Under a Poacher's Moon

CHAPTER ONE

“Welcome to Johannesburg,” the flight attendant said over the loudspeaker while I tried to shake the feeling that I’d made a huge mistake. “Thank you for flying with us, and enjoy your stay in South Africa.” Her cheeriness and sunny voice were obscene at this hour. The seventeen-hour haul from JFK had put me on edge. I reached over and subtly pocketed a tiny bottle of vodka from her cart. I still had a long day ahead of me.

It was barely dawn, Monday morning. Johannesburg was shrouded in a gray haze. From the small, round window I watched police officers sporting machine guns hustle across the tarmac. Drug-sniffing dogs searched piles of luggage for illicit cargo. Coils of razor wire topped security fences and compound walls just beyond the runway.

This trip was bound to be a disaster, I feared, not the escape I desperately needed and had been dreaming about for weeks. I cursed myself for not thinking this whole thing through, for my impetuousness, which was uncharacteristic but lately starting to become a dangerous habit.

“Have a nice time on holiday, ma’am,” the chipper flight attendant beamed at me.

“Thank you,” I mouthed ever so slightly.

I wanted to correct her, though. I wasn’t going on holiday, as in a leisurely vacation. I was going on safari, the Swahili word for “a faraway journey.” In my mind, there was a difference. For the next week, I would be staying at Mzansi Camp, a remote safari lodge located deep in the wilds of South Africa’s famous Kruger National Park. I knew almost nothing about the place except what I’d seen advertised in a glossy travel magazine. I wanted to be far away from home, as far as I could get, and I was going there alone.

The red seatbelt light blinked out with a ding, our cue to start clutching at belongings, clawing through overhead bins, shuffling in a stiff-legged march down the long, overcrowded aisle. I squeezed past the still-grinning flight attendant. Barely surviving the gauntlet of immigration and customs and baggage claim amid the bustling activity of the jam-packed terminal—more machine guns, more dogs—I made my way outside the airport. The curb was swarming with people coming and going.

In the unruly line of vehicles, I spotted a black SUV with darktinted windows. A square-jawed driver held a sign scrawled in black marker with the name “Anna Whitney.” At the sight of the SUV I felt a small measure of relief, but as I moved closer the words on the sign made my heart sink.

My thoroughly Anglo name—Anna Whitney—emblazoned in bold, black ink, shouted like an accusation. Here was just another Western tourist, the sign howled, on some kind of faux pilgrimage to Africa. Going through a nasty divorce, another middle-aged sightseer in a wide-brimmed bush hat was looking for that little extra “something” to rejuvenate a sagging existence. Ah yes, a drone on a brief getaway from the grind, a little timeout from domestic troubles back home, here to snap a few selfies for the social media crowd while spending some good ol’ American money on an overpriced African safari.

“Missus Whitney?”

“Um, yes, that’s me. Ms. Whitney, actually.” Whitney was my maiden name. I had never taken Karl’s. “But you can just call me Anna.”

Feeling unsure of myself and somehow unworthy of this driver’s time, not to mention being utterly exhausted but also concerned about my physical safety amid the pervasive unease of this chaotic place, I removed my Indiana Jones-style bush hat and settled into the back seat of the SUV for the long drive ahead.

“Very good, Ms. Whitney,” the driver conceded partially. He placed my bags in the rear, then slid behind the wheel and readied himself for the drive. “Your first time in Africa, Ms. Whitney?”

“Yes, I’m here on safari.” On the run, I could have said. Making a break for it. Heading for the hills. Lighting out for the Territory.

“Ah, on safari, you say?” He eyed my new hat. “Very good.”

“Kruger.”

“Ah, Kruger is the best. What animals you hope to see?”

I was so focused on my last-minute plans to get here that I had put little thought into this obvious question. “All of them . . . I guess?” My cheeks burned with embarrassment.

“South Africa’s Big Five, eh? Elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, buffalo.” He counted them off on his fingers for me. “My favorite is the elephant—very, very smart.” He flicked a silver elephant pendant hanging from the rearview, giving it a little jingle. “Everyone has their favorite. You will have one too. You will see.”

I tried to picture myself returning home with a big lavish tattoo of my newfound favorite animal splashed across a shoulder blade like one of the women at my health food store. Earth Goddess wasn’t exactly my look, but I wondered if I would be drawn to the ferocity of the lion, the gentle power of the elephant, or whatever the rhino were like.

“You are very, very lucky, Ms. Whitney. There is no place like Africa.”

No place like Africa. Yes, that was exactly what I felt in my bones. That was why I had come all this way, following that instinct. But what did I know?

