A IS FOR AARDWOLF: A SUB- SAHARAN PROSE ABECEDARIAN by Pam Houston
A is for aardwolf, one specific aardwolf, who spun itself up out of his hole like a dervish, mane flashing, when we accidently almost put our front left jeep tire into his burrow. The combination of the mane and the spinning made him look much bigger than his actual size, maybe twenty- five pounds, and he roared, a little like a lion, as he spun. We had woken him, no doubt, as aardwolves are nocturnal and the sun was high in the sky. In spite of his name, the aardwolf is related to neither the aardvark nor the wolf, but the hyena, the smallest member of the hyena family. Because the aardwolf lacks the claws needed to dig up termites which are its main source of food, he licks them up from the ground using his long sticky tongue.
B is for baboon, who, being a primate, is possibly the least trustworthy animal in Sub-Saharan Africa. And if you don’t believe me, ask the springbok, who they forage with peacefully until food grows scarce, at which point they have no problem enjoying a baby springbok for lunch. In my short few weeks in southern African, I have seen one troop of baboons hurl giant pieces of peeled-off roof flashing to the ground, watched another troop chuck patio furniture over a porch railing for no other reason than what appeared to be fun, and watched a single female swipe a cell phone from a tourist and then dangle it, with a maniacal gleam in her eye, over the chasm of Victoria Falls. When the guy lunged for the phone a younger baboon ran in and grabbed his day pack, which we learned from the subsequent shouting contained all his money, credit cards, and passport. A ranger heard the shouting and told the guy his only hope was serious negotiation, implored him not to chase the baboons or antagonize them in any way until he, the ranger, returned. He came back in a remarkably short time with several bunches of bananas and a bag of oranges (perhaps this happens often enough that rangers have a supply close at hand?) and then, after luring the baboons a safe distance from the lip of the falls, he executed the trade as clearly and cleanly as a man dropping off a hundred thousand dollars in small bills to a kidnapper.
C is for cheetah and the six young males we spent an afternoon watching as they moved through the tall grasses hunting for whatever tasty thing lurked there. First were the warthogs, a mother and piglet, and even though C is definitely not for warthog, she is the star of this chapter, because of the way she at first ran from the cheetah who was in hot pursuit, the piglet stuck to her side and so speedy it was as if she had it on a string, and then, once she had gotten the cheetah a safe distance away from his no-count and lazier hunting companions, turned and ran straight at the cheetah, piglet still in tow, her tusks aimed at the cheetah’s beautiful spotted backside. She chased that cheetah in three large circles around the veld where the other five cheetahs lounged, giggling softly, before disappearing, piglet first, into her burrow.
D is for African wild dog. When I went to Sub- Saharan Africa the first time, in my late twenties, the African wild dogs stole my heart to the point I considered abandoning my graduate program in creative writing, switching to animal science, and spending the rest of my life chasing those canines across Botswana. Even more than their spotty, big- eared beauty, it was the spirit of cooperation among them that wouldn’t let me go. The way, at the start of the hunt, one female dog stuck the puppies under a bush and growled at them to stay put. (They listened.) The way they communicated with eye contact, shoulder bumps and soft vocalizations for the duration of the hunt. 107 The way, after the hunt was over, unsuccessful, but not for any lack of trying, and one dog got stuck on the wrong side of a hippo- and crocodile- infested river, and began whining, running up and down the riverbank but too afraid to take the leap, all the other dogs came to the river’s edge on our side, got down on their front paws, tails wagging in encouragement, singing their support, until the isolated dog finally made the leap and everyone in the three safari vehicles who had been watching for hours erupted into spontaneous applause.
E is for elephant, because how could it not be. One older gentleman in particular who hangs out near Qorokwe Camp, who resembles in heft and breadth a three- story apartment building. He likes to stand in the soft sand of the camp’s access road and chew on the mopane trees that line the roadway. We had watched the unsuccessful hunt of the lazy cheetahs well into twilight, approached camp in utter darkness, and found him looming up in our headlights like some oversized cow on a Wyoming two- lane on a December midnight. Safari vehicles are not small. They hold eight people comfortably, are elevated to cross rivers, and are open on all sides. We had been false charged by a few female elephants with young earlier in the day, nothing serious, but enough to understand why the policy of maintaining a distance of 30– 50 yards at all times keeps everybody safe.
