Breadcrumbs

By Baharestan, past Valiasr Street, the alley with the box tree on the north corner is where she dropped the doll. I know the sun shines bright there. And the wind still wanders. I don't know if that crooked tree is still standing. Or if Valiasr Street is still paved with anything more than ragged craters, jumbled rubble, and dark unlabeled splashes. Like many streets around here.

I don't know who runs Baharestan now. I don't know who is scheming to run it next. When she dropped the doll, I think—that's when I think I stopped caring about all that. That's when I realized none of that ever mattered.

I can still see it there, the doll in the dust. Patched crooked and worn-in soft, with that...that sour-sweet smell of honey and kid sweat and too much snotty teary love.

The scene blurs.

I'm submerged, drowning in the image now every time my focus goes blurry. Limp and puny. A little star of empty rags in the dry and bitter empty desert of street. Left behind like one more teardrop along a trail of sorrow, one more hopeless breadcrumb dropped in the wake of our slow march toward uncertain death.
Dropped, I saw, not even face up, not even with one last view of the sky before the tank treads—

Her grandmother gave her the doll—I should say, gave us the doll, about a month before she was born. It was a charm, to confound any bad luck that might be hovering around waiting for her birth; a little something to hold and embrace and develop her little loving heart; a dear possession to take hostage when discipline and reasoning bow out. And...well...the meanings don't really translate. It was all of those things, and more. An image splashed in my memory like looking into the sun long enough to wonder why.

"Papa, where's Scarlett?"
I jumped so high my knees banged the desk.
"Amal!" I laughed, swallowing against my pounding heart.
She tiptoed into my study. I scooped her up, tickling. "Why are you awake, little miss?"
She squirmed and fought the giggles. "Dowwowwown!"
I obeyed at once.

She looked up and put on a serious face. Composed herself. Took a breath. Suddenly her eyes melted somber, and her face twisted with real woe. "I can't find her."

She waggled a finger in her ear in that funny way of hers, perplexed and anxious, chin wrinkled and trembling.

"Well, where have you looked?"
"Everywhere!"
I reminded her: "Amal, can your pretty little head even imagine everywhere?"

"Um, no," she said, remembering. She had just discovered counting past ten by touching her chin to each additional finger. When I'd curbed her smugness by demonstrating there was a whole universe of numbers beyond her grasp, she climbed up in her fig tree and didn't come down until supper.

  "Let's go have a look around your room."

She took my hand as we walked down the hall. We checked her closets, dresser drawers, in the toy chest. We checked among her other stuffed animals, knelt and peered under the bed, behind the bedroom door; methodically overturning every stone. The search was a formality though, really. As soon as Amal had led me through the doorway, I'd seen the doll stuffed down between bed and wall, one soft hand reaching for help above the bedspread. But it was a teaching opportunity.

When we left, the doll was the only thing she wanted to take.

My fatal flaw, in the country of my fathers, has always been prideful optimism. I see the way it should be, the way it could be, if people just would take a moment to share perspectives, to let go and open up, back and forth a bit to join together for the common purpose of advancing themselves through advancing everyone all...

But then my indignation takes over my mouth, and so I talk and I challenge and I get myself in trouble. Even now—even as tears roll down my face and salt my steaming tea, even now I can't help but scheme how best to wield that image for maximum pathos.

The little pitter-patter of her sandaled little feet. Her hand in her mother's; their dresses billowing.

Dust in the air, and roiling smoke. The doll clutched under her arm, her little red racecar duffel slung over her father's.

A heart-racing symphony of sounds: sudden low rumbles, muffled sharp shouts, demonic fast hisses, clanking, screaming, thumping, gunshots.

The doll tumbles in slow motion.
Its shadow on the wall behind.
The dust splashes pock! with bullet impacts, slow staccato like rain.
A little girl running.
Stops.
Turns back with a shrill little screech. Scarlett!
The doll.
The father looks back.
The mother stoops and scoops up the daughter.
The doll hits the ground.
An ominous rocket hiss.
Fade to black.
A soft white caption glows into being.
It says: This man was not ready.

A stretched moment while that sinks in.
The tea tastes bitter. I can't help but work and fight.
A teardrop blurs my notes. What else do I have left?

Then it says: Don't be too late.
Fade to a call-to-action. Click here and get prepared now. 

Link to a portal webpage for sifting out the apps and the jokers. Process those who make it that far, and clear out the spies and the crazies. Get in touch with those who remain. Begin the weeding which becomes the training which becomes the method.

And using the image brings her back every time I think of it.

"Will we come back, papa?" she'd asked.
"Probably not, my heart's beat."
"Probably means no," she pouted.
"Probably means it's in God's hands."
"But what if God smiles on the Others?"
"Then there's not much hope, is there."
"So where will we be?"
I thought about that.
I still think about it.
I told her: "Wherever we are, my girl."

