A Single Swallow (9 page)

The heat of Rundu, the proximity of the river and the thick green morning were completed: the rain was all you could really hear and all you wanted to look at. Even 3 feet into cover it caught you; huge drops bursting into smaller drops, billowing into spray. It crashed into us and splashed under us as we headed down the Caprivi Strip. The plan was to go just under halfway along it, turn right and cross the Botswana border, gateway to the famous Okavango Delta, a swamp so enormous that there simply had to be swallows there.

Instead, by following the Mousebird's nose down the strip, following signs to Botswana and taking a left, we became first distracted by, then entangled with, an extremely poor road.

Barely 40 yards into the bush the track disappeared into an untroubled pond of brown water. We battled on. The paths divided in an unsettling fashion, sandy high road versus vegetable low road, but the Mousebird would not daunt. Some very large vehicles had done that track but I would not have been in one, not with the narrow causeway before us now. Something which looked like a collapsed bridge passed, then we came to another, which two men were building. Over a hill, down a dale, and we were in. The track turned
into a soft loop. There were thick trees, the wooden wall of something that promised a bar, and beyond that the unmistakeable presence of a river. A huge green truck was parked in the shade, beside a couple of sober green bakkies.

The Mousebird was now modelling a sable-yellow leopard-print with matching tyres. Her white undercoat showed it all up to perfection. I was barely half out of her when a white man appeared, raising an eyebrow. He was older than me, quieter, and, I was perturbed to see, was not driving some sort of Landcruiser, which would have instantly given me one up on him, but the slightly tatty kind of estate favoured by nice families with small children. Worst of all, he appeared to have just done the shopping.

‘Hello,' I said.

‘Hi. Where have you come from?'

‘Cape Town!'

He smiled.

‘Not in that, you haven't.'

‘Ah, no – Windhoek . . .'

We shook hands and introduced ourselves. His name was Mark. His wife was Margie. This was their camp.

‘You wouldn't have any beds, would you?'

They gave me a mattress in a tent standing on a platform in a low tree down a narrow path, by the river. It was a lovely spot, and it had a snake.

‘What kind of snake?' Margie asked, when I remarked on it.

‘Green! Quite small, about so long, thin . . .'

‘Oh, it's probably a Western Green,' she said. ‘Harmless. What shape was its head? Coffin or diamond?'

It did not act like a snake. They are supposed to withdraw when they hear you coming, I believed, as I stood on my platform, watching the beast ushering itself into a bush of dry twigs about a yard from the tent flaps. The twigs did not make a sound and the snake stopped, poorly concealed, now you knew where to look. It formed a long coil, with the tail disappearing into the bush and the head pointing back out of it.

‘Knob off!' I hissed. It seemed a silly thing to say even as it came out, not my sort of curse at all, normally, but then I had never confronted a snake before. I made a gesture, some sort of noise, a stamp of the foot and another curse – and it came at me. Well, it moved, and not backwards.

‘Er, coffin-diamond?'

‘Well, it's probably a Western Green.'

‘What shape do –'

‘Diamond. But there are these things called green mambas around . . .'

‘Green mambas.'

‘Yes, and they have coffin-shaped heads.'

Perhaps it is inevitable that such a place should have a special dog. Her name was Slim, she was fat and no fan of crocodiles. Her sister, Shady, had been eaten by one. One of her rivals for human affection, a rangy bitch often the butt of the camp's paint-ball gun, had had six pups in the back office. Three of them went down a rock python.

In the Kovango River, they told me, lives the Dikongoro. The Dikongoro is a dragon. What does it look like, I asked?

‘Well, it has horns like a dragon, scales like a dragon, legs and claws and teeth like a dragon, the tail, the face, the eyes of a dragon . . .'

‘The wings?'

They were not so sure. ‘More like a Chinese Dragon,' someone said.

