he Himba boy greets Davies the second time on the first day with a fingers-in-his-mouth smile. Not so different than his own kids at that age, Davies thinks, minus the loincloth attire. The same sideways glance checking with an adult, followed by a step forward and a tilt of the chin upwards. And then the cheeks go and the boy is giggling through stubby fingers.

“Morro,” Davies says, holding out his fist.

“Morro,” the boy mumbles, then bumps Davies’ fist before scampering back over the dirt to hide behind the women standing in front of the merchandise display.

This was so much better than this morning, when the boy took one look at Davies and stopped in his tracks and ran to the mud and elephant dung hut of the woman Davies later learned was the one in charge, even if she was only twenty-four. This, despite Davies’ big American smile, which he’d put on because he didn’t know what else he was supposed to do.

He and Paula had come here with Harmony before setting out for the day to look for the animals, to the extent they could find any on account of the weather. Rain had miraculously come to Damaraland this April, buckets full. And while it had set the landscape awash with flowing green grass, making Davies’ back forty look like a five at best, the bounty had sent the animals away from the riverbed where they normally ate and finding them had become unusually difficult. Hence, the detour to the Himba village, which Paula had been excited about when Harmony offered it as an option, but which had filled Davies with dread. Animals, even ones that were hard to find, he could handle. It was people that were the problem.

This was not to say the animals were easy to locate when the landscape was its normal Mars red, covered with stones that would send you sprawling if you tried to run should a rhinoceros catch your scent. That’s what the guidebooks depicted — a rock-strewn rust desert bordered by black and grey mountains, with the stray oryx or zebra existing only as a silhouette or foreground or other photographic fodder. It’s just that before the rains Harmony said you could drive down the riverbed and your chances of the animals appearing out of the blue went from borderline to enough to support the tourist trade.

Namibia was like that — you looked and looked and looked and then the animals popped up, seemingly out of nowhere, magnificent and alone, and suddenly you remembered why you’d come here. So much different than Botswana, where Davies and Paula had spent the week prior, before flying into Windhoek and then catching a bush plane out here. If you weren’t careful at the camps in the Linyanti or the Delta — say, you left your tent screen door even slightly ajar or just forgot to lock it — before you blinked there might be a baboon rifling through your things and eating all the extra treats you’d collected from high tea. And even if you did bolt everything up tight there was still a fifty-fifty chance an elephant or a Cape Buffalo might block the way to your front door on your return from your early morning game drive.

But in Namibia you needed luck and yesterday their luck had been lousy — just a few kudus and a couple ostrich near the man-made waterhole east of the riverbed. So before dinner Harmony suggested they go see the Himba women this morning back towards the airfield; afterwards, they could try some different spots on the return to camp for lunch where perhaps they might find a cheetah.

Paula leapt at the chance and Davies had no choice but to go along. This was her trip after all; he’d planned it as a gift for her 50th, since their last had left for college she’d been down in the dumps and she’d always wanted to go on safari. What better way to lift her spirits than to make a life-long dream come true — bumping along in a four-by-four chasing hyena and lions and wild dogs beneath skies with nary a contrail you were so far off the beaten track. It was enough to make anyone forget about anything.

Including Davies. Though it wasn’t clear what he was forgetting. He just knew he was.

He walks over to the rickety merchandise tables where Paula and Harmony are already in deep discussion with the Himba woman in charge. She’s explaining something that Davies can see makes Harmony hesitate — their twenty-something guide places one hand on her hip and looks off into the setting sun before turning to translate. As she does so, the Himba woman keeps talking and offering Paula various trinkets from her section of the tables, little dolls and zebras carved in Mopani wood along with bracelets made of seeds and string and even some PVC collected from the riverbed.

The small items seem unworthy of the head woman’s stature — she’s the tallest of the seven by far and the crimson-colored hematite on her arms and bare breasts shines in the evening light in a way that it doesn’t on the others. Only her hair isn’t anything that distinguishes her. The same leather cock-spur arrangement on top as everyone else — an erembe, Harmony said it’s called — trailing strands covered with more of the hematite and then the man-made extensions that seem so out of place here in the desert. Still, the overall effect is striking. Davies merely has to close his eyes to imagine her centuries ago, waiting for the men to return like she is now but probably far more worried that some of them might not, when this village might have had seventy huts instead of seven.

Paula comes over to him bearing the bad news. “She says she sold the bowl to some other tourists who came by around lunch time.”

“Even though Harmony told them we’d be back?”

“Honey. I doubt that means anything to them.”

