owler takes his seat on the eight-seater prop plane right behind the co-pilot. He’s felt sick all morning — the jet lag from Los Angeles is making him see double though thankfully he at least grabbed an hour on the flight from Cape Town to Maun. He pops a couple of Tums, takes a swig on a lemon soda he pinched from the cooler in the transfer van, when the skinny girl with the nose ring throws her carry bag on the seat across from him.

“Friend of Taylor and Charlie?”

“Huh?”

“Taylor and Charlie. The wedding?”

He doesn’t know why he says yes, maybe it’s her English accent and the fact that she’s blatantly braless. Either way, in the ten minutes before the plane’s engines rev up to a whirring cacophony, he finds himself in a conversation about two people he doesn’t know but about whom his travel agent offered a tantalizing preview. Fowler’s get-away-from-his-divorce safari was going to be perfect, just perfect, except his first camp in the Kalahari was going to be otherwise rented out for some kind of celebrity wedding. Did he want to change things around to avoid the revelers? He might remember his first African sunset differently if instead of the hoots and hollers of fifty strangers he was listening to a male lion calling for his pride.

“It’ll be an adventure,” he emailed back. “Isn’t that what this trip is all about?”

“It’s your money,” his agent smartly replied.

And so it is, at least a third of it for the next ten years. That’s how the judge split things up, which Fowler didn’t think was very fair even if Katherine had no prospects and their two daughters were going to live with her five days out of seven. He still remembers back when they were dating and, over lunch one day in Laguna, she dismissed the notion that she’d ever want to be bound in near perpetuity to someone she’d broken up with simply because of finances.

“The idea of depending on a man you want to be with is difficult enough,” she said as she picked at her Asian chicken salad. “But one you’ve decided to let go? I’d like to think I have more self-respect than that.”

“Maybe it’s not a matter of self-respect.”

“Oh? Then what?”

“Need. Maybe sometimes people just need a helping hand, Kat.”

That last sentence was what Kat brought up about that long-ago conversation when she told him at the final mediation that 60% of what he made wasn’t going to be enough to keep up appearances. Do it for the girls, she said, they loved him more than her anyway so he had to know the money would ultimately be going to a good place. Besides, she and her lawyer had done the math, and he didn’t really need more than a quarter once the mortgage was assigned to her, so she was being generous in proposing a third.

“You’ll still have plenty of money to do the trip to Africa,” she finished up with, unintentionally lancing him further. “It’ll be a whole lot cheaper going yourself.”

But all that’s in the past now, and in the here and now the mid-thirties girl with no bra is telling him about the first time she went on safari with Taylor and Charlie, a few months after they started dating. The third wheel brought along to inspect the new merchandise — brilliant, right? She knew they were meant for each other when, during a night drive, they both spotted an animal at the same time and, after their guide turned his spotlight on it, they shouted out the same three animals in rapid succession before dissolving into laughter. “Porcupine! No. Spring hare! No, it’s an aardwolf!”

“They’re just so like that, aren’t they?” the girl says.

“Like what?”

“Finishing each other’s sentences and all that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them quarrel.”

Just wait, Fowler wants to say, just you wait, but then the engines are going and they’re heading down the runway and it’s impossible to talk further. Into the pristine African skies, not a hint of smog in sight, and after a few minutes’ climb, they’re bouncing around amidst some cumulus build-ups the co-pilot warned them about. Fowler looks over and notices the girl is gripping the arms of her seat tightly with each jolt. He can see the veins of her hands beneath her pale English complexion, brought into bold relief by her rhythmic squeezing.

“Just look at the pilots!” he shouts, trying to be helpful.

“What?!”

“Just look at the pilots! If they aren’t worried, you shouldn’t be either!”

