Fletch, Too

“They adore him.”

“Who?”

“Carr. The women just eat him up.”

Carr was having an after-dinner beer at the lodge’s bar with the two women hôtelières they had flown up from Nairobi. Carr was sitting sideways to the bar on a stool. The two French women stood with their drinks, facing him. They laughed at everything he said.

Barbara and Fletch were drinking beer at a small table at the side of the veranda.

At the entrance to the veranda, a guard with a flashlight and rifle waited to escort the tourists to their cabins.

“Don’t you find Carr attractive?” Fletch asked.

Barbara looked around at the few remaining tourists who had not yet gone to bed.

“Every woman in the place,” Barbara said, “is just eating him up.”

After clearing trails and digging holes and finding nothing significant one more day, Barbara, Fletch, and Carr had flown to Nairobi, refueled, picked the two women up, and then flown west to the Masai Mara.

Sheila said she preferred to stay in camp and dig holes along the freshly cut trails. She promised she would find a Roman city before they returned.

There was no discussion about whether Juma would accompany them. While they were getting ready to go, he simply did not appear.

The two women hotel executives from France were très chic, très jolie. They were on a business trip, but they were also having a good time. They handed around a bottle of champagne on the airplane. Carr did not drink any.

They marveled happily flying over the Rift Valley, the Loita Hills and Plains, ecologically the Serengeti Plains. Carr flew as low as he decently, legally could, so they could all see the herds of zebras, elands, giraffes grazing. The older woman, who sat in the copilot seat, snapped photographs from the air with a little camera genuinely useless at the distance of more than three meters. She thought she was getting wonderful pictures. Their first sight of elephants from the air sent them into raptures. In fast, stuttering English they were full of questions for Carr.

The women were warmly greeted by management and immediately taken on a tour of Keekorok Lodge. Even Fletch wondered how a lodge so far in the bush could provide such impeccable food and drink, accommodations and service.

Carr organized a safari guari and driver. That night and the next day, sunrise and sunset, while the hotel executives studied the operation of the lodge, Carr, Barbara, and Fletch toured the reserve.

They were to be at the lodge only two nights, before returning to Nairobi, and then Carr’s camp.

The safari guari was a well-spirited, well-sprung, fairly quiet Nissan van, roofless so they could stand in it, the clean, bush-scented African-air wind in their faces, so they could see all sides at once from an elevation of three meters as they rode along. Carr provided binoculars for them. They learned to brace themselves against the van’s frame so they could use the binoculars reasonably well as they joggled along. They also learned from the driver, Omoke, a Kisi, a new way of looking at landscape, of surveying vast areas quickly, mathematically, with just their eyes, going over it in sideways Z’s, spotting anything moving, anything even slightly outstanding in color. Anything remarkable spotted Omoke would drive to, through the bush, quietly, drawing up and stopping at a decent, noninterfering, nonmeddling distance.

Almost immediately Omoke found for them a lion and two lionesses sprawled in the fading sunlight. The tail and the hind legs of the lion were embraced by the forelegs of one lioness; his head and one shoulder were on the shoulder of the other lioness. Their heads were up. They were looking around lazily, the light from the low sun in their eyes. The bellies of all three were so stuffed they lay on the ground almost separately, like suitcases.

Before sunrise the next morning, Omoke, who saw a landscape differently from any painter, any engineer, found a small grassy depression in the ground in the shade of a bush. Lying in the hollow, clearly exhausted, was a cheetah who, just hours before, had given birth to four.

Later that afternoon they watched this same cheetah on uncertain legs hunt, bring down and kill an eland, to feed on and to feed her young. Immediately, hyenas came and took her kill from her. They dragged it a few meters away and devoured it.

The cheetah sat, blinking in the sunlight, watching them, clearly too tired to protest, to go on, just yet, or to go back, foodless, to her young.

From the ground, even more than the beasts, the dik-diks, the zebras, Thompson’s and Grant’s gazelles, topis, tree and rock hyraxes, impalas, leopards, lions, waterbucks, elephants, giraffes, or, down by the Mara River, the vervet monkeys, patas monkeys, olive baboons, were the birds, big and small, fascinating, the marabou storks and sacred ibises, secretary birds, Egyptian vultures, black kites, peregrines, francolins, spur fowl, bustards, plovers, turacos, the white-bellied go-away birds. Omoke had a bird book which he passed around. He knew his birds, but it was fun for Barbara and Fletch to look from this amazing bird in the bush to the book to confirm that such a creature existed and had a name and that one could believe one’s eyes.

Besides these specific observations, the general observation of African arithmetic is impressive. The social unit of many, if not most, species of birds and beasts is dominated by a single male. He has two wives, five wives, ten wives, fifty wives, seventy wives. Besides bearing the children, the wives do the work of hunting and feeding. All these wives and children belong to the single male, at least as long as he can fight off whatever young male would like to take his place. The only way this stupefying arithmetic can work out is if a shocking number of young males die trying. Or so Barbara and Fletch worked out in the back of the guari.

Giraffes stretch their long necks to graze off the top of trees, their four slim legs, bodies, long, graceful necks making something architectural out of whatever tree they graze/grace.

On the way back to the lodge that second night, they stopped to watch elephants graze through a stand of long, coarse grass. An elephant uses its tusk like a spoon, its trunk like a fork. With its tusk, an elephant digs down into the earth, loosens and lifts whatever it is eating. His trunk grabs it and swings it into his mouth, grass, root, soil, all together, all the while making this wonderful, rhythmical swaying movement, as if inviting someone to dance, or to box.

“The women are giving up,” Barbara said. At the bar, the two French hotel executives had put down their empty glasses. “They are going to bed. Seeing we need an askari to escort us, I might as well leave with them.”

“Okay. I’ll have a nightcap with Carr.”

After she stood up, Barbara said, “You might not find your father on this trip. But it looks to me as if you may have found your father figure.”