White Dog Fell from the Sky

19



Alice’s hair was stiff with grit and dust, and she’d never felt happier. Only the dusty road before her existed, the bush and the sun and the bright, wide horizon. She thought of home, the large kitchen sink, the screen on the veranda where the geckos ran up and down chasing flies, Isaac pottering about in the garden, Itumeleng calling over the fence to friends. She could picture these things, but Gaborone felt a million miles away.

The group had been on the road a day and a half already, having set off from Gaborone in two government Land Rovers and a three-ton truck driven by Sam, Motsumi, and Shakespeare. The idea was for them to gather information about the interplay between livestock, wildlife herds, and the !Kung San that would enable them to draft a national policy that would protect all three. They were to talk with !Kung San leaders, visit cattle posts, view a veterinary boundary fence, take in the Tsodilo Hills, stop off in Shakawe, and return home. Everything was arranged for them—drivers, food, cook tents, cots, sleeping bags.

Representing the Ministry of Local Government and Lands were Alice and C.T., her boss. The Ministry of Agriculture had sent their new assistant permanent secretary, Arthur Haddock, who’d recently arrived in Botswana from Wisconsin, plus Ole Olsen from the Division of Veterinary Sciences, and Will Vreeland, a wildlife specialist and a friend of Alice’s. A British guy who was studying !Kung San paintings in the Tsodilo Hills would be meeting them east of Maun.

She was traveling in one of the Land Rovers with her friend Will and the new assistant permanent secretary. Arthur Haddock knew how to greet people with a dumela, mma or dumela, rra, and that was about it. This must have been his first trip out, but it didn’t stop him from telling Sam, the driver, how to do his job. “Aren’t you even going to stop?” he asked, when a hornbill collided with the windshield.

“Very dangerous to stop, rra. Anyway, the bird is dead.”

Thirty kilometers down the road, the vehicle got a flat tire. Mr. Haddock said that there needed to be a more systematic regulation and monitoring of government vehicles. Alice wanted to say, Hey, buster, this isn’t Milwaukee.

Sam glanced at him. “Many thorns on the road, rra. You have a new tire, she goes over a thorn, and boom! Flat.”

They stayed in Francistown that night and went on toward Maun the following day. Deep sand tracks made the driving treacherous. One false move and the vehicle would jump the track and they’d turn upside down. It was already December, and there’d been no rain here. Next to the track, cattle stumbled over the earth, their rib cages hollow.

By midafternoon, they’d reached Nata, two hundred kilometers west of Francistown, where they stopped to meet up with Ian Henry, the specialist in San rock paintings. They inquired after him, but no one in the village seemed to know where he’d gone. A national measles and vitamin A campaign was under way beneath a shade tree; schoolchildren in faded gold uniforms with brown collars were being dragged there for vaccinations.

“Where the hell is he?” asked Arthur Haddock.

“He probably got tired of waiting,” Alice said. “We’re half a day late.”

Ian Henry did appear a couple of hours later, saying he’d needed to talk to a man who lived farther up the Nata River. Alice remembered then that she’d met this fellow the previous year, after he’d written a proposal for a permit to work in the Tsodilo Hills. Her first impression of him had been of someone disorganized and borderline cavalier. To that was added the word combative, after he and Arthur Haddock got into a discussion after dinner over San trance dances.

“Pagan rituals,” said Haddock.

“Pagan is a pretty loaded word,” said Ian. “Not that far from ‘nigger.’ And where do you get your information?”

“I saw a film before leaving the States.”

“Ah, a film. A very dependable and rigorous source. Did you ever talk to a San healer?”

“It’s obvious what’s going on.”

“Obvious? How?”

“I’ve seen that same sort of mumbo jumbo in the States.”

“This is not mumbo jumbo. Healers risk their lives to cure others. When they enter a trance, they’re often in excruciating pain—and they believe they may not return to the world. They do it for each other, and for their community. When was the last time you had that sort of courage?”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Your mind is as closed as a cuckoo clock.”

“You’ve had too much to drink.”

“In vino veritas.”

“You’re the kind of fellow who needs the last word, aren’t you.” Ian Henry was silent, and Haddock disappeared into his tent.

