Emergency Call

30/3/13

Around 22:00 Brooke answers her phone.

"Hi, Emma, what's up?"

"Drop everything that you're doing and bring everyone to the house. Now." 

Click.

"Hello? Emma?..." She looks at the phone. Swallows a snarl. Calls back. "Hi, is it a safety emergency? or—"

"Yes. Come now." 

Click.

Silent theories abound as we drop our Phase-10 cards on the table and shuffle toward the Land Rover TD-5. The house is about a kilometer down the road from camp. Is this a joke? Some kind of elaborate performance for the excitement and benefit of the volunteers?

Is it war? Has the misguided government skipped ahead a few and at last decided upon a Final Solution for white people in ZA? 

Is it bush fire?

The zombie apocalypse?

Everyone aboard, we roar through the startled night, bumping over ruts and skimming around holes in the red dirt road.

Headlights.

Elisa pulls alongside in the Hilux.

"Oh good," she says, seeing all aboard. "I'll meet you at the house."

We drive on, and she turns around to follow.

At the house we crowd around the kitchen table, quiet in the stark electric light. Anthony bustles a sleeping child out to the bus. Emma scurries past on some errand and then comes back to the kitchen where we stand waiting.

"Okay, guys," she says, bug-eyed, with a faint tremble under her sing-song Mauritian accent, "as some of you know, there was a poacher warning in town this week."

Ah.

There had been a sighting: two Chinese men with some dodgy-looking black guys. Local police put farmers on standby. In the boonies, hours from any tourist sector, with a few dozen rhinoceroses split among a handful of game farms, a Chinaman means one thing: Rhino horn. 

Valued at $10,000 or more per kilo on the black market. 

And utterly worthless.

Anthony returns, sans pajama-clad toddler. "They heard something on a neighboring farm," he explains, hitching his jeans and adjusting a head-torch. "There's no direct danger. This is just over-precaution."

Though most prefer a silent undetected approach, certain rhino poachers entering a property will not hesitate to strafe a farmhouse on their way in, to demonstrate intent and keep occupants cowering while they go about their savage business. Instead of nice hunting rifles, they use AK-47s to shoot a rhino to pieces, before hacking off its horns.

"We'll take you to town," Anthony continues, "just to make sure."

The vols worry about passports, cameras, all their stuff at camp.

"They won't bother your stuff," Emma says. "They don't come in to houses or anything like that. They just want the horns, in and out." 
The horns. To cure what ails ya.

You're better off pissing in a tin cup and drinking it.

Brooke herds the volunteers into the bus. Quick head count. "Where's Paul?"

"Here." Staying with Ant. 

I'll be damned if I'll get on that bus and run for town.

Ant hands me a night-vision scope. I kiss Brooke goodbye. Tenderly. Quickly. Later she'll be burning livid to have been stuck with her volunteers while I went anti-poaching. But now she's all business, explaining to the vols that they must not talk about any of this in town.

Everything is hushed tones. Quick quiet movements. 

The hustle of a refugee situation, of fleeing the country from invaders.

I seethe in the darkness.

We get in the Hilux and race toward camp to pick up the spotlight. And my boots. Then we fly toward the fenceline, picking up one of the antipoaching guys along the way.

Bob wears coveralls, warm protection for his nightly patrol of the fences in search of poachers. He climbs into the truck bed and clings to the steel-tube rollbar as we careen along the fence toward where he heard gunshots.

Because it's illegal, the rhino-horn trade is firmly in the hands of organized criminals. The rich sneering bastards with access to machine guns and helicopters gather up the poor family types willing to break and enter someone's property to slaughter and waste an animal for a few hundred rand, while the suits rake in the big bucks and shell out to keep it illegal and outrageous in price. The level of violence against civilians depends on who's been saying what words of warning, and who's holding whose children hostage pending product return. Sound familiar? 

Same old story. The ghost of prohibitions past.

Can we wake up?

I look at the night-vision monocular in my hand. On-button. IR-button. The lens cap says, Do not remove in daylight. 

The spotlight whistles in the wind like the spirits of shredded rhino babies, and I cling to the oh-shit handles as the Hilux lurches and bucks down the road.

I picture rolling up on a pair of mountainous mangled corpses, bloody stumps on their bumpy faces, stitched to death by a string of bullet holes.

Elisa gets a phone call from Lewis asking whether he's supposed to be in tomorrow to help with the horses. 
"At ten-thirty at night?" Ant scowls. Suspicious of everything.

