Kalahari (17 page)

A defensive protest welled within me, as it always did when someone tried to offer me comfort, but when I met his eyes it faded, a shadow shrinking from the light. For once, I didn’t want to curl up like a hedgehog, spines out, pushing everyone away. Instead something in my chest gave way, and I nodded slowly. “I know.”

T
he next morning, after kicking sand over the campsite in an effort to hide our tracks from any passing helicopters, we set off due west. My spine stung from sleeping on the hard ground, and what sleep I had gotten had been plagued with vague dreams about silver animals that appeared and faded out of the savanna. So I walked like the living dead, stumbling and bleary-eyed, each step heavier than the last. The others walked with similar exhaustion. We drifted slowly apart, with me in the front, Sam a few steps behind, Joey in the middle, and the last three lagging after him. When that happened, I stopped and waited for everyone to catch up. It would take just a moment to lose sight of one another, especially here where the bushes were growing thicker and the grass taller, and once that happened it would be difficult to find one another again.

“Can’t we stop for a while?” asked Avani when she caught up. She bent over, breathing hard. “I feel like I got hit by a truck.”

“Fine,” I replied, hiding my frustration. At our current pace, it would take a month to reach Ghansi. We had to move faster; every delay only gave Abramo a better chance of finding us. I didn’t doubt that once he’d regrouped from the skirmish at the compound, he’d begin hunting for us. And anyway, we couldn’t keep going like this for much longer. We needed water desperately, more than the others realized. I wondered if they felt the signs of dehydration like I did: My muscles were cramping, my heart would randomly burst into a series of painful flutters that left me dizzy and weak, and I felt nauseated when I moved too quickly. I could see signs of it in the others: their gazes were growing vacant, their steps clumsy.

“We’re holding you back,” Sam said softly. I was sitting with my back against a shepherd’s tree, and he dropped down on its other side. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear his whisper. “If it weren’t for us, you’d be in Ghansi by now, wouldn’t you?”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not your fault we’re out here.”

He was quiet for a long minute, and his next words were so soft I barely caught them. “I have a confession to make.”

“What?”

I could hear him pulling up the grass, roots ripping out of the earth, and I didn’t push him to answer right away, though I was curious.

“I didn’t just come randomly,” he finally said. “I didn’t want to tell you, but with everything that’s happened, I mean, we don’t know if we’ll even make it out of this—”

“We’ll make it out of this.”

“Right. Of course. But still, I just . . . I want you to know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I came to Africa because I wanted to meet you, Sarah.”

I turned around and stared at the back of his head. “Meet me? You didn’t even know me.”

He looked over his shoulder, not at me, but at the ground between us. “It didn’t feel that way. I read your mom’s book.”

My mom’s book. I remembered the day Sam had first arrived, when he’d picked up the book in my tent and lingered over it.

“Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

“I don’t know. I thought you’d be weirded out, I guess.”

I turned away again, considering. “I don’t think so.”

“Yeah, but you don’t understand. That book . . . it changed me. Adam gave it to me with a bunch of other travel books when I turned thirteen. I grew up surrounded by cement and noise and traffic, but it was your mom who kept me believing that I could escape all that one day.”

He stopped, his voice cutting off as if his outpouring had left him embarrassed.

“It’s okay,” I said. “She would have loved to hear that. That’s why she wrote the book in the first place. I didn’t like it at first. I thought it would be embarrassing for people to read about me without knowing me, but she told me something I never forgot. She said, ‘People are like stars, but it’s stories that turn us into constellations. If we don’t tell our stories, we burn alone in the dark.’ I couldn’t argue with that, mainly because I was ten and I didn’t know how. It sounded important, so I told her to publish the book.”

Sam was silent a moment, then said, “Adam and I had this map we used to circle places on, all the places we wanted to go. We circled all the countries you and your parents had been to, because there was something about your mom and the way she wrote. . . . She made each place feel as if it were the ultimate, you know? Like you hadn’t lived until you’d been there.”

She had had that effect. Not just for places, but for people, for experiences, for moments. She could make a boring afternoon seem like your life’s brightest highlight, a day never to be forgotten. She had seen the beauty in the most common things—a bird building its nest, an ant carrying a leaf twice its weight, a sunrise, a moonrise, a meteor streaking through the night sky. There was never a dull moment with my mom. People had loved her, gravitated toward her like thirsty herds to a clear, cool stream. I used to love watching her take a photographer or a journalist into the field; my parents had often guided people into the wilderness to earn some extra money. Give my mom a jaded, sour-faced journalist and she’d return him or her as a different person, full of awe and wonder and appreciation for the world. I never got tired of seeing her transform people by opening their eyes to the wonders around them. My dad had loved her for it. He used to say to me, “Your mother has the mind of a genius and the eyes of a child. You won’t find better than that.”

