Rats, Shit and Trees

Tolken's baobab requires a wide angle lens.

“Go away, rat!” Annette yells. Then she claps twice loudly. It's an early dawn in Liwonde National Park. A bit before five a.m. The rat scratching at our reed roof is wide awake. So are the birds. They sound like monkeys, like crickets, like elephants, like children playing. Malawi has more bird species than all of North America and Europe. And the general assembly seems to be convening just outside our window. Clearly, Annette is wide awake too. She has been since she woke me up thirty minutes ago to escort her to the bathroom. After a night of hearing huge hippo steps, jaws grinding on grass as they walk, she wanted the support. I obliged, mainly because of the drunk man I heard muttering epithets at nobody in the distance.

Annette has come a long way since seeing her first mouse in the Verbena Street house. Then she jumped on the couch and did the Icky Shuffle. Last night, while we played Scrabble, she watched a mouse scurry across the bar and stare us down with genuine amusement. And no evidence of fear. The rat in our roof is equally as fearless. He pauses for a moment in response to Annette's calls and claps. Then he goes back to his scratching. Nevertheless, we manage to doze for an hour or so until our alarm.

By 6:45 a.m., we are following a barefooted white man into the bush. His name is Peter. He is South African. And from my limited experience of seeing barefoot Afrikaans people in grocery stores across South Africa, his bare feet serve as an identity seal. He is Afrikaans. We walk past hippo shit splattered across a bush with its tail to mark its territory. And hippo shit wet and fresh in a pile with urine on top. Peter points out that this one if female because she pissed on her shit. Presumably, the male pisses in front of his shit. I suppose we would too if we didn't have opposable thumbs and toilets.

We see lots of baboons, mostly not close enough to confirm the opposition of their thumbs. And impala. We walk pasta pile of their shit. It's pellets, like deer or rabbit. “The impala from the same herd all go in the same spot,” Peter explains. “Then the dominant male comes along and sniffs around to understand what is happening in the herd.” He points to a turd that is a bit larger than the rest. “It's like reading the morning paper in the public restroom. He catches up on all of the gossip of the herd.”

We walk on to a monstrous baobab tree. Peter explains that for every meter of girth, the tree is one hundred years old. This one is 3,800 years old. That makes it 38 meters, the oldest and largest tree in Malawi. And it seems to possess a spirit of its own. Three different species of birds have made nests in its massive branches. And an impressive bee hive as well.

Peter goes on to explain that J.R. Tolken spent part of his childhood in Malawi. His dad used to preach under this tree. His childhood sketchbook is filled with its image. And the real setting for the fictional Lord of the Rings trilogy is here. Liwonde Park is on the Shire River, just north of misty mountains, with baobab trees that seem to be magic and alive. I haven't read the Lord of the Rings and probably fell asleep during the movie, but this sounds plausible.

We walk on past elephant shits the size of my upper thigh. They are really dry. “Elephants only digest twenty percent of what they eat,” Peter says, kicking a turd with his foot so it rolls into two pieces. “So the baboons pick through it for undigested fruits.”

I spot a water buck staring at us through the forest. At first it looks like a donkey. But its ears are horns. And its larger than an elk. Annette brings up the subject of eating it We have been talking about such things since our day driving the Cape Coast of South Africa, wondering if jackass penguins taste anything like bacon. We ate kudu and springbok that night, but no water buck.

“It's not very good,” Peter chimes in. “They have a gland in their hind quarters. It releases a toxin when it is scared. It makes all the meat taste a lot like urine.”

I notice it has a white ring around its dark brown hind quarters. I use it as an opportunity to get the thought of Peter tasting urine out of my mind. “It looks like it has a target on its ass.”

“Most antelope have identifying marks on their rumps,” he says. I ponder for a moment where his knowledge comes from. Just how much is from experience? How much comes from books? How much from locals? He probably has the shit of three different mammals on the bottom of his feet right now.