What Gets in my Bones

Or, How All This Safari Stuff Started

Safari showed up in my life with gear and history and planning and fear and expectations, all of the tourist stuff, the normal stuff that gets you there and that’s very awake and present and nibbling at your insides with the teeth of a foreign rodent you didn’t bother to learn the name of, and which you now think was maybe a mistake, because here you are, you’ve spent all this money and you’re about to go on your first game drive with a dour English couple and Fred and Martin and you’re barely awake enough to remember how to drink coffee.

Fred and Martin. Our guide and tracker. I’ll tell you about them some other time, all about them and the gear, the history, the planning, and all the emotions, my husband beside me, my camera slung around my neck.

I hadn’t grabbed my big lens I had rented for the safari – I had been so flustered I left it in my room. So it’s just me and the Nikon I had practiced on, with the kit zoom lens – fancy for a camera but nothing like what people take on safari, as I’d learn later, nothing like the bazookas as big as ship cannons, wielded by men complaining that maybe they should have gone for one level bigger after all, moderation was always their downfall.

I knew none of this, all I knew was that I wanted on the Jeep.

It was a grey pre-dawn, and not particularly promising – August is South Africa’s winter, and we were dressed in fleeces, we’d been warned how cold it would be in the open-air Jeep. Someone had stocked the Jeep with blankets, and even – a nice touch – hot water bottles. We would need it all: the air felt damp, it felt like the English couple standing beside us probably didn’t even notice a difference from home.

We made small talk with them. This was, they said, their 8th safari. Or something like that. They bickered a little. It depended on how you counted it; it might have been their 9th safari instead. They warned us that we might not see anything on our first drive; it was best not to have expectations! I had been reading safari literature obsessively for months, and also I was familiar with the general concept of nature. “It’s not like a theme park!” the English couple reminded me, and I told them I understood. “I would be happy with seeing a few birds,” I said, which was almost true.

They tittered and moved towards the Jeep, asking which seat we wanted. A perilous question.

I’ll get into the mechanics of safari vehicles and their layouts later, but suffice it to say that where one sits vis a vis one’s fellow guests can become positively Machiavellian. At the time, being newbies, we wanted to show how amenable we were, and so of course we allowed them to take the first tier, taking the second ourselves. At the last minute, the lodge’s host, Jesse -- a delightful woman who constantly made you question whether it might be possible for humans to be part elfin after all – ran out and asked if she could join us. We all agreed, and didn’t make it off the lodge – Dulini’s – property before seeing rhino (which I probably won’t show pictures of, on the off chance that, even after all this time, it could endanger the animal’s life) and two fighting zebra.

I’ll come back to all that as well because, as magnificent as all of that was, and is, and much as I’d like to say that oh, yeah, I’d be just as happy with anything, I’d be just as happy with zebra, I’d be just as happy with a couple of birds, I’d be just as happy with a couple of rocks, send me out and show me the dust and I’d find a way to be happy – I am not that person.

I would have absolutely loved safari no matter what, but I am a drama slut and I don’t know if it would have sunk into my bones in the way it did, so deeply that when the maggots munch on my marrow as one day they must, I’m positive one maggot will turn to another and say, as a connoisseur might, “safari?” And the other will nod, and they’ll go on munching.

If Fred hadn’t pointed the Jeep into a thicket of bushes that were trying to kill us, shouting over his shoulder as he did so, “mind your heads, mates,” so that you had to go near-horizontal in the vehicle to avoid being murdered by a plant while Martin worked his machete and Fred maneuvered the truck forward gingerly, inch by inch, to end up with us settling in at a sickening angle, the front of the Jeep halfway down a ravine – if all that hadn’t happened, I might not feel as I now do.

But it did, and we looked up, and around, and didn’t see, at first, what we were meant to see. It was Jesse who saw them first – saw the white tip of the mother’s tail that’s often a leopard’s only give-away.

And then, we saw the cub.

Jesse and I let out a high-pitch “squeeeeee!” that must have been heard for miles. Fred told us to be quiet, but with a laugh, the English couple clearly was focusing all their energy on being intensely bitter that this was essentially our first sighting, and Martin and my husband, Michael, had simply fallen silent.

A leopard and her cub.

We spent the morning with them, and were lucky enough to return later and spend more time with them. I got to know these two leopards a little, and through them, a little of the humans who lived there. Most of all, though, that morning was how I knew, for sure and certain, that my Dad had loved me and would always love me, though he had died just a few months before.