The Kovango River at this point is wide and browny-green. It is warm and silky but you had to be careful about swimming in it, because it was high and strong and hugely deep; after the rains it rises and turns banks into islands, islands into reeds. All the huts near the Kovango here are on high ground or on stilts, and the difference between high ground and marsh depends entirely on the rain that falls in Angola and other places, and so varies from year to year. There are crocodiles and hippopotami in the Kovango, which are two more
reasons for being careful and quiet, but the best reason of all is the Dikongoro.

Why, I wondered, does everyone speak so quietly of the Dikongoro?

‘Has anyone seen it?'

They fell silent. This is the trouble with this dragon, and the rather wonderful thing about it. If most dragons see you, they might eat you. Not the Dikongoro – no one mentioned anything of the sort. But they did say something else.

‘If you see the Dikongoro, one of your relatives will die.'

Really, I said, has anyone . . .

‘Yes,' they said. (And now they whispered.) One or two people living around here did see it, and relatives of theirs did die.

Really, I said, who?

‘There is one guy who works here, whose mother saw it . . . and another woman . . .'

And then I really did not want to know too much more. It was very clear that as a guest I could certainly ask around and meet local people who had seen the Dikongoro. Indeed, I could and did talk to several of the camp staff whose relatives had seen it, but we did not talk too much about such things. Instead we talked about the dragons themselves. Some said there was one, some said there were many. There is a certain island not far away where the Dikongoro live, and depending on who you talk to, the Dikongoro is either there or not there, and either minds if you go there or does not, and she is either a female, a mother, or she is many. Some even said the island was where the Dikongoro go to die.

No doubt the story of the Dikongoro is almost as old as human settlement on this part of the Kovango, and the locals among the camp's staff took it very seriously. The strange thing was the way their belief affected the white staff, all of whom mentioned the dragons, with a laugh, but then dropped their voices and said, ‘But you know they really do believe it. To them it's absolutely true . . .' in such a way that you looked uneasily at the river, and a bit of you believed it absolutely too.

The core of the white staff, three South Africans and two Europeans, were around my age and included Byron, from Pretoria, who was rarely seen in anything but underpants. A birdwatcher, a naturalist, with the muscles of a man and the quick smile of a boy, resplendent in dark curls and blessed with no apparent traces of fear whatsoever, Byron was most happy fishing – in underpants – zipping off into the bush to do something – in underpants – and leading tours.

‘Are you coming tomorrow then?' he asked.

‘Sure – where?'

‘For a bird walk?'

‘Are there any swallows around?'

‘Hmmm – maybe, yeah. Up by the village you sometimes see them.'

I sat by the Kovango and wrote. How does the white man come to Africa? As he always has. As a hunter. As a missionary, evangelising Development in place of God. As an adventurer, seeking near-misses to prove his existence. As an explorer, searching for miracles to take home. As a trader-plunderer, with hard currencies on his side, instead of the rifle's guarantee. As refugees from the world we have made; as boys, resolved to become men.

The camp emptied of other guests, and the staff and I had it to ourselves. There was a floating cage on the river, for sunning and cooling off and not being eaten; there was a shower to redecorate; a staff auction to organise; there were meetings held – a post-mortem of a recent canoe trip – and someone had to go to town to pick up some diesel and other treats.

Mark, whose brain-child all of this was, is keen that guests should not miss the souvenir shop. He is a South African, an engineer who had spent much of his professional life building roads in Botswana, he said, which seemed ironic, given the appalling state of the road to his camp.

‘Ah,' he said. ‘But that's no accident.'

The souvenir shop's stand-out item was not for sale: a long polemic on six sheets of paper, pinned to the wall, called ‘Mister Westerner'.

I had a look, then he summarised it for me.

‘It says, Mr Westerner, you are welcome here, but stick your hands in your pockets and keep them there, we don't want your money, and shut your mouth, and look around and learn.'

Mark was looking forward to the crash that the world's media was then predicting that world was about to face. As far as he was concerned, Caprivi and the environs of the camp had been miraculously conserved from the predations of modernity by years of war, and now represented an opportunity for a redrawing of the terms of business between locals and incomers.

