White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,48

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