A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare

facilities. Yet his staff simply refused to contract his anxiety, or work at anything like his pace. And then there was rain.
    The heat of Rundu, the proximity of the river and the thick green morning were completed: the rain was all you could really hear and all you wanted to look at. Even 3 feet into cover it caught you; huge drops bursting into smaller drops, billowing into spray. It crashed into us and splashed under us as we headed down the Caprivi Strip. The plan was to go just under halfway along it, turn right and cross the Botswana border, gateway to the famous Okavango Delta, a swamp so enormous that there simply had to be swallows there.
    Instead, by following the Mousebird’s nose down the strip, following signs to Botswana and taking a left, we became first distracted by, then entangled with, an extremely poor road.
    Barely 40 yards into the bush the track disappeared into an untroubled pond of brown water. We battled on. The paths divided in an unsettling fashion, sandy high road versus vegetable low road, but the Mousebird would not daunt. Some very large vehicles had done that track but I would not have been in one, not with the narrow causeway before us now. Something which looked like a collapsed bridge passed, then we came to another, which two men were building. Over a hill, down a dale, and we were in. The track turnedinto a soft loop. There were thick trees, the wooden wall of something that promised a bar, and beyond that the unmistakeable presence of a river. A huge green truck was parked in the shade, beside a couple of sober green bakkies.
    The Mousebird was now modelling a sable-yellow leopard-print with matching tyres. Her white undercoat showed it all up to perfection. I was barely half out of her when a white man appeared, raising an eyebrow. He was older than me, quieter, and, I was perturbed to see, was not driving some sort of Landcruiser, which would have instantly given me one up on him, but the slightly tatty kind of estate favoured by nice families with small children. Worst of all, he appeared to have just done the shopping.
    â€˜Hello,’ I said.
    â€˜Hi. Where have you come from?’
    â€˜Cape Town!’
    He smiled.
    â€˜Not in that, you haven’t.’
    â€˜Ah, no – Windhoek . . .’
    We shook hands and introduced ourselves. His name was Mark. His wife was Margie. This was their camp.
    â€˜You wouldn’t have any beds, would you?’
    They gave me a mattress in a tent standing on a platform in a low tree down a narrow path, by the river. It was a lovely spot, and it had a snake.
    â€˜What kind of snake?’ Margie asked, when I remarked on it.
    â€˜Green! Quite small, about so long, thin . . .’
    â€˜Oh, it’s probably a Western Green,’ she said. ‘Harmless. What shape was its head? Coffin or diamond?’
    It did not act like a snake. They are supposed to withdraw when they hear you coming, I believed, as I stood on my platform, watching the beast ushering itself into a bush of dry twigs about a yard from the tent flaps. The twigs did not make a sound and the snake stopped, poorly concealed, now you knew where to look. It formed a long coil, with the tail disappearing into the bush and the head pointing back out of it.
    â€˜Knob off!’ I hissed. It seemed a silly thing to say even as it came out, not my sort of curse at all, normally, but then I had never confronted a snake before. I made a gesture, some sort of noise, a stamp of the foot and another curse – and it came at me. Well, it moved, and not backwards.
    â€˜Er, coffin-diamond?’
    â€˜Well, it’s probably a Western Green.’
    â€˜What shape do –’
    â€˜Diamond. But there are these things called green mambas around . . .’
    â€˜Green mambas.’
    â€˜Yes, and they have coffin-shaped heads.’
    Perhaps it is inevitable that such a place should have a special dog. Her name was Slim, she was fat and no fan of