“I suppose that’s right.” Davies notices the head woman looking at him as if she understands what they’re saying. Which is silly, he knows. She no more understands English than he understands Otjhimba or Damara, he can’t remember which one Harmony said she uses to bridge the language gap. For a second Davies thinks the head woman is about to give him the forbidding look from this morning but then the boy is tugging at her goatskin skirt and pointing at him and she breaks out instead into a wide grin.

“Looks like you’ve made a friend,” Paula says.

“I don’t know why, but I’ll take it. Must be the boy. He likes me now.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It’s my shirt, I think. He kept grabbing at it this morning, remember?” Davies waves at the boy, who signals back from behind the head woman’s leg. “Something about the color, I imagine. Maybe he hasn’t seen it before.”

“Look up, honey. He sees better than that just about every day.” Davies lifts his gaze and witnesses a shade of orange he’s never seen before, he’d try to catch it on his phone but it’d be pointless. That, and the way the remaining light reaches from below the horizon and over the mountains, it really is like the fingers of God, just as everyone said it would be. Something about the color. How dumb could he be.

“Sometimes I’m an idiot,” Davies says.

“You said it, not me.”

From there, it’s time for the shopping Harmony promised the women this morning. And while the bowl isn’t there anymore, it goes just fine; following the head woman’s lead, all the ladies are joyous with Davies now, of course they’d loved Paula right from the start. Each time he and Paula buy something — and they make sure to purchase at least one item from all the women — there are smiles and pictures and promises of singing. Mostly, it’s just the bracelets, but one copper-colored necklace stands out. The shortest of the Himba woman places it around Paula’s neck and after that there just isn’t any choice in the matter.

But the bowl was the reason they returned here after lunch and a nap, and Davies finds himself ruing that he didn’t bring any cash this morning, the bracelets are nice and all, but just aren’t the same. Wide and shallow — like a pasta bowl, Paula had said — on the inside of the wood had been a painting of three mountain zebra emerging from behind an Anna tree in the riverbed while a giraffe ate from an overhanging Acacia. It was spectacular, the genuine article. Davies would’ve given the shirt off his back for it had he known the boy liked the damn thing so much.

When they’d asked how it had been made, Harmony couldn’t quite get the head woman to explain, but did tease out that the painter was one of the men off with the goats who wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks, the head woman’s husband. All of which made the bowl even more desirable to Davies, it was the one thing he’d seen on their trip so far that reached out specifically to him. For Paula it was the animals, and while Davies loved those too, you couldn’t bring them home with you. Memories were rarely enough for Davies. He usually needed something tangible to take him back.

Harmony comes over to him to make the exchange with the Himba woman in charge. A twenty will more than suffice, and Davies hands it over as he watches Paula pick up a little girl with a runny nose. Now that’s something that does take him back — Paula holding a toddler with one arm and smiling. It’s her natural state: mother; caregiver. He’s not so sure what his is.

“Shall we get a group photo?” Harmony asks. She says something to the Himba women in charge and all seven join Paula between two of the huts with the mountains in the distance as backdrop. “Get over here,” Paula says to Davies, and he ambles over to the group and stands off to one side. But then the boy runs over and reaches out to Davies to pick him up also, and Davies feels everyone watching, so he hoists the boy onto his shoulders and moves in close; the whole group starts laughing. “Take the picture already,” Davies yelps as the boy pulls on his hair, and Harmony snaps a few as some of the Himba women break out into song. “Thanks to our dogs for watching the goats,” Harmony says they are chanting. “Our brave and wonderful dogs.” When the music stops, Davies turns around and finds the Himba woman in charge holding one of the bracelets they’ve purchased, wanting to put it around his wrist. “Okuhepa,” she says, as the boy drums rhythmically on the top of Davies’ brow. “Okuhepa.”

Thank you.

֎֎֎

The ride back to camp in the dark is a thrill. There’s just a sliver of a moon, so what passes for the road comes at them in sudden jolts and slips of the safari vehicle even though Harmony can’t go very fast. Every so often she yells from the driver’s seat in her pleasing Damaran lilt: “Big one coming!” and Davies and Paula grab the metal rod in front of their seats — the “oh shit bar” — where during the daylight Davies hung his ancient binoculars, relics from his father’s army service. Another of those items that helps take Davies back. It’s been all over the world and then some, he lost the leather case for it on a trip to Yellowstone with Paula and the kids ten years ago.

