Safari

le 3 Octobre 2006


I've been repairing the fence. The animals come at night and shit everywhere, because the barbed wire fence is severely lacking. I would say impotent. In many places it is broken and lies, fallen on the ground, tied to its post, limp and twisted.

Ours is one of the few houses in the village which doesn't have a stone wall, and I'm beginning to understand why that is so.

So in the absence of more barbed wire (much like everything else, you can not buy this in El Qidiya) I've been patrolling the perimeter, Leatherman in hand, and twisting up any loose and lazy wires that I can. I don't have a shovel, so I re-dig and deepen the post holes with a garden trowel from Home Depot. Still, the stones made short work of that, and chipped the point of the spade into a jagged, toothy edge.

Still, the cows seem to be noticing: now they can no longer cross through at nights, as they lumber by in herds from the pasture, and so they just come up, adjacent to the fence, and peer over the top with weary disdain. They 'moo' discontentedly and stand still for many minutes, just blinking slowly and chewing with a steady motion. (BTW, cows are so weird: I was coming back from the town the other day and there were six of them on the hot dirt, all in a perfect, straight line, end-to-end, perpendicular to me, just standing there doing nothing, with no one around. It was like a traffic stop. Can you stand it?)

In general, the experience that is Animals in Mauritania, is a big, and all-pervasive one. Animals have almost complete free reign, aside from the times when they are being herded or poked or prodded, and so there are large stretches of time each day when the cows and donkeys and sheep and goats wander around everywhere, following their bliss through the shit-strewn streets, and, ultimately, into my (dirt) yard. Actual pastures are non existent here (how could they be?). It is not uncommon at all for someone to be going about their business, making tea under the tent, and for a sheep to come nose through whatever they're doing, until such a person absentmindedly punches them in the gut and they scatter.

This variety of sheep, god knows what kind, is pitifully and painfully grotesque. I'm serious, they are aggressively ugly, with their raggedy, slumped over bodies, and clumpy hair. It's not even wool. The goats, by virtue of their neat little horns and spry figures, paint a somewhat more attractive picture. Both of their voices, though, sound as if the demoniac ghosts of murdered children inhabit them. It is most unpleasant.

And lest I forget them, I'll tell you now that we have camels here, not too many, but more than in the South, where I only ever once saw one in my village. They're more of a nomadic thing. Usually I see them with a dark, howlied Bedouin, riding barefoot, tugging at the animal's reigns, hooked through a ring in one nostril, sheesh. I've seen them also, parked like a growling, collapsible car outside someone's house.

Still, the other day, walking the path from the North to the South village, I saw, in the place where it opens to a wide, dusty plain, 3 camels ambling about, munching on bushes. I walked towards them slowly, my head bowed, and when I was only a few feet away, I sat down on a stone and watched them eat.

It took several minutes for them to become sufficiently spooked by me to leave, but eventually (inevitably) the one with the longest and most curious neck, decided he (or she) had had enough of me, and they blew that joint, taking off on those long awkward legs, in search of better munching grounds. I think they are beautiful, these camels. I think, more than any other animal I've seen, they look like they're from another planet entirely. They're so totally Star Wars.

After camels, (they're the one-humps, by the way), the next most 'Africa' thing we have here is lizards. In the South, we had a funny little variety, the length of a coke-bottle, with bright yellow heads and slender tails, tapering to nothing. We call them push-up lizards, because of the exercise-like movements they constantly perform to pass the time. In the North, we don't have anything nearly so distinct, just a couple little brownish-green varieties that live in my out-house, and are constantly startling me by flitting around everywhere. I've also seen the spiny tail of a much larger kind (whether a different species, or only the grown-up) periodically darting underneath rocks, at several feet away. Yeeks! Whatever, they're not harmful, but I'm no Naturalist, and I bear no fondness for reptiles. Still, I'll take lizards over snakes.

And according to some sources, there are crocodiles in the country, and people in El Qidiya even say that we have 2 (how sweet) that live in the waters of the Marigot over abutting the cliff. I don't know… N'Beika, the oasis city 3 hours away where volunteers Fred and Greg live, has a respectable bog in which I could see crocs living, and in which they've been repeatedly sighted. But the existence of El Qidiyas carnivorous pair has yet to be confirmed by me (it's thrown into further doubt by the fact that people supposedly swim in the croc-water "Oh, they don't do nothing…." and because one of my sources called a picture of a seahorse, a crocodile). Oh boy.

So one of these must be true: there are more than two, there are none, or the crocodiles are a hundred million years old.

…..Still, no swimming for me just yet.