Kalahari

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Copyright © 2015 Jessica Khoury

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ISBN: 978-0-698-15104-8

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

TO MAMA, WHO TAUGHT ME TO SEEK ADVENTURES

T
he lions were napping on the runway again.

I held up a hand against the blazing African sun and stared at the small silver plane that was just minutes away from touching down. I’d have to move the pride before it landed.

“Theo!” I called. The Bushman was sitting on the hood of the Land Cruiser, and when he looked my way, I pointed at the three lionesses and two cubs sunning themselves on the hard-packed sand. Laughing, he leaned backward and honked the horn of the truck, his way of saying we’d have to chase them off. I nodded and ran back to the Cruiser, tossing my folder of papers in the backseat.

In a moment, I had the engine roaring and we were off, rattling down the runway toward the sleeping lions. They yawned and chuffed at me in a lazy attempt to scare me off, but I bore down on them. I recognized the pride; the lionesses were sisters, used to us rambling around the bush. They barely opened their eyes as the truck trundled up to them.

I stopped the Cruiser, leaving the engine running, and climbed onto the hood. From there, I shouted and waved my arms, to the amusement of the cubs, who rolled and yowled and stretched. At last, their mothers lifted themselves up huffily and ambled off the runway. They were soon lost in the waving golden grass, their tawny coats blending into the dry savanna. Just the black tips of their tails showed, flickering slyly above the foliage, and then those too vanished.

I drove the truck back to the other end of the runway and parked it, then grabbed my folder out of the backseat. The plane was dropping lower in the sky, lining up with the runway.

Theo glanced at me sidelong. He was part Bushman, with the lovely golden skin characteristic of his nomadic ancestors, and though he was older than my father, he was no taller than I was. He had found a praying mantis somewhere, and the insect was crawling over his hands, from one to the other. As soon as it crawled onto one hand, he lifted the other and placed it in front, so that the mantis was continually crawling forward but getting nowhere. Theo could charm any creature that walked, crawled, flew, or slithered.

“You look like you got a toothache, girl,” he said.

“Two weeks,” I murmured, my eyes still on the plane. “What are we going to do with five teenagers from the city for two weeks?”

“You’re a teenager.” He grinned, taking far too much delight in my dismay. “I am sure you will have a grand time.”

“Yeah. A grand old time.” I sank lower in my seat and flipped open the folder, riffling through the documents inside. “I went to school for three months in the States once, did you know that? The kids in my class called me Mowgli and threw bananas at me during lunch.”

“What is the problem? At the end of the day, it was you who ended up with all the bananas.” Theo turned in his seat, and though he was still smiling, his dark eyes were serious. “Tu!um-sa, it will be good for you. You cannot live your whole life with only animals for friends.”

“I can try.” I sighed and shut the folder. “Here they come.”

The plane touched down in a cloud of dust, its silver sides reflecting golden grass and blue sky. It taxied down the short length and then turned, the propeller whipping up a whirlwind of sand. Theo and I got out of the truck and walked toward the plane, and I held my scarf over my mouth and nose to keep from breathing in the dust.

After the engine died and the propeller wound down, the pilot ran around the front of the plane and opened the passenger door. I drew a deep breath and put on what I hoped looked like a welcoming smile.

“And here we go,” I muttered through my teeth.

An Asian boy with a bright red baseball cap cocked sideways over his long, shaggy hair tumbled out of the plane. The pilot, a young Frenchman named Matthieu, was standing at the door and tried to help him out, but the kid ignored him and fell to the ground, where he promptly puked onto the hard-packed sand.

I winced and consulted the papers I was carrying, quickly putting a name to our first guest’s greenish face: Joey Xiong
.
From California. Seventeen years old, Hmong American. Listed Sasquatch as his favorite animal. I hoped his sickness was due to the plane ride and not a sign of something worse. The last thing we needed was flu or malaria in our camp. The nearest hospital was an hour’s flight away.

Next out was a tall, graceful girl with springy dark hair. She paused in the doorway, half bent over, and stared at the spot where Joey had deposited his breakfast. For a moment it seemed as if she would turn around and go back inside the plane, but Matthieu offered a hand and she gingerly stepped down, her expression a mask of disgust. While Joey lurched to his feet, she pointedly stood a few steps away from him and stared in the other direction. Avani Sharma,
her profile paper read. Canadian, of Indian and Kenyan heritage. 4.0 GPA. The list of her academic achievements, recorded there for no apparent reason, was long enough to put some college professors to shame.

