White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,84

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