Chapter Three

Tess

Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia

Cocooned in the puffy warmth of her sleeping bag, face fresh in the cold desert night air, Tess had been blissfully in the void of sleep when a phone ping blinked her awake.

Rubbing the heels of her palms against her lids, she turned toward the rustling of her friend, pulling herself up to sit. “Gwen,” Tess whispered, “what time is it?” The night had been too short, and the green walls of the tent hadn’t brightened with the rising sun.

“Three fifteen. It’s not time to get up yet. Our team channel … hang on, I can’t find my glasses.”

Whatever thoughts one of their fellow tourists had in the middle of the night could, honestly, have been a “note to self” and posted in the morning when people rose to the new day. As Tess squirmed deeper into her bag, hoping to plunge back into the wonderful nothingness of perfect sleep, Gwen reached out and patted Tess’s thigh. “Got your GPS handy?”

“Why?” Her hand stretched into the cold air, feeling for her grab-and-go bag with the ten survival essentials she kept within arm’s reach when in the field—be it for work or, like right now, for play. Pulling her headlamp into place, clicking it on, and adjusting the light to green so she could see red map lines and not affect her night vision, Tess dug her backup, handheld GPS unit from the bottom of the pack. Wi-Fi was non-existent out here in the desert. Even basic phone connectivity had wide swaths of dead zones, and this was one of them. Where Tess didn’t get the ping, her friend and colleague Gwen did. It was all carrier-dependent, and, luckily, Gwen had her Namibian phone with her.

“Mandy went to the bathroom and got lost on the way back,” Gwen spoke in an undertone that would keep their conversation in their tent, letting the other happy tourists sleep on.

“Lost?” The communal bathhouse was only about fifty yards away.

“Lights are out. She was using her phone flashlight.” Gwen tugged on a pair of fleece-lined tactical pants. The days out here were uncomfortably hot, and the desert nights were bitterly cold.

After searching the GPS for “gas” and finding the station, Tess pulled warm clothes over her pajamas.

The mating calls of jackals rode the breeze. Their howls were reminiscent of a wolf, only high-pitched and short-lived. “Eerie as hell. I bet Mandy was scared to death alone in the dark with a cellphone light and the jackals,” Tess murmured. “I would be.”

The sweater Gwen pulled over her head muffled her voice. “I texted Mandy to sit tight. We’re coming for her. I bet she’ll feel better now that she knows the cavalry is coming.”

Tess scooted on her butt down the bag to grab her boots,

“Check them for scorpions.” Gwen tugged on a wool sock.

“Yup.” Tess unzipped the door and held her boot upside down for a good shake and tap before putting them on and lacing up. If a scorpion had found its way to the toe of her boot, she didn’t want to release it in the tent. She still had hopes of getting a few more hours of shut-eye after this impromptu adventure.

“I bet you Mandy isn’t wearing boots. She was walking around camp last night in flip-flops.”

“Okay, what’s the danger?” Tess asked.

“Never walk barefoot or without a flashlight at night in Namibia as a rule. Some snakes are active after sunset, and slow-moving snakes are easy to step on. The puff adder, for instance. Highly venomous.”

“And the closest hospital is five hours away. That seems like a dangerous distance.” Tess scanned her light over the area immediately in front of her. “Are there puff adders here in the desert?”

“Usually not. I was just using that as an example.”

“Wonderful. Well, just so you know, I downloaded the Namibian snake app before I came.”

“Of course you did,” Gwen said, grabbing her bag.

Once Tess had cleared the door, she waited for Gwen to follow.

Aiming her light toward the ground, Tess pointed out the jackal tracks that had circled their tent at some point that night. But they must have scampered out of their campsite because Tess didn’t catch glowing eyes in her green light. She scanned along the group’s designated area, ringed with a wall of stones. That wall might have provided some buffer from the blowing desert sand, but it did nothing to separate the campers from the wild.

Seven of their group’s ten tourists slept in tents; three had decided—at their guide’s suggestion—to sleep under the stars as he did. Of course, the tourists with no wilding experience were on the ground with the desert animals, and the guide slept high and protected on the flat roof of their off-roading vehicle.

Tess stopped at Mandy’s tent and unzipped the door. She reached in and grabbed up Mandy’s boots. Pulling out socks that Mandy had shoved in the tops, she held them at arm's length and gave them a vigorous shake. Sticking the socks under her arm, Tess turned the boots over to do the scorpion tap, put the socks back in, tied the laces together, and draped them over her neck before zipping the tent shut.

