Let’s see how fast a buffalo can run. I push in the clutch and drop it into second, speeding up only slightly. He picks up his pace, too. I push in the clutch and shift it into third, speeding up even more, and throw in a couple of quick turns, just for fun.
“Slow down, we’re losing him, for chrissakes!” the Drill Sergeant shouts.
I drop it down into second and then roll it into first. The buffalo is no longer in sight. I have been successful in losing him, but that was the opposite of our mission. Shitballs. I cut the engine and look back hoping he finds us again.
And out of nowhere, there he is, and what a hunter he is! He’s charging us at full speed, how could we expect anything less from the most dangerous animal in Africa.
I twist around while simultaneously turning the key. I push in the clutch, shove it into first, and accelerate, but the tank doesn’t move.
The Drill Sergeant shouts the obvious. “Go!”
I push in the clutch again and give it another burst of gas, but the tank remains motionless. I look over my right-hand side through the gap that would normally be a door and see that the front tire is deep in sand. I look at the back tire, it, too, is deep in the sand. The Drill Sergeant pounds the back of the truck. I push in the clutch again, and this time I jam the stick into reverse. Maybe I can rock this tank out. Failure. No movement except for the buffalo who is closing in on us fast.
His impatience is about to explode. “What the hell are you waiting for? Drive, woman!” he shrieks,
“We… uh… oh boy, how do I say this? The thing is, we may be stuck, sort of…”
“What?” he screams, as he turns around to glare at me.
“We’re stuck,” I say a little louder this time, without looking at him, but bracing myself for the rear-end assault from the buffalo that will be here any second.
“Move!” he shouts, while vaulting over the seats and landing almost on top of me as I feebly try to move over to the passenger seat. “Get in the back!” he screams.
Why do I have to sit in the back and be the first point of contact for the bull?
“Throw some Lucerne. As far as you can!”
I frantically throw Lucerne in all directions in my best attempt possible to distract the raging buffalo.
The 1,500 pounds of raging flesh arrives. Is he going to gore me to death? Not yet. He dives into the Lucerne.
After several minutes of trying to rock us out of the sand trap, the Drill Sergeant finally manages to get us out. It’s a good thing, as I have just finished feeding the eating machine the last of the Lucerne.
The Drill Sergeant wastes no time in delivering me to the tent camp. We don’t speak the entire way. I am too embarrassed, and he is too angry. He parks without turning off the engine. I jump down from the truck, when he unexpectedly asks, “Are you coming to watch the game tonight?”
The awkwardness returns. Is it just me that’s being weird about this? It’s just a soccer match, that’s not a real date, is it? What would be a real date out here? A picnic beside the mud pit? Cocktails in the elephant stable? Maybe it is a date. Lately, he has fleeting moments of humanity. He’s not always an ogre like he was before. I feel myself becoming weak, vulnerable, attracted… to him. The way a moth is attracted to a light in the dark, only to be burned.
“No, I don’t think so.”
Potential disaster is averted. My tent is the safest place for me to be. How the tables have turned in the last few weeks. My tent is a safe haven? I find myself attracted to the Drill Sergeant? Melanie would never believe it.
A few more days, and we will be reunited in the bustling city of Cape Town. While I’m sure she’s having a fabulous time, the city now seems like a foreign place to me. I have gotten use to being out here in the bush, and have long since given up most modern day conveniences. They’re useless out here. Survival is more important than having moisturized skin or flawless hair. Nourishment of any kind tastes divine when physical labor drains every ounce of energy within. I use to be a picky eater, but now I’ll eat anything—and enjoy it. Things I once held sacred have become insignificant. I balk at the importance I ever gave things like matching luggage and impractical shoes.
But more than the material things I have managed to let go, it is the unseen that this place has freed me from: fear, doubt, death, uncertainty, and loneliness. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with no distractions, no underlying buzz and hum of a city, everything is coming into plain view.
23
Rumble with the Rhinos
“You want each one to be about this size,” the Drill Sergeant says, while holding up a rock the size of a lime.
He is still happy over South Africa’s victory last night. Thankfully, the sand pit incident has been forgotten.
Before us is a mountain of rocks of all different sizes—some are small pebbles, and some are as large as watermelons—all have sharp and jagged edges. This is our road-rebuilding material, and the tools to be used are nothing more than our hands.
One by one, I toss the rocks into Harrison’s back end, smashing and cracking as they land, adding more dents and holes to his pitted bed. We have to move thousands of rocks to fix the road that was decimated by the storm. With all my twisting and tossing, it doesn’t take long before the small rocks feel as heavy as the big ones. We’ve only been working for fifteen minutes, and I try to calculate how much longer it will take us to fill the truck, since it feels like it must be halfway full by now. I don’t dare to look at our progress because I know we’ve got a long way to go.
I need to take a break before I collapse, but I will need an excuse to stop working. It kills me to do this, but the burn in my back trumps the awkwardness of a conversation with the Drill Sergeant. I take a seat on the bumper and conceal my relief as my muscles begin to relax.
“So, do you have a girlfriend?” I ask. As soon as I say it, I want to kick myself. Who cares if he does? What a stupid question. Now he’s going to think I want to know, like I’m curious or something.
“No,” he says.
“What do you do on your time off?” Another stupid question; what’s wrong with me? He’s going to think that I actually care what he does with his time or, heaven forbid, he may even think I want to occupy some of that time.
“Hunt.”
“You protect animals for a living but hunt them on your time off? That doesn’t make sense.”
“I hunt to eat, not for sport.”
“What else is there to do around here?”
“Nothing.”
“Is there anywhere to go shopping, or to a movie? Is there a pub around here?”
“Not really.”
“So what do you do, then? For fun?”
“Not much.”
“Do you ever say more than two words?”
“What?”
“You just seem kind of quiet all the time. Other than blasting orders at me, you don’t say much at all.”
“I just am what I am. I’m me. I don’t pretend to be anything I’m not. I’m not a show-off, I’m not a big talker. I don’t have to act, I don’t care what anyone thinks, and I don’t have to BS anyone.”
“Okay, but you have barely said anything to me in a few weeks. I don’t even know anything about you, and we work together twelve hours a day.”
“You want to know me? Okay, fine. Let’s see. I don’t have any money. In fact I make barely enough to get by, that’s why I hunt for food. But I love what I do for a living. I’d rather do this than get paid big bucks to do a job I hate. That’s all. What else do you want me to say? If you want me to pretend I’m something I’m not, I won’t. I don’t need to impress you or anyone else. Everyone’s busy trying to pretend they’re something or someone, or that they’re better than the next guy. That’s not me. Not very impressive is it?”