Spare

We’d talked briefly over the radio that night, I recalled.

I remember how gutted you were.

Yeah.

I could hear it in your voice.

Yeah.I was devastated.

He smiled wider. Now look at you.

37.

I was turning twenty-five in a few days, and it felt like more than just another birthday. Mates told me twenty-five was the Watershed Age, the moment when many young men and women come to a fork in their personal road. At twenty-five you take a concrete step forward…or else begin to slide backwards. I was ready to move forward. I felt, in many ways, that I’d been bag-flying for years.

I reminded myself that it ran in the family, that twenty-five had been a big year for many of us. Granny, to name one. At twenty-five she’d become the sixty-first monarch in the history of England.

So I decided to mark this milestone birthday with a trip.

Botswana again.

The whole gang was there, and in between cake and cocktails they said how different I seemed—again. I had seemed older, harder, after my first combat tour. But now, they said, I seemed more…grounded.

Odd, I thought. Through flight training…I’ve become more grounded?

No one gave me more praise or love than Teej and Mike. Late one night, however, Mike sat me down for a somber heart-to-heart. At their kitchen table he spoke at length about my relationship with Africa. The time’s come, he said, for that relationship to change. Until then the relationship had been all take, take, take—a fairly typical dynamic for Brits in Africa. But now I needed to give back. For years I’d heard him and Teej and others lamenting the crises facing this place. Climate change. Poaching. Drought. Fires. I was the only person they knew who had any kind of influence, any kind of global megaphone—the only person who might actually be able to do something.

What can I do, Mike?

Shine a light.

38.

A group of us piled into flat-bottomed boats and steered upriver.

We camped for a few days, explored some remote islands. No one for miles and miles around.

One afternoon we stopped off on Kingfisher Island, and mixed up some drinks, and watched the sunset. Rain was falling, which made the light look pink. We listened to music, everything mellow, dreamy, and lost all track of time. As we were pushing off, getting back onto the river, we suddenly ran into two big problems.

Darkness.

And a major storm.

Each was a problem you never wanted to encounter on the Okavango. But both at the same time? We were in trouble.

Now came the wind.

In the dark, in the maelstrom, the river was impossible to navigate. The water pitched and rolled. Plus the driver on our boat was wasted. We kept plowing into sandbars.

I thought: We might end up in this river tonight.

I shouted that I was taking the wheel.

I recall brilliant flashes of lightning, seismic claps of thunder. There were twelve of us on two boats and no one was saying a word. Even the most experienced Africa hands were tight-faced, though we tried to pretend we were in control by continuing to blast the music.

Suddenly the river narrowed. Then bent sharply. We were desperate to get back, but we had to be patient. Obey the river. Go where it led us.

Just then, a massive flash. Everything bright as noon for about two seconds, long enough to see, standing directly before us, in the middle of the river, a group of enormous elephants.

In the flare-up I locked eyes with one. I saw her snow-white tusks swooping up, I saw every wrinkle in her dark wet skin, the hard water line above her shoulders. I saw her giant ears, shaped like an angel’s wings.

Someone whispered: Holy shit.

Someone cut the music.

Both drivers killed the engines.

In total silence we floated on the swollen river, waiting for the next lightning flash. When it came, there they were again, those majestic creatures. This time, when I stared at the elephant closest to me, when I looked deep into her eyeball, when she looked back into mine, I thought of the all-seeing eye of the Apache, and I thought of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and I thought of a camera’s lens, convex and glassy like the elephant’s eye, except that a camera lens always made me nervous and this eye made me feel safe. This eye wasn’t judging, wasn’t taking—it just was. If anything, the eye was slightly…tearful? Was that possible?

Elephants have been known to weep. They hold funerals for loved ones, and when they come upon an elephant lying dead in the bush they stop and pay their respects. Were our boats intruding on some such ceremony? Some sort of gathering? Or maybe we’d interrupted some kind of rehearsal. From antiquity comes a story of one elephant who was observed privately practicing complicated dance steps he’d need to perform in an upcoming parade.