Halfway there, the ride smooths out a bit and Harmony is able to pick up the pace. They’re crossing an open plain where during the day you can see the fairy circles, the mysterious patches of land in the Namibian desert where, when the rains do come, the grass doesn’t grow. No one knows why, though Harmony shared the latest theories when they stopped here yesterday afternoon for coffee and snacks off the back of the truck. Termites or soil chemistry; maybe even some aliens, she joked. Paula hypothesized it was leftover poison from the Euphorbia bushes that grow everywhere in Damaraland, but not where the fairy circles are. Melkbos, everyone calls them in Afrikaans. Milkbush. People die every year from the damn things, Davies read last night on the Internet when the Wi-Fi in camp was working, though supposedly the poisonous white sap might someday have use to treat cancer.

The Germans have returned to Damaraland to study the circles, to try to identify definitively the reasons for their existence. Amends have been made, or so the papers say, though whether bygones are truly bygones, Davies has no idea. He guesses for some yes and for others no, the same as anywhere else. Though he’s noticed no one speaks German around here, and even in the camp the family from Berlin communicates conspicuously in English at their breakfast table.

They are tall and good-looking, the Berliners, and came to Namibia at the urging of some friends. See Africa before it’s too late. Before everything is gone. Two perfect parents and two perfect teen-age sons, the boys had been especially keen on Davies and Paula joining the family and their guide in a scorpion hunt last night beneath the stars. But when Paula suggested they come along to see the Himba women today in return, you could pick out the mother’s cringing even by flashlight.

“I couldn’t do that. Like watching animals at the zoo.”

“Which way?” had been Paula’s quick reply.

“Sorry?”

“Which way? Are we watching them or are they watching us?”

Harmony points out the sign for the German research station at the bottom of a rise, lit by the vehicle headlights. “ACTIVE RESEARCH AREA. OFF-ROADING STRICTLY PROHIBITED.” “Remember that, guys?” she hollers, and Davies nods, recalling her joke from this morning. “There’s only off-roading in Namibia!” he yells together with Paula into the rushing air, and it feels fantastic, like screaming on a roller-coaster when you were young and hadn’t a care in the world.

As they crest the hill just beyond what Davies guesses are some soil monitoring devices, they all see another car or truck headed towards them. “I wonder who that could be at this hour!” Harmony calls out, and moves over to the left to make room to pass. Then all at once they realize whatever it is isn’t moving and Harmony slams on the brakes, pitching Davies and Paula forward into the oh shit bar. “Is that?” Davies starts, but before he can finish Harmony is shouting with glee.

“Springbok! Hundreds of them!”

The animals jump across the road in front of the truck. Harmony shuts off the lights — to settle down the herd, she says — and the Springbok move around them in the dark. Davies looks to his left and sees several of the antelope right by their side. He can smell them they’re so close, and it’s everything he can do not to reach out and try to touch one. He feels a silly smile cross his lips, and then Paula’s hand reaching for his across the bench; he grasps it and holds on tight. “Incredible,” she whispers. “Wonderful.” “Look,” he says, and then points off into the distance, where you can just make out some of the herd outlined against the mountains. The Southern Cross shines above them, pointing the way. Davies can’t believe what he’s seeing.

Then there are the sounds, the snorts and honks and chuffs rising vaporous into the night. Along with the scratching of the hoofs on the rocks and the soft thuds of the Springbok landing on the plain. For a moment, it’s as if the truck and the three of them are part of the herd, there’s so much activity all around them. An antelope symphony, Davies thinks, he won’t be bragging about the suburban deer on that back forty of his ever again.

Two minutes pass, maybe three, and eventually the herd sorts itself out on either side of the road. “Ok?” Harmony says. “Should we get going now?” Davies takes one more look over by the mountains, at the animals and the stars draped from horizon to horizon, and squeezes Paula’s hand. “How about that?” he says. “How about that?”

“I love Namibia!” Harmony then cries out, and, after re-starting the engine, sends them back down the road through the canyons to camp for dinner and then off to bed.

֎֎֎

In the morning, it’s time to leave for the next camp. Davies and Paula are headed south, to a ritzy place their agent picked out as a mid-Namibia rest point before heading down to the South African border for some hiking at Fish River Canyon. A couple hours even further into the desert from some place called Wereldsend in Afrikaans, though apparently there are several places with that name in Namibia. World’s End.

They gather their things after breakfast and say their goodbyes, including to the German family, who are staying one more day to take a helicopter to see the Skeleton Coast. Davies watches as Paula tries to convince the mother once more of the merits of visiting the Himba women. “They want to see you as much as you want to see them,” Paula says, in a misguided effort to assuage the mother’s guilty conscience. Misguided because that’s precisely the problem, Davies thinks. The German mother doesn’t want to see the women.

