Melissa Haynes - Learning to Play with a Lion's Testicles

There, lying perfectly camouflaged, with only his yellow eyes and fang-lined jaws visible, is a king crocodile. My knees instantly turn to jelly, and my stomach hardens into a tight ball. Melanie’s mouth drops at the same time her pen hits the ground. Had I taken my usual approach of running and jumping into the water, I would already be in the death roll embrace of a crocodile.

Gerrit’s face turns deeper purple with every word he shouts. “You watch too much TV in America, you think a safari is romantic. People die every single day and it’s people like me who die trying to save intolerable people like you. You come here under the premise of ‘volunteering,’ but you just end up wasting my time because I am the one who has to save your ass from your own stupidity!”

“Save my ass? Save my ass? Are you kidding me?” The words squeeze out through gritted teeth, and I can feel the blood pulsing in my temples. Granted, wading in a mud pit in Africa may not have been the wisest move, but had he actually shown up on time, I wouldn’t have gone in the pit in the first place. Jerk.

“If I was in my right mind I would strip my mood on you!”

“ Strip my mood? What the hell does that mean?” I demanded. Obviously, he is a lunatic.

“It means you’re an ignorant city woman who couldn’t survive a day in the bush if your life depended on it. I’ve had it with people like you coming here wasting my time, my resources, and most of all, my patience. You think you can play with a lion’s testicles with no recourse.” The words shoot out of his mouth like nails from a nail gun.

“Play with a lion’s testicles? What kind of a sick pervert are you?” It is no longer a hunch he is crazy, it’s confirmed. “And hold on a minute. Melanie and I were almost killed last night because of you! ”

“What are you babbling about, woman?”

“There was a wild animal in our camp. I think it was a lion, but it may have been a rhinoceros, it was hard to distinguish but it was here and it tried to kill us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, if a lion wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.”

“Well, something was there, and you left us alone and defenseless. We didn’t even have a weapon to protect ourselves. We’re lucky to be alive, no thanks to you. It was my own survival kit that saved us!”

“What survival kit?” Melanie asks with a small squeak.

Up until now she had been speechless, instead watching the crocodile for any sudden movement. I hadn’t told her about the brownies I had to discard outside our tents, and I wasn’t about to now.

Gerrit stomps off towards our tents. When he gets there he begins poking at the ground, picking up blades of grass and tossing them aside. “It appears your lion is very rare indeed,” he finally says.

“My God! A lion! It was a lion in our camp?” Melanie gasps, “I cannot spend another night here, I want to go to Cape Town today.” Her face is ghostly white, and she looks as though she may pass out.

“I knew it!” I yelled, shaking a muddy finger in his face. “I can’t believe we’re still alive. This is your fault for leaving us alone without a weapon. It’s by the sheer grace of God and our survival skills that we’re alive today.” I put my hands on my hips, squaring off for a verbal duel. “So what was it? A rare, gigantic, man-eating lion?”

“NO!” His teeth are clenched so tightly his jaw muscles are pulsing. “Your lion is rare because it is the only lion in the world that has quills!” He holds up a long, sharp quill as evidence.

“Quills?” I lean forward for a closer look.

“Yes, quills. Your lion was not a lion at all. It was a porcupine, a scavenger, an African rat. You had food in your tent, didn’t you?” His eyes pierce through me as he throws the quill past me, narrowly missing me.

“Of course not.” Defiance conceals my guilt.

“Well, they only come in here if they smell food, so unless someone else laced your camp with food, it had to have been you.”

“So maybe it wasn’t a lion, but we could just as easily have been shot by that porcupine. Stabbed in the eye, blinded for life. I’ve read of that happening to people.”

“Porcupines don’t shoot their quills. They back into their enemy and poke them.”

“Well, we could have been injured if the porcupine did that.”

“It would only back into you if you were chasing it. Would you chase a two-hundred pound African porcupine in the middle of the night?”

A red flush creeps across my cheeks. Looking away, I pull my hair forward over my reddening ears. Leaping into that mud pit with a waiting croc would be less painful than this. I quickly change the subject. “Anyway, Melanie and I are bored. We want to do something, can we at least go for a walk?”

“No. You can’t leave the camp. You won’t last five minutes out there before something eats you.”

We’ll die of boredom if we have to spend another minute in this tent camp. “Can we work today? We want to do something. Anything. “

“It’s Sunday, no one works on Sundays in Africa.”

“What are we supposed to do, then?”

“Relax, take the day off. We’ll get that croc moved and maybe later we’ll take Melanie on a game drive because she’s leaving tomorrow morning.”

“And me, too?”

“Yes, it would probably be best if you left tomorrow morning as well. You haven’t even started work and you’ve already disrupted the camp.”

“I meant the game drive. Can I go on the game drive, too?”

He sighed heavily. “As long as you stay in your seat, away from the wildlife… and me.”

Ranger Gerrit pulls up to the tent camp in a rickety old white pick-up truck. The white paint is sparse and the carriage appears to lean to the left under the weight of a broken axle. It doesn’t look anything like the safari game drive vehicles one may expect to see on a game reserve. It looks like something that belongs in a scrap yard.

I step inside, careful where I place my feet, since rust has eaten through most of the floor, leaving behind gaping holes the size of apples. There are no handles for the windows, so they are permanently half-open, rain or shine. The door doesn’t close properly, either, and it takes several attempts before it stays partially shut. Melanie takes special care not to lean against the door, since it will open under the slightest pressure. Predictably, there is no stereo, just basic functions on the dashboard, which Gerrit says not to touch because none of them work. Satisfied, he has given us a proper introduction to this piece of twisted scrap metal that we’re stuffed into like sardines, he chirps out a “Right, let’s go.”

We are beyond underwhelmed, and even he can sense it.

“This is Harrison,” he says with obvious affection.

“It has a name?” It’s hard to believe he can conjure up affection for anything, let alone this ugly and worthless hunk of junk.

“Yes, I just told you, we call him Harrison.”

“Why Harrison?”

“You will soon learn why,” he chuckles. “And don’t let looks deceive you, Harrison is a mighty warrior.”

With that he pulls the stick into reverse and, with a loud huuccccckkkk, Harrison rolls backwards. He shifts into first and again, Harrison coughs a long huuuccckkkk. Melanie and I cringe and cover our ears. How can it be possible that this rusty hulk sounds worse than it looks? “Is Harrison going to make it?”

“Harrison is a champion,” he answers confidently while accelerating towards the gate.

The electric gate slowly opens, revealing more of the reserve with each inch. We have not yet explored the reserve, being bound by the tent camp and common area up until now. Finally, the gate opens fully and we chug forward around a slight bend in the pitted road.