Killing Food

The day finally arrives. I've known—or hoped—it would happen for ages, though the date has been up in the air until yesterday afternoon. A quick phone call; much of it garbled by poor cell service, and the remainder poorly understood by an accent barrier. But the idea makes it through, and an item on my New Year's Resolutions list stands ready to be checked off:

Hunt an African animal.

Perhaps a bit outlandish, a bit bloodthirsty; but it makes sense in my own head, where musings spill like acorns in a cyclone, and misgivings come and go like flies in summer with no regard for propriety or property.

The gist is thus: What kind of savage hypocrite would happily eat meat yet be incapable of killing for it? What fool would subscribe wholesale to the fiction of plastic wrap, to the fantasy of cutlet? A steak, a chicken wing is not just a product, it's the product of a murder. Plain and simple. Blood was spilled. No two ways around it. An animal was killed; it was cut up nicely; a label was stamped on. Close not your eyes, lest they remain dark to all.

I'm here to get in touch, to dip my toe back into the cold stream of life, where throat-ripping brutality is the daily do. Ever see a hyena kill? How about a coyote's, for that matter? Ever watch a wasp paralyze a beetle and lay her eggs in its abdomen? I have. You can't help but shudder and watch intently. And let's not forget gamma-ray bursts and supernovae. Nature is no pretty picture, though it's beautiful and wild and profound. Camouflage and quickness are the only currency, and violent change the only constant.

So how dare I enjoy the fruits without standing in person at the point of decision and choosing to kill for food? I have to try it for myself. I have to get my hands dirty. If I can't do this, I quit meat for good.

I wake before my alarm. It promises to be a beautiful morning as I set out. To paint this sunrise would require every hue of the pastel rainbow, plus enough gold leaf to line the clouds. My way out is delayed by a rare leopard sighting by the main dam. A good omen, to be sure.

A mere 20 kilometers away, Daan's place is more beach-sandy than where I'm used to, dense with mopani trees a startling vivid green amid the dusty tan and khaki and gray of the dry season. The hardy leaves provide sustenance through the drought; ripped off by browsers, picked up by grazers, beloved by farmers. And then the mopani worms will be born, will crawl free, and will feed everything for weeks, like a locust plague fattens the land while it flattens the crops. For whatever combined flukes of geography, biology, and meteorology, out here not a day's walk away from our thorny tangle is a whole different rolling veld. More fat and gnarled leadwoods. Not as much grass. Fewer cat-claw acacias and spear-wielding shrubs. It's a different sort of beautiful, refreshing at this time of year. But the downside of the verdure is, you mostly can't see past layer two of bush, which tends to be about five meters from your nose.

We drive along narrow two-tracks, pinning turns at acute angles between broad baobabs. The cruiser bumps across what must be a good stretch of technical rapids during the rains. Daan points out an enormous thick-waisted tree. Says he had the dendrological society out to evaluate the granddaddy leadwood, and they estimated 6,000 years.
"Two thousand at the very least, they told me," he tells me proudly.

He explains that the bush isn't supposed to be this thick; that this hedging-in is a product of too much rain mixed with too much firefighting.
"Nobody obviously wants thei' feed burning and thei' game dying. That's the money, hey? But it's bad for natural processes..."

Without the periodic incendiary culling, the bush creeps thicker and weaves itself into living mesh. Some farmers actually go out with chainsaws and sweating workers to thin it out. Some guys are willing to do controlled burns—but when the controlled part fails, Daan says, "That other guy then, youh neighbor, can sue you. 'e can take youh farm then, hey."

Daan shifts his weight in the seat and adjusts the beer bottle between his legs. We turn up a dry riverbed of thick sand. Dried clots of grass and formerly floating detritus hang from tree clefts well above my waist. Daan stops and gets out to lock in the 4x4 pegs on the wheels.

He gets back in, and I pass him a stick of peppery kudu biltong. Best practice is to stuff your pockets until you forget about it. Then, later in the day when you're maybe reaching for a bullet or something, you discover the dry salty cache and rejoice. We both chew reflectively for a while, until he stops the car and we get out into the bush.

Daan looks around, listening and sniffing. I take potshots with a .22 to warm up. The bullets are cheap and the report is negligible, thanks to a MagLite-size suppressor screwed onto its muzzle. I've heard carrots snap louder. This is illegal in the states. Yet no game will be panicked by a gunshot...good thing to have.

"Ready to walk?" he asks, flicking a Bic to test the wind. He lights a cigarette and walks opposite the drifting smoke. You can also kick a puff of dust to see which way the wind. No one around here really sticks a dirty finger in his mouth.

"If they see you," Daan warns, "it's okay, because they know the danger. They know exactly whe' you ah. But if they smell you—they gone like last month's pay. They don't know whe' you ah, but they know they's something. So they pfft! fuck right off just in case."

For a long while it's all tracks, no animals. There are a few promising piles of dung. The freshest has a green sheen and still smushes. Older is hard as pebbles. Still older crumbles to pale dust and becomes part of the shifting, living ground. We walk as quietly as we can, a rocking sort of tiptoe to shift weight without stepping. Yet despite our care, we broadcast our way with the hush of canvas, the creak of leather boots, the crunch of sand, grass, and twigs underfoot.