She shrugs and points to her ears, she can’t hear a word he’s saying. He contemplates leaning across the aisle to tell her more directly, but then thinks better of it, instead waves his hand to just forget it. He doesn’t want her thinking he’s hitting on her or something, though maybe he is, what’s that going to be like anyway, trying to finagle your way back into the good graces of the feminine half of life’s equation again. Christ almighty, is that ever going to suck. Though maybe he’ll get lucky and be one of those divorced men who’s content to let himself get a little fat and some tart from San Diego will just fall into his lap when they are mistakenly given each other’s drinks at Starbucks.

“Hi, I’m Marie — did you order a Vente Latte?”

Man oh man. He’s a cliché already.

He passes the rest of the flight reading some articles on his phone and, before he knows it, the engines are slowing and they’re banking for landing. There’s water down there still — dry season hasn’t quite fully kicked in — and here and there Fowler can see a few animals gathered by the remnants. Zebra from the looks of it, and some wildebeest, though nothing like the great herds his agent promised. The gay couple in the far back claims to everyone they see something else: “Elephants!” one of them yells out. And then as they all search in vain: “No wait, false alarm everyone! Sorry!”

At the airfield, they’re met by their guides, and the English girl — Amelia, she introduces herself as — tells Fowler to look for her at the rehearsal dinner tomorrow before she heads off in a separate safari vehicle. She’s paired with the gay couple and two other women from a different plane — more wedding guests, Fowler figures — while Fowler is left by himself with a rangy-looking fellow who can’t be more than twenty-five wearing a pair of Aviators beneath a fold-over safari hat that advertises the company to which Fowler has entrusted ten percent of his savings. Leitibolo, the young guide says, offering his hand to Fowler. First-born, in Setswana.

“Me too,” says Fowler.

“We planned that — we’re full service around here. Can I get you some Champagne?”

Fowler laughs. He likes this guy already.

They head off in the truck through some scrub and onto a dirt road Fowler can’t even tell is there. Small trees and brush and grass whiz past and it’s hot as hell, though Fowler doesn’t mind. If he’s going to put Katherine out of his mind, a little suffering will go a long way. Replace one pain with another, a tried and true recipe.

“Do you have any particular goals for this trip?” Leitibolo asks as they emerge into a clearing.

“Goals?”

“Yes. Most people come here wanting to see something in particular. I just spent a couple days with some Italians who had me return over and over to the same tree because one of them swore they saw a leopard by it when the plane was landing. I told them it was probably an A.L.T.” He says the letters slowly, A then L then T, in his Setswana accent the “L” sounds particular melodic, like something you’d try to imitate at a party but had no chance at.

“A.L.T.?”

“Animal looking thing – usually a tree stump. We’ve got all kinds of them out here, my man. Look over there, for instance.” Leitibolo hits the brakes with a squeal and points at a marshy area in the distance where a pair of enormous birds are walking around. He hands over a set of binoculars. Binos, he calls them. “You see that hump? Where the birds are?”

“No—” But then Fowler catches what Leitibolo is talking about, the hump looks like a cheetah or some other great cat in repose but then you see it isn’t moving. And the birds. They move around the hump without even the swish of a tail. A.L.T. — Fowler will have to remember that. He lowers the binos and swats at a couple of flies buzzing around the brim of his Dodgers cap.

“Do you have any real animals out here?”

Leitibolo laughs. “Oh, we have real animals, my man. But how about those birds? Complete bastards. Total pains in the ass.”

“Why are they bastards?”

Leitibolo laughs again. “Got you, my man. BUS-tards. The Cori bustard. Just seeing if you’re listening. Let’s go!” He restarts the truck and with a grind of the gears that sounds like a car crash sends them off. Fowler sits back and watches the scenery. He looks hard for animals but sees only trees and grasses and other plants he doesn’t recognize. Kat was the one who was good at this, though to be fair she had lots of practice because he did most of the driving all the time. They went on trips to wherever and she was the one spotting the moose or deer or elk that matched the caution sign they’d just passed from her spot in the passenger seat. Even in the Colombian jungle she managed to pick out an anteater when all Fowler saw were banana bushes.

“You’re blind,” she said, her curly brown hair catching the light just so, her neck glistening with the thinnest of sweats.

