan, which he discovered in his last years in the Selous.

An hour is needed to cross the flat river plain of the Luwegu, on the east side of which a pair of Bohor reedbuck start up from high grass along the wood. The going is mostly very fast, but because of large animals we

PETER MATTHIESSEN

travel no more than a few miles m an hour. Buffalo tracks and buffalo manure are copious, and so are the attendant flics that do not sting but alight damply on the eyes and mouth. Then we are in thickets and karongas once again, and Goa, squatting to see beneath the bushes, craning, listening, picking out the big and silent shapes that watch us pass, must move circuitously and with more care. Brian, too, is wary and alert, kicking apart a fresh elephant mound, then stooping without breaking stride to judge the proximity of its maker by the degree of warmth that rises to his fingers.

In a sand river - and he thinks this is the one that has no name - we meet a cow elephant with half-grown calf. The cow goes off into the thicket to our left and the calf dawdles, then blunders toward the right, starting to bawl. Unaccountably, Brian and Goa move between the animals, and a moment later the cow, no longer visible, is bellowing from a short distance away; reverberations from the thicket make it clear that other agitated pachyderms are behind her. Goa turns quickly, taking the shotgun and giving Brian his own Game Department rifle. ("He knows I am more skillful with it," Brian explained later, "so he doesn't mind.") The porters rush forward in a covey to take up positions behind the guns. After a mild demonstration charge that brings the guns up, the cow wheels and goes trumpeting off with the others; probably it was not that dawdler that had concerned her but a much younger one too low down in the bush for us to see.

A mile away, vultures spiral upward from a kill, and we have gone less than a few hundred yards when Goa's deep and urgent voice says, "Simba!" Two lionesses, then two more, shoot out from beneath an enormous tree fallen into the river bed perhaps thirty yards away; they are followed by a big growling male with a fine mane which accelerates as it sees the file of men, its big paws scattering hot sand. The lion bounds across the river bed and up the bank. The whole bend of the river stinks of lion, and there are print patterns of the litter of small cubs, which must be lying hidden just close by. Brian says, "I seriously doubt if those lions have ever seen a man before; even the poachers stick to the main rivers. Yet look at how fast they shot away! What makes them run off like that? Quite interesting, really. If we'd come up on them in a Land Rover, chances are that these wild lion would be just as tame as those lion in the parks. It's the cars that fool them; they can't seem to identify men in cars. If you're up in a tree, a lion will recognize you straight away, even though that's not the way he's accustomed to seeing you."

A lone African hare crosses our path in its age-old silence, and in the thicket, banded mongoose skirl and squabble, in furor over some edible find. Every little while we pass the dung-spattered double scar on the dry ground that marks a rhino scrape; although we have seen many fresh scrapes in the past few days, the great primordial beast itself has remained hidden. Soon the porters take their rest in a grove of the sand

SAND RIVERS

river, which twists and turns back and forth across our course toward the south, and Goa and Kazungu dig down in the dry sand until the hole fills with the clear water that will be used for morning tea and porridge.

In the early afternoon, blue water glints in the eastern distance; at this time of year, when all but the main rivers have gone dry, this can only be the Mbarangandu, which we had not expected to see until tomorrow. If the two rivers are so close - not much more than twelve miles - then we are further north than we imagined, which means that we have struck almost due east, instead of east by south as we intended; we have no compass, and throughout the morning the sun that would have given us a bearing has been hidden in the fire-shrouded sky. We turn due south. I am glad of the miscalculation, which brought us to this place at the right moment: we have hardly seen the glint of river when Goa points out two rhinoceros, a mile away down a long slope of the savanna; one fades quickly into the high grass but the other lingers a few moments, turning broadside, before barging off into the bush.

I yip with pleasure, and Goa is delighted. To Brian he says, "The only thing we must show him is leopard!" Goa has a sudden fine full smile that sends wrinkles back on his tight hide across the high cheekbones to the small tight ears: the old hunter looks like a hominid designed for passing through bush quickly and quietly, catching nothing on the thorns. Never watching the ground for vines and holes and sharp grass-hidden stones but seeming to drift over the earth, he scans the terrain with those yellowed eyes that see so much, on all sides and far away.

Old elephant paths of other seasons cross the rolling hills of high bronze grass, but there is no sign of animals whatever except for two pretty klipspringer, tawny and gray, which prance along the black granite rim of a low escarpment; from this black rock, in the white sun, so very hot that it bakes our feet, a dark thing flutters up like a great moth - the freckled nightjar, which makes its home on the black outcroppings of stone.

Here and there on these black platforms, emerging like low domes out of the grass, lie shards of quartz, agate, chert and other stones, apparently brought here to be worked by stone tool cultures, for many are distinctly flaked, with the characteristic hump that betrays the method; occasionally I pause long enough to stuff one or two of these ancient tools into my pockets, including round tortoise cores flaked all the way around the edge, like those Hugo and I had found on the ridges north of Mkangira. The heat of the tools, and the feel of their great age, is somehow satisfying and profoundly reassuring, as if we had passed into another age, as if those Stone Age men had paused here yesterday, taking the sun god's name in vain as they cursed their sharp, obdurate stones, scowling in the heat.

Cutting across a series of wide bends, still heading south, we come

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PETER MATTHIESSEN

down to the river. Two watcrbuck, two wart hog, and two buffalo wait on the bar, like creatures left behind by Noah's Ark; the buffalo refuse to give ground at our approach, although we shout. We have circled wide and now stand in the shallow water, trying to ease them up into the thicket so that we may proceed along the sand. "Don't want to make them think they're trapped," says Brian. We can go no closer to the lowering brutes, which have backed up with their spattered rumps against the bank. Before the wrong move can be made, the buffalo wheel suddenly and plunge off up the bank into the thicket, agitating a group of elephants that we had not seen.

In the shade of a big butterfly-leafed piliostigma we stretch out on the cool sand, and I listen to the young Africans behind me; they are still excited by our encounters with the tembo and the simba, and describe to each other in dramatic tones and with nervous squeals how Mzee Goa and the Bwana Mkubwa (for they are too young to have known Brian as "Bwana Niki" and refer to him as the Head Bwana, the "Big Bwana") raised their bunduki to protect our lives.

While Kazungu busies himself over his pots, Goa walks inland and sets fire to the bush, then wades across the shallow Mbarangandu and fires the high grass on the far bank; in a few minutes, the clear African day beside the river is despoiled by a crackling roar and columns of black smoke, which stings the eyes, and stinks, and dirties the sky. A pair of hawks are circling a tree where the accumulated grass and deadwood is feeding fire that booms and reverberates as it moves away; perhaps their nestlings have been singed of their feathers, and even now nod just a little, blackening in death.

Brian, sensing my disgust, insists once more that early-season burning is essential to wildlife management in the Selous. There are moderate rains in the months of December, less in January; the heavy rain that renews the vegetation is concentrated between late February and early May, when twenty-five to thirty inches may fall here in the south and twice that amount in the Kilombero region and the west. The two rainy seasons tend to merge into one long one, in which the grass grows very high, coarse, and unpalatable, and smothers the wild pasture for the remainder of the year; the use of fire as much as the removal of the inhabitants is responsible for the fact that the game population of the Selous is many times greater than it was when the first Europeans came into this country.