Periodically we stop to listen. Thunder tides of quelia whir back and forth some distance away, moving on the wing like a living cloud or a school of fish. Daan points out a few horn-rubbed bush trunks. Young eland bulls, he says. Rubbing horns on anything they come across, the randy buggers. These marks are a few days old.

We palm branches aside and dodge thorns, ducking the more menacing twigs and pushing through the less ferociously defended. We stop to listen. Ants crawl along a twig, on about their Sisyphean task to digest the garbage of the world. The gun gets heavy. It's a BRNO Arms .270, a Czech piece. Nice scope. No strap. A working gun, evident in the scarred stock and dulled steel. I feel a new appreciation for soldiers who have to lug these things around all day every day. My elbows kink up. I relax my hold on the stock and envy Daan's gunless at-ease gait. We stop to listen. Daan points out the husk of a mantis egg-sac near a small yellow daisy-like flower. He checks back to make sure my bolt handle is at a safe half-cock position. It is.

Then Daan stops cold, holds a palm back near his hip. I freeze. Hear snorts. Then I see them, darks shapes through the bush. Wildebeest. A few of them. Stock still as we are; wary, watching, searching. On alert.

We breathe as shallowly as we dare.

I scan for more animals and crawl my fingers along the stock toward the trigger, having earlier given up the alert grip for the comfortable. The receiver rustles my jacket. Daan frantically waves quiet. The wildebeest turn.

"Gun up," Daan whispers harshly.

I thumb down the bolt lever and raise the rifle, looking for a shot.
Too slow.
They leave, loping off into the bush, invisible before I can drop the scope from my eye in disgust. Daan explains just how still we have to be, lest they see any too-quick change of shape. I realize I'd been turning my head to assess my peripherals. Chin back and forth, nose flying like a flag, head shape changing like a predator.
Oops.

We follow their tracks through the bush. They're running, cleft toe-marks deep with a long V of sand kicked behind the heels. We come out on a sandy river bed and walk along it.
"Here they started walking," Daan points out.
Some eland tracks cross the trail. Running as well. If only I'd gotten a damn shot. Wildebeest is supposedly nice meat. And the skin is storm-cloud blue, streaked with black.
Still we follow, until the trail goes cold.
We walk to complete the loop, still hopeful but healthily skeptical. Daan shows me a level clearing where a village once sat, a hundred or so years ago. He kicks at a ball-round rock near a low, wide concave stone, both of them dense and ground smooth, from mortar-and-pestling maize and grass. He picks up an angular coin-sized fragment nearby. "Pottery shard," he says, and tucks it in a pocket for his kids.

The rest of the day passes as a casual walk in the bush. We get back in the car and check all of Daan's usual places—but nothing. At one point some guinea fowl flush up from the road, running and flapping and bobbing along, and I crawl out the passenger window as we follow them, to grab the .22 from the gunrack before they cut into the bush. "At least we must get something!" Daan curses. But by the time I get back in and thumb the bolt lever, they're too far into the bush for the popgun bullets.

At his house that evening we braai short ribs and get drunk on whiskey while the coals settle in. Daan produces a handful of Chinese firecrackers. His kids giggle and cover their ears, dancing on tiptoes as he sparks off the little poppers.
"Well that's the loudest bang I've heard all day," I quip, thinking of the .22.
"Hell," Daan laments, shrugging and sipping his drink, "that's just hunting. Sometimes it's nothing."

Next morning the bush is equally eerie-quiet, with nothing but quelia rushing here and there about their en-masse quelia business. We chew on biltong and brood, increasingly pensive as the sun climbs the sky.
"Sorry, Paul," Daan shrugs. "I don't know why nothing is out. This weather..."
"Yeah."
We walk on. He shows me some baboon shit, a sticky clump of berry pips on rocks and other surfaces, some smeared in streaky territorial patterns like gang graffiti. We follow some old tracks as the afternoon wanes. Near one of the water holes we find his two half-wild horses, with their tagalong subadult zebra. The little guy snorts in alarm and bucks off a few meters, but stops when the horses don't follow. Daan strokes their necks and comments on how fat and healthy they look. One chews the unlit cigarette from his hand, munching it greedily down, and folding his lip over his nostrils to trap the smell. We walk on.

Then, disappointed, Daan has to go back to the house to take care of some business. But he's arranged a tracker. "This is Geiss," he introduces. "If he can't find you an animal, it can't be found."

Geiss is tall and slight and dark, teeth flashing in his face under a young-man's thin tight mustache and proud little patch of goatee. His eyes are narrow and discerning, and his subtle smile as inscrutable to me as the tracks he reads like plot arcs in a book. He wears the usual green canvas uniform, with ragged sneakers and a thorn-frayed camouflage cap. We shake hands and then stroll into the bush without a word. I realize too late I've left without my hat, and my newly shorn head will surely roast in the afternoon sun.