And I knew it was true.

I stared at Sam with new eyes, and something inside me softened at his confession. We were linked together by Mom’s spirit, as if she were between us, holding each of our hands.

“She would have liked you,” I said.

“You think?” He sounded pleased. “I wish I could have met her.”

I drew a sudden, deep breath, feeling my eyes burn as grief blurred the corners of my mind. It always came like a flood, seeping through the holes I was so sure I’d covered up with silly distractions: ordering more food for the camp, making sure Dad’s notes stayed organized, keeping up with my studies (which, since Mom’s death, had been left mostly up to me. I could have quit school altogether and I don’t think Dad would have noticed). Every time the black waters of sadness poured into my thoughts, I rushed to throw up flimsy dams. They worked for a while but never for long. It was like trying to patch a boat with Scotch tape.

I leaned my head onto my knees and shut my eyes, my default defensive position, curling up like a hedgehog. My hand automatically went to my pocket and around the recorder. I didn’t even notice Sam had moved until he was beside me. He didn’t touch me or say anything, but I could sense him there, silent and unmoving.

After a few minutes I lifted my head, my eyes dry.

“We should keep going.”

He stood up and offered me a hand, pulling me up. “Are you sure you’re okay with it?”

I smiled and held his hand a moment longer than necessary. “I’m glad you knew her, in a way. Sometimes I wondered if anyone else missed her. It helps, knowing she was a part of your life, even without having met you.”

He smiled back, and suddenly I was aware of how warm his hand was in mine, each of his fingertips making my skin tingle. I pulled my hand away, blushing.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get the others.”

“The boss is back,” groaned Joey when we walked over. “Lunch break is over.”

“It’s not a lunch break without lunch,” said Avani grumpily.

I looked around, studying the surrounding vegetation, searching for something—
anything
—edible, and I smiled.

“I can fix that.”

The others watched doubtfully as I pulled up a thick handful of dry, golden grass. I held it up proudly.

“Great,” said Joey with zero enthusiasm. “Cow food.”

“Crowfoot grass,” I said, giving him a hard look, “is a staple of any proper Kalahari salad. It’s actually pretty good for you and makes a tasty trail snack if you’re out tracking a leopard all day.”

“I assume you’re speaking from experience?” asked Sam.

“Multiple experiences. Joey! Stop!”

He’d picked a handful of the grass and was stuffing it in his mouth. He froze and looked at me, long stalks hanging out of his lips. I heard Avani giggle behind me; there was certainly a kind of amusing bovine quality to his expression.

“Just the seeds,” I said, and to demonstrate, I nibbled the tip of one of the stalks, where the tiny seeds were clustered.

Joey spat out the grass. “Oh. Right. So, not like a cow. Like a
bird
.”

“Like a bird,” I confirmed.

“It’s actually not bad,” said Miranda, trying some. “Sort of like sand. But in a good way.”

“
Vegetarians
,” muttered Joey, sliding her a suspicious look.

“Hey, I think there’s some more over here,” said Sam. He was several yards away in a thicket, and he waved. “Yeah, I see it— What the—!?”

“Sam!” I ran toward him, but before I could get three steps, a young bull elephant burst out of the bushes, headed straight for Sam. I read the signs in a heartbeat: ears pinned back, trunk curled inward. This wasn’t a mock charge.

“Tree!” I yelled. “Quick! Climb!” There was no time for full sentences.

He made for the closest one, and I grabbed my hair in my hands and yelped, “Not
that
one!”

But it was too late. He scrambled up three branches before he realized his mistake. His yowls of pain made me wince in sympathy. The elephant reached the tree a second later, and to my horror, it didn’t stop. It rammed its head into the trunk and threw its weight forward. With a loud series of cracks and pops, the tree began to tip, with Sam clinging desperately to its branches.

Joey, Avani, Miranda, and Kase had all scurried up trees, but they’d had the fortune of
not
choosing the wait-a-bit tree that Sam had found. There was no plant in the Kalahari as notorious as that one. You only had to brush against it, and it would grab you with its thorny branches that put all other thorns in the world to shame. Extricating yourself from a wait-a-bit tree required surgical precision and patience—hence the name.