‘You've got kids here who go away and come back and now won't go near their parents because suddenly they say they smell. Who don't respect their parents because they live in a hut, not a house. Do you know what the Human Rights Act did? It killed the traditional structure of law-enforcement round here – they used to just take you into the middle of the village and hit you with a stick: not any more. So the old respect is going.'

‘So what do you do?'

‘You give everyone a basic standard of education, to the point where they can make an informed choice: do I want to join the rat race or do I want to stay here? But what you don't do is tell them that one is better than the other . . .'

He was planning to defend the area with three strategically placed checkpoints. ‘There will be a hut, with display boards showing how people live here, and something like Mr Westener: we don't want your bloody aid here, your bloody values! We've already got the values of — here!'

‘So this is an environmental re-education camp masquerading as a holiday?'

He laughed. ‘Look, I'll show you something.'

It was a tree stump.

‘What's this?' he asked.

‘. . .?'

‘I say it was the tree of knowledge. And when I came here I cut it down.'

All the other trees and the grass needed a lot of river water pumped up to them, and soon he went off to see about it.

Byron appeared in his underpants with Cristoph, who was as tall and lean and black as Byron was brown: they were like brother warriors; they looked as though they could run all day, catch their supper and disappear into the vastness without a care.

‘Bird walk?'

‘Yes!'

‘Might get a bit wet. OK?'

‘Sure.'

‘And it's still very hot. Have you got sun cream?' Margie asked. She would be coming with us. She was wearing her sun hat. We set out.

We left the camp and bent left, following a path through tall golden grasses. We passed huts and a stockade; a village grouped around a great tree. Soon the path was twisting gently through reeds. Byron and Cristoph veered off to the right.

‘Stay that side if you like,' they said. Now our path ran through shallow water, while theirs plunged them in up to their thighs.

‘Blacksmith Plover!' they cried, shooting out hands like spears.

‘Right! Lovely!'

It was a golden evening. The water was beautifully cool, and in some places my feet plunged into black silky mud, cut with sharp reeds. Byron and Christoph were in quite deep now, splashing confidently.

Byron paused: ‘Crocodiles?'

Cristoph laughed. They shook their heads and plunged on.

‘When the rains come there will be hippos and crocs here,' Margie said, as various ducks, geese and waders got up, were named by the men, and disappeared. She told stories of expeditions with Mark. Their favourite place was Mana Pools, she said, a reserve on the Zambezi in Zimbabwe where she once looked up and saw a leopard gazing down at her from the branch of a tree.

‘Mark and I have a deal, which is if one of us is killed by an animal, no one is to kill that animal.'

‘Even if it's a croc?'

‘Of course!'

There was a commotion in the reeds. Suddenly Byron and Christoph came haring past us, crying out.

‘Great Snipe!' they shouted.

The bird looked like a fat woodcock. It burst from cover only moments before the hunters went hurdling after it. They marked its flight and charged at the spot where it went down. We were all in up to our thighs now, there was no path and no boundaries, just trees, outcrops of higher ground and the evening light playing over all like the wind. I was carrying my shoes and giggling at things.

‘What is it?' Margie asked.

‘It's those two – like mad hunting dogs! And I was just thinking I got a text message from my brother today he said hi hope you're having a great time Mum says make sure you tuck your trousers into your socks.'

Suddenly there was another double cry from Cristoph and Byron. This time they were frozen, not running, and both pointing at the killer. The peregrine's belly was gold as the grass; it came in straight and fast and low and our cries made no impression on it. We watched it go all the way we had come in seconds, twist and disappear. We grinned at each other, speechless.

The walk took us in a slow curve to higher ground, then back towards the river and the camp. A line of quiet cattle followed a drier path. We stopped to watch them as they came, gently swaying along, attended by a very small boy who smiled shyly. The cattle's heads nodded gently as they walked and their hooves made hardly any noise on the path. The peace and ease of the beasts and their guardian were infectious. We stood still as they passed, as though witnessing something as old and simple as can be imagined, a pre-pasturalist scene, from a time when our forebears and their flocks were nomadic.