James Patterson: Zoo

Abe spent about ten minutes bellowing like a bull at the two of them in a language I soon learned was Setswana. In the end, Abraham, his face sweaty, red, and puffy with heat, fished around in the pouches of his utility vest and handed the guy at the desk a folded wad of bills. The man thumbed through them with hands that were still sticky from the meat he’d been eating, seemed satisfied, and directed us outside with a Mafia tough’s chin jerk that he’d probably learned from American movies.

We walked outside and down a lane between two rows of small bush planes. Abe threw open the door of a rust-flaked red-and-white Piper Super Cub that had cartoonishly oversize tundra tires and squeezed my bags behind the seats.

“Wait here, man,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Abe went back into the hangar. When he returned a moment later, he was coming from the other end of the airport, riding in a battered Range Rover. Two dogs, sleek red-brown Rhodesian ridgebacks, tumbled out when he opened his door. They hopped into the plane as though they’d done so plenty of times before. Then Abe heaved two large gun cases from the truck and packed them into the plane as well.

He caught me looking at the guns.

“Better to have and not need than need and not have, right, man?” he said, giving my cheek an avuncular pinch.

Soon my ears were nestled in squishy radio headphones and we were taxiing onto the runway. On the other side of the airport’s dusty service road, I spotted a fenced field that had stones and strange striped tents in it.

“What’s that, Abe?” I shouted over the gathering roar of propeller chop, pointing.

“That’s a graveyard,” Abe shouted back. He opened the plane’s throttle and we began bouncing down the tarmac.

“So many dead from AIDS around here, they cannot dig fast enough. So they pile the coffins under tents. What’s the American joke about cemeteries?”

“People are dying to get in?” I offered.

“Right, man. That’s the one.” Abe gave me a sardonic smile. His teeth were jumbly-crooked and tobacco-stained. He pulled back the throttle and our tiny plane left terra firma. “Welcome to Africa, man.”

EVEN WITH MY jet lag, the claustrophobic confinement of the plane, and a dog panting fragrantly in each ear, that thirty-minute plane ride was the most exhilarating of my life.

Flying over the Okavango Delta was like going back in time. I half expected to see dinosaurs walking around below us. There wasn’t a single building, not a house or even a rondavel, on the endless brown plain rippling along beneath us. I watched the shadow of the aircraft glide over white islands dotted between clear blue ribbons of water. On them were palm trees and giant lumps of earth that Abe told me were termite mounds.

Now that it was July—one of the winter months, Abe explained—the delta dried up and swelled to three times its normal size, attracting one of the greatest concentrations of wildlife on the planet. We flew over hippos, hyenas, a herd of massive Cape buffalo, horned and black, which Abe told me were considered by some professional hunters to be more dangerous than lions. There were river birds, seemingly in the millions, scattering from the dry marshes at the sound of our plane. The first humans we saw were a couple of African fishermen in a hand-cut dugout. Who needs the Discovery Channel? I thought.

“This is it,” Abe said a few minutes later, his voice crackling over my headphones. We lowered our speed and altitude as we banked down toward some thatched roofs beside the faint white scar of an airstrip. I was expecting the landing to be as bumpy as the takeoff, so I was surprised when Abe laid the Piper down as smooth as silk. I pulled off my headphones, and in the wake of the noise, the silence was almost ghostly. My ears rang a bit.

“That is funny,” Abe said as we climbed out of the plane and into the heat. “Not funny ha-ha.”

“What?” I said.

“The staff—when they see a plane landing, they are usually waiting here, clapping, singing their silly folk songs and holding a stiff drink and a hot towel. I do not see or hear anything. Do you? Not even any animals.”

He was right. The only sound was the thrumming drone of insects under the glaring sky. The thatch-roofed buildings in the distance, which we could see at the end of a dusty path lined with brittle brown reeds and papyrus, all seemed empty, deserted. A silvery band of light shimmered on the horizon, vague, shaking with heat.

Abe whistled and the two sleek red dogs broke into a trot, scouting ahead, heads scanning, their sense of smell going into overdrive. The camp we followed them into was as bustling as a graveyard. We searched all six platform tents, along with the dining area. We found clothes, luggage, safari gear, tourist stuff—pith helmets and khaki utility vests—open portmanteaus spewing socks and underwear onto unmade beds. But no tourists and no staff.

There was what looked like a shipping container—a giant red box of corrugated metal—behind the kitchen. Alongside it we found a Land Rover with two extra rows of raised seats to accommodate wildlife watchers.

Abe half coughed and half cursed in a language I didn’t recognize. He spat a jet of shit-brown tobacco juice into the grass and wiped his mouth with his shirt.

“Two of the trucks are missing. Besides the guides, there are another half dozen maids and cooks. This is very strange, Oz. Where the devil is everyone? Where’s my little brother? I have a bad feeling.”

Abe put his fingers to his lips and pierced the air with a whistle, and the dogs came running. He hopped into the Rover, found the keys, and started the engine. After we drove back to the plane and retrieved his rifles, we drove north from the camp over a badly rutted car path. Pebbles popped and crunched under the tires, and the car rattled and shuddered over the washboard-like waves in the road. When the car path petered out, we hit an even bumpier field of tall dry grass. Around a stand of ebony trees, some baby hyenas were wading in the shallow river water, fat gloves of reeking mud on their paws. I couldn’t help but gawk as though I were on safari, but if Abe noticed them or the family of giraffes drinking in the shallows a hundred feet south of them downriver, he didn’t say anything.

We were steering around a stand of fig trees when we finally saw people. A group of Africans stood milling around by a dock at the river’s edge. It was two men and a pudgy boy, all in chef’s whites, and they were preparing to get into some dugouts. Abe pulled hard on the wheel, piloted the Rover over to the men, and brought it to a jerky stop. He shouted something quick at them in Setswana. The men yelled something back. They seemed to be arguing. The conversation took a few minutes. At the end of it, the three kitchen workers reluctantly got out of the canoe and climbed into the back of the car. I turned around and looked at them. Their faces were stolid and blank, hard to read. They didn’t acknowledge me.

“What’s the story?” I said to Abe as we pulled away. Abe tucked another pinch of tobacco into his cheek.

“It’s worse than I thought, man. Two groups went out day before yesterday—twenty people, including my brother. Haven’t heard from them since. Not only that, they said lions were actually in the camp last night. Roaming around like stray kittens, picking at scraps. These bozos back there hid themselves in the shipping container. When they woke up, the radio transmitter had been broken, smashed somehow. Just now, they were going to try to go downstream to get help.”

“Why were you arguing?”

Abe took off his straw hat and wiped sweat off his sunburned brow. Abe perspired like a leaky faucet.