Sand rivers by Peter Matthiessen, 1937- Hugo van Lawick Page A

encouraging numbers, with a few waterbuck, buffalo, and elephant, another bushbuck, a bush duiker, and two bull eland, one of them a lordly specimen of august hump and swinging dewlap and thick spiralled horns. The game was especially abundant on the further side of a deep sand river called Kipilipili, a steep-banked barrier to vehicles which was only crossed with the help of Hugo's winch; we hauled his machine out of the sand bed, using a tree, then winched out the other vehicle, which had got buried to the axles trying to bull its way up the steep bank. There were more bones of dead elephant than seemed natural for one locality, and in one place two skeletons lay together, suggesting that the beasts had died at the same time. Both of the big skulls had worn-down teeth, an evidence of age which might have meant large tusks. "That's what's happening, all right - bastards! And that so-called anti-poaching unit, running out here at top speed all the way from Kingupira, wrecking the machines and turning right around and going back -!" Realizing he was repeating himself, the Warden left the rest unfinished, shaking his head.
    Here and there flew the lovely racquet-tailed rollers that seem to replace the lilac-breasted species in niiombo woodland, and in a big pterocarpus, bare except for its odd, hairy seed pods, sat a dark chanting goshawk, clear gray with long red legs. The track had deteriorated entirely, and at the next sand river, a tributary of the Kipilipili, we ascended the white sand of the bed until the stream was blocked by a fallen tree.

From this place, we headed off on foot, and almost immediately Goa sprang backward, smiling shyly in apology for his alarm; he had heard a noise from the high grass on the bank. "Probably a puff adder," Brian said. "Come round this way, Melva." We detoured around the grass clump and started off again. Brian walked just behind Goa, and both of them carried rifles. Sandy stayed close behind her father, followed by Melva, who set off bravely but was out of condition; like her husband and most other East Africans, she is a heavy smoker. Try as she would, she soon slowed

    Brian Nicholson at lonides's grave, Nandanga Mountain.

    SAND RIVERS
    down, very red in the face, in the thick high grass and humid heat and the steepening hill. "1 do wish my legs weren't so short," she sighed. Melva suggested that Hugo and I carry on without her, but we didn't wish to leave her behind: elephant and buffalo dung was fresh and plentiful, and the grass in places was well over our heads. Melva tried again, and again slowed down. The Warden was now far ahead, not looking back, though Sandy did so, a bit worried; Sandy herself was more hardy than she looked and was going strong. "He'll never stop," Melva said despairingly. "Not for anybody." In this complaint there was a note of pride, as when she says, "He never takes a day off, never." Desperate, however, she called him and, when he did not seem to hear, called again- "Brian!" Sandy turned around, obviously concerned, but she did not chide her father, and 1 found this odd; his impertinent pretty Sandra Was the only one from whom the Warden would take teasing, and she needled him constantly and to his great delight until she got him laughing, as she said, "like a hyena". Seeing that Melva was done for, 1 decided to yell at him myself, and this time he turned, and they awaited us on the open hillside under the big, dark-trunked muyombo trees.
    It was already mid-afternoon, and we had to keep moving. Melva was left in the care of Goa as the rest of us ascended to a foothill ridge under a steep red cliff face of Nandanga Mountain, which lies very near the geographical center of this vast reserve. Nandanga is only 3000 feet high, but it has power, like any isolated monolith arising from low plains; it is an outcropping of basement rock from the great African shield, some of the most ancient rock on earth. On the summit of the ridge stands a handsome stone