Chapter 17
Donovan
“What am I looking at?”
Sarah had crossed from the far flank as the herd slowed, picking her way through the column’s rear to reach me. She pointed toward a low fold of ground where the ridgeline flattened out. “That’s where we stop.”
A wall about eight feet high curved in a rough circle around a clearing large enough for the herd.
“The core is thorn brush,” Sarah said. “That’s the oldest layer. Branches stacked and woven so tight that nothing can push through. It still works.”
It looked as if, through the years, it had accumulated other materials as well, though.
Wooden poles lashed to the thorns with fencing wire.
Strips of corrugated tin wired across gaps where the brush had thinned.
Stretches of mesh fastened over sections that had been shouldered apart.
Flat stones wedged along the base where the ground dipped.
“It’s called a boma,” Sarah said. “It is basically a livestock enclosure. This one’s been here for decades. There’s a whole chain of them along the migration route.”
She ran her hand along a section of mesh that had been fastened with strips of old tire rubber. “Somebody patches it with whatever they’ve got. It’s never finished. It’s just maintained.”
“Who does the work?”
“Whoever’s here. These are open to anyone herding animals through this area. Rangers, locals, whoever. Nobody assigns it. They just show up and fix what’s broken.”
Every bit of it was improvised. But every repair told you someone had come back, found what was broken, and fixed it with what was available. It was a collage of community effort. They were people who understood that good enough, repeated, was better than perfect.
“The cattle know it,” Sarah said. “Some of them have been here more times than we have.”
The herd had already begun to drift toward the opening in the wall. The lead cows angled for the gap on their own. They knew what that wall meant. The rest of the column followed, the whole herd pulling itself forward like water finding a drain.
The boma needed work before it could hold them, though.
Gaps had opened since last season. Sections of mesh had sagged where something heavy had leaned into them. A stretch of thorn brush near the entrance had been pushed through entirely, leaving a hole wide enough for a cow to walk out of.
Everyone immediately set upon the work at hand.
Sarah was in there with the rangers before I’d even put my stick down.
She grabbed the loose end of a wire strand and hauled it taut while one of the younger rangers hammered a post deeper with a rock.
She gave him a direction in broken Swahili, and he adjusted without hesitating.
Then she moved to the next section, pulling branches back into place and weaving them into the existing wall with both hands buried in the thorns.
Fortunately, we Citadel guys were no foreigners to the construction of makeshift barricades.
Andrew and I had spent careers building things under pressure.
For the first time on this whole drive, I wasn’t learning a new language or trying to read a cow’s ear.
I could just work intuitively. Andrew had a wooden pole across his shoulders and was fitting it into place along a weak stretch of wall while two rangers held it steady.
Cole worked beside Baraka at the far end, resetting fence posts that had listed sideways.
We closed the gaps. Tightened the mesh. Reinforced the low spots with whatever the rangers pulled from the supply vehicles.
More wire and poles to lash brush together.
Sheets of corrugated tin that had been stacked in the back of one of the trucks.
I braced a sagging section while Zayn wired it to the post beside it, both of us pulling in opposite directions until the tension held.
“Tighter,” he said.
I pulled harder. The wire bit into my palms. He twisted the ends together and gave it an approving nod.
The work was fast and hard, and nobody talked much beyond the necessary. By the time we finished, the boma was solid.
The cattle had been milling at the entrance the whole time we worked.
Jomo stepped to the gap and called them forward, those same cadenced sounds and whistle sequences that had moved the herd all day, and the lead cows walked through without any pressure from the flanks.
The rest followed. The column compressed and funneled and poured into the enclosure.
Jomo’s last call hung in the air as the final stragglers pushed through. He stepped back from the gap, and three rangers moved in behind him to close it off with the heaviest section of mesh.
We made camp outside the boma. Everyone slept in the open, close to the fires.
The rangers started building them before the light was fully gone, three fires spaced around the perimeter, each one big enough to throw heat and light in a wide arc.
The fires stayed lit all night. That was the system.
Lions wanted the cattle, not a ring of people making noise around open flames.
The rangers would take turns moving around until dawn. They would talk, play a soft radio, and express other forms of general human merriment. That was the entirety of the deterrent.
Dinner was whatever the camp cooks had packed for us before we left.
Cold food passed around the fires. Flatbread, dried meat, fruit that had survived the journey in canvas bags.
Andrew ate his sitting against a bedroll with his long legs stretched out in front of him.
Cole was working the day’s dust out of his pistol with a rag.
He’d heard the bit about noise and fire being the whole deterrent and looked about as convinced as I’d expected.
Everyone was spent. A full day of walking behind livestock in equatorial heat had a way of leveling the difference between an operator with twenty years of fieldwork and a twenty-year-old ranger who’d been doing this since he was a kid. We were all equally done.
The food disappeared. People spread across the three fires and leaned back against packs and bedrolls. The conversations thinned as exhaustion won.
Sarah sat beside me at ours. She’d undone her braid after dinner, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders. She’d pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, watching the flames.
She’d been right there all evening, working beside operators and rangers alike. She hadn’t held anything back.
I couldn’t stop wanting to be closer to her than I thought social norms of the camp would allow. People all around us and the six inches between her shoulder and mine somehow felt farther than the whole journey we’d already traveled today.
