August 27, 1998 

Nights around the fire at camp in the Okivango Delta, the guides saved the most frightening stories for a pre-bedtime reminder to obey the rules on staying in our tents after darkness and not to leave the grounds in the daytime unescorted.

On one evening, I visited the site of a lurid tale. A native poled two of us in a mokoro (a dugout canoe) through a swamp close to one of the tragedies. We skirted pools full of hippos, bathing and rumbling out a thundering, grunting song like a giant playing a huge trombone off-key, which is enough trauma to cause a baseball umpire to have high blood pressure.

Stricken by the serenity of floating through the reeds and flowering plants, I named it, "the ride of the lily pad walkers." In each small pool, the jacana bird stepped from lily pad to lily pad on long gray legs, without rippling the water. The elusive amphibious antelope, the sitatunga, also runs over the wetlands faster than on dry ground. (Had I known beforehand that a three-ton hippopotamus in Zambia bit a crocodile in half and splintered a big rowboat to trash, I'd of packed rubber flippers so I could walk on top of the water like the jacanas and sitatungas.)

The ride ended at dusk. We docked in a still, shadowed lagoon, surrounded by tall reeds, perfect for a hippo to wallow and go aground to graze in the full moon, or a crocodile and a cape buffalo bull to face off in mortal contest. The night before, the camp manager waited until I was sleepy to tell us of a client the year before, who after the mokoro ride, demanded to be allowed to return for a photograph of a buffalo bull seen across the very pool where we landed. The guide refused permission; the client, a strong-willed German, slipped back alone to be gored to a horrible death.

Standing within paces of the tragedy, the sound of poles rubbing the sides of the mokoro sounded exactly like a bull's horns scraping the side of a chute. (Mokoros are no longer carved from jackal berry trees. Conservationists provide fiberglass ones, much noisier and harder to keep upright in the swamps.) Energized by the story and inspired by the light-footed jacana, I barely left marks in the mud bounding from the mokoro to the safety of the seat in the Range Rover.

The pace continued the next morning to check out from one camp to fly charter to a check-in at Jack's Camp on the eastern edge of the Magadikgadi Pans Game Reserve. In a few hours, (and we are still in Botswana) the scenery changed from the rich wetland savannas to the Kalahari Desert's salt clay pans as white and dry as the chalk tray of a blackboard. Huge expanses of smooth, shallow pans, unmarked by one leaf of grass or shard of stone, framed islands rising on the horizon, covered in palms, left over from an ancient lake.

At nightfall, we rode four-wheelers out on the pans, wearing turbans for effect, bundled in all of our clothes against the cold, to lie under the stillness of a moonless sky, lighted in stars like prisms of crystal glass. Returning, a caravan of Rovers met us. A bar was set up under lanterns; 30 minutes later, we were served a full course meal lighted by candles in silver holders over damask cloth. Near invisible waiters put shovels of live coals beneath our chairs. Heavy china kept the food hot. Chilled, we were ravenous, tearing into the cutlets like the animal providing the fare. (I think it was zebra steaks.)

On the way back to camp, an aardvark ran in front of the Rover. The driver raced after him, disregarding the terrain or our safety. He shouted over and over, "I've worked here six years without seeing a (expletive deleted) aardvark."

The next thing he did that he hadn't done in the six years was drop his rear wheel in an aardvark burrow. Out he jumped and threw the Rover in four-wheel drive without ever checking on two of the passengers lodged on the floor of the back seat.

Aardvark lore is hard to come by. They feast on termites by poking their 18-inch tongues into the hill and closing their nostrils to keep from being choked by their prey. The tail is six inches longer than the tongue. The burrows are big enough for bushmen to crawl down in the hole to capture the aardvark while he sleeps. But bushmen pull the same trick on porcupines and honey badgers. The one we saw, however, through a tilted windshield and over a bucking motor hood, looked like a kangaroo wrapped in a river hog's hide.

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