White Dog Fell from the Sky

31



In his mind’s eye, he saw her face flushed with fever, her hair stuck to her cheek with sweat, her eyes swimming. Driving her back out to the main road, he’d wanted to keep harm from her forever. But that feeling was mixed with something stronger that had nothing to do with keeping her safe. Once he’d seen pictures of the living bridges of Cherrapunji in northeastern India, made from the roots of rubber trees. Some of them were a hundred feet long and could hold the weight of fifty villagers. The bridges were grown from secondary roots, using betel nut trunks sliced down the middle and hollowed out, to create root pathways. This was how it felt with Alice: a living bridge between them.

He’d planned to leave Francistown that night but realized his spare tire was in bad shape. God would be unlikely to provide. By the time he’d be able to find a new tire and get himself organized, he thought he might as well stay for the night. But it turned out to be a night that would have been better spent elsewhere.

An hour after dropping off Alice, he bumped into Gwyneth at the hotel. She was up from Gaborone doing business for De Beers. Her old demon, depression, had caught up with her. She’d cut off all her hair. She was into her second whiskey sour, standing disconsolately with her back to a window.

“What are you doing here?”

“Work. What about you?”

“I just dropped someone off at the train.”

“A woman.”

“How did you know?”

“I can see her on your face.”

“Have you had dinner?” he asked.

“No.”

“Want to join me?”

“You wouldn’t rather be alone with your amorous thoughts?” That was the beginning. The weeping in his arms and her regrets about her life followed. He preferred not to think about what happened next. The odd thing was how good it still was with her, after all they’d been through. How many times had he cursed the day he’d met her, and yet this, these blindly loving bodies … this remained.

The following morning he was out before dawn, heading west. He drove fast, trying to outrun the night that clung to him. If Gwyneth had been a manipulator, he would have known what to do, but she lived at the mercy of inner hellions that threatened to erase her. He told himself that he’d been a lifeline last night, nothing more. And even as he had the thought, he knew the “nothing more” wasn’t quite true. He imagined telling Alice, then he imagined not telling her, and neither seemed right.

He planned to turn south on a track between Bushman Pits and Maun, and head toward the southeast corner of the Kuke fence, working his way west as he cut fence cable. His hope was that animals trapped both to the east and south might find their way toward the Okavango through at first a narrow opening and then a gradually widening one. There was no predicting when the rains would come to this part of the country, or even if they’d come at all.

Etched into the map in his mind, Ian pictured the northern wilderness of Botswana as a wire prison. The Kuke veterinary fence, running from the Namibian border across the northern boundary of the Central Kgalagadi had been constructed in 1958. A similar cordon fence, running along the international border between Namibia and Botswana, enclosed three and a half sides of a box. It made him nearly crazy to think about it. It was no different from penning wild animals, withholding food and water, and watching them die.

His hands, which rattled on the steering wheel of the Land Rover most of the day, still shook after he climbed out that evening. South of the main road under a small clump of trees, he pitched a tent, laid out his sleeping bag, and built a fire. Dust kicked up by a herd of cattle that’d passed through, choked the air, and the sun blazed down to Earth, huge and white with a dark streak across it. He made a supper of beans and a bit of goat meat he’d bought in Francistown, and ate meditatively, listening to the night sounds. The sky was dead clear. The cry of a spotted hyena, rising quickly, ended with an exclamation point. He thought he heard thunder, and then realized it was wishful thinking.

He opened a packet of Marie biscuits and munched one after another. Without asking to, Alice had called his life into question, his long held assumptions about what mattered, his independence elevated to a quasi religion. He was still traveling forward on the momentum of his former life, but the ground underneath was rifting.

By early afternoon of the next day, he reached the intersection of the Kuke fence and the Makalamabedi portion. He drove across the veldt, searching for wildlife and found a mixed herd of wildebeest and zebra at a distance of several kilometers west, moving slowly in the direction of the fence. Carcasses littered the landscape, beasts dead from thirst and famine. Among the living were very few young ones. He parked the Land Rover near the section of fence where he planned to start, unbolted his license plate, and hid it under a blanket in the back.