As he swung the SUV away from the curb and swept me from the confines of the airport, that mysterious three-syllable word—A-fri-ca—danced in my mind again. The word itself tapped into some deep subconscious well, releasing a flood of images all at once and in seeming contradiction. Africa: a land of vast expanses, teeming cities, white hunters, impoverished masses, natural beauty, gut-wrenching violence, baobabs, savannas, poachers, wildlife, businessmen, shamans, colonialism, corruption, lions, urch-ins, luxury, poverty.

The word repeated in my head—Aaaa-fri-ca—until that wonderfully expansive short-vowel a sound mingled with the other two complementary sounds and produced an incantation that became unreal, dreamlike. After I had booked this trip and was in a slightly more rational frame of mind, I looked up the word on my phone in an effort to figure out the etymology. No conclusive answers about the name’s origin had appeared on the little screen, only a handful of questionable theories: the Phoenician word afar, meaning “dust”; the Latin aprica, “sunny”; the Greek aphrike, referring to “heat” and “horror.”

Despite its unclear meaning, or perhaps because of it, an amorphous sense of promise—for me, for my life—resonated in this word that defied my attempts to define it. What could that little word Africa possibly mean to me, a forty-year-old white woman from America who had never laid eyes on Africa until now?

It was a five-hour drive from Johannesburg to Nelspruit—Nelsprait, the driver pronounced it—a small town to the southeast and the last outpost near the western border of my final destination: the Mzansi Reserve. The expansive bushveld wilderness of Kruger—to be specific, the gigantic 150,000-acre Mzansi Reserve—was tucked into the greater Kruger National Park wilderness where the five-star Mzansi Camp awaited. The Mzansi Reserve was a private “game reserve” that shared a long contiguous border with Kruger—essentially an extension of the park itself—where bespoke safari lodges were permitted to operate.

As the SUV plunged headlong into the helter-skelter traffic of Johannesburg, the reality of Africa continued its collision course with my escapist fantasies. Within the first few blocks we came to a stop at an intersection where a skeletally thin African man stood on the curb holding the hand of a runny-nosed girl. In his other hand he held a half-empty Coke bottle. The girl was wearing a dirty, tattered dress, some kind of secondhand frilly thing.

Then the man looked over at the car, his eyes blazing as he scowled at me. Even through the tinted glass, I was positive he could see me. I slipped on my giant aviator sunglasses and slid instinctively lower on the soft cowhide seat. Perhaps I was feeling paranoid, but to me it seemed there was outright hostility in the man’s bloodshot eyes. The little girl was staring at me curiously too.

“Oh, that poor girl.” Her squalid appearance was so upsetting. I was wilting under her innocent stare and the man’s hard gaze.

The girl and the man began to recede from my view in a cloud of dust and exhaust when I felt a loud bang near my ear and heard a shattering of glass. The man had hurled the Coke bottle at the rear window, and the bottle exploded into a million pieces and cracked the window. A stream of brown, sticky Coke ran down the tinted glass.

“Dammit,” the driver cursed, momentarily dropping his veneer of professional calm as he spun around to assess the damage, slightly swerving the SUV in the process. Then he quickly turned to face forward and resumed driving straight down the highway.

The little incident left me feeling quite vulnerable, like an unwanted stranger.

The SUV moved on through the urban haze, and I saw more images of a type of poverty generally unknown in America. We passed a sprawling settlement of doll-sized shacks sitting at odd angles and made of corrugated metal. The rusty, multicolored shacks were located just off the highway, connected in haphazard rows, seemingly thrown together without planning or forethought. I asked the driver what the place was called. “Township,” he said without elaboration. Children played in the street with a frayed soccer ball; women carried babies on their hips; undernourished men wore secondhand T-shirts, their skin covered in a shimmer of perspiration; members of both sexes heaving random bits of construction materials over their shoulders—big, messy spools of wire and piles of oddly shaped wood scraps and jagged sheets of plastic and metal. People walked along the hot, dusty edges of the highway, hauling small bundles of firewood to sell. Some were wandering, seemingly without destination, while others squatted on the ground and stared at the dirt.

I rolled down the window a few inches and could smell the smoke of hundreds of cook fires, not only smoldering charcoal but also the harsh fumes of burning trash: plastic, rubber, wood, other refuse. Occasionally I would catch a powerful whiff of human waste drifting from an open sewer.

As we drove on, the dire scenes gave way to chintzy, low-slung shopping centers and larger ramshackle houses. Tacky billboards were everywhere: escort services, p***s enlargements, and various ads for nondescript restaurants and hotels and roadside attractions. There were quite a few “AIDS Kills” public service announcements. We passed the red-and-white lights of a dumpylooking KFC.