No one needed a surprise jackal curled on their sleeping bag.

“Thorough,” Gwen said, pulling her arms through the straps of her safety-ten pack.

“Absolutely,” Tess whispered, “I’d feel better if she had these.”

“I hear you.”

With her GPS on her palm, Tess dropped a pin to indicate their tent’s location. That way, she and Gwen wouldn’t be wandering the desert as lost as Mandy—more lost; Mandy was at the gas station just outside the camp gates. Eventually, the workers would show up, and Mandy would be sitting at one of the picnic tables in her jammies and flip-flops.

Tess glanced toward the tour vehicle and saw that the soup pot from dinner was resting on the fold-out table. “Five bucks says he tries to feed that to us for breakfast.”

Meals were part of this excursion’s fee. When the driver, Otto, skipped over lunch yesterday, everyone was too polite to ask when they’d get to eat, but this also made them hangry with a side of carsick.

It had been a visually exciting but hot and unpleasant five-hour car ride from Namibia’s capital city of Windhoek. The trip had been two hours longer than anticipated because of the stop to change a flat tire and another when the engine decided to conk out for no apparent reason.

Along the route, dotted across the powdery earth, termite mounds towered as high as Tess’s head.

Baboon families lounged by the side of the road.

An occasional giraffe or springbuck would make everyone point and gasp.

And then there were more termite mounds. And more termite mounds. And more.

Tess liked them. She held a sense of awe that tiny termites could make their own skyscrapers. She’d love to see one of the mounds cut in half to discover the interior architecture. But, given that they were full of termites, Tess was equally glad Otto didn’t offer to chop one open—for everyone’s sake, including the termites.

It was all magical and amazing.

The only problem was that Tess wasn’t great without food. Since she was sitting next to Otto, she took up the subject with him, making sure the guy knew she was displeased and that they expected to be fed properly throughout. Maybe her tone wasn’t as diplomatic as she’d wished, but Tess succumbed to the effects of hangry like any other human.

Tess got it. Namibian jobs were sparse. With a twenty percent unemployment rate, people were willing to work for meager wages. Tess had concluded along the drive that Otto was probably pocketing the designated food money to fatten his wallet. That was understandable, especially since he’d told Tess he was divorced with a child support check going to Botswana.

But still, Tess knew from her lean-pocketed grad school days as a single parent that there were plenty of creative ways to feed a crowd. Otto could skim a little off the top without someone posting bad reviews for future tourists to read, causing them to click over a different tour operator’s page. Seemed to Tess like that was biting off your nose to spite your face.

As Tess stumbled along following the GPS red arrow on her rescue hunt for Mandy, Tess realized from her inner dialogue that her hangry hadn’t been appeased since yesterday, and she needed calories to let go of her inner grumbling.

A missed lunch wouldn’t have been that big a deal, except she’d skipped breakfast for their early departure and then arrived at the campfire to find a dinner unfit for consumption.

Not just unpalatable but inedible.

They’d all been starving, and—after Otto’s bragging about his gourmet camp cooking skills—the travelers had high expectations and growling stomachs.

When the group gathered in a line to dish up their share of food from a pot in the fire pit, they discovered that Otto offered them a dinner of half-cooked rice. The chicken wings he’d thrown into the pot, with white, gelatinous-looking skin, floated to the top. Some vegetables that had been green and leafy were now cooked to strings. But the combination of soggy everything and the crunch of the uncooked rice made this stuff not just visually off-putting but a top candidate for causing a bad case of travelers' sickness.

Tess and Gwen pulled out the meal replacement bars they’d left in the vehicle, keeping them safely away from their tent where the enticing chocolate scent might lure scavenging jackals.

That’s what they ate for supper. And now the friends were out of options. Tess needed to think about something other than her empty stomach. “I’m not a fan of being out here with the jackals.”

With her headlamp in her teeth, Gwen wound her long black hair into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. Tugging her lamp back into place, she said, “They’re out here looking for a quick snack and maybe a willing female for a little midnight lovin’. You’re not a small animal, and you’re not furry enough to make them consider you for a girlfriend.”

Tess pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose in a wet and satisfying way. “I don’t know about that. I haven’t shaved in a couple of weeks.”

“TMI, my friend.”