“How do your arms feel?” she asked.
“Like I spent twelve hours herding cattle and then rebuilt a wall out of thorn brush.”
“So, good?”
“Outstanding.”
She laughed quietly, and the sound of it was almost enough to make the day worth living through twice.
At the second fire, I spotted Cole and Alyson. They seemed to be talking. I couldn’t hear them from here. Cole sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward, engrossed in whatever she was saying. Alyson was gesturing with one hand, surprisingly animated even at the end of a day like this.
“Is Alyson still with Daniel?” I asked.
Sarah glanced toward the other fire. “I think that might be wrapping up. She’s tired of putting up with his shenanigans.”
We watched them for a moment. Alyson’s lively gestures. Cole hanging on her every word.
“You think Cole’s interested in her?” Sarah asked.
“Cole’s a great guy.” I picked up a twig and turned it over in my fingers. “He’s just got a lot of walls.”
“Don’t we all.” She watched the fire for a moment.
The camp settled around us, everyone finding their spots for the night.
Somewhere along the perimeter, one of the rangers on watch had a radio playing, the tinny sound of music drifting across the clearing.
The cattle had settled inside the boma, the occasional sound from the herd the only reminder of what was penned thirty feet away.
“When we lie down…” Sarah said. She was looking at the fire, not at me. “I can sleep farther off. So nobody—”
“No.”
She turned her head.
“No,” I said again. “You sleep right here. Next to me.”
“People will see.”
“I don’t care who sees.” I held her gaze. “And if something happens in the night, I want to be able to reach you.”
She was quiet. Her face did something I couldn’t read, as if she was wrestling something around in her mind. Her eyes went bright for a second. Then she blinked and it was gone.
“Okay,” she said.
We lay down next to each other. Everyone around us was too far gone to notice where anyone settled. The only people staying up were the rangers taking first shift, making enough noise and keeping the fire alight to ward off predators.
The ground was hard under my back. The sky was absurd, more stars than I’d ever seen.
I could hear the rangers moving on the perimeter, the deliberate coughs and conversation that kept the predators at a distance.
The cattle shifted and breathed inside the boma.
Something popped in the fire then settled.
Suddenly, Sarah’s hand found mine.
Her fingers slid between mine and held. She didn’t turn toward me. I didn’t turn toward her.
I didn’t try to name what was happening or figure out what it meant. I held her hand and let sleep come.
It came.
Something woke me.
I was on my feet before I knew what it was. My body had registered a threat and responded while my brain was still catching up. For a stretched-out second, I stood in the firelight and didn’t know what had pulled me out of sleep.
Then the sound registered in my mind.
It was the cattle. The whole herd, moving at once inside the boma.
A low, restless surge that built fast, hooves churning packed earth.
The animals were pressing against one another and thus pressing against the walls.
I’d heard fear in animals before. This was it, multiplied by every head of cattle in the enclosure.
All of them reacting to something beyond the perimeter that I couldn’t see.
My hand went to my sidearm.
No. Can’t shoot at something in a boma. Nobody around me was reaching for a weapon. The rangers on watch were already moving, already responding, and not one of them had a rifle up.
I put myself between Sarah and the open ground beyond the fires, did it without deciding to. She was still getting to her feet behind me, and my body had already made the choice.
The rangers knew the protocol, and I didn’t. So I did what they did.
Two of the men on watch were feeding the nearest blaze, throwing brush onto it until the flames climbed high enough to light the ground twenty meters out.
Others moved along the perimeter, banging sticks against the earth, shouting, filling the night with noise.
They made themselves loud and unmistakable.
They were aiming for presence and volume.
Hopefully creating a wall of human sound between predator and prey.
I grabbed a branch and swung it against the hard-packed ground. Yelled into the open. Added my voice to the racket.
And Sarah was right there with me. Whatever I’d done, putting myself between her and the open ground, she’d already moved past it.
She was up and working, banging her stick and shouting toward the perimeter with everything she had.
Andrew was on his feet at the far fire. Cole too.
All of us doing the same job the rangers were doing.
The boma seemed to be holding well enough. The cattle continued to surge in fear inside it, but the walls didn’t give. Yet.
We kept up the noise until the herd settled, which indicated that the threat had probably wandered off in search of something easier.
Nobody was hurt. The herd was rattled but contained, every patch and repair we’d made that evening proving to be well-placed.
I stood in the firelight with a branch in my hand and my pulse still hammering. Sarah stood next to me, breathing hard from shouting and swinging viciously as well.
It was close enough to dawn that nobody was going back to sleep. The sky to the east had the faintest suggestion of gray, still an hour from useful, but enough to tell you the night was finished.
Adrenaline drained out of the group in stages. The rangers on watch kept their posts. The rest of us stood or sat and let our bodies come down from the spike, one system at a time.
Someone started making coffee. Camp coffee, over the fires that were already going. Grounds measured with still-shaky hands and overeager eyeballs.
Sarah wandered off to find Alyson as Andrew showed up with two tin mugs. He handed me one without a word. I took a sip. Strong and bitter, as if we weren’t awake enough already. I drank and watched the eastern sky lighten by several shades. Around us, the camp slowly reorganized itself.
Day two was starting whether anyone was ready for it or not.