A huge warehouse sat just off the highway, white and boxy. Sticking out from the front of the building was the enormous head of a bull elephant. The sign below it read “Bush Brothers Taxidermy.”

An impossibly small 1970s-era Toyota pickup truck passed us at high speed. The truck was almost completely rusted out and carried at least half a dozen haggard-looking men sitting in the bed as they held onto the sides for dear life. A few of the men smiled wide, toothy grins, and waved.

As we got closer to Nelspruit, prosperous-looking suburban developments began to adorn the sides of the roads. These neighborhoods had high walls, iron gates, and little security guard booths at the entrance. Advertisements for “private security” with images of guns boasted of apparent perks like “five-minute response time.”

After a long afternoon, the driver finally announced, “We have reached our destination, Ms. Whitney.” He angled the SUV toward the front curb of the small Nelspruit airport to let me out, then hurried around and reached for my luggage. I had gone on a pre-trip shopping spree, splurging on “safari chic” items like these extremely overpriced Louis Vuitton bags, thinking I needed them to complete my “look.” Now it felt like maybe I had gone a bit overboard.

I paid the driver a healthy tip in cash. The magic bits of paper passed from my hand to his. “Thank you for your business, Ms. Whitney, and please call on us again,” he said, and was behind the wheel ready to move on. “Oh,” he rolled down the window and flashed a broad smile at me. “Have a good time on safari. Hope you see the Big Five.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being extra nice or patronizing me. I returned his smile half-heartedly.

Baggage in hand, I made my way inside the airport and through the security line. The airline personnel directed me outside onto the asphalt tarmac where a small bush plane awaited. A beefy Afrikaner pilot, with large forearms and a barrel chest, was tossing bags in the rear luggage compartment of a flimsy little prop plane the size of a minivan.

“Mzansi?” I asked.

“Ja,” he replied. Yaah.

I glanced skeptically at the ancient-looking craft. “It’s okay,” he assured me with an enthusiastic double thumbs-up. The flight in his little eight-seat puddle jumper, he guaranteed, would be a short, easy hop from Nelspruit over the southwestern portion of Kruger to Mzansi. “Just a short romp,” as he charmingly put it, though I was beginning to find that nothing in Africa was ever quite that simple.

At takeoff, the twin propellers roared to life and the rickety plane shook as if it might break apart. I gripped the black leather armrest on the tiny seat, white knuckles shining. The small craft started to rise above the tarmac, fighting hard against the tug of the earth. As the plane rose, I struggled to ignore the surge of an emotion unfamiliar in my normally staid urban existence: fear. Real physical fear of the life-and-death variety.

Once airborne, the deafening buzz of the propellers, and the yaw and pitch of the small craft bobbing in the sky, turned my stomach a little. The acrid smell of motor oil and burnt fuel wafted through the tiny cabin. The sensations were immediate and powerful in comparison to the deprivation-chamber experience of the jetliner that had carried me in a deaf-dumb vacuum across the Atlantic.

My trepidation, however, quickly gave way to astonishment at the views. The low-flying bush plane cast a small black shadow on the landscape below. Leaning forward, I peered out the miniature window, following the plane’s shadow across undulating yellow hills spotted with dark green stands of trees. Spreading out before me was Kruger. Larger than the entire country of Belgium, the pilot said. Over seventy-five hundred square miles of the rawest wilderness left anywhere in the world.

After a few minutes of taking in the vast whole, I was able to focus on individual parts. Searching for signs of life, I spotted something moving along the ground: a herd of elephants marching through high gold grasses toward a dark grove. Then a series of blue-black ant-like spots: wildebeest grazing languorously in loose groups. Obvious words like wild and exotic came to mind. I was an alien, hovering over a lost world.

In contrast to the disconcerting poverty, deprivation, and suffering I had seen on the drive from Johannesburg to Nelspruit, in a kind of inexplicably seamless shift, I was now soaring over an unspoiled dream world of grasses, streams, trees, animals—a primordial world that had, against the odds, been preserved in its original Edenic state. I wondered how long this primeval paradise could last surrounded on all sides by mass-scale human misery.

“First time on safari?”

One of the fellow passengers was shouting at me above the din of the propellers, rudely interrupting the contemplative mood I was cultivating. I spun around in my teensy seat. The guy was leaning forward and looking straight at me with a big, dumb grin on his pink face. He said his name was Jim something or other, a dentist from Chicago. His teeth were stark white and straight as boards. He wore an orange golf shirt, shorts, and white tennis shoes. His physical presence was plump, a round, goofy-grinning American meatball. He would have made good bait if anybody wanted to use him to hunt lion.