“I know this elephant,” our guide Delta said. “He is very old, nearly deaf, maybe completely blind. If he knows it is us he will surely let us pass.” Delta flashed his headlights twice, spoke to the elephant in Setswana and revved the engine. The elephant backed into the trees until his rump pressed against them, but most of his immense body was still in the road. “Hold on, now,” Delta said, “keep your hands inside.”
You know how sometimes when you are boarding an airplane and the flight attendant is in the aisle, trying to get back to the galley, and you have to contort your body and your carry-on suitcase not just around her but also the guy sitting in the aisle seat at the place you all intersect and he happens to be a giant? That is how the safari vehicle negotiated what remained of the road and the trees and the elephant. For the several seconds we inched along right beside him, the grinding of his molars on whatever branches he had in his mouth when we arrived was the loudest sound I had ever heard. Even in the way back of the vehicle, the highest seat of all, I was not even level with his shoulder. For more than a second, I could have reached out and touched his tusk, that giant piece of ivory that could have lifted our whole vehicle in the air like a Tonka truck if he so chose. There probably aren’t words to describe the thrill of having only inches of 108 air between me and a living being of that stature. I can only say I was too thrilled to be frightened. Sitting here, weeks later, I can still feel his presence, his calm, his politeness, as he pressed his giant hind end into the trunks of the mopanes behind him to let us pass.
F is for francolin, the terrestrial (though not flightless) bird who looks like the love child of a threesome between a partridge, a quail, and a sage grouse, ubiquitously found either running directly in front of the safari vehicle’s tires or posed, as if for his portrait, amidst the bare branches of dead trees. Our guides, without exception, know exactly how fast they can go without squashing one. Our guides, without exception, are experts at flora, fauna, geology, ethnography, geography, history, ecology, best conservation practices, insect borne illness, skin rashes and bites of all kinds, poisonous snakes and corresponding bush remedies, tracking (mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects), bird calls, plant medicine, sustainable farming, diesel engine repair, generator repair, day pack repair, first aid, group dynamics, cultural sensitivity, maintaining authority without anger, singing, dancing, photography, iPhone photography, TikTok, camera repair . . . I could go on. The only thing I need to be an expert at, while on safari, is being wholly present, of learning from the guides’ exquisite knowledge, of bearing witness to all the lives being lived.
When I booked my second trip to Africa, a 2022 trip to Namibia, to assuage my conflicted feelings about safari culture and colonialism, I chose outfitters (the collaboration of Natural Habitat in the U.S. and Wilderness Safaris in Africa) who advertised themselves not only as conservation- forward but also as Namibians first. When I arrived at the very first camp, Little Kulala, and sat down for my very first lunch, a woman brought me a plate, took my hand and said, “I’m Joy, welcome to Little Kulala.” I said, “Hi, Joy. Thank you. I am so, so happy to be here.” But Joy did not let go of my hand. She arched her eyebrow just slightly and said, “And you are. . . . ?” It was an education in a single gesture, one that has served me every day since.
G is for giraffe, those gentle beings, with their long eyelashes, black tongues and graceful canter, powerful enough to break a lion’s spine with one well- placed kick. Do I tell the story of the giraffe we saw who had, upon trying to get a drink in the desert, slid down into a mud hole at the base of a tree and now seemed too exhausted to get herself out? What kind of writer am I if I tell that story? What kind of writer am I if I leave it out? And if I tell you she was very much alive and we could do absolutely nothing to help her? Because we were only one vehicle. Because she might have kicked Abner Simeon, the best guide 109 of them all, to death? Because the default in the bush is to let nature take its course. Poor girl. Elderly, Abner said, like me. I spent hours I ought to have been sleeping willing the mud to harden underneath her. I imagined ten or twelve of her giraffe friends coming to assist. Failing both of those improbabilities, I imagined her making a solid meal for the desert-adapted lion, who is always hungry, for the shy brown hyena, for the black-backed jackal and the bat-eared fox. But this too is true. In the morning, 15 giraffes walked past our camp in single file along the river. Maybe they were going to help her. Maybe they were going to pay their respects. Maybe they were saying we are still here, a lot of us, surviving, in this brutal, beautiful place.