The day before, he'd gotten an SMS asking whether his helicopter can fly at night. Ostensibly from a potential student, but Ant had long suspected the man.

Odd timing.

I ask Ant if he has a gun.

"No rifle," he says. "Just a nine-mil. In here. Didn't want the vols to see."

"You a good shot?" Hint-hint.

He snorts. "As good as a nine-mil can be. It's more for just scaring."

My fingertips itch. I long for a good repeating rifle. Hell, even the 9mm. I'd love to bag a Chinaman. Grind up his fingernails and sell the powder to idiots. Take his head to the taxidermist to mount over my mantle.

Don't worry: the receptionist is the mother of one of my students.

We stop and I peer through the night-vision at a flat pale-green landscape. Nothing moves. I try the infrared, but it's too bright under the early third-quarter moon.

Ant talks to Bob, asks him about the gunshot.

Just one shot?

Yes.

You're sure it came from our side?

Yes.

What kind of shot? Boom? Pat-pat-pat? A .357?

No, smaller. Just one. And he might have heard a car.

Ant scans the area with the night-vision.

Nothing but crickets.

A dead tree rises stark black against the smudged charcoal sky. When I close my eyes I see its brilliant negative like upside-down lightning. 

Bob whispers it was right around here. He thinks maybe we've gone too far already.

We listen.

If they try to climb the fence in the corner, we'll hear it, dink-dink-dink-dink. Would they leave their grounding sticks twisted through the electrified wires? 

We hear the steady hollow clank of cowbells from the other side of the fence. Oddly calm. A laid-back summer sound like wind chimes over a patio lunch.

After a while we drive off.

As we get to the staff compound near the house, Bob calls us back. He heard voices. We fly back along the fence, lights off. The Hilux purrs eagerly.

We hear a whistle. Crashing toward it through brush, disregarding sickle bushes that can puncture tires. Disregarding off-road destruction. No seed net. Don't care. Hiss of grass under the truck. Spotlight out and bright, searching. Igniting the night. Distant eyeshine. Antelope herd. Roar of the Hilux. Bang of suspension. Bumping over holes and mounds. Blinding reflection on close bushes. Spooky jouncing shadows everywhere else. 

Everything looks like a crouching man.

But nothing.

We patrol the fence for almost an hour. Whoever they are, they're lying low. Easy enough to hide out in the bush, if you've got the nerve. Could be just pig poachers. Rhino poachers would have fired more shots. Pig poachers don't usually use guns, sending skinny dogs to locate warthogs and spearing them in their holes. 

But there were no dogs.

We leave Bob to keep watch through the night. Anthony calls his pilot and tells him to bring the helicopter at first light.

He won't sleep a wink.

Chic Shack

15/3/13

Our hut is tiny. 

Cozy would be a friendlier term. 

It's a kleenex box of corrugated iron, painted with a gritty gray protective coat against the sun's glare—though that simply turns broil to convection-bake.

Upon our first arrival, its previous occupants glare suspiciously at us. Then we duck in under the low doorway, and they scatter, disappearing to wherever geckos go. Our living flypaper.

We get to work moving the two rough-lumber twin bedframes together against the wall, which leaves just over a meter of smooth concrete floorspace to the next wall, which we soon fill with a pair of fold-up camping dressers and a dorm-style laundry hamper.

One narrow window lets in a puff of air every now and then. Brooke hangs an open-weave orange scarf as bug screen and privacy curtain. Within seconds, it's bleached pale by the sun.

Each night we climb in under the mosquito net, like kids in a make-believe tent in the basement. Our solar-charged lamp casts a blue shadow as backdrop for ghost stories.

Each morning we wake with the sun, with about ten minutes until the preheat cycle really gets up to speed. After the equinox, we're up before dawn, which means a nice cool breakfast before the day begins.

Over the next weeks and months, we add to it bit by bit. Candles for romance, binding-wire coatracks, runners for the narrow stretch of floorspace, a magazine tear-out of a rhino, a save-the-date photo of our silly Detroiter friends. We add more blankets as the nights get cooler, and a couple of throw pillows, which will look great on a future couch. Brooke puts together a squadron of dragonflies from a handful of cuckoo feathers she found and some bobby pins, and hangs them on the walls.

