A Single Swallow (10 page)

I set out to emulate our expedition at the same time next day. I hoped to see swallows, and Byron said there were hobbies, a fantastically manoeuvrable falcon which hunts swallows, which I longed to see – but my main purpose was to prove to myself that I could just go for a walk, somewhere in Africa, and not get eaten by anything. I
circled villages, listened to children singing in a school, and eventually found myself a mile from the camp under a sky which had turned suddenly black.

‘This place!' I muttered, hurrying back as fast as one can without running.

The storm drove spears of lightning into the land on the other side of the river. A girl was heading for cover 30 yards to my right and we slowed and smiled when we saw each other, pretending not to be scared, and there was a crack like cannon fire, an arrow of bright electricity, at least one of us shrieked and both fled. I paused again, later, just by the gateway to the camp. Just before dark is the time to see birds of prey, Byron had said, and he was right. I had watched a Fish Eagle earlier, up river, beating low and magnificently heavy not far away, but this was like glimpsing death.

Suddenly it was there, twisting and flickering in the dusk. Its wings were like sickled scimitars, black against the gathering dark, and it flew in a careless, chaotic way, like a malignant swallow, as if it did not care at all which way it fell next. Then it was gone.

‘Bat Hawk!' said Byron enviously, back at the camp, as we pored over one of the bird books. I was delighted, and shaken. This thing eats bats! And yet, and yet, what I really wanted to see, the bird I had been looking for, was the Hobby. In Europe swallows do not have many predators. A Peregrine is fast enough to take them, but peregrines are more likely to hunt larger prey: pigeons are their game. The Sparrow-hawk is not fast enough, though they occasionally catch swallows by surprise, and the Goshawk is confined to forests: the one raptor which routinely hunts swallows, and even swifts, is the Hobby, migrating on the tail of the tide of swifts and swallows, from southern England and northern Europe down to the southern fringe of the Sahara. This beautiful falcon has long wings, a dark back, a handsome black moustache, and red feathers around its thighs, as if it were wearing scarlet shorts. But in Africa the swallow's problems multiply. As well as peregrines and migrating hobbies, there are African hobbies, eagle owls and bat hawks. Then, crossing the swallows' line of travel is the track of Eleonora's Falcon, an elegant, dark-backed
bird which migrates between Madagascar and the Isles of Mogador off the Moroccan coast, as well as along the North African littoral into the eastern Mediterranean. Matching the speed of the sea wind, Eleonora's falcons hang together in hovering flocks, a curtain of hunter-killers, waiting for exhausted migrants. Add the rain, the deserts, road traffic, storms, human hunters and adverse winds, and the swallow's journey begins to resemble a giant chessboard, crowded with mortal dangers.

The immediate change that camp wrought in me was to do with fear of the threats that might attend my own journey. Knowledge of what snakes were in the reeds, of how animals behaved, of where the Dikongoro lived, of how quickly cerebral malaria can take you, an understanding of all the places in which death lurked and the myriad ways it could strike did not allay fear. What blunted it was seeing people disregard fears, laughing, as if they had accepted in advance whatever price Africa would ask of them.

In London the restaurants were booked solid. The London Eye was probably glowing pink; no doubt with a bit of planning and cash you could have rented a pod, complete with roses and champagne. Happy couples were kissing each other and more needful ones were texting. In Caprivi the bush telegraph had been busy with news of the evening's entertainment. Of particular interest, as far as the staff were concerned, was the question of who the Overlanders were being guided by.

‘Who's coming?'

‘Two Lucys!'

‘Juicy and Posh?'

‘No, just Juicy, and another one.'

In swallow terms, St Valentine's is a festival of human courtship, display, pair-bonding and copulation. Swallows compress into days a ritual which western human culture has stretched into years. Arriving
at their European breeding sites, which – depending on their time of arrival and the ferocity of the competition – may or may not be where they themselves were born, males select and defend a territory and await the arrival of females. With the coming of the females the males begin their display flights; soaring and diving above their territory, singing and flaunting their tails. If and when a female is drawn to him, the male will land, fan his tail, give his enticement call and point out his suggested nest site with pecking gestures. If the female is unimpressed the male will need to suggest another site, quickly, or find another mate. On average a female will find a partner within three days of arriving; males are likely to court two or three females before wooing one. While just over four days is the average time it takes him, up to thirty-one days of trying have been recorded, before, finally, one bird succeeded.

If breeding is not a success they will split up – and it is the females who seem to make this decision, changing nest sites, and therefore mates. If breeding is a success and both partners survive to return the following year, they may breed again, travelling together over 12,000 miles. However, the perils of migration take a terrible toll of bonded couples: only around 10 per cent of pairs seem to manage to breed two years in a row, with very small numbers managing three or four years, and only one recorded pair breeding five years in a row.

And yet swallows are not always loyal. Both male and female swallows practise extra-pair copulation – they have affairs – and they are highly adept at it: between a third and a half of all nests contain a chick fathered by another male. For reasons which are unclear the most attractive male swallows (with the longest tails, in the best condition, which have the least difficulty finding mates) make the poorest partners and fathers, contributing the least to feeding and rearing chicks. Just as many males of both species father children with different females, so female humans and female swallows sometimes give up their offspring to other females – known as ‘fostering', in human terms and ‘egg-dumping' in swallows. The difference is that human females know they are raising someone else's child, while a
female swallow who suspects the egg in her nest is not hers will push it over the edge. Infanticide is common in swallows. Males will kill chicks in poorly defended nests, in the – usually successful – hope of mating with their mother.

What swallows ‘want', or, at least, their goal as suggested by their behaviour, is clear: to have as many offspring as possible. The aspiration of humans as suggested by our behaviour is more opaque, but perhaps only slightly, at least on Valentine's night.