H is for hyena, the girls in particular, beautiful and badass lady survival machines whose reputation plummeted because of The Lion King, which seems ultimate proof of how utterly ridiculous humans actually are. I was told, in fact, by a woman who has dedicated her life to brown hyena research, that in the years since The Lion King came out, research money for the species became so scarce she now sells brown hyena silk screened buffs and t-shirts to support her program. I bought twenty of each.
The female spotted hyenas are a third again bigger than the males and they run the show entirely, so dominant, in fact, they sometimes have both male and female sex organs. If two females are born in the same litter of puppies, the mother will let the stronger female kill the weaker one as soon as their eyes are open to avoid inevitable conflict later. Females are in charge of the hunts, the scavenging, the pecking order and the communal denning, while the males slink around, waiting to be told what to do, trying not to get into trouble.
I is for impala, who can run forty miles per hour and leap up to thirtythree feet in distance and ten feet high. This leap is sometimes called pronking, an Afrikaans word that means “showing off,” though an impala’s pronk is somewhat different from a springbok’s pronk, which might be thought of as the classic pronk, where at the apex of the jump, the springbok drops its head and tail, and for a half second appears to be hanging from the sky by an invisible rope around its middle. When a predator approaches, the impalas scatter, leaping high and crazily in every direction, sometimes over obstacles, sometimes not, and when they jump they release a scent that helps the herd find each other after whatever danger has passed. Intermittent pronking confuses a predator and delights the tourists, who spend literal hours trying to catch impalas and springbok at their pronking with their cameras. There is much debate about why these animals 110 pronk in the absence of a predator and my inexpert answer is, it looks fun as hell. A mother impala can delay giving birth for up to a month if the conditions are unfavorable, for instance, if she is waiting for rain. Other than a few subspecies of francolin, and the baboons who, like humans, are highly adaptable, the impala is the first animal in this essay that does not appear on any threatened or endangered species list.
J is for African jacana, a bird with toes so long it appears to be able to walk on water and is colloquially called the Jesus bird. What the jacana is actually walking on are lily pads and other vegetation that is either slightly submerged or right at the water’s surface. But late in the day, when the water gets that particular shimmer that has always suggested to me some sort of God (or at least a druidic high priestess) must have created it, it is fun to watch the jacana walk on water in a way that resembles, just slightly, Harpo Marx entering a room. The male jacana builds the nest and is responsible for keeping the (usually four) eggs the female has laid warm and dry, not by sitting on them, but by sliding two under each wing. The eggs are among the most beautiful of any species, a deep tan color with lines of even darker brown dribbled like paint all over them, and polished to a high gloss to help camouflage them against the bright surface of the water. If the nest starts to sink, or the eggs are otherwise endangered, the male will pick them up and carry them under his wings to a new site. The chicks are able to walk, swim and dive a few hours after hatching so the male teaches them to forage right away, and after, they return to rest under his wings, making him resemble, when he walks on water with them tucked under there, some Seussian ten- legged, thirty- toed bird.
K is for . . . such a tough choice between the woodland kingfisher and the kudu, because the woodland kingfisher is my favorite bird and the kudu is my favorite antelope. What you should do right now is stop reading and google an image of a woodland kingfisher, so you can imagine me leaving Jacana Camp each morning at daybreak and seeing the bright flash of neon blue and green against the sunrise and hearing his good mooooooooorrrrrrrrrning trill.
Everyone thrills at the sight of the male kudu, the second tallest of all the antelopes, with his dashing white face paint and his six- foot spiraling horns, but I like the lady kudus best, the elegance and subtlety of their stripes, their elk- like heads and shoulders, their giant pink heat- expelling ears, the way they stand, motionless in the long hot afternoons, perfectly camouflaged in clusters of trees on the islands of the Okavango Delta.
L is for leopard, the animal I had never seen on any of my three trips to Southern Africa, the excuse, though no one really needs an excuse, for going back again and again. On the very last day of my most recent trip at a place called Okonjima, with the help of GPS tracking collars and the AfriCat Foundation, I was able to watch a leopard named Khleesi reunite with her eight- month-old cub after a morning of hunting, watched how they wrestled their greeting, even got to hear them purr as the nearly full- grown cub rubbed against her mother’s chest.
