Sand rivers (26 page)
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SAND RIVERS
dust that rises out of the shadow into the sunHght withdrawing up the hill. At dark a hyena whoops and another answers, for the clan is gathering, but their ululations are soon lost in a vast staccato racket, an unearthly din that sweeps in rhythmic waves up and down the river bars, rising and falling like the breath of earth - then silence, a shocked ringing silence, as if the night hunters have all turned to hear this noise. Somewhere out there on the strand, 1 think, a frog has been taken by a heron; my mind's eye sees the long bill glint in the dim starlight, the pallor of the sticky kicking legs, the gulp and shudder of the feathered throat. The frog's squeak pierces the racket of its neighbors, which go mute. But soon an unwary one, perhaps newly emerged from its niche under the bank, tries out its overwhelming need to sing out in ratcheting chirp; another answers, then millions hurl their voices at the stars. The world resounds until the frogs' own ears are rfnging, until all identity is lost in a bug-eyed cosmic ecstasy of frog song. In an hour or two, as the night deepens, the singing impulse dies, leaving the singers limp, perhaps dimly bewildered; remembering danger, they push slowly at the earth with long damp toes and fingers, edging backward into their clefts and crannies, pale chins pulsing. ^.
Toward midnight I am awakened by a bellow, a single long agonized groan; a buffalo has cried out, then fallen silent. Perhaps something is killing it, perhaps a lion's jaws have closed over its muzzle, but I hear no lion, now or later. At daybreak a bird call strange to me rings out three times and then is gone, a bird I shall never identify, not on this safari or in this life. As a tropic sun rolls up on to the red cliffs across the river, setting fire to a high, solitary tree, the moon still shines through the winged piliostigma leaves behind the tent.
Kibaoni, or "Signboard", is a location on the Mbarangandu River where lonides had caused a sign to be put up on the footpath between Liwale and Mahenge, reminding the Ngindo that they were in a game reserve and that it was forbidden to stray off the trail. A few miles short of Kibaoni we head west from the river, climbing gradually toward the red cliffs of a plateau. Though our destination is right there before us, Goa seems oddly disoriented and indecisive, wandering back and forth and tending into the wrong paths, until finally Brian stops him and explains the route. To me he says, "He knew where he was going, but never having been there before he had no sense of it. That's why he was wandering like that."
On a grassy hillside of small trees, a burst of terminalia saplings has sprouted out of a rhino scatter on the path, and there is lion spoor. Then Goa's hand is up: he points. A large dark animal stands in the high grass below the ridge line. With binoculars I pick out four more sable, lying in the copper-colored grass of the ridge summit; they do not look at us but face eastward, over a broad sweep of the river, two miles away. Then
{Left) Violet-tipped courser. (Preceding page) Monitor lizard.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
another big male, long horns taut, is standing up and staring at us, his shiny black hide set off by the white belly, chestnut brow abristle with morning light above the twin blazes of his face. Apparently he gives the alarm, for now another bull jumps up, and then another. The bulls regard us for a little while before leading the herd away along the ridge line and down on the far side. A dozen animals cross the sky, including a very young calf, and probably as many more never emerged from the high grass but simply withdrew down the north side of the ridge. The two lead bulls watch the others go before moving up through a small glade of silver trees at a slow canter, turning against the sky to stare again, then vanishing from view.
"They're incredibly tame up here," Brian remarks. "Don't know why this herd pushed off so soon. I've walked up to within twenty yards of sable down in this part of the country."
At the foot of the plateau, heart-shaped prints of sable ascend a slide where elephants have broken down the small steep cliff to make a pathway up and down the escarpment; in precipitous places, an elephant may sit back on its haunches and brace all four feet out in front to slow down its descent, but sometimes it is killed or injured anyway, and I wonder if the first one to try it in this place might not be buried deep beneath all this red rubble.