Geiss walks me along a two-track in the opposite direction from before, through an orchard-looking stretch of land. He peers at the ground, walking as though he knows the way, one arm crossed behind his back, fingers in the crook of his other elbow. A butane-blue sky blazes overhead, and I curse my forgotten hat and its useless shadow slanting down the arm of the couch.

We walk for ages. I check my watch. Dangerously close to my time limit before I have to get back for work and other nonsense. Just an hour or so left. Then Geiss stops me with a raised hand. I freeze. Eyes darting.
"I have go the toilet," he says, and shambles into the bush for a while. I squat beside the rifle, for the first time coming to grips with the possibility that I may have a fruitless hunt. And who knows when I'll get another chance.

Geiss returns, and we turn off into the bush, rocking-walking as before, as quietly and carefully as we can. He doesn't stop to listen, but makes turns and adjusts his course while slithering through branches and bushes. I don't see anything that looks like fresh spoor, and I begin to feel discouraged as five o'clock tiptoes closer.

We stroll into a more open section, with lower underbrush and taller, sparser trees. Gratefully I pass through a few spots of shade, pretty much ready to head back, discouraged and hot and tired.

"They!" Geiss whispers like a hack saw, pointing. "Luke luke luke! Impala!"
"Where?"
Heart pounding, I fumble the bolt lever down and locked, and swing the .270 up, sighting along the scope for my prize. There!
I find the impala in my eyepiece.
No horns. It's a ewe.
A brief hesitation grips me. But then I remember:
I'm not here for trophies, I'm here for meat. I'm not here to crow, I'm here to prove myself a point. And a young impala ewe makes a much finer dish than a long-horned sinewy old ram, though her head wouldn't impress much up on a wall. But I've never been one to relish the idea of a murdered animal reading over my shoulder in the lamplight, scoffing and pointing out all my gaffes and goofs and gall-garbled gabble, even if it is just molded plastic and fancy stitching. I am eager for the pelt, but I don't give a tinker's damn for a stuffed head over my mantle. Rather relish the wild flavor at its tenderest.

And there she is, grazing and scanning and chewing, about 60 meters away in dappled bush shadow, blending with the busy backdrop. Blink twice and lose her, and I only get one shot. She stops chewing, and twitches her ears my way, sniffing the air.
My heart pounds.
She chews.
I take a deep breath, willing myself calm, willing myself back together, willing myself into the moment. Eyes on the crosshairs, crosshairs just behind her shoulder, elbows tight, cheek relaxed on smooth sun-warm wood; watch the drift and measure breath, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Finger on the trigger, hand easy on the stock, squeeze-don't-pull, tighten so smooth and slow I'm startled by the crack! and buck of the gun against my shoulder.

There's a moment suspended in time, frozen there for eternity. A suspended snapshot where the deep crack! still rips, where the acrid tang of gunsmoke hangs in the air. A benighted instant of not knowing whether she's down or disappeared. My disbelief checks the script, confused. My spirit holds its breath. On the other side of the tableau, a creature is jerked to awareness of a narrow shaft of her body, a sudden spindle through her core, impelling her toward the ground and somehow radiating pain and blood and she can't draw breath. Cud forgotten. Joints giving way. Mouth open. Vision clouding with fire. Adrenaline pouring itself out heroically but in vain. Diaphragm pulling desperately to inflate a shattered vacuum, terrified heart pumping and pumping forever pumping into empty space.

When my vision clears and Geiss assures me I've hit, I rack the bolt just in case, and we move forward. She's dropped right where she stood. Not even a startled bound. Legs folded beneath her, for all the world like she's taken a quick nap—except for the autonomic arching contractions of her neck, and the spittle-flecked working of her mouth. My shot is a few inches back of where I meant, shredding lungs instead of puncturing heart, but it's done the trick by the time we arrive at her side.

I lay a hand on her back. Soft. Warm. Graceful and smooth even in death. A wave of sadness washes over me, tumbling me toward an embroiled surf of melancholy. This is a creature, a living set of sensations, fears, connections, social scopes. Calmly going about its daily function and minding its own business; until I nodded yes-okay to myself, and pulled the trigger.

Then I wriggle and rise to the surface, gulping a breath of pride and exhilaration. I've executed my primeval destiny! I've succeeded to secure survival. I've brought home meat; that high-density, life-giving, storable energy that contributed so much to our long-ago physical and mental development as we walked the savannas in search of purpose.

Then I'm under again, noise rushing in my ears, seeing nothing but a young being ripped from a moment of life, a severed web of possible futures, a neat little jigsaw piece in this mysterious turmoil; just to fill my plate and fulfill my introspective quest. Died unable to take a breath, losing consciousness and life in the same few frantic moments.

And then my face unfurls a giddy grin, and I regain my footing over adrenaline-wobbly knees. Part of her part in this thing is to die for me and my part. A savage life lesson. I thank the impala for showing up in my time of neediness, and mouth a silent sorry. Geiss opens his dime-store knife and plunges the blade into the soft throat, rocking it back and forth to make gurgling squelching crunching sure she's dead. He prods an obsidian eyeball. Not even a flicker.