Alice smiled. “Are you?”

“I could have gone on to tell him that I’d once had the honor to enter the kind of trance I was talking about. But I didn’t.”

“Very restrained of you.”

All three vehicles stopped midmorning by the side of the road, and Will said he’d like to take a detour to the Makgadikgadi Game Reserve to check out what was there. Haddock asked if that was part of the agenda.

“No, it’s not necessary to visit the Makgadikgadi,” answered Will, “but I thought we were here to learn things we didn’t already know.”

“Ngamiland is where we’re supposed to be going,” said Haddock. He turned and headed toward a Land Rover, but one of his shoes slipped on the sand. His arms windmilled, and he went down on one knee, as though praying. Alice wanted to laugh, but then she felt sorry for him. Who would wear shoes like that in the desert?

“Why don’t we just split up?” said Alice’s boss. “Anyone who wants to take in the Makgadikgadi can. The rest can go straight to Maun. We’ll meet there.” There was a small stampede toward the two vehicles not carrying Arthur Haddock. Sam got stuck with him in the truck, and the rest crammed into the Land Rovers.

As they wallowed up the sandy track in the Land Rover, Will said, “Between Nata and Gweta is mostly mopane forest, but off the main road … well, if you’ve never seen it, you’re in for one of the most fascinating sights on Earth. These salt pans were at one time part of an ancient inland lake. There are remnants of stone age civilizations on outcroppings. If there’s rain, water forms at the point where the river joins the Sowa Pan. It’s a nesting place for flamingos migrating from Namibia. I’ve seen literally thousands of birds there.”

The main road crossed a narrow finger of the northernmost edge of the Ntwetwe Pan. They turned south at Gweta. On either side lay alternating dry grasslands and mopane trees, opening out occasionally onto plains dotted with palms. Thirty kilometers later, Ntwetwe Pan appeared. Looking south was an eerie expanse of white salt and white sky and searing sun.

“Astronauts apparently can make out the outlines of the old lake from outer space,” Will said. “From close up, you’ll see where the shore was. You have to be careful crossing. This time of year, the surface looks completely dry, but the water can be just a couple of centimeters below the surface. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen through and had to spend all day digging out.” His face had been sunburned over and over until his skin was burnished a deep reddish brown.

The pan was terrifying, the horizon white and fathomless, a savage, demonic, eerie place. So hot you couldn’t breathe. Alice sat next to Ian. She couldn’t see his face, but he was hardly breathing. One gets used to a landscape that’s human in scale. There’s a future because it can be seen, just over the horizon if we choose to walk there, or ride there. But there was no future or past here. The horizon was unreachable, unknowable, swallowed in white.

“I’d love to go to sleep and wake up here someday,” she whispered to Ian.

They stopped partway across and got out. Ole Olsen, a big, strapping Norwegian, was in the other Land Rover. His chest was collapsed, his chin tucked down as though he’d received a blow. She went over to him. “Okay?” she asked.

“Can’t get my breath,” he said. “It’s like we’re on the bloody moon.”

They drank water, climbed into the vehicles, and retraced their steps back across the pan. Close to sunset, they crossed the Kuke veterinary fence. Alice wished Haddock had been there to see the devastation. The carcasses of dozens of wildebeest were piled against the barrier. Will said they’d been trampled when their herd had run headlong into the fence while trying to migrate toward the Okavango Delta.

A few live animals grazed on scraps of grass not far from them. They tore at her heart with their homeliness and simple desire for water. Their noses were long and wide, their horns unremarkable, their beards, manes, and tails thin and scraggly. Their legs appeared too spindly to hold even a drought-ravaged body, ribs sticking through dull fur. A patient resignation clung to them, like people who’ve lost everything. The oxpecker birds sat on their backs and necks, picking bugs off.

Will told the group, “They depend on seasonal migrations for survival. During drought season the herbivores move toward sources of surface water. After the rains, they move back to grazing in and around the central Kalahari. Because of these fences, they’ve been cut off from sources of water and food, and squeezed into areas that are overgrazed by cattle. The herds die of starvation if they stay near water and die of thirst if they move to better grazing. By some estimates eight hundred thousand wildebeest died at Lake Xau in the year after the fences went up.