On the flat tableland above the cliff is a stand of closed miomho woodland, and we have not penetrated it very far before we pass twin gouges of a rhino. Before long, light appears beyond the brachystegia, and the graceful dark trees open out upon an elliptical pan nearly a mile in length, ringed all the way round by the closed woods. "Goa has never been here," Brian murmurs, "and the Ngindo in this country don't seem to know about it, either. Even my esteemed predecessor never knew about this place. So far as I know, you're the only white man besides myself ever to see it." But as he speaks, he is scanning the lost pan: despite all the sign that we have seen, the well-worn paths that have beaten flat the woodland edges, the good clear water, there are no rhino, elephant, or sable, not a single animal of any kind. In a way, the emptiness makes the great pan more impressive - the stillness of the glittering water, the yellow water lilies and the tawny marsh grass, the circle of still trees that hide this lovely place from the outside world, the resounding silence and expectancy, as if the creatures of the earth's first morning might come two by two between the trees at any moment. A pair of jacanas stand in wait where the east wind stirs the floating vegetation, and a few swallows loop and flicker in eternal arabesques.
"Pumzika," Brian says, and the porters, sullen, dump their loads; they seem to wonder why we have come all the way up here. Even Kazungu, who was mildly rebuked early this morning for letting the porters eat up all the food, has curdled a little in his attitude for the first time on our safari. Not wishing to talk, Brian goes off a little way and sits
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SAND RIVERS
down with his back against a tree. Soon the wind dies. A scaly-throated honeyguide comes to the gray hmbs overhead, calhng out to us to follow; otherwise the woodland is dead still. Kazungu, who knows perfectly well that tea and porridge are expected after the first trek of the morning, is sitting himself down, doing nothing about a fire, until finally Brian must call out to him, "Is our tea ready?" To cheer him up, Brian adds, "Tu na tupa macho yetu kambini," "We are throwing our eyes toward our camp" - in other words. From here we are starting home. Kazungu grins, and the porters look pleased, too; they have enjoyed themselves despite their labor, but now they are ready to return. Only Goa shows no elation; he is content with whatever Bwana Niki decides.
Before leaving Mkangira the Africans were given enough biltong to last eight days, or even ten if they took a little care; after five days the biltong is all gone. To carry loads, the porters say, they need something stronger than rice and porridge, and as the beans are already in short supply, another animal will have to be shot. Brian dislikes the idea very much. "For one thing," he says, indicating the waiting trees, "I would hate to break all this silence with a bloody great noise." We can take guinea fowl, wart hog, buffalo, or impala,^nd the first choice is impala: most of the Ngindo are Muslims, which eliminates wart hog, one or two guinea fowl would not suffice, and to kill buffalo would be very wasteful. "Anyway," Brian says, "I don't want to shoot at a dangerous animal with that Game Department .458 that I've never fired; I doubt very much that it has ever been zeroed in. If somebody got gored out here by a wounded animal, we'd be in serious trouble. The nearest settlement where we might send for help is at Liwale, at least four days away across rough country. Probably send us back a couple of aspirin."
From this nameless pan on this nameless plateau we shall head back north to the sand river where two days ago we surprised the resting lions, then follow it north and east to the Mbarangandu, which we shall descend to Mkangira. We realize now that this pan has been our outward destination, that today we are turning back to the New Africa, to an orderly life, to "civilization". At this prospect, Brian's expression, so clear and youthful in recent days, visibly sours. He wonders aloud if our companions have been fighting. "Always women who do the fighting on safari, usually against one another. Probably get back and find some of them camped on the far side of the river!" He is joking, of course, and starts to smile as a sly, bad expression comes across his face. "Who knows what they've been up to back there!" he exclaims, warming to his fantasy. "Buggery and lesbianism, probably! I tell you, the human animal when he gets despondent is bloody bad news!" And this bad old bush rat. Mister Meat, with his unshaven jaw and bad smile and loose teeth, removes his cigarette holder and laughs himself red in the face, and I laugh with him, not so much at what he has said but because of the infectious gusto of his cynicism.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
Brian sighs, gazing about him. "In Africa, out in the bush, man is still a part of nature, and what he does is mostly for the better. It is only where the bloody Western civilization has come in that everything is spoiled." Brian has a poor opinion of Homo sapiens and his ambitions, but in the main he is amused by human folly, not made gloomy. Now he grins. "I told Melva once that human beings were the dirtiest and most destructive animals on the face of the earth, and she took it personally. Women aren't really very logical in these matters. But now she understands my point of view." He heaves to his feet, and sets off into the woods without a backward glance at the hidden pan.