An older friend of an older friend of mine recently got a terminal diagnosis, and when my friend asked her how she was feeling about it she said, “Well, I have been to Africa three times, so I guess it is okay.” Now that I have been three times, now that I have met Khleesi and her cub, I must face the fact that three times might not be enough for me. And maybe even more than the animals (though spending time with them makes me vibrate with joy), it’s the large- heartedness of the people pulling me back to Africa. That, and the vastness of the African sky.
M is for meerkat, or more specifically, Chucks, the guy whose job it is to follow the meerkats around. When we first catch a glimpse of Chucks out on the absolute flatness of the Makgadikgadi Pan, it is hard to say exactly what he is (A cell phone tower? The most unlikely skyscraper? Some desert God mirage?) and also, how tall. And even when we get close, the unending pan plays tricks on our eyes. Can it be a person out there. . . . a person who is fifteen or twenty feet tall?
But it turns out to be just Chucks, who is maybe 5’8’’ and who walks behind the habituated meerkats all day long, so they don’t get lost. They can’t get lost because families whose children have grown bored with birding and lions and even the pool back at camp can bring those children out here to the middle of the pan where the meerkats oblige them by climbing onto the tops of their heads. Not unlike a termite mound, a head provides an excellent vantage point.
After the meerkats climb onto our heads and we are having coffee at the safari truck and the guides and guests are exchanging first job/worst job stories, Chucks admits, rather shyly, this is his first job, and he likes it just fine. After we leave Chucks to his walking, our guide Lets Kamogelo says, “It takes a brave man to walk alone out here behind the meerkats,” though it’s clear Chucks is not much older than a boy. “There are lions here,” Lets continues, “and leopards, and Chucks is alone with no weapon at all.”
N is for Namibian desert-adapted lions. Okay, so I cheated a little. But I wanted to tell you about Charlie, a desert-adapted lion who lives in 112 the environs of Hoanib Camp near Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. Or perhaps it is more correct to say Hoanib Camp exists in Charlie’s territory. When I first saw Charlie in 2022, she looked bad, so thin, sad, and lonely. Desert-adapted lions are gaunt to begin with, compared to their savannah- residing cousins. In fact, all the desert-adapted species in Namibia look like normal lions, elephants, giraffes, etc., that have had all the water wrung out of them. It has not rained in Hoanib Camp since 2019, though the river water comes down from the highlands in the east most years on its way to the sea, which is how the old giraffe got into trouble. All of the desert species have learned to live with a scarcity of water, food, and shade. When you see the place, its spare, ragged beauty, you understand their very lives are a miracle, a magic trick of acclimatization.
Charlie has two sisters, Alpha and Bravo, who live adjacent to Hoanib camp, a little closer to the coast, but they don’t like her and it seems the feeling is mutual, which is a hard choice to make, given how hard it is for a lion to hunt alone. But on my 2024 trip, just three days before I arrived back at Hoanib, the powers that be brought Charlie a male companion, a young lion who was causing trouble with cattle farmers in a nearby village and was sure to get himself poisoned or shot. This was a controversial move, because of that first rule of letting nature take its course, but hard to deny a win/win situation when there are so few desert- adapted lions left. Conservationists have tried everything to keep the lions from killing cattle there, including painting giant eyes in fluorescent paint on half their cow’s rumps, knowing if they painted eyes on all the cows, the lions would figure it out. So this male, who we temporarily named Dude, was darted, captured, and flown into Hoanib, where we were lucky enough to see him and Charlie together. We kept a great distance, so as not to disturb the male, who, given the last several days of his life, would be none too pleased to see humans. But even through binoculars, I could see Charlie had gotten her groove back, and as she sashayed in front of Dude, and Dude roared happily to claim his new territory, it seemed Charlie would be lonely no more.
O is for oryx, and the several hundred we saw in one day, crossing Namibia’s Hartmann Valley, near the Angola border, one of the harshest landscapes I have ever seen in my life. Think Death Valley, on steroids. An oryx’s horns can reach four feet long and are lethal enough to kill an attacking lion. They have a super low metabolism, which allows them to survive for much of the year without drinking anything, getting the moisture they need from their food, including the drought- hardy desert melons they dig from the ground with 113 their hooves. Oryx minimize water loss through their skin by allowing their body temperature to rise to 113 degrees during the heat of the day, avoiding overheating by circulating all the blood that will enter their brain through a cooling chamber of blood vessels in their noses called the carotid rete, then allowing the stored heat to dissipate over the cooler hours of the night. They are beings who are perfectly adapted to the desert just as they are, and as we watch wave after wave of them run across the immense expanse of the valley, the slates and greys of their coats perfectly aligned with the shades of sand and shadow, they look a little ghostly, nearly see- through, dream creatures, made more from spirit than flesh.