But ATP ripples the superficial muscles, quivering the limbs spastically until its reserves are spent. Death in real life is not the neat Hollywood collapse–last word–wrenching groan–eyes-closed stillness. There is no idealistic romance in the movement and storage of energy. After a bit, Geiss hoists the body onto his shoulders by neck and forelegs, neverminding the thin blood streaming from the wound, and we hike to the road in silence to wait for our ride.

As Daan arrives we eviscerate the impala, and he has me take a bite from the raw liver. It's a tradition for a first kill, he says. Bush sushi. I paint blood stripes on my cheeks, and just barely resist a triumphant screeching war cry. Conscience assuaged, for the time being; feeling in touch, a bit, with my ancestors at long last.

Game Auction

Game Auction
Paul D Blumer

From the car park, the excitement is already audible. Afrikaans crackles from the loudspeaker, and the low buzz of side conversation fills the air between the savory sizzle of boerwors and the sticky-sweet waft of pankaku. We make our way toward the big striped tent, weaving through kids running around with cap-guns, camo, barefeet, and tow-heads. People peel away from the concession windows with koeldrinks and waters, beers and styrofoam cups of tea or coffee.

Inside the grand tent is a semi-circle of spartan benches on brick-fronted risers. Big Dutchmen with serious expressions lean forward, making notes in belly-balanced booklets. Watching, weighing numbers. Calculating, predicting. Grumbles or nods at each lot passed. A handful have number placards in shirt pockets. These are the bidders. But dozens more are paying full attention, keeping up with the business trends. Their pulled-low camouflage caps all point toward the tall dais in the center, rising above a quarter-pie-shaped livestock gate on wheels, which is used for displaying cattle and sheep. The Vleissentraal auctioneers sit at a table up above, keeping their own notes. One stands at the lectern with a microphone, chanting and pointing and laughing at his own jokes.

"Lot thirty-five," he sings, "kudu bull, and what-a fine bull! Do I hear five-point-five? Okay, four, starting at four—four-and-a-quarter—four-point-five—" A constant thrum of words, English and Afrikaans in a swing-rhythm jumble. He hits a rolling steady galloping pace, calling numbers, pausing, pointing left, right, center, and back. "Five over here, five to my left—five-and-a-half in back—five-seven-fifty right up front, do I hear six, six anywhere? Five-seven-fifty up front once—six in the back! six thousand rand..." Hand pointing to the last bidder; eyes aimed at the next. Inviting competition; mocking, chiding, scorning hesitancy with practiced jollity. "Six thousand rand for the fine kudu bull. The hammer is up... And down."
BANG!
"One up and done. Buy-a-donkey! Many thanks! Baie danke!"

At a lull, we tour the lots, groups of animals behind palisade-fenced bomas with lot descriptions in chalk. Impala, 1m 3f. Gemsbok, 6f. Bloewildebees, 1m 2f. The animals are nervous, hearing and smelling but not seeing intruders. Some pace the boma floors. Some paw the sawdust ground anxiously.

Nyala stand like crazy wizards, with long dark beards, twisted horns, and small white pince-nez markings on their faces. Darting eyes. Cape-like fringes of hair along flanks and legs. A kudu bull stands quietly, 45" horns spiraling proudly. An enormous eland bull chews grass, with a chest dewlap you could use for a blanket. A wildebeest with a broken ankle, standing calmly now, after a pisser of a tantrum. Jagged bone pokes through the skin. He's done-for. Someone's staff will eat well tonight. We pass several skittish lots of impala. In one, a calf tries and fails to nurse. At the corner of the corridor, in a taller boma than the rest, a group of giraffes glare through the cracks, kicking the walls with rifle-crack suddenness.

We return to the auction, happy to have finally seen these wild animals up close, but saddened that they're behind bars. Once bought and transported, they'll adapt, but it's a humbling sight.

There's a heavy quiet after the final lot, not much more than postcoital murmurs of conversation as the spectators disperse. A few chatting dawdlers left behind the rest of us spill back into the afternoon sun. Discussing last season, the next big auction, prices, the fattening effect of a heavy rainy season, and other farmish fragments. The whole shebang wraps itself up like an auctioneer's gavel, and we all go about our business.