I let out a little breath, trying to force my thoughts to stay positive, as the next two guests exited the plane: a boy and a girl so entangled with each other that it was hard to see where one ended and the other began. They were both dark haired and pale skinned. They had on khaki from head to toe, but they wore it as if they’d just arrived for a Burberry photo shoot—his shirt was partially unbuttoned, her beige scarf was arranged in a complex knot, and they were both sporting manicured, immaculate hairstyles. There was no denying they were both drop-dead gorgeous and deeply obsessed with each other.

They could only be Miranda Kirk and Kase Rider of Boston, Massachusetts. They had come together and they were both seventeen. Other than that, the profiles they had filled out were scant on information. The space asking why they were here at all—
Please state what you hope to gain from this experience—
was blank on Miranda’s, while Kase’s form said only
wildlife photography portfolio.

They jumped to the ground without taking their arms from around each other, then stood between Avani and Joey, whispering in each other’s ears and regarding the surrounding wilderness with suspicious looks.

Last out of the plane was a boy who must have been, by process of elimination, Sam Quartermain, our final guest: shaggy dark blond hair, a plain white tee tucked messily into his jeans, carrying a tattered Adidas duffel bag. The moment his shoes hit the ground, his head was up and his eyes were wide, scanning the trees around us and finally settling on me.

“Hey!” he called out, the first of them to even acknowledge my presence. “Sarah, right? I’m Sam!”

“Hi, Sam.”

“Mind if I take a picture?” said Kase, pulling out a camera roughly the size of a lawn mower engine.

“Um, no?”

“Sweet.” He held up his camera and the shutter clicked. Then Kase cursed and fiddled with the dials. “Crap. Settings are all screwed up.”

Miranda shielded her eyes from the sun as she whipped out her phone, her fingers a blur as they navigated the touch screen. “Ugh! No service? Are you
kidding
me?”

I suppressed a sigh and nodded to Matthieu. “
Salut
,
Matt.
Bon vol
?”

He grunted and began unloading the boxes of food and necessities I’d ordered from our supplier in Maun. “Je ne t’envie pas vraiment dans cette situation. C’est aussi amusant qu’un panier de serpents.”
I don’t envy you with this lot. They’re about as much fun as a box of snakes.

Easy for him to say. I was the sort of person who, upon arriving at someone’s house on a social visit, ended up making friends with his or her canary instead. I’d take a box of snakes over these five any day. But as Dad was fond of saying, “We must soldier on, eh?”

“Hello, everyone,” I said, clearing my throat.
They’re just people. Get it together.
“Um, I’m Sarah Carmichael and this is Theo. Welcome to the Kalahari.”

Beside me, Theo flashed his brightest smile and said, “Hello, hello,” in his soft accent. I was glad I’d brought him along to meet the plane, because he immediately began putting everyone at ease, shaking hands, taking Miranda’s and Avani’s bags and pretending they were too heavy for him. Avani smiled a little, but Miranda rolled her eyes. Only Sam and Joey laughed, and Theo gave them a grin and a shrug as if to say,
Girls, eh?

“Climb aboard,” I said, waving at the battered green Land Cruiser. “It’ll be a tight fit. You’ll have to hold your bags. We’re about a ten-minute drive from the camp.”

As the group climbed into the Cruiser, I made a quick check of the supplies Matthieu had brought and then left Theo to stand guard over them until I returned with the car to load them up.

The Cruiser choked to life as I turned the key, and the whole thing began vibrating like it was about to fall apart. I heard a little shriek from behind me but couldn’t tell who it was.

“This is Hank,” I shouted over the engine, slapping the dash. “He sounds like a trash compactor, but he’s the only thing that’ll get through this terrain.”

I turned the Cruiser around and rumbled down the track to the camp. The sides were all open and the canvas roof was rolled back, allowing the passengers a 360-degree view of the Kalahari semidesert.

A dry wind blasted my face, pulling my hair out of its messy braid and nearly sucking the wide-brimmed sun hat off my head. All around us, the graceful acacias and stocky
Terminalia
swayed and rustled, and a lone chanting goshawk cut the air above, hunting for mice in the tall golden grass. Behind us, Matthieu’s plane grunted to life, and moments later I saw him climbing into the sky ahead of us, destined for Maun and his next group of tourists to ferry through the cloudless Botswana sky.

