Elephant

Part 1

We girls piled into the lorry. One by one by one. With heavy mattresses, a bag of clothes, extra shoes, and snacks bought at the corner store on the way to the pool where the muddy red path had become hard like cement from everyone walking on it. It was a large lorry and inside were thirty girls each one with a mattress and mosquito net. This was not a Nancy Boy American Truck. This was a diesel spitting look at the size of those tires and no suspension as it creaks over dirt roads and demolishes acacia thorns scattered across the savanna plain kind of truck. Forget about napping. Forget about sleeping. You will be tossed about, thrown from side to side to side while the lorry bounces, rumples, and roars over mud puddle holes the size of baby elephants. It revved up steep inclines and whirred against jutting out boulders in empty river beds until it passed through Naivasha, constantly heading northwest into the dustyred Rift Valley plains of a rhino farm.

An outing They said. A camping trip They said. They, were the limping gimpy headmaster and two teachers along for the trip, along for the scoldings and the dry Brit wit to share all around. Nobody laughed though. All the girls said it was a trip to take us out, for the kill. One by one by one. To be eaten by lonely lions, jumped on by waiting leopards in tree branches, scratched to bleeding by furious baboons, and worse, to be gored by stampeding cape buffalo. They said nevermind that. We were going to learn how to live three days in the bush. Three days setting up camp in the wild open air to be watched by a billion blinking twinkling stars that lit the way for stalking hyenas, slithering black mambas, and slinking cheetahs.

By the river They said. That was the campsite. A shelter of feverish acacia trees where a half-eaten antelope lay on its side by the bank, ever so slowly sliding towards the water's edge, so slow in fact, we couldn't see it move. Up in the trees went the mosquito nets, and down fell the biltong in tough brown stringy strands. We chewed on the ones that fell from the trees straight into our mouths. Tough feel like dried leather. The taste of game and sun between our teeth and tongues and the scoldings began. We held the dried meat in our mouths, pretended they were empty, or pretended we were simply licking our lips. We didn't own the biltong. They belonged in the trees, to the hunter that hunted the game and slit the bellies and cut into strips the blood red meat and hung them in the trees to dry in the wide-awake sun. Slowly, we chewed here and there, while our back was turned putting up a mosquito net, while we bent over putting our mattress down on the dusty ground, while we scurried here and there moving our bags, our shoes, our boxes of sweetsour orange juice and packs of potato crisps. We chewed them until dinner came and then we could chew like normal girls chewing their dinner and not chewing swiped biltong.

The farm owners came out to see the girls on the bush trip. We could watch some leopards if we wanted, if we sat very still, very quiet like small mice waiting for crumbs to drop behind table legs and under kitchen counters. We said we could quite possibly, yes, be very quiet. But it was limpy gimpy who said that, not us. He was our mouth, our brain, but we were his bad leg going to and fro serving him dinner and cleaning up his plates and sliverware. Then someone's nose whistled in the whispery dark night as we crouched behind bushes waiting for leopards to jump on us. Teachers hushed and scolded and told us no leopards would come if we didn't stop sniggering at stuffy whistling noses. The whistling nose was told to blow it into a tissue so that she could finally shut up and let the leopards come. We fell asleep in the dark whispery night waiting, waiting waiting until no leopards came and we went to our stiff mattresses under the mosquito nets by the river bank careful not to step on acacia thorns the size of concrete nails and the lion roared in our sleep, prowling along the banks, sniffing the air full of girls sleeping under the blinking twinkling stars of night.

1:26 PM | |