“I don’t think so.”

He shakes his head to rid himself of the memory, though he knows there’ll be another soon enough. And then oceans of them tonight. Lord help him tonight, alone in his bed under the stars. They pass a row of palm trunks without crowns and right as Fowler’s about to tap Leitibolo on the shoulder to ask what’s happened to the trees they turn a corner and run smack into a tremendous cloud of dust. Fowler inhales a blast and starts coughing when he hears them, like thunder or a train or a couple of Mack trucks rolling by in the middle of the night. Wildebeest, dozens of them, charging across the road not twenty yards in front of them. Unconsciously, Fowler stands up from his seat.

“Holy shit!”

“I told you we have real animals! Though I wonder what’s spooked them.”

“Us?”

“Hardly. They started running before we turned the corner.” Leitibolo raises the binos and scans the horizon to one side of the truck, while Fowler takes out his phone and videos the stampede. Kat won’t believe this, he thinks, and it’s a second or two before it hits him that he won’t be calling her tonight to share his day like he always did when he was on the road alone. Shit. But though the thought is depressing, the wildebeests are so stunning he’s left with only a mild remorse. They should have tried harder to do this trip when they were still together. They should have tried harder at a lot of things.

“There it is,” Leitibolo says, pointing.

“What? Another truck?”

“Lion. You are one lucky American, Fowler. The famed Kalahari lion. Fifteen minutes after landing no less.”

Fowler looks through the binos and at first sees nothing. “Where?” he asks, and Leitibolo reaches back and gently directs Fowler fifteen minutes to the left. He adjusts the focus and, right as he’s about to drop the binos and say “I don’t see it,” the animal appears. Not quite motionless like the hump, but resting on its hind legs on what Leitibolo is calling the salt pan. Fowler knows enough to recognize it’s a female — no mane — and that it’s far enough away that it isn’t hunting the wildebeest. But for the prey it’s better safe than sorry, he supposes, as the lioness leans her head back and yawns. Her teeth are astonishingly large.

“Incredible!” Fowler shouts. “Unbelievable!”

“Yes, it is. You see the cubs too?”

“Cubs?” Fowler spots them right as the word falls from his mouth. Two of them, rolling around in front of their mother. One on its back, the other on top, and then they switch, until they get too close, and she swats at them with her paw. The pair slink away and disappear behind a bush while the lioness, with one last yawn, flops down on her side out of view. Fowler places the binos on the armrest and sees out front that the wildebeest have settled down by a waterhole.

“That was amazing! You plan that too, Leitibolo?”

“Like I said, we aim to please.” The young guide picks up the two-way and tells whoever’s on the other end they’re eleven and a half minutes out, the precision a little joke between friends he later explains. He also lets camp know about the lioness and the cubs, which results in a lot of excited backtalk. When he’s finished he turns in his seat and gives Fowler an enormous grin. The contrast of his black skin and his white teeth is glorious, a man in his element, something Fowler knows only in passing.

“Well, my man? Shall we get going?”

“Where to?”

“Wherever the road takes us!” Leitibolo screeches the truck into gear again and they head off towards the tents in the distance beneath more of the broken palm trees.

🚙 🚙 🚙

“You’re the extra, right? You look good! Our lucky American!”

It’s the big dinner the next day and Fowler has cleaned himself up to the approval of the cheerful camp matron after a full day out with Leitibolo. As it turns out, that first encounter with the lioness has proven to be the high point of things so far, at least as far as animal sightings go. It’s mostly been one bumpy slog after another since, Leitibolo says most of the big cats and the elephants have moved on for the season, they’ll be lucky to catch any of the former again and he doubts they’ll ever spot the latter. Instead they’ve made do with the wildebeest and the zebra, along with jackals and impala and warthogs and all kinds of birds, including one ostrich who ran alongside them this morning for the better part of half an hour. Leitibolo tried to shoo it away after a while, but the damn thing kept returning, like it was lost and they would lead it to wherever it needed to go. You had to admit that was special, Leitibolo commented, even if the giant birds are gashu.