On an elephant slide on the north end of the plateau lies an old cracked tusk that has been there for many years - mute evidence that no man comes this way. Descending, we head north through rough and unburned country. Goa is setting his fires again; columns of thick smoke rise up behind us as we head north to Mto Bila Jina, the River Without Name.
Coming down off the Luwegu side of the high plateau, this big stream that becomes a sand river in the dry season tends to the northward, bending close to the Luwegu. Eventually it curves away toward the northeast as a tributary to the Mbarangandu, an avenue of sand perhaps forty feet across, under steep banks lined on both sides by big trees; even now, deep in the dry season, there is clear water not two feet beneath its hot white surface. Because of the river's serpentine course, we do not walk along its bed but cut cross-country between bends, holding to our northerly direction, and in the early afternoon we break the journey at a rank meadow spring on an open hillside. When the day cools a little, we continue onward, skirting an occasional elephant, hearing the bark of an occasional Sykes monkey or baboon, crossing and recrossing the River Without Name. All the while, Brian is looking for impala, but there is no sign of impala, or of wart hog, or of guineas, only the baked savannas and dry hillsides and open woodlands of high grass.
Toward sunset, where the river rounds a bend, three buffalo bulls stand together at the end of a long stretch of clean white sand. Brian is footsore and discouraged and irritable, and he knows that for the first time on our safari, the morale of the Africans is precarious due to the real or imagined need of meat. Earlier he had said that in shooting a buffalo too much of the meat would be wasted, even if two porters gave their loads to the others in order to lug all the meat that they could carry, but now he decides without further ado to execute one of the bulls. Leaving the rest of us behind, he stalks with Goa to a point on the stream bank not twenty yards from the three buffalo below, a point-blank range from which he is sure to drop the animal with the first bullet. At the crack of the rifle, the buffalo sags down upon the sand with the windy groan of death, and in the echo of the shot, the Africans laugh and clap their hands
SAND RIVERS
together. No second shot is needed, and when we come up, I congratulate Nicholson on killing the buffalo with such dispatch; he refuses the small comfort I have offered. "I hate doing that, it really depresses me," he says. "But we were getting into a serious food situation with these porters. Karen and Rick have never been on a real foot safari, where beans are the staple; they gave us twelve kilos when what was required was a whole bloody sack." He swears to himself, restless, unable to make his peace with it; I had not suspected that he would be so upset. After all, this man has killed thousands of animals, and no doubt hundreds of buffalo among them; the buffalo is not an endangered species, and these three bulls may have passed the reproductive age since they had wandered off from the large herds. Even the "waste" will not be seen as such by the carnivores and vultures that will reduce this buffalo to borfes in a few days. It is not the waste that bothers him, but the intrusion by man into the "heart of the Selous" which was symbolized by that isolated shot.
Already Goa is preparing for the butchering, cutting dense branches of the dark green adina trees to lay as a meat rack on the white sand beside the carcass. Despite the hard day thejy^ have had in the dry hills, the Africans are inspired with new resolve by the dead buffalo. "We'll have to camp here through tomorrow so they can smoke that meat; they'll start tonight. And they need the rest. That's one reason I decided to shoot that buffalo and have done with the food problem; there's good water right here, we can camp next to the animal, they don't have to lug all that wet meat out of the woods."
The inert dark mass lies sprawled on the white sand, tongue lolling, as ticks and flies crawl over its thin belly hair and testes. In sunset light, Abdallah cuts its throat, and the thick blood pours away into the sand, and still Brian Nicholson does not stop talking. "These buggers can gorge themselves on meat tonight, and with my blessing, and all day tomorrow, too. And the next day, one man, maybe two, is going to carry nothing but meat; the rest will have to manage the extra loads. Because I'm not shooting anything again." I have the feeling he may still be talking to himself as he goes off down the stream bed for a wash.