It's two and a half hours to the airfield and Harmony suggests they can break it up with another stop at the fairy circles for some pictures. Or, they can power straight through and take a hike with the Herrero guy who works as the airfield caretaker, Clement. Like the other Herrero men, Clement wears Western clothes, and sported a New York Yankees cap when he and Harmony first greeted Davies and Paula two days ago. Davies, a diehard Boston Red Sox fan, jumped off the plane and shook hands with Clement in the Namibian way, a regular shake and then a soul shake, twice over.

“The Yankees?” Davies said. “Even here in Namibia?”

Clement flashed an easy smile. “Who are the Yankees?”

“Exactly.”

Clement then explained that he’d gotten the hat only last month, some guy from Joburg left it behind in the airstrip bathroom. No sense wasting a perfectly good cap, could Davies tell him more about the Yankees? Clement knew it was a sports team, but that was about it. “My bad,” said Davies, and, after providing the requested explanation, they all toasted Clement’s insouciance to the American pastime with their welcome cocktail beneath the sunshade. “Welcome to Namibia,” Harmony said with a bright smile after serving them their drinks.

They take their seats in the safari vehicle and Harmony starts them on their way. Paula votes for hiking with Clement, commenting that it’s too bad they can’t just go hang out with the Himba women again for an hour, it’d be fun to learn more about them. “Oh, you want to see the ladies again?” says Harmony. “Why didn’t you say so? They loved you guys.”

“Even me?” Davies says.

“Especially you. That little boy? He’s the son of the painter of that bowl you liked so much. Let’s go see them again. They won’t mind. We can tell them you want to stay overnight.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. They love a good practical joke.”

So they drive past the fairy circles and back to the Himba village. On the way there, they have more luck — in a clearing just after the canyons, they come across a clutch of giraffes, making their way to another of the waterholes. Six of them, with one juvenile missing most of its tail. The giraffes stop for a moment to take in the travelers and then move along, steady and slow. Like ships at sea, moving inexorably across the frame.

“That’s one fortunate giraffe,” Harmony comments.

“How so?” asks Paula.

“The tail. Lion most likely.”

When they arrive at the Himba village, Harmony tells Davies and Paula to go ahead, she has some things she was going to give the women on the way back from the airfield but now she can drop them off early. This is the way out here, Davies thinks, the exchange of goods and information and visits. The Himba get some needed supplies they’d otherwise have to walk several days to obtain, as well as gossip from the camp, and Harmony’s guests, East or West, get a reminder that everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time, so to speak. Even if all they are wearing are loincloths and skirts.

Behind them two of the Himba women have taken Davies and Paula’s small bags off the truck and are bringing them into the village. They get all the way to the surrounding fence — tree limbs lashed together with some rope fashioned from native plants — before Harmony lets them in on the joke, and all the women start giggling. The head woman, who watched the whole thing unfold from just outside her hut, seems particularly amused. She walks over to Harmony, laughing and smiling, and the two exchange a fist bump. They make quite the pair — the educated Damara woman with aims on becoming an engineer, dressed in safari chic, and the veritable child in charge of six women and five toddlers in an outpost in the scorching desert. Harmony has explained that her own home village is no more than 20 kilometers from here. What a difference ten or so miles makes, Davies thinks.

Harmony hands over the provisions, bags of maize and some spare water bottles filled with cow milk, while the rest of the women gather around Davies and Paula. As they did at times yesterday some of the women reach out to touch Paula’s hair — Harmony said the women admired Paula’s lengthy tresses, the extensions they purchased at the market were a pale imitation. As for Davies, he’s surrounded by the toddlers, including the boy, who grabs again at Davies’ shirt, which today is plain white with the logo of a donut shop from home. “You and my shirts,” Davies says to the boy, who raises his arms in the universal gesture of a toddler asking to be picked up. Davies obliges.

“Smile!” Paula says, and Davies looks up as she takes one of him holding the boy.

Quickly, the hour they have goes by. First, they watch three of the women preparing and then applying the hematite to their bodies for the day. They grind the clay on a stone and then mix it with butterfat from the goats to produce the red paste they rub on each other’s skin. Protection from the sun and insects, Harmony explained yesterday, as well as the aesthetic aspects. For obvious reasons, the mixture is why the Himba are sometimes known as the “red people,” though since most of the men eschew the stuff, the common name is a bit too general for Harmony’s tastes. She’d prefer people call them what they are — the Himba — and leave the colors for those Namibian sunsets no one can quite capture.

Next, they are invited into the head woman’s hut to view where she and the boy live. It’s shockingly spare, Davies thinks as he ducks inside, and he tries not to pass judgment but is having difficulty. In the center of the dirt floor embers smoke, perfuming some clothing hanging above, while off to one side is the sleeping area, nothing but a goat skin on the bare ground. On the other side are the woman’s possessions, various utensils for eating and cooking and some supplies in more of the plastic bottles. One of them contains the butterfat, labeled with a commercial mayonnaise manufacturer. That knocks Davies off his perch, and he sees the home for what it is — a sturdy shelter from the sun and insects at mid-day and a comfortably snug place to sleep at night her people have utilized since the Portuguese plied the waters near here.