Drops of Rain

9 July

There was rain today.
A brief, quick patter on the tin roof, of such duration as to compete with the longer of shooting stars. At the first clatter, an easy dismissal. Must be dust and wind. Shouldn't be rain until October or thereabouts. The skies threaten—or promise, depending how you look at it—but nothing happens. Rain starts in spring. Spring starts at the end of September. A grim acceptance settles—unlike the dust, which hangs thick.
Dust splashes where you step, and little baby cyclones pick up paper thorns, chips of grass, withered flaky leaves, and powdery sand, dancing dervishly across the yard and depositing its giddy finds right at your doorstep. Sweep to your heart's content. The job will never be done. Desiccated twig tips of the trees out back claw at the siding and rattle on the tin roof, trying sanity and parrying patience away like a wilted daisy.
But this...
It can't be...
I hold my hand out under the porch eaves. It's wet. In the sky.
I open my mouth, hold out my tongue. It's sweet. Clean. Exciting.
But I shiver, and the wind blows cold at the back of my neck. Of course it wouldn't rain on one of the hot days.
And then it's gone, and even its little footsteps disappear in the thirst of seasonal drought.
But the sand looks solid. The air smells fresh. Everything swells just a little, nature heaving a wistful sigh. A few birds sing their amazement to each other. Leaves whisper of coming attractions. This spot of moisture has merely whet their thirst. Drops in the sand become little dry donuts. What green remains stands out from the dust.
A friend phones.
Hey, howzit?
It's raining!
I know it!
News is news. This is a bizarre event. It's not supposed to rain today. Not for another few months. And then it won't stop. It will flood, replenishing and destroying at once. Survived the dry? Learn to swim.
Nature is tough here.