“The fences were meant to stop the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease in cattle, but there’s no evidence that they’re effective against it. Hoof-and-mouth is airborne, carried by birds and wind, so how would a fence stop it? It’s a crude attempt, unfounded in research, a holocaust for wild animals. Of course this has been devastating for the !Kung San as well. As wildlife is dying, so is their food supply.”

That night, they camped in a grove of baobab trees. Ian wanted to introduce the group to a man he knew, one of the San people. He set out in one of the Land Rovers across the bush to where he thought he’d be. “It’s the drought,” he said when he returned to the campsite alone. “They’ve moved on, I don’t know where.”

Ian, across the fire from Alice, had begun drinking steadily. When he heard the maniacal, barky laugh of a hyena, he said to her, “They chew your nose off at night, you know, if you’re sleeping out in the open.”

“Come on!” She was in no mood for it.

“Really, I knew a bloke camping outside Molepolole …”

“Get out.”

“Hey, lovey,” he laughed, “why don’t you just lighten up, enjoy the night?”

“I’m not your lovey.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

She looked at him, thought about how he’d sat motionless in the face of that endless horizon earlier in the day, hardly breathing. It occurred to her that the sight had frightened him. She got up, threw a log on the fire, and left. Walking outside the circle of light made by the few lanterns in the tents, she leaned against the back of one of the Land Rovers. She didn’t want to be wasting her years, poised for a fight with any man who looked at her wrong. She set out for a walk, but once the light had vanished behind her, she stopped in her tracks. There was no moon yet, she had no flashlight, and the darkness was total. She retreated. In the hugeness of that silence, every rustle felt like a menace.

The next day, they came across an adolescent elephant, walking slowly away from them, up a track beside the boundary fence. He felt along the wire every now and then with his trunk, searching. Will had seen him before, he said, trying to find a way through. He’d been separated from his family by the fence. It was one of the saddest sights Alice had ever seen.

On the south side of the Okavango, one of the Land Rovers ran out of gas. Every vehicle was fitted with an auxiliary tank, so when the primary tank ran out, the line was switched to the other tank automatically. But it turned out that the line to this second tank was blocked. The two drivers, Motsumi and Shakespeare, talked in Setswana; then Shakespeare rinsed out a plastic sugar bag and siphoned fuel out of the second tank into the bag, and poured the fuel into the working tank. He did this several times; they drove another five kilometers, and the Land Rover ran out of gas again. In a clearing surrounded by mopane, they finally stopped to camp.

They decided that Shakespeare would drive to Maun the next morning for a replacement line, while the rest stayed behind. Once he was in Maun, he’d let Sam and Haddock know they’d been delayed.

Within an hour, a huge dinner was ready. She sat next to Ian, chewing a mouthful of beef, tough as a buzzard. Even out here, in the middle of nowhere, the “professionals” were divided from the cooks and drivers, who sat on the far side of the fire, their backs to the dark bush. Ian, absorbed in his tin plate of meat, rice, gravy, and pumpkin, was happy as a child when he discovered that someone had thought to bring ginger biscuits for dessert. It was only when he’d downed four or five that he seemed to notice anything around him. He turned to her. “I’m sorry about last night. I was a bit cheeky.”

“Never mind.”

“So, what are you doing here?”

The question irritated her. She couldn’t help it. Most expatriate wives came to Botswana as appendages, existing for the purpose of organizing dinner parties and entertaining their husbands’ colleagues. No one expected a woman to have a brain in her head. “I could just as soon ask you the same question.”

“No offense intended,” he said.

“You know, you’ve met me before.”

“I have?”

“My office gave you leave to do the research you’re conducting. I guess our meeting wasn’t all that memorable.”

“I’m grateful for the permission granted.”

She couldn’t tell whether he was being ironic or not. “To answer your question,” she said, “I’m helping to work out compromises between the !Kung San and the Department of Agriculture. Agriculture holds all the cards. I’m one of several people trying to even the deck.”

