Binstead's Safari by Rachel Ingalls Page A

maps?”
    “Ecological maps. They’re counting. Just counting the numbers of animals in a herd and in a district. It’s easier to keep track of them from the air. You work through the space systematically and don’t find yourself going over the same herds twice. Or not at all. Druce, that’s his name.”
    “I’ve never seen a balloon like it. It looks like a candycane, with those pink and white stripes.”
    “It’s like one of those things in a picture of the World’s Fair years ago.”
    “And it really works?”
    “Oh, absolutely. For the forests, it’s the only way.”
    “Have you ever been up in it?”
    “Curious you should ask.”
    Mahola gave a muffled snort of laughter.
    Ian said, “Yes, I went up in it once. Not for me. The wind took us and nearly blew us against the mountain. Next day, Pippa insisted on going up. I warned her. Icouldn’t stop her. Of course it was beautiful weather, clear as crystal, gentle breeze. Only way to travel, she says. But you couldn’t get me back in the thing for love nor money.”
    “It looks like such an easy way to drift along, so lightly. And it would be quiet too, up there, wouldn’t it?”
    “So quiet, the only sound you can hear is your dinner going over the side. I never saw the poetry of it. That’s the way it affected her, too. For weeks I heard about the new insight on life and she kept wanting to go again. It’s just luck that they’re professionals—they haven’t the time to give lifts to everyone who wants one.”
    “They should have some kind of cross-check.”
    “There’s two other teams. We may see all of them. But the others are amateur outfits. One from London—some sort of conservationist group. And the others are Swedes—that is, one Swede and one American. The American’s married to a girl who’s a doctor, working as a GP. And the Swede has a girlfriend who—I’m not sure quite what she does. Sometimes she follows in the landrover, sometimes she’s with the men in the gondola.”
    “Gondola?”
    “That’s what they call it. The basket bit.”
    Stan woke up thirsty when the sun was already fairly high and the day growing hot. He looked at the others, at Millie in particular. It seemed increasingly odd to him—astonishing—that she, who always made a mess of everything, worried, and then made the worrying come true, had not put a foot wrong from the moment she’d found herself in foreign surroundings. Once she was away from home, she said the right words, did the right things, and was accepted by everyone. More than that—they all liked her, very much and straight away. Whereas he—they tolerated him. And they didn’t consider him so interestingor think his academic theory was all that exciting, either. They had undoubtedly seen lots of visiting anthropologists , sociologists, conservationists, and they only trusted the ones who were born there or had chosen to settle down there for life. He had the impression that Hatchard’s book, no matter how bad it probably was, would be regarded as a success simply because the doctor was one of them. A better work by an outsider would not be countenanced. Even the archaeologists seemed to agree that whatever you believed should be put into practice. It had to be your occupation, not just thought about. Scholarship was what you stepped on and walked over.
    To a certain extent, they were right; it was the only way to find out. Otherwise, why travel thousands of miles, when he could just have used the tapes and translations, and borrowed video material from Jack? He wanted the part of the mystery you couldn’t get by sitting at a desk and theorizing. And he was certain there was something in Adler’s idea.
    *
    They went through hilly country with trees, continued on among flatter grassy plains and scrub, and drove through a stretch of land like a desert covered by high anthills that resembled totem-poles. They saw a lioness asleep in the crook of a tree. The sky was like the portraits of