“Gashu?” Fowler asked. “What’s that?”

“Sorry, my man. Stupid. Gashu is Setswana for pea-brained.”

Gashu. That’s how Fowler feels alone at this dinner. The matron has prepared a separate table for him, looking out over the salt pan with the full moon rising in the distance. On the other end of the tent the wedding crowd is only just now beginning to meander towards their assigned tables after at least an hour of cocktailing. Fowler tried to time things better, so that he arrived from his tent after the guests were already seated, but the matron tells him things got delayed by a round of story-telling using the microphone and speaker from the karaoke machine. The bride and groom are both in the camp business, this one included, and they finally decided to get hitched after ten years out here. There are tales about them behind every acacia tree.

“Oh? I thought they were celebrities.”

“Bush celebrities, Mr. Fowler. Out here Taylor Swift has nothing on those two.”

The matron excuses herself to tend to the wedding guests as Fowler eyes his lone table, away from all the others. Wistfulness rises from his belly, moving swiftly to his chest and shoulders until it emerges through his lips as a lengthy sigh. Kat, Kat, Kat. What happened to us? He steels himself to brave the whole lone man in the restaurant routine when Amelia catches his eye from behind her Collins glass, this time wearing a bra beneath her tasteful sleeveless blouse. The rest of her looks appropriately British on safari in Botswana — billowy beige pants with a snappy yellow belt that shows off her hips, expensive sandals and silver bracelets on each of her wisps for wrists. She comes over to him and links her free arm with his. “Fowler! How was your day?”

“Terrific. I made friends with an ostrich.”

“Just one? Minimum is two. Must be because you’re American.”

“Even worse. California. Los Angeles.”

She laughs, a pleasing rasp that gives away that she smokes. She takes a sip of her gin drink — he can smell it over her rose perfume, if there’s any mixer in there, it’s just a splash — and says she has several girlfriends she wants him to meet. It isn’t every day you come across a proper single American in Botswana, he’s bound to find at least one of them attractive. Then she pops the question. “What table are you at? We’re all at four. Taylor and Charlie’s old work friends, we were all in management consulting together before they came down here. Who are you sitting with?”

He looks at her and considers lying again, but then decides what the hell she seems like a regular sort, high-borne accent and all. He points to his solitary table, not so different than that ostrich running alongside he and Leitibolo this morning. Out of place. Trying to find something. One of the staff has placed a lit candle in a tumbler in the center, as if it were a romantic setting for two. Except it’s not.

“Over there.”

“Where?”

“The single in the corner. With the candle.”

“No, seriously. Which one?”

“I am being serious.”

She takes a second to absorb the import of what he’s said, then uncouples her arm and smacks him lightly on the shoulder. “You devil! You had me so fooled on the plane.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. What a rascal you are. So, are you divorced or just broken up?”

“Divorced. Finalized last week. How did you know?”

“The only men alone on safari originally paid for two. Come. I insist you join us at our table. Taylor and Charlie will be thrilled at your American moxie.” And before he can protest, she’s dragging him to the other side of the tent and yelling to a couple loitering by the head table: “Taylor! Charlie! There’s someone here you simply must meet!” Lots of head turns and chit-chatting and then Fowler is standing face-to-face with the bride and groom. They’re a lot older than he expected, closer to his age, he guesses, though the weathering they both have from their new careers might be leading him astray. Regardless, he feels embarrassed standing before them, his face would have turned scarlet if it wasn’t already torched from the sun. A wedding crasher at age 42. Pitiful is the word that comes to mind.

He introduces himself by apologizing and explaining the situation in as few words as possible. He doesn’t get very far before they’ve put him completely at ease — they’re the ones who are sorry for intruding on his vacation. The idea to have the wedding at camp was a natural but it gets booked pretty far in advance. This weekend was the only one before June where there was just the one tent already spoken for. The matron — Tumeh — has told them all about him, including the lioness he saw, everyone has been trying to find her again without any luck. Was she really with two cubs? Amelia punches him softly on the shoulder again.