By eight-thirty Juicy Lucy was dancing on the bar in a skintight ‘leopard-skin', entertaining her troops, an overlanders' truck. By ten we were all dancing on the bar. Mark and Margie had passed by, Margie smiling, Mark trying hard not to, clearly thinking Thank God the rest of the camp is empty and there is no one living directly opposite us.

‘Don't you know what a springbok does?'

‘NO!'

(I was clinging to the best seat in the house, hitting various bottles, and there was every chance of dancing.)

A springbok – a small South African antelope, usually, but in this case the participant of a drinking game, as Lucy explained to the crowd – pogos to within a leap of the bar, exposes its white tail, looks right and left, shaking its tail, pogos the final leap to the bar, lowers its mouth (springbok have no hands) over its shot of Springbok (Amarula, amongst other things), and shoots it as best it can. Supported by the other Lucy, Lucy had no trouble persuading the group to drop their shorts and take part. Byron had done his bit, appearing in the leopard-skin in the first place, before ripping it off. Even a leopard-skin cannot match a good pair of pants. Lucy's persuasion of the two most senior members of her clan, Adventurous Travellers if I ever saw them, summed up the role of tour guide on an overland truck.

‘YOU TWO CAN —— GET THE —— UP HERE ——
NOW!

It was not clear to me if that was true though, because they were holding each other up, laughing
helplessly. It was a night for laughing and dancing and I forget all the songs except one. The chorus sounded like:

‘What if God was one of us . . . Just a slob like all of us . . . Just a some-some some-something ye-ah, ye-ah, God is Love, yeah, yeah God is Love . . .'

I could not help but look around and ask
What if God were one of us?

And the answer was standing there, half-smiling, not quite wide-eyed, not at all drunk, despite my efforts, and beyond bemused: he looked hornswoggled. Earlier he had muttered: ‘There are two people – over there. I think they are women!' and indicated the sundeck which overlooked the floating platform around the swimming cage, the dark Kovango and the water monitors' reeds.

Everyone called him something else but he told me his name was Joseph: he was the brother of the day barman (of the same name), filling in for the regular night man, who was off, and being given his first taste of the Dionysian side of the camp. The casual, raucous and extraordinarily permissive antics of the white world had perhaps not offended so much as shaken him: he smiled tentatively, nervously, as if witnessing something forbidden but unexpectedly funny.

The next morning we said our farewells and I was given one pearl of advice for the road to Zambia.

‘Don't hit an elephant.'

‘What?'

‘Seriously, don't hit an elephant. You will not come off best.'

¹
UNICEF to 2005.

²
UN Human Development Report, 2002.

 

IN CERTAIN PARTS
of Africa, in the game parks where there are still large numbers of wild animals, a good way of finding swallows is first to find an elephant. Ideally, several elephants, in grassland, and on the move. As they go, swaying along, in the gentle, heavy-hipped way they have, like fat ladies lost in thought, elephants will disturb and put up a great many small insects from the grass. The swallows know this, and so they follow the beasts, and hunt.

‘Come on then you elephantine chickens, come out and fight.'

The endless DANGER! ELEPHANTS signs had worn me out. Another storm came up with a fantastic bang, lightning landing like artillery, much too close. The road was dead straight and dead empty. There were only tall trees and occasionally clearings on either side. This part of the strip is a game park and the wartime convoy habit is dying hard.

Byron had said there were hobbies along here, loads of hobbies, but of course until you have seen a bird once it is doubly difficult to see it for the first time. I wished Byron was there.

The Mousebird beeped disconsolately, I swore at her, changed gear, and began singing ‘Fairytale of New York' to keep my spirits up. All my self-containment was drained: it was a lonely business, leaving half a dozen people who had become fast friends, and taking the wilderness in exchange. I muttered to myself, scolded the car and sang the song's tune again, changing the words. ‘ “'Twas the day after
valentines, in Caprivi, and the signs said mind el-ephants, but there weren't any anyway” . . . Holy mother!
'
There were elephants. Six young bulls, right next to the car. They were standing under a tree, sheltering from the storm and all but winking as we sailed past; I saw their eyes; one elephant looked right at me, through the windscreen. Its expression was amused and happy: that elephant was eating, chewing ruminatively, pressed up against its fellows as they waited for the rain to pass.

I met another, later. He stood in the road just long enough to stop us, a quarter of a mile short, before ambling off to the south. I craned to see him as we passed his spot, but though the cover there was not thick he was quite gone.

I spent the night in Divundu, a steamy dump of a border town with persistent and hungry mosquitoes. The car had a wash in heavy rain and I shivered in a sort of caravan that reeked of damp and rot. I cleared out the Mousebird, brusquely. I knew no good way to leave a beloved. Someone was making a great pilgrimage up from Windhoek to take her home but I felt jealous rather than bad about it. Life would be lonelier without her. The way our possessions reflect our personalities and pasts back at us is an effective screen, a defence against the indifference of existence. We were a well-adjusted little unit, and I would have felt better about going into Zambia with company, albeit inanimate. I did not know anything about Zambia, except that it was one of the world's poorer countries.

It was a clear hot morning. Three irritated young women, and a mother and child, distressed because they were leaving Dad in Namibia, were waiting for a ride that had not shown. They allowed me to join them. When the driver turned up, the voluminous boot of his van was stuffed with ill-concealed cans of contraband petrol, which was cheaper in Namibia than Zambia. He was working as a white-water rafter at Victoria Falls, he said, and smoking a lot of dope, I judged. He got us through the border very quickly, the officers remarking that I was lucky I had got my visa in London as
Zambia had just slapped a stiff, hard-currency price-increase on its rate to Brits.