Norman Rush - Mating

I laid out what was left. I thought we would survive if Tsau was where I estimated it to be. Food for me was more than adequate, especially now that I was so anorectic. Water was the dilemma. I had two plastic five-gallon jerricans, one empty and one a third full of water that was reserved for Baph. I had two canteens, one full. There were enough oats for two skimpy feedings for Baph. If we got there, he would arrive hungry.

I had started a new journal, in a separate notebook, in Kang. That was gone. This meant I had no sure fix on the date. I hadn’t paid attention to the date on the page I had written my farewell-to-Kang entry on. But all my Tswapong and Gaborone journals were safe.

A perfect index of the shape I was in was my reaction to losing my mirror. All my toilet articles had gone with Mmo. I couldn’t stand it. It felt like I had lost my left hand. I would have traded my first aid kit for my mirror and my comb. It was irrational. How could I look at myself, check myself, before I got to Tsau? I would need to look at myself. It was urgent because I knew that through fear and exertion, weight was dropping off me. I was certain I was in ketosis, since I was living on protein and water — pilchards and water, tuna and water, ghastly Vienna sausages and water. When I lose weight rapidly it shows first in my face, then go breasts, hips, middle. This was why I needed a mirror. I felt stabbed in the back by life, by my foul luck. Now I was supposed to present myself to Denoon with only the vaguest notion of how I looked, and uncombed. I was wild. I thought of trying to devise a comb out of the nails in the sand.

So I lit the fire. It was a spectacle.

Baph was exhausted, clearly, because he got down on his knees as soon as we stopped. I slept half on top of him, or half slept, after pulling a tarp over us both.

April nights in the Kalahari are cold, but we were hot. I got up three times to renew my paean to heat, light, and destruction. I burned everything. Even as day fell I threw more into the display.

The Well

The day began with the ordeal of fishing up water for us.

This was by the spoonful, almost.

The casing the ox pump shaft went down into was about eight inches across. There was a clearance of at most three inches between the shaft housing and the casing wall once I had battered and levered the shaft over as far as I could through brute force. My canteen was too fat to slide through the gap. I was stymied. I needed a thing, ideally, like a bayonet case that I could reel down to get water by increments.

What I did was pound, crush, and crimp my canteen cup into a travesty of itself, beating the side in and folding the bottom up over it and praying to god I wouldn’t pierce or break it. It was thinner than a pack of cigarettes when I was done with it, and it would hold about half a cup of water. I had dropped a ten thebe piece down the shaft and concluded that the water was forty or fifty feet down. I had a hundred feet of nylon cord. I made two holes in the rim to thread the cord through.

On my first try, the cup, crushed and compressed as it was, seemed to take a long time to immerse, even though I jiggled the line vigorously once it was in the water to tip it. So before the next descent I attached a sinker made of odd bits and pieces of iron fitments I scavenged from the area, and then we were all right.

It took hours to fish up enough water to fill all my vessels. I had to be in an excruciating position to do it. My knees and back were agonized. Whoever said he had measured out his life in coffee spoons was talking about me that day.

I made Baph slake himself before we left. That was difficult because I discovered a rent in the collapsible canvas bucket he very much preferred to drink from, which meant holding the rent pinched closed while he took his time, which could be done only by my assuming a position specially created to torture my already excruciated back. Finally we could go.

Walking erect was bliss for a while.

A Nadir

What transpired next survives in my mind as a medley, more or less. I was beyond writing things down. I may have had two identical days or I may have imagined one of them.

We went until late. When we stopped I had the strength for only one small fire, so we slept between it and a termite mound, which I thought I had heard lions disliked. I slept tied to Baph, as per usual. He was becoming very acclimated to fires, I observed. This time he stood all night. I remember this night scene, with the firelight flickering on the termite mound, happening twice, which is not possible.

In the morning I woke up with two songs I had forgotten I knew fresh in my consciousness — The Old Triangle, three verses, and Where Have All the Flowers Gone, all verses. They were both good trek songs.

The terrain was harder. We had to negotiate a sequence of lines of small dunes running straight north-south. The interdune valleys were gravelly, with occasional tracks of metallic-looking grasses growing in tufts. Now that we were regularly going uphill I had to pull Baph, whereas before he had been willing to go up or down anything with alacrity. My lips were puffing up because one thing I had kept in my toilet kit instead of my first aid kit was the zinc oxide. This brought on another, but weaker, episode of mirror anguish.

After the dunes the flatlands resumed, stretching away into the glare. Where was Tsau? Tsau should appear. It was built around and halfway up a substantial green koppie three hundred feet high and noted for its conicality. At the least I should be able to see the line of low red hills Tsau lay just eight miles beyond, or the sand river that cut through them and swung close to the base of the Tsau koppie.

East of us the ground was gray and yellow, mottled, with patches of thick shoulder-high brush we preferred to circumnavigate. To our north there had been fires recently. We began to encounter charred brush and prongs of black, burnt ground. The sky was a burning white, like the inside of an abalone shell.

Naturally when a windstorm came it would be from the north, plain grit and sand not being annoying enough for us: we would have to have ash and smuts too. Baph noticed that it was coming before I did, at least this is how I interpret his sitting down, like a person, on his rump. There was a dark blur to the north, moving. I could make out dust devils here and there. I put my back to the oncoming blur and hugged Baph’s head in an attempt to shield his muzzle. The blast reached us.

Fortunately it was brief, if stinging. I tried, when I was brushing myself off, to be fastidious and flick away the dots and particles of ash on my clothes lest I mash them and make myself look camouflaged. But it was unavoidable. I brushed Baph off and dabbed his eyes clean. They seemed to be discharging. In fact he looked unwell. It was no surprise that he refused to move when I pulled on him to come. I didn’t persist. This was serious. After one more bout of pulling as hard as I could made not the slightest difference I sat down with him.

This was my lowest ebb. Baph had to get up. I couldn’t carry the water cans.

I had to remobilize. Venting was no use. I need a bath, I shouted, and Never do this again, but it was pro forma.

Then I impressed on myself that if I died there, no one in his right mind would regard it as a tragedy. I would be in the category of an aerialist falling to her death. Or I would be entitled to the species of commiseration people get who show up at parties on crutches but who got injured skiing at Gstaad or some other upper-middleclass earthly paradise. It would be sad but not that sad.

Enfin I made Baph get up by stabbing, or rather stabbing at, his hindquarters with a ballpoint pen — not drawing blood, but stabbing harder than I would ever have credited myself with being able to do. I still flinch at myself.