“You didn’t tell me you were the one who spotted the lioness. I’m impressed!”

“What can I say. Bragging to foreign women is something I’m a little out of practice at. But all I’ve spotted are A.L.T.’s. My guide is the one who found her.”

“A.L.T.’s?”

“You know. Animal-looking things. Tree stumps or bushes.”

The three friends laugh and then Taylor and Charlie say “Leitibolo” at the same time. “You see?” Amelia spouts. “It’s just like I said on the plane.”

Fowler holds his tongue.

Dinner is a scream. The company is good, the booze even better. Everyone here except Fowler has been on safari a bazillion times, and they’re all supremely accomplished at the evening meal afterwards, even when it’s a rehearsal dinner. It’s the British empire reborn, lots of Aussies and Scots and people who went to Oxford and Eton and who live everywhere from Vancouver to Singapore, with stories as entertaining as they are droll. Fowler has never felt so American, he amuses them all almost like he’s a little boy.

Every now and then someone comes over and asks Amelia who her date is, they’ve heard he’s the one who found the lioness. After a while she stops denying he’s her date and he stops giving credit to Leitibolo. It’s only a matter of time before he starts to feel her leg against his beneath the table and she’s asking him to dance. Why not, he thinks as they spin to the faster tunes, he deserves this, Kat can go to hell. But as he sways with Amelia to a Billie Holiday standard — even the English play Billie Holiday at weddings — he looks over her shoulder and sees the candle on his table has burned almost all the way down. Guilt comes at him out of nowhere, like a rifle shot, piercing his heart. He steps back from Amelia and tells her he’s had a lovely evening. She doesn’t look too surprised.

“Leaving so soon?”

He points through the canopy to the moonlit salt pan. “She’s out there somewhere.”

“Who? The lioness?”

“Her too.”

Tumeh walks Fowler to his tent by flashlight — it would be bad luck to have a guest trampled or eaten the night before a wedding. The goings-on are still audible as they mount the three stairs to his tent, though it’s far enough off to serve Fowler a last portion of melancholy, seeing as he skipped dessert. Things have progressed to the karaoke stage, the bride and groom having left for their separate tents for one last night apart, Tumeh says. Right as she’s asking him what time he wants his coffee and cookies in the morning — five, he tells her, Leitibolo has something special planned for Fowler’s get-away morning and he needs Fowler up extra early — someone’s voice cracks to the high notes of Moon Dance.

“It’s a good thing these people aren’t still in charge around here,” Fowler says, meaning it as a joke about the off-key serenade. Tumeh raises an eyebrow as she zips up his bug screen.

“They’re not?”

And then Fowler is alone again, just as he was last night, and just as he will be the remainder of this trip. He lays awake in his bed, perched high over the tent floor like a king’s, as the laughter and music eventually gives way to silence. Loneliness seeps through the screen from the salt pan, and Fowler tries to stave it off with thoughts of his children, his wonderful girls, the twins he didn’t even want but for whom Kat was so desperate. Bright shining lights along a road that grew ever darker — the two kept the engine running long after the car began to break down.

But eventually the inevitable intrudes. Hair and eyes and body so supple — that also kept things going, at least he thought it did. Until it didn’t, and they retreated to their corners of the house, first on weekends, then every night, meeting up only for silent meals and the occasional donnybrook. Everything ends badly, he reminds himself as he finally drifts off. Broken dishes and broken hearts.

Around two he wakes with a start. A wind has come up, and his tent is rattling sharply in the breeze. Something else is audible beneath the racket though, something close that Fowler strains to hear. He sits up in bed and draws his legs to his chest, peers through the screen at the wilds outside. There’s a shape out there, back-lit by the moon, not far beyond the stairs. About the same distance as the rampaging wildebeest yesterday, but stock still in the moonlight and seemingly facing his way.

