GOOD MORNING, SWEET Cleo.” The sun was just on the horizon, but already Cleo was down from her sleeping cliff, ready to start the day. I watched her run off and thought about Sara, living in the city that never sleeps. Sinatra was right. If she could make it there, she could make it anywhere, and finally she was getting her chance. I pictured the two of us diving off a bustling sidewalk into a corner café to celebrate this huge move in her career, and to toast her marriage also being on the same positive track. The picture faded as I climbed out of my sleeping bag and filled the silence with the hissing of the gas cooker. As the water boiled, I acknowledged that I still worried about Sara, a divine right of friendship, but I was sure that in time she would strike the right balance between working at the network and making her relationship work.
Meantime, I was also finally starting to figure my life out. I was dirt-poor, dirty, and deliriously happy. Maybe a bit crazy, too. Few people I knew would willingly live out of the back of a Land Rover, far from civilization, in a place of such extremes. Here, the east winds blew hot enough and strong enough to kill you, hyenas were a menace, and the threat of contracting tick bite fever clung with the little creatures to every blade of grass. Fewer people still would do this for free at the age of thirty-one, when even the formerly footloose often succumb to words like “pay raise,” “health care plan,” “401(k)’s,” and “stock options.” Crazy, maybe, but I loved it, loved the baboons and the fact that they accepted me, and I loved being behind the camera, finally making my own film.
The Bartletts, Julie’s parents and Sara’s friends, had loaned us a 16 mm camera, a few lenses, and a slim, yet costly amount of film stock. They trusted us to figure out the rest. Their generosity was overwhelming, and knowing the financial risk they were taking, it was also daunting. When our first set of exposed film came back for viewing, I laughed only to keep from crying. Nad turned to me and said caustically, “Interesting. Where’d you find a headless warthog?” My head would be the next to go if my camerawork didn’t improve quickly.
When Sara had visited, she’d watched the rushes and offered help, urging me to follow my instincts, to get in close for those intimate, emotional shots that would tell the story. Taking direction from anyone, even a friend, had never been my strong point, and I felt myself becoming defensive. Sara’s role was in front of the camera. How could she possibly appreciate how difficult it was to lug equipment up and down sand dunes while chasing four-legged creatures? Did she understand that when sweat pours down your forehead, it’s hard to maintain focus? Couldn’t she sense my fear that my talents were as limited as our film stock? But when I quieted that negative voice, I knew she was right. I was also sure that she understood my fears and knew the only way I’d overcome them was by making a good film. If I just shut up, I could learn from her experience and make the story better. After all, the story was all we had to hold on to.
Baby baboons were dying, females were kidnapping other infants, and males, with no offspring to protect, had begun fighting to the death. The baboons were primates like us, yet they were somehow surviving weeks, even months without drinking water. But that struggle was taking a psychic toll on their tiny society. Life in the riverbed was one big soap opera, but tragically, it was real. Survival of the fittest in a place that was unfit to live in. I had chosen this life, once again isolated, once again with one man for company, and this troop of desperate souls had chosen me. Hard as it was, this was exactly where I wanted to be, living as part of a troop.
In New York, acceptance was based on who you knew, what you looked like, or what you could do for someone else. In the Kuiseb, the baboons’ acceptance was honest. It felt ancient, natural and pure, and it gave me what no man had ever given me. It made me feel worthy. And it came as an incredible surprise to know that Nad accepted me in the same way.
During Sara’s visit to the desert, the two of us had coasted down a steep dune, coming to a soft stop at the bottom. Out of breath and lying in the sand, she’d asked, “So what about you and Nad. What’s happening?” After spending just a few days with us, she knew he was funny, kind, and smart. What she didn’t know was that he washed my hair with precious water, held the flashlight for me at night so that I wouldn’t step on scorpions when I needed to pee, or that he was as demanding of me as he was of himself. “We’re friends. Good friends,” I told her, hoping that if that’s how I labeled our relationship, she wouldn’t ask any more questions that I didn’t know how to answer. “Friend” wasn’t exactly the right word, but I wasn’t sure what was.
Growing up in a house full of women, I didn’t understand men and was doubtful that a strictly platonic friendship with a man was possible. My girlfriends would tell me a thousand times over, “Yes, I have tons of male friends,” but that hadn’t been my experience and maybe that’s why I shied away from making friends with men, creating a cycle that became my loss.
That hadn’t been true with Nad. We became friends quickly, and I’d resolved to keep it that way. Each night we rested our heads on pillows placed against different tires, hoping this setup would keep us safe from hyenas, jackals, and each other. Then one night, through the thick mist of sleep, I’d heard Nad talking.
“Stop it. Come on. Now look what you’ve done. I told you guys to get lost.”