But the greater danger was definitely the fifteen thousand pounds of angry elephant intent on trampling Sam. If I didn’t do something fast, the tree would fall and Sam would be flattened by those massive gray feet.

“Hey!” I shouted, waving my arms and advancing toward the animal. “Hey, big guy! What do you want him for, huh? What’d he ever do to you? Gosh, you’re a big fella.” Keeping up a stream of chatter, I managed to get the elephant to turn its head my way. His ears lifted as he studied me, and then he lifted his trunk into the air and trumpeted.

“Oh, is that right? You don’t say.” Keeping my hands spread wide, I moved in a direction that would lead the elephant away from the tree. “What are you doing out here, anyway? All by yourself? The girls are all up north, dummy. You’re not supposed to be here. Sam?” Without changing my cajoling tone or averting my eyes from the elephant’s, I addressed him: “Don’t try to climb down. Stay in that tree! I know what I’m doing.”

He stayed put, looking chastened, while I turned the elephant around. The animal was watching me warily, his trunk searching the air like a fat, gray snake. He trumpeted again and took a threatening step forward. Every muscle in my body was tensed, ready to react. I tried not to look at his long, white tusks, sharp enough to gore me.

I now had the elephant’s full attention. All I had to do was figure out how to chase it away before it saw the others, up in their trees off to my left like a troop of alarmed monkeys. But at that moment, the elephant shot forward in a burst of speed—it was charging me.

I looked around, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach a good tree in time. So I spread my feet and my hands to make myself seem as large as possible and began shouting at the elephant, meeting him eye to eye. The ground underneath me shook from his heavy steps and the sun flashed off those wicked tusks, but I didn’t move an inch.

I could barely hear the others all screaming my name over the roar of the elephant and the rush of my heartbeat in my ears. The world shrank away until all I could see was a gray blur thundering down on me like a tsunami, and I had never felt so small, so insubstantial, a pebble dropped into a rushing river. I braced myself, prepared to be swept away.

But at the last moment, when he was just a few feet away, the elephant veered. He trampled past me, so close that the coarse bristles on the end of his tale brushed my shoulder.

Away he ran, noisy as a freight train, and though he disappeared in moments into the bush, I could still hear him trumpeting his frustration to the sky, and a minute later, a loud crack as he pushed over a tree.

I shut my eyes and let out a long breath. When I opened my eyes again, the others had all gathered around me, talking excitedly, laughing, swearing, patting my back.

“No big deal,” I said, but my voice was shaking. “Happens more than you’d think. How is Sam?”

We found him still stuck in the tree, which was leaning at a crazy angle after being partially uprooted by the elephant. The thorns had him securely trapped deep in the branches. It took a good half hour to extricate him from the tree, and Kase and I also got stuck in the process.

At last, when we were all free of the wait-a-bit tree, we collapsed onto the ground, panting with thirst. But my spirits had risen like a leaf gathered up by a warm breeze.

Because where there are elephants, there must also be water.

T
ake your shirt off,” I said to Sam.

He tried, sucking air through his teeth when the cloth rubbed the lacerations on his chest. The cuts from the thorns were nasty enough, but worse was the deep cut across his ribs where a branch had gouged him when the elephant had rammed into the tree.

“Oh, here.” I gently eased his shirt over his chest and he lifted his arms to let me tug it off. I tried not to stare at his smooth bared skin, but it was hard given that I had to clean the cuts.

“Last thing you need is an infection,” I murmured as I inspected his chest and torso. “And the thorns on that tree were no joke.”

Avani appeared with a handful of leaves from the shepherd’s tree, which was pretty much the only thing out here that kept its foliage through winter. I used them to wipe the blood from the wounds, my fingers strangely clumsy and my ears burning. Sam made a gargled noise in his throat and winced up at the sky.

“Ouch,” said Avani, squinting at the cuts. “Some of them are pretty deep. We need antiseptic.”

“See that bush over there?” I pointed.

Avani nodded. “
Ximenia
, yeah.”

Of course she knew the name of it. “The berries are mostly dried up, but there should be some seeds still in them. Look in the center of the bush, where the animals can’t reach to eat them.”

She gave me a skeptical look. “They’re an antiseptic?”

“No, but they’ll help the skin heal faster.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” said Sam, waving his hand in dismissal and pulling on the injured skin around his ribs. He winced and sucked in sharply.