The touristy nature of Jim the Dentist’s question—first time on safari? almost obliterated the genuine sense of adventure I was starting to feel. His beady eyes bore into me. It was then that I noticed the other passengers—a handful of affluent-looking American and European tourists, three couples in all—staring at me. There was Jim’s better half, a smiling brunette; a French husband and wife, both lithe and blonde; and a pasty pair of Brits, all of them friendly and forgettable. To my absolute horror, the chatty couples were now prepping for the inevitable follow-up questions: Where are you from? What do you do? Are you married? Do you have children? Are you traveling alone?

So I gave my chubby interrogator Jim and his chatty pals the brush-off with a tight smile and a slight affirmative nod. Yes, it’s my first time on safari. I had zero interest in them, or explaining myself to them or anyone else for that matter.

“Did you hear the news?” he continued eagerly. “A tourist was gored to death in Kruger yesterday. A woman from England. Cape buffalo got her.”

How lovely, Jim, thanks for that bit of news.

He and the others peered at me intently, waiting for my response, searching my face for any signs of worry.

Though the prospect of violent death on the horns of a wild beast did indeed fill me with a sense of dread, I refused to give them the satisfaction. I remained stone-faced, bringing our little conversation to an end by muttering, “My, my, Cape buffalo, very deadly I’ve heard. She must’ve got too close.”

My ears turned red at the thought of them barraging me with questions. I didn’t want to tell a small plane filled with strangers why I was in Africa. What could I have said to these people, if I were being honest? That my husband, Karl, of more than a decade had just walked out on me? That for the past three and a half years I had been making questionable, possibly reckless decisions? That this trip was a ludicrous whim, a desperate attempt to escape a lifetime of failures and disappointments, some that were buried too dark and deep to touch? Or should I tell them that I simply wanted to go to Africa because I had never set foot on this continent, I had no history in this place, and no one knew me here.

No, I could not handle a real conversation with a normal human being, so I pivoted away from the cheerful couples to resume my contemplation of the landscape below, and eventually they lost interest in me, thank God.

Suddenly, the pilot shouted at us from the cockpit, “Hold tight, everyone!” He spoke in a heavy Afrikaans accent. “Might be in for a bit of weather, guys!” he warned with the trace of a sly grin.

Pebbles of rain started to pelt the windows of the plane with an audible pitter-patter. Craning my neck to peer through the windshield, I saw a massive thunderstorm building on the horizon. Huge streaks of lightning flashed in jagged zigzags across a tall stand of cumulonimbus gathering in the distance.

To fight the sudden onset of terror, I tried to count the seconds following the lightning as I had as a child, but there was no lag time. Boom-crack! The crash of thunder was deafening. The little plane shuddered from nose to tail with each successive barrage of light and sound.

Boom-crack! Boom-crack!

Lightning flashing and thunder exploding all around us, we bounced in the maelstrom like a toy boat in a stormy sea. My stomach tightened into a knot, and with each dip and roll, the knot pulled tighter. As the seven of us tossed about inside the tiny cabin, I genuinely felt I had reached the ends of the earth, alone. I closed my eyes and put my head down between my knees. The plane climbed up then dipped down. Up and down, up and down. The first waves of nausea were starting to build in my gut. I uttered a vague agnostic prayer and just waited and waited for the ordeal to be over.

After what seemed like an eternity the pilot shouted, “Hold tight, guys! Ja, we’re going to make a run at the landing now!”

I lifted my head and saw a long grass landing strip rising up into my field of vision. It looked like a football green accidentally misplaced in the middle of the wilderness. The craft listed back and forth violently as the landing strip grew larger and larger, closer and closer.

“Ja, here we go now! Hang on to your asses!” He pronounced it “osses.” I would have chuckled if I had not been so terrified.

With great force, the black rubber wheels slammed into the earth much too hard, sending all of us bouncing high out of our seats, almost crashing into the ceiling of the cabin with the tops of our heads. The plane fishtailed down the runway. The brawny pilot held her steady, though, and the wheels hugged the rough grass while the plane slowed to a stop.

“Your first bush landing!” The big man turned and grinned at us in congratulatory fashion, as if we were now being initiated into a select club of those-who-have-survived-bush-landings.

I recalled reading somewhere that Hemingway had suffered massive injuries in a bush landing during one of his African hunting safaris shortly before he blew his head off with a shotgun.

As the plane’s propeller finally came to a halt and the engine went quiet, my head did not feel so firmly attached to the rest of my body. I clutched the seat for support. Everyone hollered in excitement. Despite feeling woozy from the rough approach, I cracked a smile and exhaled a big breath, overcome with a profound sense of relief that I had arrived in one piece.