He was right, of course. The throttle, the angle of the joystick, the tail skid and wing flaps and elevators—each element needed to become something I could feel and know—and even fail at occasionally, especially at the beginning. Sometimes the Moth’s weight sagged, and she lost altitude, dropping towards the sun-bleached grass and the rocks, everything hurtling at great speed. There were unpredictable downdraughts near the mountains. The propeller could sputter out as quick as a breath, or weather could come up from nowhere. You could land in sansevieria, ripping your wings to tatters, or sideslip and crack the undercarriage. You could hit buried roots or clods or the deep snag of a pig hole and bust the struts, grounding yourself or worse. You could practise and practise and read all the signs correctly, and still founder. And yet the challenges felt exactly right to me. They brought me alive in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
“I want my B-class licence,” I told Denys when he came back to town. “I could be the only professional female pilot in Africa.”
“You don’t want much.” He laughed. “But you broke the same sort of new territory as a trainer, didn’t you?”
“I suppose so. This feels different, though. It’s just you and your instincts up there, isn’t it? The challenge of that feels new every time.” I was quiet for a while and then felt my way towards something I’d only just begun to realize. “After what happened with Gervase, I began to wonder if I’d ever find my way again.”
“You’ll see your son soon,” he said softly. “Mansfield can’t fend you off for ever.”
“I won’t let him. I would never give up on Gervase the way my mother did me. I couldn’t.”
“Sometimes when you’re hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.”
I nodded.
“Just promise me you’ll be careful when you fly.”
“I promise,” I said. “You know, Ruta has made the leap without a hitch somehow. He seems as exhilarated by the whole business as I am, and Tom says he has the makings of a damned fine mechanic.”
The sun had set and I lit the hurricane lamp while Denys dug a book out of his satchel and then stretched out in a chair, his long legs crossed. He read aloud to me as I curled next to him, both of our bodies in a warm arc of light. For nearly ten years I’d wanted this…this exactly. Is he really here? I thought. Am I? Denys read on, his voice rising and falling, while a leopard moth that had got caught in the curtains stopped struggling for a moment, and realized it was free.
Denys was between safaris, and there was a window, a very small one, for the two of us to go out alone. We made for southern Masailand, aiming at the Mara River with a team of Africans including Denys’s man, Billea, and a Kikuyu boy, Kamau, he often travelled with. It was impossibly dry, and yet past Lake Province we saw countless animals—buffalo and rhino and shaggy lion, gazelles of every shade and variety. The golden slopes and shimmering flatlands swarmed with life.
Denys was most himself in wild places. Through a pair of smudgy field glasses, he could gauge a set of kudu horns, or the weight of still hanging ivory. He knew how to shoot anything, with no miscalculation, and could skin an animal so quickly and with such precision there was almost no blood in it. But he was just as keen not to shoot or kill, not if he didn’t have to, using his camera instead. Photographic safaris were a new idea then, and he believed cameras had the power to change hunting, the sporting idea of it. Hunters could have Africa without taking any of it away—without ruining it.
On safari, I saw Denys in sharper relief than I ever had. He had an infallible compass, and a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. More than anyone I’d known, Denys understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistance or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend. I knew all this from my Lakwet days, but being with him helped me remember it, and feel it all again powerfully.
—
For most of a day we walked through alkali flats, the white crust like a frosted layer of salt that rose in a powder when your boots punched through. We wore the chalk on us everywhere—up to our knees, in the creases of our fingers clenching the rifle strap, down in the cavity between my breasts, and in my mouth, too. I couldn’t keep it out and stopped trying. I couldn’t keep anything out, I realized, and that was something I loved about Africa. The way it got at you from the outside in and never let up, and never let you go.