“Sure you are,” I said.

Avani hurried off to gather the seeds. I glanced over my shoulder to check on the others, and to be sure our elephant wasn’t lurking around, waiting to charge again. Kase, Miranda, and Joey were standing glumly in the shade, nibbling crowfoot grass and talking.

“At this rate,” I observed, “it’ll take
two
weeks to reach Ghansi.”

“Sorry. If I’d seen the elephant—”

“Don’t,” I said. “It’s all right. Happens to the best of us. Porcupine, remember? Anyway, nothing you did could have stopped him from charging. The younger males are always wild with testosterone. They spend most of their time knocking trees over in fits of anger. It’s all that . . . uh . . . sexual frustration. You know. Because they haven’t found a female.” I’d descended into an embarrassed mutter.

Sam laughed. “I know a couple guys like that, back home.”

“Yeah, well. That’s elephants for you.”

My eyes settled on the dog tags that hung between his pectoral muscles—which were, I couldn’t help but notice, remarkably firm and defined. Pretty much like the rest of him. My eyes trailed down to his abdomen, the tight muscles beneath smooth skin. . . .
Focus, Sarah.
I snapped my eyes back to the dog tags, safer territory that didn’t send fiery tendrils curling across my skin. His brother’s name was stamped onto the tags, along with a line of numbers and medical information.

“Do you remember what he looks like?” I asked in a low voice, so soft I barely heard it myself.

Sam frowned, then his hand went to the tags. “Sort of. I mean, I have pictures. But it’s different.”

“Yeah. I know.” I brushed away some sand from around one of his cuts. His skin tightened at my touch.

“Your mom?”

“I’m starting to forget. I think that’s the worst part. I try not to. I try to picture her face every night before I go to sleep, but it gets fuzzier each time. I look at photos, but it’s not her. The more I . . . forget, the more it hurts.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this to him; I couldn’t even talk to my dad about her. But I felt like I could spill all of my thoughts to Sam and he’d understand, and the weirdest part was that I
wanted
to. “When I heard her voice on the recorder, I realized I’d even forgotten what she sounded like.”

“The pain does fade, Sarah.”

I looked up at him. His eyes were gentle and unwavering. “Does it?”

“It doesn’t go away, but one day you wake up and find it’s a part of you.”

I nodded.

“I felt guilty at first,” he added. “I thought it wasn’t fair to him if I, I don’t know, got better. Like the only way I could honor his memory was by torturing myself. Not letting go.”

I scrunched my eyebrows together, feeling as if he were reading my thoughts. I hadn’t even known I’d felt the same way until he spoke it.

Suddenly, his fingers brushed my temple as he tucked my hair behind my ear. It was a tentative gesture, as if he was afraid I’d pull away. But then his fingers lingered on my hair. My thoughts went a bit fuzzy, and I tilted my head slightly, leaning into his touch. “They’d want the opposite, I think. More smiles about the time we had, instead of tears about the times we didn’t have.”

I gave him a smile that fell away as quickly as it had come. “That’s pretty deep.”

He laughed. “I stole it from my school counselor.”

Avani returned with a handful of seeds, and Sam yanked his hand away, coughing, while I blushed furiously. I took the seeds from her and crushed them between my palms. I squeezed some juice from the bit of
bi
root I had left into my hand and mixed it with the seeds to create a poultice. Avani watched closely as I spread it over the deeper cuts on Sam’s chest.

“Feel better?” I asked Sam.

“Yes, actually,” he said, looking down at his torso with his brows raised. “Feels better already. Okay. Let’s go.”

“He still needs antiseptic,” Avani muttered to me.

I sighed. “We’ll be in Ghansi soon. He’ll just have to make it till then.”

“Ladies. I’m
fine
,” said Sam.

“Mm-hm,” said Avani, her hands on her hips. “You be sure and tell me that when you wake up in the middle of the night and pus is leaking out of your stomach and your skin’s turning green.”

He looked a bit taken aback and studied his middle more closely.

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “At least for a little while.”

“Or we could cauterize it,” said Avani, her face lighting up.

“Cauterize?” Sam echoed, looking slightly panicked. “Like, with
fire
?”

“Yes!” She grinned even wider. “I’ve read how to do it. I definitely could.”

“I should’ve let the sexually frustrated elephant rip my guts out,” Sam muttered. “At least it had the decency not to
smile
while it contemplated my murder.”