P is for puff adder, which causes (by far) the most deaths of any snake in Africa, even though its venom is not the most potent (that’s the boomslang) and people fear the black mamba more. But the puff adder is really good at camouflaging itself, and people stumble across it. At Serra Cafima Camp, we call our guide Moses Sheehama the reptile whisperer, because of the way he can be driving a safari vehicle at thirty- five miles per hour and see, out the corner of his eye, a fiveinch golden plated lizard crossing a dune, stop the vehicle, leap out, climb the dune and bring the lizard back so we can all witness, for only a moment, the brilliance of its golden scales shining in the sun. We always know when Moses hits the brakes, some magical and heretofore unknown- to-us creature is about to be revealed. At one such stop, it was not even the adder, but the track it had left in the sand that caught Moses’s eye. Picture it: high noon, nothing but sand reflecting sky, and wind, softening anything you might call a track almost instantly. And yet, there goes Moses across the sand, stick in hand, because, well – venom – stepping forward, doubling back, twenty- five then fifty yards from the truck, a pause over a tiny scrap of a salt brush, and then his giant smile beckoning us forward. An adder, not a foot long and no bigger around than a cigar, catching whatever shade he can and maybe a nap, in the midday heat of the Hartmann Valley. “See how it’s moving there, rectilinearly?” he says on our way back to the truck, pointing to some memory of a track only he can see in the sand. But we all nod, happy because he is happy, because the adder didn’t bite anyone, because we are in the presence of someone so tuned to his environment, we are in a state of wonderment all the time.
Q is for quagga, a subspecies of plains zebra that was endemic to South Africa until it was hunted to extinction in the late 19th century. It joined the bluebuck and the Cape warthog as the first large animal extinctions to follow colonization. Because of my equine addiction, I 114 can say with certainty, I would have loved the quagga, and honestly, fuck those 19th century hunters for killing them all.
Right now, in 2024, most of the iconic species in Sub- Saharan Africa are critically endangered, including but not limited to the African lion, the African wild dog, the black rhino, the white rhino, the cheetah, the leopard, the forest elephant, the savannah elephant, and of course the desert-adapted animals of all kinds. (I pause here to tell you I spent one entire revision of this essay uncapitalizing the names of every animal, because in first drafts I can’t stop myself from capitalizing all of them, as my heart knows they deserve.) Many, many people have dedicated their lives to saving these species against all odds and at great cost (in time, money, heartbreak) to themselves. Which is why all the misgivings I had about safari culture disappeared the moment Joy took my hand and said, “And you are . . . ?”. Because like it or not, if people stopped going on safari, all of the big cats in southern Africa would be dead in a matter of years, to say nothing of the tusk-bearing elephants and rhinos who would be eliminated far faster. All of the animals are habituated to safari vehicles. The poachers would not even have to chase them. There would be no revenue source to pay for or even justify their protection. Namibia, for example, would be turned almost entirely over to oil, gas, and mineral exploration, and diamond mines owned by De Beers.
R is for rhino, in this case, the white rhino, who is not white (nor is the black rhino black; both species are similarly grey) but is named white because of a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word for wide (wyd) that refers to the white rhino’s wide square upper lip. In contrast, black rhinos have a pointy upper lip. Another difference between them is white rhinos are more social and far less aggressive, which is how I find myself walking alongside a crash of white rhinos in Zambia’s Mosi- oa- Tunya National Park. I’m following a female ranger who carries a submachine gun, not to protect us from the white rhinos, who browse along the ground not fifty feet from us and pay us no mind whatsoever, but to protect the rhinos from the poachers who could show up at any time, and represent the only real threat to our well- being this afternoon. It’s weird to walk this close to an animal that weighs 5,000 pounds and sports two horns, the larger of which is four feet long and more than a foot in diameter. There are 16,000 white rhinos left in southern Africa, and based on my anecdotal observation during my last two trips, far more than 16,000 humans with machine guns protecting them. May God Forever Bless the Rhino Keepers is one of the short story titles (this one by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri) that lives in my head like a prayer.