When I looked down again, I realized there was a face hovering beside mine and I jumped, gripping the wheel harder and biting back a curse. It was the one named Joey. His baseball cap was now backward, and a sprig of his black hair sprouted over the Velcro strap.

“I’m Joey,” he said. “Nice wheels. Very rugged. I like a girl who can drive manual. And on the wrong side of the car too.”

In response, I kicked the Cruiser into third gear and gave him a tight smile.

I desperately wished we didn’t have to do this, but my dad’s conservation research needed all the funding it could get, and in return for babysitting four American (and one Canadian) students on a conservation exchange program, we’d receive a research grant from the Song Foundation. We might even be able to buy another vehicle, which we sorely needed. It wasn’t a good idea to be this far out into the Kalahari bush with only one form of transportation readily available, not with the way the terrain around here destroys cars. We’d had a second car, until Mom’s accident.

I turned to Joey and smiled a bit wider. “Have a good flight over?”

“Ugh! Dude, did you see me hurl?” He laughed and elbowed Sam. “You totally shouldn’t have let me eat all those sausages in the airport, man.”

“You guys know each other?” I asked.

“Nah, met on the plane from JFK. Totally bonded though. We did a
Die Hard
marathon on the flight over, but my man Sam here conked out halfway through number three. Yippee-ki-yay!”

Joey’s chatter continued, most of it blasted away by the wind, but I nodded and pretended to listen as I navigated the Cruiser through the treacherous sand. There’s not a single stone to be found in the Kalahari, just endless deep sand, white in the north and fading to red in the south, the nemesis of every vehicle that attempts to cross it. I’d lost count of how many times Dad, Theo, and I had had to dig this thing out. It was the reason why I had “muscles like a rugby fullback,” according to my dad. He’s from New Zealand, and in his view, everything on the planet can be analogized to rugby.

We startled a pair of tall gray kudu, and they froze in front of the car, their huge dark eyes fixed on the great gray-green monster that had interrupted their grazing. At once, everyone behind me was leaning forward, and I stopped to let them get a better look. Kase’s zoom lens extended over Joey’s shoulder as he snapped a ream of photos. Avani suddenly spoke up, identifying the “two young female kudu, called cows, scientific name
Tragelaphus strepsiceros
” and rattling off a stream of kudu-related information as deftly as any safari guide.

As the car approached them, the kudu leaped into fluid motion, disappearing into the brush in three steps. They weren’t called the “gray ghosts of the bush” for nothing; despite their size—they stood as tall as horses—they could vanish in moments into the dry vegetation.

The group let out a collective sigh and then they all fell silent, now on high alert for more animal activity, but we reached the camp without seeing anything more exciting than a few sparrows and fork-tailed drongos.

My dad was waiting. He stood with a warm smile and an armful of bottled water, outfitted in his usual khaki gear, rugged and faded like a worn photograph that’s been handled too many times. He looked older than he was, tanned and leathery from spending all his time underneath the suns of a dozen wildernesses, from the Burmese jungles to the Australian outback and now the Kalahari savanna, charting migratory patterns and documenting the myriad ways humans were destroying the natural world. His long graying hair was tied in a ponytail at the back of his head, though a few wispy strands had escaped.

As soon as our guests’ feet touched the ground, my dad introduced himself, his strong Kiwi accent booming across the grass. “Welcome to our little corner of the Kalahari, boys and girls! My name’s Ty Carmichael, and I’m the head researcher here at Camp Acacia.”

You’re the
only
researcher here
,
I thought, shaking my head a little.

“Camp Acacia” wasn’t much of a camp. There was my tent, Dad and Theo’s shared one, and then there were the two new ones we’d put up that morning to accommodate the guests—one for boys, one for girls. The tents were large enough. You could stand up straight if you were right in the middle of them, and they kept out rain (for the most part), if not bugs and the occasional snake or wildcat. There was a fire pit in the middle of the camp, surrounded by logs for seating, and a portable shower was set up in the trees nearby. It was about as crude a camp as you could ask for, but it had been my home for the past five years, more or less, and resembled every other camp I’d lived in as my family moved from one remote location to the next.