“Are you okay?” “Yes.” Michael had been quiet, from Heathrow on. “I’m tired,” he said. Emily, however, was ablaze with excitement, inhaling Africa. She wanted to see yellow-bellied whip snakes and cape buffalo and vultures, and above all, to meet the girls her age who slept in their own huts, while lions hunted overnight on the same walking paths the children took to school in the morning. “Baboons! Look!” she said. A troupe of them glided past in the bush 20 yards off. A small one stopped to regard them until its mother hurried it along. “Keep walking, dear,” Jillian told Emily. Michael pointed to the grass roofs of his village. “There it is.” . . He could have lied. His grandparents and parents were dead by then. His brothers were gone, working in the diamond mines or living in Gaborone—no one knew for sure what had become of them. Gaborone was the capital city, on the other side of the Kalahari, where 70% of the population was HIV positive. There were those in the village who remembered him, of course, and knew his trial period had not ended in marriage, but that was not unusual, and ten years was a lifetime here. “There’s another village we need to visit,” he told Jillian. “After this one.” He was speaking in a voice she hadn’t heard before. His eyes were crow’s eyes. “I have relatives there,” he said. “Which relatives?” He pointed. “We can walk along the same road where we came.” . . Emily saw her vultures the next morning, whitebacked with downy, bald heads, waiting in trees pushed over by the elephants. Black beaks like polished stone. Some of them were still working on a carcass in the grass, eating it down to the skeleton. “Impala,” Michael identified the bones for her. “How did it die?” she asked. “A leopard would have hauled it up into a tree.” He looked around, shading his eyes to the east. “Hyenas eat everything, bone and all.” He pointed to higher ground. “There.” Three cheetahs, still looking hungry, sat like living room statues in the grass in the shade of an acacia tree, black teardrop markings beneath their alert eyes. “Cheetahs give up their kills easily, even to vultures,” he said. This was how the nightmare went. At the second village, Kagiso, he spoke in Setswana to the people he could find. Many of the huts were empty. Young women lay in the shade, suffering. Their children couldn’t walk. Anyone with strength pounded grain into meal. Michael looked out theMeadow 23
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