A burly airgun loiters in the corner, along with several hundred pellets. Target practice, mostly, tink-tinking into a rusty tin cup. But when baboon gangs venture too close to camp (BOGG'um! BOGG'um! like the devil's own town crier) I gleefully pop deterrents their way, with a cricket bat close at hand. If they make it to the common area, all is lost. They'll even shred the thatch straw on the roof.

The open-air shower and toilet around the corner is ours alone. A neat little square of stone-and-mortar walls, just over head-high. A dry-rotted door that we never close, since it's blocked by our hut. That plus our location at the very end of a row of volunteer tents affords us some privacy, for moving in and out of the shower in the buff. Not that we'd care. But it's nice not to offend anyone by accident.

In the rain—dwindling now, as we saunter into the dry season—the tent becomes a kettle drum. The roof stays intact, but there's a leak under the door. Brooke spends a sleepless night dripping candlewax into the breach, waking me up periodically to trumpet a moment of success. She eventually gives up and turns to her bush-knowledge reading, trying not to chew her nails.

The runner is soaked. The dog doesn't mind. I grumble tardy congratulatory platitudes. She looks at me with her red-filter headlamp, shaking her head and delving into the difference between a tawny eagle owl and a spotted eagle owl. I drift back off. I'm still on much-needed vacation, but tomorrow I have to go early to town to sort out something with the curriculum, which we still don't have, though Term 1 is already history.

At the end of each long day, we skip, walk, or shuffle down the path toward the setting sun, hoping not to stumble over scorpions or puff adders, hoping the water in the donkey boiler near the hut has been warmed sufficiently through the day to provide a bit of heat. It's a chore to build a fire underneath, but a hot shower gives a good sense of clean. A sense of relief from the dust and sweat and grime of game trails, of red sand, of grubby kindergarten fingers.

After a long drive along dreadful but adventurous roads, heads roiling with thoughts and stories, we grind up to the roundabout in front of the common area. Switch off the key. Roll up the windows. Collect our accoutrement. Duck under the wicked thorny branches. Head for a shower.

Home.

The Wheels on the Ropes Go Round and Round

14/3/13
The new tire-swings sit red and glittery in the early morning sun. They've been painted and put up over the weekend, and today will be the kids' first exposure to the new play equipment. There's one hung horizontally from three ropes. That's the main attraction. The other is hung on end, and mostly serves as a staging ground for the next in line.

It's funny how quickly the kids teach each other the ways of the tire, how almost instinctive it is to tuck in and focus on the spinning circle of dirt between your feet; how leaning out and pulling in at the right time speeds the spin. I'm flooded with memories of tire-swings dotted across the landscape of my childhood. How sometimes it was fun to push—and sometimes you'd squabble bitterly over the last remaining seat.

One of the girls is older, and she's had tire-swing experience. She knows how to rock the tire and its occupants back and forth, how to push to the limit of her height, before twisting and pulling on one rope to impart a pendulum whirl that turns her passengers' world into a twirling top. She giggles and leaps out of the way as those aboard stare between their feet or at each other with fascinated horror, feeling the forces and physics they can't begin to comprehend. It's just the magic of the world all around.

After the spirals exhaust themselves, I challenge the riders to dismount and walk along the narrow caterpillar made from vertical tires sunk in the playground dirt. They all laugh and stagger and fall, as the earth tilts beneath their feet and the sky heaves overhead. They exaggerate their drunkenness and collapse in paroxysms of laughter, falling over each other and rolling gleefully in the red sand that has given their white-shirt uniforms some playful character.

I smile somewhat wanly, thinking of the belly-lurching, the vision reeling, the head swimming. An image pops up, of a bygone babysitter telling my parents how sickening it was to watch us spin round and round on our carousel-seesaw combo. In skeptical seven-year-old scorn, I turned away from him in disgust and vowed never to grow up. I remember trundling barefoot through the grass, staring at the sky and twirling in tight circles until we fell down in ecstasy as the "spins" thrilled up our spines. The days of dervish delight.

For love of the game, I extend recess well beyond reason, almost 'til Home Time. The kids take turns on the swing, adjusting each other for weight distribution, laughing and falling all over each other in tangles, with utter disregard for class, socio-economics, race, age, or gender. They don't know or care about the stir their school may be causing in what board meetings where. They don't know or care that this little dirt school yard is the talk of the town, though there's not even a sign by the entrance yet. They're just kids playing with tires hung from a branch under a wide open African sky.