Avani rolled her eyes. “Sam, you gonna put your shirt back on? Before Sarah here starts to hyperventilate?”

Looking thoroughly chastened, Sam shrugged his shirt on. I hissed at Avani through the corner of my mouth as he walked away. “Hyperventilate?”

She shrugged and inspected her nails. “You were studying him like you were prepping for an anatomy exam.”

“I was not!”

She gave me a patronizing look. “Whatever, girl. Can’t say I blame you. Personally, I’d also prefer to have him walk around with his shirt off.”

I sucked at my teeth. “It’s not like that. . . .”

“Come on, you guys are always whispering, always rushing to save each other. Anyway, it’s not like it has to mean anything. Soon we’ll all go our separate ways and that will be that.”

I turned to face her full-on. “How can you possibly think that
at a time like this?”

She looked thoughtful. “I actually think there should be a name for it. Some scientific term that describes the crazy that people get when they’re in mortal danger. You know, like in apocalypse stories—everyone’s biggest wish is to get with someone before the asteroid strikes or the aliens blow us up, or whatever. Or how people will confess all their secrets right before they’re shot or hanged. Maybe it’s the adrenaline. I should research it when I get home.”

She must have realized I was staring at her, because she finally broke off and shrugged guiltily. “What? So I do research for fun. You should understand, right? Of all people?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“What it is then?”

“There’s a scorpion in your hair.
Parabuthus
granulatus
,
to be exact.” I thought she’d appreciate the specificity. “Don’t move. I’ll get it.”

But she ignored me and went berserk, batting at her hair and dancing in a circle, screaming.

“Avani! Stop!”

At once, the others jumped up and ran over, asking what was wrong.

“It’s the most venomous scorpion in the Kalahari!” she yelled.

“I know!” I yelled back. “That’s why frightening it is a
bad idea
. It’ll sting you!”

She went still and I quickly flicked the scorpion with a twig. Avani had only driven it deeper into her wild curls, and it took several tries to get it out; it stabbed the twig once, and I was infinitely glad that I hadn’t used my finger. I’d been stung by this little beast twice, and both times had left me sick and in pain for days, and that was
with
the antivenom, which we always kept stocked.

The scorpion landed harmlessly in the grass and disappeared in seconds, probably gone to its burrow to recuperate after its terrifying ordeal.

“Okay,” I said, maybe too brightly, “so this was a great stop. Very productive. Let’s get going.”

This time, no one complained about walking again. They all seemed eager to outpace the elephants and scorpions, and I didn’t point out that there were likely just as many ahead of us as there were behind us. One good thing might still come out of the encounter: the elephant’s tracks, which had come from the west, could very well lead us to a water source. I didn’t voice this to the others, in case it turned out to be a false trail, but my spirit stubbornly clung to the hope. We needed water, and badly. I could feel myself drying out like a dead leaf, shriveling beneath the sun. The others were no better, and their chapped, dry skin and cracked lips were, like mine, only minor outward signs of the more dire inward symptoms. If we didn’t find water before tomorrow, the Kalahari would kill us as efficiently as one of Abramo’s bullets. The elephant’s trail was my only lead and perhaps our last hope. Mercifully, there are few tracks as enormous and obvious as an elephant’s.

The whole incident had been like a splash of icy water, yanking me out of the stupor Mom’s recording had left me in. There was nothing I could do about Mom now, but there was plenty I could do to keep us alive out here. I promised myself that I’d focus on the present. Another lapse like that, and next time I might not see the danger in time and someone could end up hurt or killed. We couldn’t afford for me to wallow in regret, not now.

The day was, like every winter afternoon in Botswana, brilliant and blue. No clouds, a soft breeze, temperatures as balmy as a Tahitian beach. The weather out here was weirdly coastal, even though the country was landlocked.

People often talked about the Kalahari as a place of physical and emotional healing, and on a beautiful day like this, I could easily see why. It angered me that Abramo and his people had invaded this sacred place, first to exploit it and then to poison it. I felt the same prickling heat that always rose in my dad’s face at the mention of poachers.

I had to do something. Had to get help, had to find Dad, had to warn the authorities about the Metalcium—all of it. This was more than just personal now. What I’d seen in that menagerie had frightened me not only because it threatened my life but because it threatened the entire planet.

My wandering thoughts must have been partly due to my overwhelming thirst, because I can’t explain how else I didn’t notice the helicopter until it was nearly on top of us.