“I wish you good luck with that. As you already know, I’m just a useless toiler. What I do will make no difference to anyone but myself.”

“I don’t agree.”

“How would you know?”

“I read your proposal. People assume that San paintings are nothing more than primitive daubing, with the occasional brilliant rendition of a sable antelope or giraffe,” she said, “worth something only because they’re so old. But to bring that disappeared world back to life, to try to discover something of the people who inhabited it, what could be more important than that? It might make someone think again before they destroy a culture.”

“Do you know the work of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek? Without Lucy, a whole language would have been lost forever.”

“It’s lost anyway.”

“Aren’t you the gloomy one.”

“Not always. What got you going on all this?”

“I grew up in Manchester, one of five kids,” he said. “My mum was a housewife, my dad repaired refrigerators. My dad loved books. He’d read to us at night. He wasn’t big on story books. He went in more for real life. He was daft on history, on anything to do with far-off places. Once, he brought a book home on the Bushmen. I was the youngest—three of my brothers and sisters had already left home. Just me and my sister Mary still there. The book had all sorts of pictures—Bushmen sitting under rock shelves, Bushmen hunting eland, a picture of the ruins of a Christian mission. I understood, looking at that photo, that things disappear. Someday I’d be gone, my mum and dad would be gone, my sister Mary, the sitting room, the electric fire, the settee. But it wasn’t me or them I was really thinking of—it was those short men crouching in the desert with their bows and poisoned arrows.

“‘Where are those little men now?’ I asked my father.”

“‘Dead.’”

“‘All of them?’”

“‘It was years ago those pictures were taken.’”

“‘And what about the paintings on that rock?’”

“‘They’ll still be there, I reckon, if the rain hasn’t washed them away.’”

“‘Sure? You mean, if we went there, you and me and Mum and Mary, we could see them?’”

“‘Your mum would never go on such a trip. But when you’re dead and gone, those pictures you draw now, if someone thinks to look after ’em, it’ll be as though part of you’s still here.’

“That’s when I caught the bug. I’d always wanted to be an artist. I had a knack for it, but compared with a real professional, I wouldn’t have made the grade. Through luck and a little elbow grease, I was given a scholarship to Cambridge. Studied anthropology and fine arts and fell into this. What about you?”

Most of the group had drifted away. It was just Sam and Motsumi tending the fire. “What about me? I’m from the Midwest. My mother and I lived close to the river that borders Ohio and Kentucky, just the two of us. My father drowned when I was four. He was a cop. Apparently he was trying to arrest a man running across the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge. It was around one in the morning. He jumped over a railing after the guy and they figure he didn’t realize there was a break between the road and the pedestrian walkway. In the dark, he thought he was jumping onto the walkway, but he landed in the river. The water was so cold it took three weeks for his body to surface.”

Across from them, Sam pushed a large log into the center of the fire. It flared and sent sparks toward the stars. “Do you remember him?” Ian asked softly.

“Not really.” Not memory, but imagining the ice floes far below, the shock when he hit, every fiber of his body broken with disbelief.

“I used to like swimming in very cold water,” he said and stopped. “I’m sorry, that was a right stupid thing to say.”

“It’s all right. What did you like about it?”

“I guess the simple surviving of it. Mind you, I don’t have a self-destructive nature. Nor did I have one then. It was something else. Heightening life, I suppose.”

He was quiet a moment, looking upward. “Have you read van der Post? He talks about how every human on Earth has a longing for the vast. How does he put it? As the natural coherence of the world vanishes, there’s a guilt that grows great and angry in the basement of our being. The beast wants its day. And culture wants to desensitize us to what we’ve lost. That’s why Bushmen are all but stamped out. They’re a direct threat to a ‘civilized’ culture that’s inherently unstable. All you have to do is look at one of their paintings, and you know what we’ve lost. They’re alive to the tiniest gesture: the way an impala turns, the way an antelope lifts its head.”

“Didn’t van der Post father a child with a fourteen-year-old girl who was under his care on a sea voyage?”