Capture Game

We roll up on a carnival atmosphere. A handful of cooking fires smolder around a big water jo-jo. Hands in boxy green fatigues lounge in the shortening shade against semi-truck trailers drawn up in a half circle. Some smoke or play stones. A few nap. Tinny phone music crackles. Occasional bursts of laughter interrupt a lazy stillness.
Good thing we rushed here from camp, hoping to make it on time.
Hurry up and wait is a leitmotif here.
Dust puffs up underfoot like a splash of rainwater. It practically ripples, and the dry season has only just begun. Time to sell some game, or there won't be enough graze and browse for anyone. Thin the herds before nature does it first. The reservoir dams are already shrunken to shallow ponds.
The auction is days away. Farm life has woven itself around the weft of game capture. Anything not directly related has been postponed or foisted off short-straw style. By the time it's over, a couple-hundred wild but deeded animals will be captured, transported, and sold, transported to other reserves with smaller game populations or lusher groves. Or faster hunters. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud: a whole province of wilderness preserves, with rough-plaid patterns of two-tracks for hunters to quarter an area and walk in on quarry. The reality is, hunting has the interest and the money to keep the natural world alive, so it can kill its proud, aging individuals. Idealism just has volunteers.
A big semi trailer with window slits stands drawn up right to the boma ramp, ready to receive the animals.  Heavy green canvas sails angle off into the bush, half-again the height of the tallest worker inside. The setup is eerily similar to the opening scene of Jurassic Park. Good thing it's daytime.
We climb up one of the slatted semi trailers to get a view. Stamped bits of straw and manure line the sun-dappled wooden floor inside. Down on the ground, beyond the ramp, the rest of the boma sprawls like an arena inside thick green walls held taught with cables. More of the green-clad workers bask in the sun or repose in the narrow shade. Each sail stretches on for 300 meters, a giant funnel billowing faintly in the breeze, leading inexorably up the ramp into the long sturdy trailer.
One of the Hanley foremen stands near us, murmuring Afrikaans into a walkie-talkie and chuckling through big front teeth angled welcomingly like sideways dutch doors. The faint whup-whup of a helicopter approaches from the hill, chasing a herd of wildebeest our way. There's a crosswind. It's okay, but not ideal, he tells us. Yus, but it's better by far than a back wind, hey?
The workers inside rush to their stations. The helicopter roars into view, climbing and dipping, sideslipping back and forth like a gunship in a video game. The tail swings wide, skidding a semicircle. Suddenly a dozen wildebeest barrel through the bush along the canvas barriers. Men shout. Curtains clatter closed with a hiss along the funnel, and the animals' choices get narrower and narrower, until the boks crowd at the ramp entrance, jostling and bumping, puffing and blowing. Green sheets flap. Sweating workers bark and shout. The wildebeest bumble up the chute and bang into the trailer. The gate closes behind.
We blink.
A worker near us leans into the trapdoors in the trailer roof with a long cattle prod and separates the bulls from the babies and cows, poking them toward separate compartments. Workers outside slide bulkheads open and shut, cordoning the animals neatly and quickly. Kneeling next to the zapper, the farm owner leans in with a spring-loaded hypodermic spear with calming drugs. They barely jerk at the puncture. He scratches horns with the needletip to mark dosed animals.
Fresh dung on the floor. Hiss of frightened breath. Shit-smeared tails. Eyes wide with fear, scrambling away from the zap, blowing with relief when the doors slam shut, and nothing further happens. Breathing slows. Anxiety dims. One male shifts about in exasperation, flailing curved horns at the others' flanks and snorting madly. Before he can be sedated and separated, he starts tossing, hooking his horns at his companions. Lifts one frightened calf off his forefeet. We find out later the horntip pierced the little one through the heart. Collateral.
The trailer unhooks itself from the boma chute, and we all exhale with laughter as it rumbles off. Everyone settles into another interim rest period, and we move down toward the green canvas, limboing under taut cables and wandering into the funnel.
Prince meets us at the junction of one of the curtains. He's a young buck with smooth dark skin and a gleaming smile, fresh green fatigues rolled up at the sleeves. A red cowboy neckerchief nestles behind his lapels, and a crisp camo cap with a flat brim leans back casually on his head. He offers to teach us venda, watching us with bright eyes and tugging at one thick leather gardening glove. The foreman chuckles and rolls his r's at us. "Worry about your curtain, Prince. Then we'll see about teaching somefink."
Prince nods and backs up into his curtain, pulling the dusty thing around himself like a soft old cloak, winking and flashing a smile when the foreman wanders off. Then he cocks an ear toward the sky. The helicopter is airborne and approaching.
Prince explains that we must wrap ourselves in the curtain as the animals come through, so they don't see anything but plain green stretching forever into the chute. We must not make noise, or move around. Then, once they're past our station, we'll run with the rough curtain until it's shut, blocking the animals' escape to the rear. The whole funnel is sectioned off thus, with five parallel sets of bulkheads sliding along binding-wire rings on steel cables, meeting in the middle. All the way down the line, guys hide in their curtains. Bush-quiet settles. Behind us is a softly rustling dusty curtain. To our left a canvas wall disappears into the bush. Across the way another green barricade. Like being in a maze.
Enter the Minotaur.
A siren sounds overhead. The helicopter announcing its approach. More of the fancy sideways flying. Wrangling, rallying the beasts. The tail swings wide, and it completes an arc, darting forward and dipping low, swinging around again. Rotors a sharp blur above like a cowboy's lariat.
From farther up the funnel come shouts and whistles. Vala! vala! vala! in the distance. The helicopter swings away. Whistling, sharp slap of sticks on canvas, hoarse cries in the bush, raw adrenal fear channeled toward dauntless ferocity. Vala! vala! vala! closer. Dust roiling, wheet! wheet! Movement through the dust, scrambling men, whistles, shouts. A crowd of wildebeest, confused, scared, looking desperately for outs. Lurching, stamping, eyes wide to the whites, spittle flecked around mouths. We, wrapped in curtains, scrutinized by a gang of wild beasts. Wild eyes, whipping branches, yelling, banging our curtain. Prince bails. We shriek and holler, as they look at us, move closer, still confused. We clap our hands, slap our canvas, cowboy whoop hiiyah! They think better of it and curve through the opening a hairsbreadth from our ruddy cheeks. Vala! vala! vala! Run yank curtain closed, companions across the way sprinting toward us, meeting in the middle; slipping through, chasing them down the funnel yelling whistling beating branches down the narrowing aperture, past the next curtain—yanked closed—next one—vala!—rattling up the ramp into the trucks.
A restful sag in the adrenal aftermath, nice and easy while the workers tease Prince for fleeing. Younger and smaller than the rest, he takes it ruefully but in good humor. The others tell us he's just returned from a few months recovery time after an incident. We can only imagine. The trailer unhitches and moves away. In the shade of a boma wall, Andres sparks a spliff. I take a puff. He calls it swaz because supposedly it comes from Swaziland. The Afrikaaners call it daga, which seems about right since it rhymes with caca. Prince rolls one with a scrap of newspaper. I don't bother.
The sun shines bright overhead, pleasant against the winter breeze. It's a fleece-tossup sort of day. The excitement keeps us warm; the inactivity sends shivers and goosebumps.
Next up are gemsbok. If wildebeest are the defensive linemen of antelope, gemsbok are the crazy middle linebackers, with long straight horns as sharp and accurate as rapiers. They come in small groups or one at a time, not in easy big herds like the wildebeest. More angry; less nervous. Stories circulate about gemsbok stabbing shadows on the wall, goring workers standing outside the boma.
Next to the ramp is a small fire and a tall bundle of black pneumatic tubing cut to meter lengths. Once corralled in the ramp, the gemsbok will start getting violent. Each fatal accident costs tens of thousands. To prevent it, the hands will heat an end of the tube and tap it down over the deadly horns with a mallet, before hustling the antelope all the way on board. That means one will have to lean over the barricade and grab the evil-looking keratin lances one at a time. We shudder.
But we're not about to leave the fray.
A siren whoop! signals ready. Pre-game tension crackles through the boma. Everyone wraps up tight and peers into the bush. A pair of gemsbok dash out of nowhere, racing toward the chute. Vala! vala! vala! We run the curtain closed. Look around.
Easy.
But then, vula! vula! vula! Close? We did! No—vula! vula! Open! open! open! There's still one more gemsbok in the funnel.
Everyone scrambles.
Then nothing.
Turns out he's stuck at the apex of Curtain One, his back to the wall, unwilling to move. The hands throw rocks and sticks, beat at the canvas, shout, and don't come closer than five meters from the gemsbok. He stands calm, head on a swivel, gently tossing his head as if keeping his sword arms warm and loose.
Someone barks an order.
After a while two guys appear from the bush, carrying a heavy steel door with two shield handles. At the sight of the pushboard, the gemsbok trots casually away down the funnel calm-as-you-please. The vala! cries down the line are a bit bemused this time, not as frantic, though still cautious and quick.
From atop sturdy trees, we watch the gemsbok stop still again just a meter from where we had been standing with our curtain. Looking around, daring someone to come for him. We don't have the experience to help with this part. We've been banished to the best seats in the house. The pushboard appears again, and one of the hands gets behind it, stepping it closer and closer to the gemsbok. It makes gentle contact. The bok tenses. The hand shifts the board again. The animal clacks it experimentally with a horn. The man shifts again. The bok is tired, tongue lolling, lactic acid burning. He clacks the shield, harder. Another hand joins the pushboard. The first reaches over gingerly until he gets a hand on a horn. Two hands. The bok tenses to strike. The hand shrieks hoarsely in venda, staccato barks that could only mean, Get the fuck over here now! now! now! now! now! to his colleagues standing nearby watching. Three men join him on the horns. The fifth leans on the pushboard. The bok settles, panting, to his knees. He jerks his head, resisting, but only nominally. He's resting. Waiting.
The four men get to their feet, tugging at the horns. The bok resists. They pull. Muscles taut like ropes. He stands. Tongue hanging. Ribs a bellows. Snorting, mouth foaming. Rapid communication, hauling centimeter by centimeter toward the next curtain. Sweat glitters in the sun. Pushboard behind. Panting. Dust. They get him past the curtain, and the harsh chatter increases in tone and speed, five voices rasping to a crescendo, and they gingerly but quickly let go the horns and start slapping, kicking the snapped-shut canvas, renewed yelling, whistling madness. More hands inside slap and prod with thorny sticks, and the gemsbok finally clatters down the chute and up the ramp, where a pair of tubes are thrust onto his horns and pounded home. The fire-warmed plastic cools and shrinks around the horns, and the antelope is in the trailer amid his comrades. They stand relatively calmly in a warm bovine odor of farmland, frontier, and wild.
Another period of calm settles over, as the implacable sun makes its way toward the northwest horizon. Just another day of work in the bushveld.