“Right.” Looking around, Tess could understand Mandy’s disorientation. Every camp looked almost identical—tents, numbers, and vehicles— all the tourist groups were like theirs. “Over there.” Tess pointed at the activity to her right. “Turning my head with my headlamp on and seeing the jackals humping is just kind of rude on my part, wouldn’t you say?”

Gwen chuckled as they stumbled forward through the deep desert sand.

It didn’t take long to get to Mandy. There she sat with her arms wrapping herself, shivering.

Gwen called out, “We’re here.”

“Oh, thank goodness it's you. I didn’t know who was behind those lights and whether I should be relieved or scared.” Grabbing first Tess, then Gwen into a tight hug. Mandy stuttered through chattering teeth, “I thought I was going to freeze. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

Mandy sat to get her boots on. “And thank you for boots and socks. Flip-flops in thirty-some-odd degrees aren’t great.”

While she waited, Tess pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose again.

“Did you come down with something?” Mandy asked. “You keep fussing your nose.”

“Strangest sensation. I’m so dry I’m getting nosebleeds.” She slid the tissue away and then used the hand sanitizer she kept in her jacket pocket.

“Is your nose bleeding now?” Gwen tensed up. “Are you chumming the air for predators? Maybe take a step to the side.”

“Are you kidding?” Mandy’s voice ratcheted up. “Is that a thing?”

“It’s not a bloody nose this time,” Tess said. “Something in the desert gives me an allergic reaction. It was the same in Arizona.” Tess reached out her hand as if she could catch hold of the air and roll it through her fingers.

“Every time I come here, I have the same problem,” Gwen said. “I call it a Namibian facial when I’ve rubbed my nose raw. Two percent humidity isn’t my comfort zone.”

With Mandy shivering in her flannel pjs, Tess felt badly that she’d thought of boots but not a jacket.

As they retraced their path to the tents, Tess slid an arm around Mandy to help keep her warm. “It’s just up ahead. I can see our tent configuration.”

Tess was actually enjoying this side adventure.

Walking in the crisp temperature, the satiny darkness of the sky was made spectacular with shooting stars. Under the glittering riot of the Milky Way, Tess felt like she was part of a bigger whole. And that felt good.

The jackal humping and fellow traveler search party just added to the memories Tess was storing away on this week-long vacation from their jobs.

Gwen and Tess were climate scientists for WorldCares NGO. Their job was to watch weather patterns, hoping to accurately forecast where WorldCares should pre-position supplies in advance of a humanitarian crisis.

Their next research project would focus here in Namibia, where a dangerously low rainfall during the last wet season made their dry season calamitous.

The drought was already stressing the production systems in Namibia.

Things had turned dire across the entire country.

Tess suddenly felt self-rebuke flood her system for griping about Otto and the food situation. Then she reminded herself they had paid for all their meals, and the rice was uncooked. If Otto had served the group mopane worms—the caterpillars collected, dried, and cooked as a traditional form of protein—Tess would have loved the adventure of tasting it. She’d read that they were delicacies but hadn’t found them on a menu. So it wasn’t the food but the preparation, or lack thereof.

Before this tour, she and Gwen had dined on wonderful foods in Windhoek—fresh oysters and ox tail. But that wasn’t available for everyone in Namibia.

Here, there was a stratification of haves and have-nots, a remnant of when South Africa ruled and Apartheid enforced strict policies. Those regulations had an enduring effect on where and how the people lived.

Things were often lean in Namibia. It took a daily dose of creativity to survive.

But much more so right now.

After finishing up this adventure tour—something Tess called “wonder-wander”—they were heading to Gwen’s parents’ vineyard just to the north, outside of Etosha National Park, one of the best animal preserves in Africa.

There, they’d start analyzing the crop and weather data, developing predictions of what was to come in the near future.

WorldCares had just learned that the government was feeding its people from the emergency reserves. Difficult choices lay on the table. So, WorldCares wanted a report on how the communities were adjusting. Could their tribal knowledge get them through to the next rain, or were the people succumbing to the weather events?

Lives depended on help arriving on time with the right equipment and supplies. WorldCares had been honing that skill for the seventy years it had worked to relieve suffering.

Both women felt the pressure of getting this right.

Even though Tess wanted to forgive herself for grumbling about the food on this trip, she felt the privilege of knowing she could pull something off her shelf at any time, make a meal, and feel full.

It hadn’t always been like that in her life.

She should never forget how life-threatening things could turn in a flash—in the swing of an arm and a plea for help. One minute, things were happy. And the next, she was running for her life.