“I don’t know. It’s likely that he did. Not good form. But still, does that wipe out everything else he ever said or did? The point is, people have lost their courage. They’ve gone for safety. No one wants to be reminded what a tiny speck in the universe we are, but knowing that’s the key to everything. We’re afraid of big spaces. We herd for safety, and before you know it, you’ve got civilization. But in the wild, look what happens. Which animals do lions choose to prey upon? Zebra and wildebeest. Animals that travel in herds. The herd feels like safety, but it only makes us more vulnerable.”

“Animals in herds are safer. The chances for any individual’s dying is slim.”

“I don’t mean we need to wander around in the desert by ourselves. I mean face how ridiculously small we are. Just look at this sky. How many hundreds of billions of galaxies are we seeing, as big or bigger than our own? Freedom comes from knowing you’re a dot. Smaller than a dot.

Sam and Motsumi had gone to their tent. “Listen to me pontificating,” he said. “You were talking about your father.”

“I’m done talking about him.” She told Ian she needed to go to bed. She wasn’t tired, but something between them was ratcheting up. She was scared, actually. It had been awhile since she’d talked to a man with even one idea in his head. There were men, plenty of them, better looking than Ian, without the beginning of a paunch, without the gold tooth, bottom left of center, but not who read books, and thought, and imagined, and asked questions. She had an irrational desire to start a fight, drive him away.

“Are you married?”

“Not anymore,” she said.

“How long has it been?”

“Eight months.”

“You fell out of love?”

“Something like that. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Who does? Who hasn’t f*cked up their life?”

It was an opening, but something kept her from asking how he’d f*cked up his. She didn’t want to know. They were quiet.

“Have you ever been to Moremi?” he asked.

“No.”

“Would you like to go?”

“How far is it?”

“We could get there and back in a day. Nothing else is happening tomorrow. We’d have to ask if any of the others want to go, of course.”

The “we” wasn’t lost on her. “That would leave everyone else without a vehicle,” she said.

“Damn it, do you want to go or not?”

“Sure I want to go.”

“Well, then, we’ll go.” He left to talk to the others and came back saying they all wanted to stay here. How had he put it to them? A long, grueling drive? Not much to see? Somehow she knew he’d figured a way for them to be alone.

She tossed on her cot, the sound of her heartbeat in her ear. Blood pumped through chambers and echoed. Her head was pillowed on the lump of sweater she’d brought for chilly nights. The sound continued, magnified, her head filled with it. She missed rain. She wanted it to fall in torrents, for the dust to rise off the steaming earth.

She believed her parents had been deeply in love. After her father died, her mother became a ghost. Once, she’d wondered out loud whether Alice’s father had jumped from the bridge on purpose. It never would have occurred to Alice if her mother hadn’t said it. Growing up, she tumbled around in her mother’s anger. Much of it seemed directed at her, as though she should have saved her father and hadn’t. She remembered Saturdays, rain-drenched windows, rivulets forming and reforming on the glass, streaming down. A clock humming on the wall, with its click to the next second, and the next.

Her mother was protective of her and ambitious for them both, but she’d never led Alice to believe that happiness was something within her grasp. After her father died, her mother went back to school and became an English teacher.

“Why don’t you date anyone, Mom?” Alice asked one night. Her mother was lovely still, with a southern European kind of elegance. Eyebrows that arched upward and fell gracefully. Her nose, long, slightly curved. Her skin, ivory and unmarked. It was her gray-green eyes, though, particularly the melancholy in them, that carried her beauty.

“I’m not putting you through that,” her mother said.

“Through what?”

“A string of losers, in and out of my bed. I don’t know any man I’d want to date.”

“There are men around who aren’t losers.”

“Show me one.”

Alice was reading Jane Eyre in a fast-track sophomore English class. “Mr. Rochester,” she said.

“Mr. Rochester was a figment of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination,” her mother snorted. “In real life, her sisters and brothers died of TB. Then she married her father’s curate and died in childbirth. Her husband was boring and selfish.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know the type. Someday, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Alice got off the cot and lifted the flap of the tent. The half moon was heading downward, toward a clump of baobab trees on the horizon, bare-limbed, their trunks broad and wrinkled. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of two black-backed jackals, yips rising and falling, silence. And nearer, the sound of her heartbeat in her ear.