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.

H is for Honeycomb

13/3/13

Fresh honeycomb. Either you have it or you don't. Gingerly, between two fingers and a thumb, I heft the biggest brick I've ever held. The dark honey in its complex geometric structure is quite rich, and holds together better than what you find in the market or at a state fair. It's the product of wild African honey bees, the kind that go ballistic like bloodthirsty marauders of old, and chase interlopers for miles, stinging with a long merciless memory and often killing the unlucky through sheer persistence and volume. 

When we first arrived at Umkwali, our boss's house was a jumble of odds and ends, the material mishmash of a place about to undergo a renovation. The spare room we stayed in was crammed with warthog tusks, years-old office papers, vuvuzelas, cast-off toys, curtain rods, filing cabinets, a golf ball, unidentifiable odds and ends, a piston-powered airgun that I later appropriated, and a cramped low mattress. It was a relief to get into our corrugated-iron shack in the bush a few days later.

When we first arrived, the kitchen ceiling was a patchwork of soft tiles and duct tape. An ominous hum underlay the sound of printers and toasters and teaspoons clinking in mismatched mugs. It accompanied our naive conversation about conservation and culture and planning. Anthony told us the rafters above were home to a population of bees. And that the weight of the nest threatened to collapse the ceiling. It could happen at any time. 

"What about your kids," I asked, nodding my chin at the high-chair in the corner. 
He shrugged. "We're working on it." 

Apparently there were too many bees just to fumigate the room and have done. And too many for him to rent a suit. And the handful of professionals who'd come to evaluate had retreated in horror, shaking their heads. But what was he supposed to do, just burn the whole thing down? They nodded sagely.

For our first days on the farm, any kitchen conversation was punctuated by the crack and sizzle of bees in a bug zapper. Emptying the zapper was a many-times-daily chore for the house staff. Some weeks later, they completed a renovation of the house, building shelves in the kitchen and putting up stone tiles. It was beautiful. Except the ceiling remained.

But then came the fumigation campaign. Finally they'd found some guys willing to take on the buzzing horde. In exchange, they would take the bees and the honey. Apparently there was enough to make it worth their while. With that, they rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

I arrive on the farm just after they've finished stripping the honeycomb from the opened ceiling, preparing to fumigate the remainder and cleanse the space. They've packed the riches in numbered boxes on stacks of pallets on a flatbed. What they couldn't fit they left for us. We revel. The brick in my hand weighs easily half a pound. 

The honeycomb is almost red. I take a slow eager bite. My teeth sink in as if coming home after a long journey. Crystallized bits of honey tickle my tongue, and a natural warmth spreads to all the little crannies of my mouth, filling my soul with flavor and sweetness and gold. It's rich and faintly smoky from a previous attempt to flush out—or at least subdue—the hive. The wax is sturdy, not sticky, and keeps its integrity as I chew out the last molecules of honey. I look up, and everyone is staring. The moan dies on my lips, and I smile ruefully.

"Yum," I say.

Then I take another bite.