The lioness? Or just another A.L.T.? Fowler descends from the bed and grabs a flashlight, steps forward towards the screen. He hesitates for a moment — if it is the lioness, the zippered mesh seems scant protection. He remembers those teeth, yellow and endless, he wouldn’t stand one chance in twenty if she charged him. On the coffee table by the entrance an air horn beckons, but curiosity pushes aside restraint. He didn’t come to Africa to wallow in his fears, his citified sensibilities, though he isn’t above checking to make sure the alarm is within arm’s reach, is he now.

He inches forward, his heart pounding beneath his Coca-Cola t-shirt. He’s surprised the creature doesn’t hear it, doesn’t smell him, though perhaps it’s because he’s upwind. Above him the tent continues to shake in the gale, rippling the screen in front of him. Fowler raises the flashlight to eye level, about to click it on, when he hears in the distance the great sound his agent promised, though she skipped the part about all his hairs standing on end.

The roar of the male. Good God.

Fowler drops the flashlight to the tent floor he’s so startled, as the roar repeats itself twice more. Quickly his surprise is replaced by a sudden acuity — his senses are sharpened like never before. All around him is commotion: whatever is awake is on the move, and Fowler is the one who hears it, Fowler is the one who smells it. The whinnying of the zebra, the stink of the wildebeest. Everything — and everyone — responds to that call. A siren song on the African desert plain.

He bends to retrieve the flashlight as a few lights appear elsewhere in camp. People are calling out to each other, making sure everything’s ok. “Are you there, Taylor? Are you there, Charlie?” “We’re here, we’re here. Everything’s fine.”

But no one utters Fowler’s name, he stands in his tent utterly alone. Save for the shape outside, for a moment it stays with him. The lioness, he decides, it has to be. What else would stand by him in the face of that call? He raises the light to make certain as the far-off roar sounds once more. And before he can focus the beam on it, in a flash the shape is gone.

🚙 🚙 🚙

“Here’s to the bride and groom!” Fowler hears in the distance. He peers through the binos from the jumpseat on the roof of the safari truck and tells Leitibolo down below that it’s just another A.L.T. They’ve been tracking the lioness for over ninety minutes and it’s brought them back near camp, and all Fowler can discern through the viewfinders is a dirt pile that, in all fairness, resembled the big cat from further away. That and the wedding guests eating a post-ceremony brunch in a green pavilion away from the main tent.

Mimosas line a table in front of a tiered sky blue frosted cake, which instead of a tuxedoed groom and a veiled bride displays a plastic safari truck with what look like miniatures of G.I. Joe and Jane facing down a snarling leopard. A far cry from Fowler and Kat’s topper — they went the interlinking heart route, which the catering staff shattered when they tried to stuff it into too small of a box with the top layer of the cake. An omen if there ever was one, Fowler remembers thinking several years later.

“Ok! Hang on to your hat, my man! This could get rough!” Leitibolo hits the gas and they lurch off towards a lone baobab tree, at first going slowly to inspect the footprints they’ve been following — three sets, the mother and the two cubs — and then flooring it when Leitibolo decides on the precise direction. Behind the Baobab Fowler sees the field where the meerkats live, the “something special” Leitibolo planned for this morning. And special it was. As the first rays of daybreak crested the horizon, turning the sky a spectacular burnt orange and lilac, Fowler lay on his side on a thatched tarp as a half dozen of the imps scampered over and around him. The adults took turns using his Dodgers cap as a lookout until a soaring fish eagle chased the mob below ground.

“Come on,” Leitibolo said at that point. “Let’s go find your lioness.”

As they left the meerkat field Fowler shared the tale of his early morning encounter, and Leitibolo agreed it was almost assuredly the mother on the prowl. She’d probably stashed the cubs in a den somewhere and was hoping to catch a stray zebra foal or wildebeest calf, the babies sometimes hung around camp too long at sunset and got separated from the herds. Or perhaps she was out scavenging — lions weren’t above eating carrion as the Kalahari transitioned from wet to dry. Also known as the Makgadikgadi, a word that was way too long for the camp brochures, which, by the way, conspicuously omitted the lion’s corpse-eating habits.

