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