“Where I grew up,” he once told Emily, “the children moved into their own huts at seven years old, one hut for girls, one hut for boys.” These were like bedroom huts, he explained, so a family might have three huts. “We went to the bathroom outdoors in the bush, not in a single place but anywhere far from the village—much like the animals.” It returned soon enough to the soil. Mothers walked all the way to the Chobe River for water. Then the new government dug wells and built a school. Life became better. “In the old days, it wasn’t very expensive to live,” he told Emily. “We knew if we met a lion on the trail not to turn our backs but to look it in the eye and move off steadily. It’s when you turn your back, they think of you as food.” Michael was of the Tswana tribe. In their language, Bo referred to the country and Ba referred to the people of the country, and so in 1966 they named their new country Botswana , which was more or less equal to the Kalahari Desert. The nearest town to Michael’s village was Kasane, an outpost of 7,000 people plagued by troupes of baboons marauding through kitchens and yards, and by herds of ellies pushing over the acacia trees to get at the roots and milling about under baobab trees they could not push over, near the airport, as if they were waiting for their own flights to depart. “Once I walked to work and found a large bull elephant asleep under the Ba Ba Bololang sign,” he told Emily. “We had to poke at him half the morning to get him to move.” The airport was two miles out of town and very much a part of the elephants’ world. “What is the Ba Ba Bololang sign?” she asked. “It means ‘Departures,’” he said. . . Emily loved to hear the story of how her parents met in Bo-tswana. Her mother had arrived for an overnight stay at a tourist camp where Michael worked as a guide, an hour’s flight from Kasane by bush plane. She planned to leave in the morning for a month of field research concerning hyenas in the Okavango Delta during the dry season, to prove they were hunters as well as scavengers. But her team did not arrive the following day as planned. So she waited. At the morning campfire, she drank strong tea with Michael to keep the chill away. He fed the fire with one long log, moving it into the center as it burned. They had no communication equipment that reached as far as Kasane except a radio the pilots used. There were no paved roads. It was a waste of money to try to pave the Kalahari. Her team, as it turned out, was hung up at the border crossing at Kazungula, a notoriously congested and chaotic place where four countries met—Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Botswana. “You need to stay in camp,” he told her. “No walking—even between theMeadow 19
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