Cry of the Kalahari by Mark James Owens

Author:Mark James Owens
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

11

The van der Westhuizen Story

Delia

It is not easy to remember

that in the fading light of day . . .

the shadows always point toward the dawn.

—Winston O. Abbott

WITH A LONG sweeping motion Mark stripped the silver-grey leaves from a thin catophractes branch. He dipped the stick very slowly into the drum of gasoline, pulled it out again, and pinched the spot where the coating of liquid ended. “This has to last us for eight more weeks.”

It was May 1976, twenty-one months since we had received the $3800 grant from National Geographic. Once again our money was nearly gone. Without another grant very soon, we would have to abandon our research and earn the funds to get home. We also desperately needed money for radio-tracking the brown hyenas and lions, who were difficult to follow in the thick bush savanna, where they spent most of the dry season. In this habitat we could usually only follow the hyenas for an hour or so before losing them. And so far, we had no idea where the lions traveled in the hot months. We had done just about all the research on them we could do, without more sophisticated equipment.

A few days after Mark had checked our gasoline supply, a bush plane zoomed down the valley just above the treetops and buzzed camp, circling and dive-bombing the island like a mobbing bird. We ran out just in time to see a small bundle tumble out the window and the aircraft waggle its wings in salute and speed away. Our mail from Maun, tied up with string, lay in the grass. We never found out who had done us this favor.

We opened the package and found a handwritten message from Richard Flattery, Maun’s new bank manager, telling us that a Mr. van der Westhuizen would be in the village soon with some money for our project. Van der Westhuizen was the name of the director of the South African Nature Foundation, to which we had applied for a $20,000 grant. Declaring the night a holiday, we celebrated with pancakes and homemade syrup.

Next day we packed the Land Rover and started for the village before the sun had reached East Dune. Night had fallen when we wound our way through the jumble of earthen huts, each softly lighted by a flickering cook fire and shrouded in a drifting haze of smoke. The Flattery’s house was a flat-topped stucco standing opposite the reed fence of Dad Rigg’s place. Through the screen door, patched and repatched with an assortment of mesh, we could see Richard cleaning fish over a bucket. His wife, Nellie, was frying fresh bream over a gas stove.

“Glad to meet you . . . heard all about you . . . yes, Mr. van der Westhuizen has money for you. We’ll tell you all about it—stay and have some food and a cold beer.”

We sat down to a meal of fried fish, potatoes, and fresh bread in a small raftered dining room that might have been in an English cottage, except for an active termite mound protruding through the floor.

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