S is for secretary bird, named so because somebody thought her crazily sprouting head feathers made her look like she had a pencil tucked behind one of her ears. The Setswana name for this bird is mokwaledi, which means writer, which means me, and so I pay extra attention when we see her. This secretary bird is nearly four feet tall and has a wingspan of over seven feet. She has the body of an eagle, the legs of a crane, and head adornments that remind me of the Jetsons. She hunts on the ground and can kick with a force 5- 6 times her body weight. It only takes 15 milliseconds for her foot to go from perfectly still to making contact, often with the head of a snake, her favorite food.
T is for termite, which I know doesn’t sound very sexy, but with the exception of the elephant (who kicks and wallows the water holes into existence and spreads seeds all over the place with his droppings), the termite might be the most important creature to the entire Okavango Delta ecosystem. One of the world’s few inland deltas, caused by the uplift of the south-to-north-running tectonic plates in the center of the continent, the Okavango Delta is comprised of a series of wide plains dotted with islands of all sizes. Following the rainy season in the Okavango River’s headwaters in Angola, water makes its way slowly down to Botswana (there is little elevation change), flooding all the plains, nourishing all the plants and animals, and leaving the islands above water as cover and habitat for the land- based creatures who live there. Seventy percent of those all- important islands were formed because certain trees really like to sprout in termite mounds. In fact, when you fly over the Delta, you can see one giant termite mound in the center of nearly every island, no matter its size. Like attracts like, tree- wise, and the islands get bigger. So, the next time you find yourself cursing a termite, I invite you to find consolation in how essential they are to something other than the wooden beams that hold up your (or in this case my) garage. (I just had the repairs done a few months ago.)
U is for ululation, because if there are any animals or birds or reptiles in Sub- Saharan Africa that begin with the letter U, even in Setswana, even in Oshiwambo, I can’t find one. And in any case, I have never experienced one, which was the other stipulation of this exercise. Ululation, on the other hand, I experienced a lot of, because it is practiced widely by the women of Botswana at weddings, celebrations, and just generally as an expression of good cheer. At Jacana Camp, our chef, Olivia, ululated to get our attention when she was about to tell us what was for dinner, and Olivia’s cooking was always a source of 116 good cheer. The sound is high pitched and explosive, often accompanied by dancing and clapping. It sounds a little like the lilililis expressed by Lakotas and other indigenous people in North America. Olivia also spent an afternoon teaching me how to weave a basket from palm fronds, another thing the women do together. And though the resulting baskets are beautiful, this practice is, I confirmed via direct question, mostly an excuse for them to sit in a circle and talk shit about men.
V is for vervet monkeys, who don’t like direct eye contact, and chased me anytime I engaged in it, in spite of the significant size differential. They are complex communicators, making unique and distinct sounds for land predators, sky predators, snakes, baboons, humans, and domesticated dogs, and reacting appropriately upon hearing each specific warning: climbing trees for land predators, diving into bushes for sky predators, gathering together in an outward facing circle to protect the whole troop from a snake. Vervet monkeys give birth to a single baby who spends the first week of life clinging to her mother’s stomach, after which she is encouraged to play. Some mothers are quite proprietary for the baby’s first year while others are happy to let any interested female babysit. It is their close resemblance to humans in this and other ways that has led to vervets being used as test subjects for all manner of research including biomedical. No wonder they don’t want to make eye contact with me, their tentative, clumsy, hairless, tailless cousin who can’t even swing from a tree.
W is simply too hard to choose. There is the wildebeest who God made from the leftovers of all the other animals, a buffalo’s horns, the head of a locust, a cow’s body, a lion’s tail and a goat’s legs. There is the aforementioned and appropriately celebrated warthog mom. There is the gravely endangered and unspeakably lovely wattled crane who leaps and dances in a mating ritual rivaling that of the sandhill cranes in the valley where I live in Colorado. But I choose the dancing white lady spider for the way she spins a delicate trapdoor of silk, which conceals the entrance to her burrow, where the white lady hides from the day’s extreme heat and from which she springs to attack her prey. When covered with the lightest layer of windblown sand, the trapdoor is entirely invisible, except, of course, to Moses, who, on our last day in Serra Cafima, lifts the tiniest door with the tiniest twig to prove to us it exists.