I lifted my head and saw him standing up pointing to the remains of a chewed indicator light on the Land Rover. Two hyenas with round bellies and big brown eyes stood in front of him. Nad had a whip in his hand and was wearing a tiny pair of red underpants. I tried hard not to laugh.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, don’t worry. Go back to sleep.”
Not only did I feel safe, I felt full of affection. The next night I asked if I could rest my pillow by his tire. My resolve had lasted about a month. Nad might have been the only man within an hour’s drive, but it was more than that. He made me laugh, he made me think, he made me forget some of the pains of the past, and like a good friend, he also made me feel free to be myself.
It was a relationship that was easy and relaxed and Nad wasn’t asking for a definition. At night, over hot beer, we laughed about SP’s exploits during the one week of each month when all the males wanted her, when she went from being the lowest-ranking baboon to the baboon with the most power, the power to conceive a baby. We bet on who would become the new alpha male and then we would lie quietly, waiting for a shooting star to blaze across the sky before falling asleep. By 1992, nearly three years into Nad’s study, our relationship, the research, and the filming were going well. And then, in the pursuit of science, we nearly ruined it all.
Nad’s doctoral research wouldn’t be complete unless he could answer a fundamental physiological question: How could these baboons survive in the desert without drinking water when every medical fact agreed that they should be frying inside? We’d collected a lot of information. The dry slog of documenting what they ate, when they ate it, how much moisture it contained, when they rested, how long they rested, data bits and bites that added pieces to a complex puzzle of survival. Now, to understand how the baboons regulated their body temperature, Nad needed to dart several with a sedative and then surgically insert a temperature-sensitive telemeter. The telemeter would send out core body temperature readings during the day and Nad could compare these with what was happening when they were drinking as opposed to when they weren’t; or when they were running as opposed to standing still; more data to paint a richer picture.
Forktail was to be the first. Like me, he was low-ranking and accepted it, which meant that removing him for the surgery, and to sleep off the effects of the drug, wouldn’t change the dynamics in the troop. Turned out, it changed everything.
For three weeks Nad shadowed Forktail with a long steel blowpipe. Finally his opportunity came. I heard the whack of the dart hitting skin, followed immediately by Forktail screaming. Baring his teeth in submission, the dart dangling from his backside, he ran past me, straight toward the safety of the sleeping cliffs. The other baboons converged in the middle of the riverbed and I ran to meet Nad there.
Together we watched in silence as Forktail lay down alone on a sheer cliff and fell asleep. We gathered Nad’s surgical instruments and the telemeter, but before we could reach Forktail, another baboon got to him—Gable, a male who had known Forktail his entire life. He stood over his sleeping troopmate, his mantle hairs on edge, and then pushed Forktail, just like a rock, over the edge of the canyon. We heard Forktail’s skull crack when he hit the ground.
“No!” I screamed. Mine wasn’t the only voice echoing off the canyon walls. Gable barked, those hideous wahoo-wahoo barks, as if boasting. Then there was silence as every female baboon in the troop ran to Forktail. They surrounded him, mumbling soft sounds of reassurance when he moaned. Each of them had a special relationship with him. He protected them; had mated with some of them, had fathered others. Yet not a single baboon touched him. Then, one by one, they moved away.
“We can’t let him die alone,” I whispered, remembering the hyenas that had kept us awake the night before.
“That won’t happen.” When we reached the base of the canyon, Nad gently touched Forktail’s head. He felt the bones shift. His skull was shattered. I ran my fingers through his coarse hair while Nad rubbed Forktail’s leg, trying to raise a vein, and then he shot an overdose of morphine into his system to ease the pain, permanently. It was all he could do. The moaning stopped. Forktail was dead.
Nad was shell-shocked. He’d planned this operation for months, trying to eliminate every potential threat, every obstacle, anything that could put a baboon in danger. We never imagined that the canyon itself would get in the way.
“That’s what you get when you trust humans,” Nad said, choking on his words. But it wasn’t “humans” they trusted, they trusted us. Just us. When Forktail died, Nad and I held each other for a long time, our tears mixing with our guilt. Now, as much as my heart ached, and as much I feared it would complicate things, I knew I loved this man.
It was after dark when we packed up and headed for Swakopmund. This time there would be no dinner out, no celebratory phone calls home. We sat on hard twin beds in a tiny pension and debated whether we should continue our work with the baboons. We blamed ourselves for this ultimate betrayal of trust, for killing Forktail. We cried, we had a fitful, sleepless night, and then we got ready for the long drive back to the desert.
When we reached the research station, there was a package for us from Sara. Inside was a selection of delicacies—coffee, pistachios, chocolate—and a note, signed “With love,” from Sara and her husband. I took this as a sign that they were pulling their marriage together. If they could do that, then surely Nad and I would be able to pull ourselves together and go back to work. The next day we drove slowly back upriver to where the next drama was unfolding.