Finally, Harmony and the head woman gather everyone in the center by the main cooking fire where Paula and Davies share the pictures they’ve taken over the last couple days, including of the villagers. One of the women says something Harmony translates roughly as “do I really look like that?” and Paula asks Harmony to tell the woman she looks “even better.” “Okuhepa,” the woman then says to Paula with a huge smile, as Davies crouches to show a group of the toddlers his smartwatch. All of them immediately start swiping the face as they’ve seen with the phones, producing a display Davies didn’t even know was possible, though the boy isn’t among them. Davies looks around for him, but all of the sudden he’s nowhere to be found.

And then the visit is over. They thank the women again for their hospitality, the shortest woman takes one last touch of Paula’s hair, and then there is more singing, this time with dancing. Harmony doesn’t translate and Davies and Paula just watch and listen to the jubilant and, at times, comical display, with one woman slipping at one point and falling on her backside. That’s right, Davies thinks. All of them are under twenty-five.

The travelers wave one final goodbye and head back towards the truck. A strange melancholy overtakes Davies — Paula notices and rubs his shoulders as he walks. He will miss this place, these people, though he can’t quite put his finger on precisely why. He’d say it was the simplicity, but that isn’t it, he knows he could never live like this. But still — they have something he’s lost. Replaced by whatever it was he was busy forgetting.

He turns around for one last glimpse, at the seven oval huts laid out in a line in front of the scrub. The woman are gathered by the fence watching them, the toddlers around their knees. Davies looks again for the boy and doesn’t see him at first, but then finds him over by the side, exiting the head woman’s hut. He pushes his way between all the legs, through the fence, and then runs towards them across the dust with a frantic look on his face, as if Davies and Paula have walked off with something that’s his. Davies crouches to meet him and then sees what’s going on. The boy is holding something, a parting gift. Davies shakes his head and laughs.

It's a bowl, one of the cooking implements they saw in the head woman’s hut. It’s nothing like the one from yesterday, simple and wooden, with no decoration at all. Chipped and stained from use, it’s a little smaller than a cereal bowl, and fits easily in the boy’s hand. Davies takes it from the boy, gives him another fist bump, before standing and turning to Harmony.

“You knew about this?”

Harmony smiles. “I might have. The head woman felt terrible about the other one so she insisted.” Davies waves and the head woman returns the gesture. “Okuhepa!” he calls out, and she and the rest of the group start laughing again. He asks Harmony whether he should pay for it as the boy clutches at his shirt.

“Do you pay for gifts at home?”

“Point taken.” Davies then glances over at Paula, who’s been filming the whole thing on her phone. “Amazing,” he says to her, and she just nods without saying anything.

Davies looks down at the boy at his feet. “We have to go, little buddy.” He gives the boy a nudge on the shoulder towards the fence. But this just makes the boy clench the shirt even tighter. Davies drops to his knees and the boy throws his arms around Davies’ neck, going limp, in the familiar manner of a toddler who doesn’t want you to leave.

“Be careful there or you really will have to stay,” says Paula.

“Maybe we can give him something.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“I have an idea.” Davies gently peels the boy’s arms from his neck, setting him down in the dirt, and looks over at the Himba woman in charge. Whatever trace of disapproval Davies perceived on her face that first time yesterday has vanished even from his imagination. He turns to Harmony. “Ok if I give the boy my t-shirt?”

Harmony shrugs. “They don’t wear them ever, but he does seem to like yours for whatever reason.”

“Will it be all right with her though?” Davies smiles at the Himba woman in charge, who smiles back, and Harmony shouts out to her. A brief exchange and some laughs and then Davies is removing the shirt and showing off his farmer’s tan. “For you,” he says, as he tosses the shirt to the boy, who snags it and runs back to the fence. When he gets there one of the women picks him up, and he wraps the shirt proudly around his shoulders. Beaming — his face could light up even the night skies here in Damaraland.

Davies boards the safari truck as Harmony starts the engine. Paula gives him a fresh shirt; he puts it on and hands her the bowl. “Put this someplace safe,” he says, but thinking, he doesn’t really need it, not this time. This will take him back. All of this. The shirt off his back. No one will ever believe it. He rides off with Harmony and Paula as the Himba women break into song once more. Thanks to our dogs, they sing again, thanks to our brave and wonderful doggy dogs.

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