Five strands of thick wire were strung between wooden standards. He tested the tension on the cable to see whether it was likely to snap out when it was cut. Probably not. From the backseat, he lifted out an industrial-sized bolt cutter with solid pipe handles and black rubber grips that his friend Leonard had lent him. Leonard said it would cut through anything—something like an eighteen-hundred-kilogram cutting force for a twenty-five-kilogram force on the handles.

Ian opened the jaw of the thing, positioned it around the bottom wire and pushed the handles together. Snap. The wire coiled back on itself in two directions. He moved up to the next cable and did the same. All the way up through the five cables. Would the ends of the wires injure animals? He thought it best to cut through close to the standard and coil the loose ends of wire around the adjoining post as best he could.

He moved to the next post. He told himself he’d do five standards, or twenty-five cables, and rest. Twenty-five more cables, rest. After a hundred cables, he’d drink some water. He made it through only seventy-five before needing water. He paused and went back to wrap the wires around the posts. By the end of the day, he’d averaged something like eight posts an hour. Nothing brilliant, but the pace was manageable. Close to fifty standards by six P.M. About 150 meters. It wasn’t a large enough opening to make a real difference, but if a herd traveled along the fence looking for a way through, they’d find it here.

On the third day, he came back at six in the morning and found evidence that a small herd had passed through to the other side—hoof prints of wildebeest and zebra, possibly steenbok. As he moved west, he found more carcasses of wildebeest, and farther along, part of the carcass of a giraffe that must have died or been killed in the night. Three cape vultures circled, their white bodies glowing in the sun, dark tails spread and black wing feathers stretched out like fingers, feet dangling oddly, like something dead. Their wingspan was at least three meters wide. As they descended, their bodies tensed; their feet became suddenly poised and muscular. They landed, and two of them hopped, hissing and cackling to the carcass, naked throats extended, their black beaks lethal as the bolt cutters Ian held in his hand. At the outskirts, slightly away from the carcass, one waited, its neck S shaped. After a time, they took off, trailing death, climbing on warm thermals.

He set to work again, still moving west. The bolt cutter was doing a number on his arms and shoulders after only a couple of days’ work. The pain disgusted him. In his twenties, he could have worked three times this fast and not felt a thing.

He opened another forty-five standards before noon, dropped the bolt cutters where he stopped, and walked to the Land Rover to get the billy can for tea. The work made him ravenous; he’d be running short of food within a day or two and needing to return to Maun. He lit a fire and boiled water, opened a tin of sardines, and made a sandwich of fish and bread. A few wildebeest, with a young one trailing, moved along away from the opening he’d cut. They looked weak enough to push over. Ian put down the sandwich and tea, ran around behind them, and waved his arms, until they turned around and walked in the other direction toward the opening in the fence. He urged them along until they went through. Water was eighty kilometers away.

On the fourth day, he was clipping and sweating and didn’t hear a Land Rover come up behind him until it was almost on him. A red-faced man leaned out the window. “What the hell you think you’re doing, mate?”

“Cutting wire.”

“I’ve got eyes. What the bloody hell for?”

“Notice the animal carcasses? They can’t get to water.”

“Well, see those cattle over there? Those are part of my herd. That’s my living. Hoof-and-mouth will wipe me out in a matter of weeks.”

“No one’s studied whether the fence prevents the spread of hoof-and-mouth.”

“Study? What the hell did they put it up for if it didn’t help? Look, mate, this isn’t a conversation. I’m telling you. Get out.” He lifted a shotgun. “You’re destroying government property.”

“If you want to look at it like that, it’s been good chatting. What’s your name anyway?”

“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? You won’t get it from me.”

Ian picked up his bolt cutter and billy can. “Well, I’ll be off.” Without turning, he walked the few yards to his Land Rover, picturing the back of his head in crosshairs. He heard the sound of the other vehicle leaving and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck.

On the way back to the main road, he thought, that guy was trying to make a living, so why didn’t he give a damn? But some wildebeest and its calf trying to stay alive, he’d risk his life for. He bumped over the veldt, avoiding an anthill. He knew the greed, the small-mindedness of a man, that was why, but animals, they don’t take more than they need. He stopped, replaced the license plate, and bumped down the rough track.

He guessed he was finished here. He’d head south of Sehitwa, west of the Mabele a Pudi Hills, where the fence was about the same distance to water.