One evening we waited out a rainstorm in the jeep drinking and telling stories (some about Lorraine from London). When dark was near we realized we had not got a campfire going. We needed wood, so we separated in two teams with flashlights to scour the surroundings. The ground was slippery, the liquor confused our balance, and we giggled as we fell. We put the wood beneath the jeep hoping to dry it out. We worried about dinner, a fire, and our tents, which had not been put up. Ivan and I were on our last mission for wood when I swung the flashlight and saw yellow reflections -- dozens. Ivan stiffened as I tried to distinguish the shapes around the eyes. I thought they were schoolchildren, hee-hawing in the hallways, until I made out the outline of a dog, big, shepherd-like. "Hyena, don't panic, just walk slowly back," said Ivan. He was frightened, but my head was light; I hurled a branch out into the night and shouted at the dogs. They scattered -- ee-ee-huh -- and Ivan ran back to the car with his wood. I walked back, grinning, shaking my head in wonder.

    Ivan was furious and frightened and demanded that we get a fire going. His account of the hyena spurred Steve and Johnson into action, while I casually remarked that the dogs had been at least twenty yards away. I was to prepare dinner, Steve the fire, and Ivan and Johnson the tents. Try as he might, Steve could not get a fire going in the wet, and every sound in the brush interrupted his concentration. We moved the fire site close to the car, where Johnson and Ivan were erecting a tight circle of tents. We were losing our footing: the area around the jeep became more of a quagmire with each step. Johnson joined Steve to help with the fire; Ivan put up the tents alone while I chopped vegetables. For thirty nervous minutes, the fire wouldn't take even with drips of gasoline splashed onto the wood. Ivan shone his flashlight in a wide arc and we could see the hyena gathered in the dark, yipping, maybe forty yards away. Johnson kept lookout while Steve cursed over the fire, at last getting a stick aflame, and then another; with the fire blazing the hyena seemed comfortably distant. Ivan was back in a cheery mood, and the fire's success called for another round of rum.

 

    Minutes before dinner, two beetles flew into the stewpot. I picked them out but noticed several more. Johnson began yelling, brushing his clothes frantically, and we learned then of his insect phobia, as a swarm of beetles descended. For an hour we endured thousands upon thousands of beetles crawling over the campsite, in our hair, backs, arms, food, over the jeep, and, according to Ivan, "Even in the bloody Cuba Libre!" Johnson hid in his tent until the swarm passed and we began to dine. Steve crunched into a beetle and spat it out, and we laughed until Johnson leaped to his feet, screaming. On his pants was the Cadillac of beetles, three inches long, shiny black and mean, of a different genus entirely from the harmless bubbles raining through camp minutes before.

    We held Johnson still and I tried to pry the beetle off with a stick. The creature’s legs seemed to secrete industrial glue. I couldn't remove it, and Johnson began to beat at it with a stick. He panicked, and we chased him out into the dark, cursing him for the acacia thorns we carefully avoided in the moonlight, until we caught him and dragged him back to camp. It took us ten minutes to dislodge the beetle from the pantsleg of the English archaeologist. Dinner over, fire blazing, Johnson becalmed -- the lions began roaring. First we agreed they were five or ten miles away, as we craned our ears to the roars and coughs in the West. The roars faded after several rounds and we settled back into the contemplative calm of a good fire. Suddenly, more roars, from the east, right on top of us, the ground shaking,
    "Good lord, that's the closest I've ever heard it," said Ivan. We all stood up, flashlights in hand, gazing out at the dark. "They cannot be even a mile away."
    The roars continued, blasted every fifth minute from closer range. At the perimeter of the firelight we squinted into the moonlit dark, but saw nothing but bush, shimmering blue beneath the moon. A lion's roar made us dance back to the fire.
    "That is the bloody closest I've heard."
    A nerve-wracked hour later, the roars had moved farther away -- "Two miles maybe," said Ivan "still very near, chaps" -- and we crawled into our tents, except Steve.
    "I've got a bad feeling about this,' he whispered to me, as he prepared to sleep in the jeep. "Before we came over I kept having dreams that I was going to be eaten alive by some animal."
    "You never told me that."
    "I thought it was too ridiculous to mention."

    I tried to read a little by flashlight, feeling chilled by each booming roar, and wondered if I would be one of the strange stories we'd heard in Nairobi, of people hauled from their tents at night. An English schoolteacher had been dragged from her tent by a lion gripping the large orthodontic brace she was wearing and which prevented her from screaming loudly enough to wake her companions. When the roaring ended, I fell asleep and dreamed the stuff of childhood, when my father kissed me to sleep with facts like clouds are really just different flavors of ice cream.

    A sharp sound woke me in the morning. The inside of my tent was hot. Daylight had come and no lion had eaten me. Another noise startled me, and my sleepiness evaporated when I felt the ground beneath me tremble -- thump, thump. Out of my tent, I noticed Johnson walking away from camp stealthy as a thief. I followed him into the acacia wood until I heard a twig crackling -- a tree snapping, rather, because behind me, its warm dung steaming at my feet, stood an elephant casually ripping apart a tree, her eyes twinkling as she watched me freeze in fear.
    The herd surrounded us, busting into the trees. Johnson like James Bond slunk around mounds and trunks to take photographs, I stood in the sunlight, not believing my eyes. Twelve, twenty, thirty elephant, all of them tolerant of us and our jeep, and the smell of ash from our extinguished fire. My first thought, as I looked at a bull with magnificent tusks, was that we might have had guns. What would the trust of the pachyderms have meant then? It could have been suicide.
    But the bull, ears flapping gently, eyes dark and deep, had read my mind. We know, the elephant bull said to me in the mists of morning and dung, You do not have guns. He turned away from me, and let us follow gingerly and politely in his footsteps as he wandered around his charges. We were awed by how clearly he communicated his acceptance; no guns, my mumbling apologies for disturbing breakfast in his twitching ears, off he went propelled by the turbo of his indifferent farts. It was a wonderful morning.
   

    In Nairobi I called Hugh Lamprey again.
    "Yes, I remember, you're the fellow with the silly questions about the wildlife in Africa," he growled. "Well, did you learn anything?"
    “It was fantastic,” I replied.
    "Better than the books, was it? Well, the most important thing you need to know is that it’s disappearing. By the time we finish talking on the phone, a little bit more of it will be gone."

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