“What’s it mean?” Fowler asked when he stopped laughing.

“The linguists will tell you it means large dry dry area. ‘Ma’ means large and ‘kgadi’ means dry, so put it together and you get large dry dry. We don’t have a word in Setswana for ‘very’ so we repeat stuff instead.”

“Makes sense.”

“I suppose, though you’d think we’d have come up with one by now, this being Africa and all. What’s it been? Three hundred thousand years? As for me, I’m more the romantic type, or so my lady says. I prefer the bush translation.”

“Which is?”

“Mother of all dry places.”

And from on top of the safari truck, Fowler can see why. The vegetation seems to be withering by the minute, and the dust clouds they’re throwing up are immense. If they do spot the lioness before Fowler has to catch his plane for the next camp, it’ll be because she lets them, she’ll see them coming from miles away.

“You ok up there?” Leitibolo shouts, slowing down for a moment.

“I’m good.”

“All right, my man. Let me know if the dust gets too much, and we’ll stop and you can come back down. Until then you’re my eyes!”

Leitibolo floors it again and off they go. It’s exhilarating riding on top, the lack of a seatbelt is both dangerous and fun, though it does have the disadvantage of leaving one alone with one’s thoughts. Down below Leitibolo shares all sorts of information — most notably this morning the source of the rows of broken palm trees. Elephants, supposedly. They love the palm fruit and crap out the seeds as they march, the trees germinating in the piles of dung. But it’s too dry for the palms to grow wide and sturdy and when the elephants bash the trunks to knock down the fruit the trees are readily injured and lose their crowns in the phefo. The wind, in Setswana. And round and round it goes, the elephants both creating and destroying, which is how you get straight lines of palm trees growing smack in the middle of a semi-desert.

“Just like in Beverly Hills Cop, right, my man?” Leitibolo quipped.

Up here there aren’t those kinds of stories to distract Fowler, as he tries his best to focus on the search for the lioness. So far it’s been all A.L.T.’s, and not just from him. Even Leitibolo has been fooled a couple of times, without the excuse of a recent divorce, the entrails of which spring into Fowler’s mind without warning, disrupting his concentration, like the bumps and dips on this so-called road. “I love you like a brother,” she said the morning she told him she was filing. An excuse no better than if she’d had an affair — she just wanted out and was unable to articulate why.

Fowler yells down to Leitibolo to stop as they crest a hill beyond the meerkat field.

“What is it, my man?!”

“Over there! What is that?”

“Where?”

“By the riverbed. Something walking back and forth.” A few seconds pass as Leitibolo fumbles around below. Fowler lowers the binos, shading his eyes with one hand to place the animal in perspective against the horizon. It looks like a giant white and black rooster, strutting amongst the grasses waving in the wind. The phefo.

“Secretary bird!” Leitibolo shouts up to Fowler.

“Secretary? As in office-worker?”

“Yeah, here. This explains it.” Leitibolo is holding out a field guide but Fowler can’t reach it from up top. He tells the young Botswanan to hang on a second and climbs down to the seats below. Leitibolo congratulates him when he’s back in his chair.

“Good spotting, Fowler. You’re getting much better at this.”

“You think so? Birds, maybe. Not so much with lionesses.”

“You’re too hard on yourself, my man. I told you it would be difficult to find her again. How about coffee and a snack? This is as good a place as any to stop, and then we’ll head to the airfield. Who knows, maybe we’ll find her on the way. The tracks are headed in that direction.”

The pair hop out of the vehicle and make their way to the back where there’s a fold-out table for eating and drinking. As he watches Leitibolo prepare the late morning treats, Fowler peruses the field guide and learns of the ongoing debate over the origin of the name of the secretary bird. Some say it’s because the birds’ upright feathers resemble London secretaries’ pen quills of the 1800s, others say it’s a bastardization of the Arabic word saqr-et-tair, meaning hunter bird, while still others say it’s a mispronunciation of the Boer word for Sagittarius. Whatever it is, everyone agrees the birds are majestic, four and a half feet of nature’s snake-killing perfection, stomping all over sub-Saharan Africa.