And let’s face it, I choose the dancing white lady spider for her name, because I am a white lady who manages to dance, earnestly, clumsily and just off the beat, one way or another, every single day 117 I’m in Africa. Because Africa is a place where when you say, hey, let’s dance, even though there’s not yet any music, most people are already out of their chairs. Which is another reason three times is not enough. Which is another reason, when I was asked to name my five favorite moments of my most recent trip, not one of them involved a woodland kingfisher or a kudu. And if it seems an odd thing to conclude, near the end of an essay in which I have gathered as many animal riches as the alphabet will allow, that my deepest love for Africa is for her people . . . well, you already know why it’s not odd at all. Because without exception, the hearts and minds of my African friends have been shaped by their nearly perfect attunement to the land and animals that comprise wildest Africa, and because they work hard every day for its continuance.
X is for xerus, the Latin name for the four ground squirrels of Africa, which include the Cape ground squirrel, a kind of misnomer, because of their preference for arid areas with dry rocky soils. These squirrels spend 70 percent of their waking hours feeding, 20 percent being vigilant, and 10 percent socializing, which, if I place my working hours into the feeding category (where I think they belong) is also how I spend my waking hours. The male Cape ground squirrel has the largest balls proportionate to his body size of any land animal. They are golf ball sized, representing twenty percent of the length of his head and body, and make a kind of meditation pillow for that 20 percent of the day he is sitting up, being vigilant, looking around.
Y is for yellow mongoose, which all desert dwellers love because of their reputation as fearless and efficient killers of poisonous snakes many times their size. Something in the mongoose’s body chemistry makes venom less lethal to them than it is to other species. A mongoose can die from a snake bite, but generally, they don’t. They strike fast and then feint even faster, causing the snake to counterstrike and miss, quickly spending its limited supply of venom. On my first trip to Africa, in the bathroom of a campground, I happened to open a stall where twelve mongooses (mongeese, I’m told by Oxford, is also correct, but feels wrong) were huddled against the night’s unseasonable cold. I screamed and they screamed and then I reached up to the top of the stall so I could elevate my legs and swing in place while the mongooses scurried out of the stall underneath me.
Z is for zebra. My favorite African animal of all, lifelong horse girl that I am. I somehow missed the fact that our decision to go to Makgadikgadi in February meant we would witness the Great Migration, 118 which includes twenty- five thousand zebras who come to the pans to drop their foals in the relative safety of vistas that go on forever. Zebra foals are born with legs as long as their mothers’, so when they walk side by side a predator can’t identify them as young. Is there anything on Earth cuter than a baby zebra? Don’t feel the need to answer.
What I love most about zebras are their stripes (not original, I know), not just black and white but a whole range of greys and browns and in some cases even light purple. Also how their bodies make manifest, most obviously, some might even say garishly, how Mother Nature is the original pattern maker, and our response to patterns, as makers of art and as art appreciators, began, as all things began, with Her.
When zebras arrive at a water hole in Makgadikgadi after traveling 300 miles across the desert, they line up politely, to drink by tens and twenties. It’s almost as if they understand that the repetition of their patterns from body to body as they lower their beautiful heads, the reflection of all those stripes in the water below, the dust rising orange in the late afternoon light behind them, kicked up by a hundred more zebra who are about to arrive, all of it together, is a sight profound enough to bring a human, especially one who grieves the ailing earth on a daily basis, to grateful and unstoppable tears.
“They say Africa is not a place but a feeling,” Lets says, breaking our awed silence, as the zebras change over for the fifth or six time since we got there. If I were given a camera and a couple of large SIM cards, some small amount of food and water and was asked to photograph zebras slaking their thirst at a water hole until I got tired of it, there would probably be some amount of days after which I would be ready to do something else, but the number would not be one or five and might not even be thirty.
At any formal gathering in Botswana, when the speaker (a head of state, politician, religious leader, or expert of some kind) begins talking, instead of saying “Good evening ladies and gentlemen,” or “Thanks be to God,” or “Four more years,” or “Lock Her Up,” he shouts, “Pula!” which means rain. The crowd answers, “Ga e ne,” which means something like let it come down in gentle showers. And as many times as the speaker shouts “Pula,” the people are sure to answer.
Pam Houston is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction including Cowboys Are My Weakness (W.W. Norton, 1992), Deep Creek (W.W. Norton, 2019) and the forthcoming Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom (Torrey House Press, 2024).