Read Wild Ducks Flying Backward for Free Online Page B

they made us feel like muggers.
    During the five-hour rail trip, we’d gotten acquainted with our leaders, employees of Sobek Expeditions, a company of, well, reasonably sane adventurers from Angels Camp, California. The Sobek people had chased thrills, chills, and spills all over the globe, but they were as excited as the rest of us when, halfway into the ride, we began to spot a few animals: a baboon here, a warthog there, a small herd of distant bushbuck, and in the ponds and marshes (lavendered with water lilies the color of Oscar Wilde’s hankies) yellow-billed storks taller than most Little League second basemen, poised there among the lily pads as if waiting for a throw from center field.
    Yes, it was exciting, but there was a bit of a theme-park atmosphere about it as well; as if those random creatures had been placed in our field of vision by a San Diego entrepreneur. Then, suddenly, a pair of giraffes bounced into view. When the engineer mischievously sounded his whistle, the giraffes panicked. Stiff stilts churning, necks waving like rubber bands, they bolted toward rather than away from us, and in their confusion very nearly crashed into the side of our car. One wheeling giraffe was so close I could have flipped a cashew into its terrified muzzle. Oh, Boy! Oh, Cheetah! Oh, Tarzan and Jane! This was Africa, baby, this was the real thing! But it was not yet the Selous.

    Our first day in the bush finds us up at dawn. Having only seen dawn from the other side of the clock, I never imagined daybreak might actually be pleasant. The tsetselike sting of 5:00 A.M . is softened by the sight of an elephant family, Mom, Dad, Bud, and Sis, carelessly mashing a million dewdrops as they jumbo down a deep green valley to a water hole.
    We watch the elephants from the rustic veranda of the Stiegler’s Gorge Safari Camp, the last outpost of humanity we’ll enjoy before we venture into the Selous. We had slept at the camp, or rather,
tried
to sleep, for an all-night newsboy choir of hyenas periodically sang us awake. Late the previous afternoon, the train had deposited us at a village called Fuga, the end of the line, where we—eighteen of us, including the guides—were met by a trio of Land Rovers and driven for a couple of battering hours down an Armageddon of a road, a moonscape of a lane to Stiegler’s Gorge. By the time our gear was stowed in our respective huts, it was dark and a rusty gong had summoned us to a dinner of green beans and steak.
    Dave, a veteran guide, had hoisted a morsel of that steak aloft in the lanternshine. “Impala,” he had said authoritatively, studying his fork. “At first I thought it might be sable. Africa is an adventure in meat.”
    At any rate, it’s our first morning in the bush, and a detachment of us hike for three hours from the Stiegler’s Gorge complex, beneath a blue sky that’s already hissing like a blowtorch. Down in Tanzania, it’s July in January, and if the sun has anything to say about it, there’s a fireworks display all day, every day.
    The savanna grass is green but dry, and it crunches underfoot. J’nanga, our native game guide, steps noiselessly on the bare patches between clumps of grass, but we cement-footed Americans sound as if we’re breakdancing in a silo of Rice Krispies. Our gauche sneakers scuff at fresh cheetah tracks, at shiny licorice drops of wildebeest dung, at impala skulls as bleached as a surfer’s eyebrows, at midget wildflowers, and a mega-Manhattan of ants.
    Scattered about the plain are trees that resemble huge stone jars; trees that resemble dendritic delicatessens festooned with salami and pepperoni; trees that appear to be growing upside down; trees that look like 50’s haircuts, their foliage organically barbered into Sha Na Na flattops; and—outnumbering all the rest—leafless trees bristling with thorns so long and sharp they could pierce the heart of a bureaucrat.
    The trees, the flowers, even the piles of gnu poo are attended by