Mackenzie Ford - The Clouds Beneath the Sun

Daniel and Aldwai got into one vehicle and led the way out of the camp. Jack and Natalie got into the second, with Christopher and one of the other guards in a third. They drove on to the rough dirt road outside the camp and headed north, which took them down into the gorge and then up the other side. It was coming on to dusk and when Natalie went to speak Jack held up his hand.

“Not just yet. This track is tricky at night, or dusk. Wait till we get through the gorge. It’s flatter on the plain.”

Jack didn’t drive too close to Daniel, not wanting him to be blinded by headlights glaring in his rearview mirror.

They rocked over stones and gullies, slowing every so often so as not to put too much strain on the axles. Jack engaged the low four-wheel drive to ascend the far steep side of the gorge. When they got to the lip and looked on to the plain, Daniel’s Land Rover was already a hundred yards in front.

“Now,” said Jack, as the terrain became flatter and smoother and softer, “you remember that long line of wildebeest that we saw from the plane the other day, when I was giving Christopher a lesson?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “One of the great mysteries of the wildebeest migration is that, although it has been going on for—oh, tens of thousands of years, if not more—every so often the animals choose to cross rivers that are, at the point where they make the crossing, literally impassable. Deep, swift running, steep sided. No one knows why, no one knows why they haven’t evolved the skill to choose safe crossing places, but every so often a catastrophe occurs. Sometimes ten years pass without anything happening, but when it does, when it does, thousands —thousands —die. That’s what’s happened now. We try to save as many as we can.”

Natalie let this sink in. Around them the landscape was indistinct, the darkness descending.

“How far is it?”

“Olpunyata? About an hour and a half.”

Natalie turned in her seat. Christopher’s Land Rover was about a hundred yards behind.

“Aren’t wildebeest kind of big? Big and fierce—dangerous, I mean. What can we do?”

He squeezed her knee. “Yes, wildebeest are huge, savage creatures, with long, curling horns. We can do a number of things, none of them very effective but better than nothing.”

He swerved to avoid a termite mound that suddenly loomed into view.

“People will be converging on Olpunyata from all over the area, just as we are, in their four-wheel drives. Some of us will drive between the animals, try to divert wildebeest who haven’t reached the river to try to make them cross someplace else, somewhere safer. Then, together, we will shine our headlights on that stretch of the river where they are floundering. That will help at least some of the wildebeest find their way out of the ravine, and it will keep predators—crocodiles, lions, hyenas—away. Obviously, in such a catastrophe, such a panic, with wildebeest thrashing about in the water, drowning and being knocked about by the others, they are sitting targets for predators.”

He changed gear and drove a little faster, closing the distance between them and Daniel.

“The third thing is to lasso the young. Normally, wildebeest don’t calve until January, but as it’s now mid-December some of them will already have produced their young early. They are not so heavy, or anywhere near as fierce, and their horns aren’t formed, so a couple of men can usually haul them to safety. Sometimes they get separated from their mothers but we can’t help that and it’s better than dying.”

Natalie looked about her. It was too early for the moon and she could make out almost nothing at all, except the flatness of the plain.

“If it takes two men to pull out even a baby wildebeest, why am I here? Won’t I just be in the way?”

He grunted as a family of birds, caught in the Land Rover’s headlights, hurried out of harm’s way. “Three reasons. We’re going to be here all night and well into the morning. Daniel’s loaded a primus stove and some tins of soup. We’ll all need a break from time to time. Also—” he changed down, to negotiate a deep rut in the track, “it’s quite a sight, all these animals thrashing about in the water. I thought you’d like to see it.”

She nodded. “And the third reason?”

He changed up again, and accelerated. “Don’t let this go to your head, Dr. Nelson, but I like having you around.”

“Is there any of that soup left?”

“There’s plenty—and it’s piping hot. Let me get you a mug.” Natalie reached into the back of the Land Rover and took an enamel mug from a cardboard box. She took it to the primus stove and poured the tomato soup into the mug.

“Here you are,” she said softly, handing the mug across.

Daniel looked exhausted, she thought.

It was an hour off dawn, almost four-thirty, and they were all dirt tired.

What a night it had been.

Some two dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles were drawn up, on either side of the Mara River at Olpunyata. All had their headlights full on, and some had game lights fixed to their roofs as well, beaming across the river.

When Natalie had first seen the heaving mass of bodies, the wet, black-brown torsos, writhing and flailing, sinking and reemerging in the water, screaming, squealing, roaring into the night, the white flashes of their distended eyeballs, their horns piercing the flanks of their neighbors, their glistening hooves sinking down the steep riverbank as each plunged headfirst after the creature that had gone before, she thought she had never seen anything so awesome, so terrible, so final, so catastrophic . It was like a scene from one of those huge Victorian paintings about the damned in hell.

Between them, Daniel and Jack and Christopher, too, with Aldwai’s help, had managed to lasso perhaps a dozen young wildebeest and haul them to safety. It was plain, to Natalie at least, that the poor creatures didn’t want to be helped, and though she couldn’t be sure, because outside the range of the headlights it was deadly dark, she suspected that more than one young wildebeest, once released from its rope, had plunged back into the river all over again.

She had found a flat stone, between two vehicles, where she could light the primus and warm the soup. Daniel had packed a dozen mugs, so she had been able to help men from other locations who had answered the call that had gone out on the radio-telephone.

She was standing now, a mug of soup in her own hand, looking down over the lip of the riverbank. She supposed their presence was having some effect, but the shapeless, writhing mass of contorted bodies below her seemed as dense and as demented as when they had arrived. The shrieks and squeals and yowling had not ceased. The stench was as bad as ever.

Jack and another man were jointly holding the same rope, which was looped around the neck of—as Natalie could now see—a wildebeest that, though not a fully grown adult, was on the large size for a newborn infant. Even by the light of the Land Rover headlights it was difficult to make out the age of the creatures in the mayhem of the river.

Jack and the other man were winning, sort of. Both were lathered in mud, and they were edging back onto the flat ground at the top of the riverbank. But the animal didn’t want to be helped, and writhed and thrashed, pulling them back towards the river. And this one had horns.

The two men heaved, and heaved again, and were back on level ground.

Suddenly Jack took the end of the rope which he had wrapped around his lower back and threaded it into a metal hook on the front of the Land Rover. He tied it in a double knot.

“Good idea,” shouted the other man.