The debate over the name is like a lot of things out here, Fowler thinks, the past warring with the present, those now in charge trying to figure out what to make of all they’ve displaced. Or for that matter, everywhere. Everyone just trying to make his or her own way in the world. Not so different than Fowler, the freshly minted lucky single American, when forever and a day he was snakebit and married and everyone called him Michael.

He raises his coffee to his new-found African friend. “Leitibolo — lioness or no lioness, it’s been a blast.”

“Oh yeah, my man? You didn’t mind the wedding stuff? Tumeh was worried.”

“Are you kidding? That was half the fun. The other half was you. You got my trip off to an amazing start.”

Leitibolo flashes his buoyant smile. “Just remember that when it comes time for my tip!”

On the way to the airfield, they spot a couple more jackals and a steenbok, one of the smallest antelopes in the world. Leitibolo says breeding pairs spend their lives apart from each other, coming together only to mate. It’s an excellent survival strategy, he explains, one we humans perhaps ought to mimic, maybe then the divorce rate wouldn’t be so high, in Botswana it’s nearing fifty percent. When Fowler doesn’t laugh, Leitibolo apologizes, he meant no offense, does Fowler have experience with that?

“Only the bad kind,” Fowler says.

“Is there any other?”

As for the lioness, it’s all false starts and looking under the wrong bushes. This time of day the big animals are seeking shade so finding her is a matter of knowing where she’s likely to take shelter. At one point they think they’ve got her, a jumble of footprints by a ten-foot termite mound and a couple of guarri bushes. Leitibolo slows the truck to a crawl, creeping forward towards the scrub, though if anything that makes them seem even more conspicuous to Fowler, the wheels crunching the dead grasses and branches and the brakes shrieking like some of the birds out here. Leitibolo tells Fowler not to worry.

“We won’t disturb her if she’s there?” Fowler asks.

“We’re nothing to her, just part of the scenery. Besides, the footprints tell me this is yesterday’s resting spot, I was just hoping she might come back.”

“And?”

Leitibolo looks at his watch. “And I think it’s time for your plane.”

At the airfield, Leitibolo helps with the bags and gives Fowler a parting gift in exchange for his tip — a metal water bottle painted orange with the inscription of the camp name stenciled in black. Fowler is about to tell Leitibolo he shouldn’t have, the camp gift store’s prices are ridiculous, but then turns the flask over and reads the other side: “Taylor and Charlie Finally Got Married.” Fowler bursts out laughing one last time.

“You are something else, Leitibolo.”

“No, no. It wasn’t me, Fowler.”

“Then who?”

“A pretty lady named Amelia told me to give it to you before you left. And this.” Leitibolo hands Fowler a yellow envelope with flowers on the border. Inside is a short note with Amelia’s phone number. “Ring me sometime,” it says beneath the number. “Africa is just a phone call away.”

Leitibolo claps Fowler on the back. “You found your lioness!”

“Not quite, Leitibolo. Though come to think of it, you never know.”

“That’s the spirit, my man!”

And then Fowler is stepping onto the plane and the pilot is asking if he’s made sure to bring everything, there’s no turning back once they’re in the air. On board, it’s just him this time, there’ll be a full house tomorrow when the wedding party is over, the pilot says. Fowler tries to remember where the next camp is but blanks as he looks out the window at Leitibolo waving goodbye from next to the truck. Behind the young guide a pair of hornbills take flight as the pilot switches on the propellor. Fowler squeezes in one more question before everything is drowned out by the engine.

“Where are we headed again?”

“Wherever the skies take us! It’s a beautiful day!”

The plane roars down the runway and Fowler swears he sees her hiding in the bushes, behind every tree, as he lifts off alone into the crystalline African skies.

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