They took the early flight on a hazy Sunday morning from Cape Town to Jo’burg, then on to Nelspruit, where they were to drive a rental car to Kruger Park.  Americans, their eyes wide, still dazed after two days in Cape Town from hurtling to the other side of the world, from being upside down.  Everything was both more familiar and more strange than Elizabeth could have imagined.  At the airport gate in Cape Town their flight to Johannesburg was called.  They waited in line, moving slowly toward a door that opened into the bright sunshine of outdoors.   Outside waited a bus which would drive them to the plane, which was visible just beyond it, in easy walking distance.  As they moved slowly forward Elizabeth saw a custodian smiling at the people ahead of them, moving his push broom at their feet as if displaying his sweepings.  Dreadlocks hung around his face and he smiled a shy, almost proud smile, glancing down at the floor then up at the white faces.  When she approached she saw that his sweepings were a giant mound of dead crickets, fat and black.  No dirt, just crickets. One live one jumped and struggled over the mound, but the man pushed it gently back with his broom, and back again, all the while smiling at the people filing out into the African sunshine and onto the bus, on holiday. 

    It was while sitting on this bus, waiting for it to move, that Elizabeth first began to feel strange.  She had not slept much on the long flight to South Africa, or since they arrived.   Now she pictured a giant elastic band, attached to her center and pulling her back, to where it was attached on the other side of the world.  No wonder she felt queasy.

            Rob sat beside her, adjusting his Red Sox cap and glancing at the man across from him, who wore a Yankees cap.  The man, a young white South African, paid no attention to Rob or his hat; he probably was not aware of the rivalry between the teams.  Here a Yankees cap was a style, an affectation.  Rob reached into his backpack and pulled out a book on Kruger wildlife.  On the cover two rhinoceros touched the sides of their horns together.  The brown hairs of his forearms gleamed like fine shards of metal in the sunshine through the windows.  She read over his shoulder.  There were 1500 lions in Kruger Park.  Surely, she thought, surely they would see one. One was enough:  her own lion, walking quietly through the grass to see her, to be seen by her.  A photograph of a lion’s face looked out at her from the cover of the book, its eyes gold and hurt within its rough circle of gold mane.  Since she was a child she’d gravitated to lions at the zoo, watching their self-possession, their restrained power as they sat staring.  They knew who they were.  There were other animals to be seen in the huge park, as Rob reminded her; 147 species of mammals, in fact, most of them small species such as mice, shrews, or bats.  But it was the thought of seeing a lion in the wild had made her encourage Rob when he spoke of wanting to visit South Africa.   

      When Elizabeth closed her eyes she saw small animals—Maine mice, chipmunks—running helter-skelter through a field’s edge.  They scattered from feet crunching through the dry grasses; hiking boots, scuffed and dirty, stopping before a tall plant.  Hands reached to pull the plant from the ground.  With a jerk and a groan the bus rattled away from the terminal, and Elizabeth opened her eyes.

    The airport at Nelspruit was a wooden building, with a thatched roof.  A new building, made in the style of an old game lodge to charm rich visitors to Kruger Park.  She waited in the spacious hallway with its polished wooden floors while Rob filled out papers for their rented car.  They drove through the countryside in a red Toyota Tazz, white people who stared at the concrete huts dotting the hillside, wondering about the lives of the black men and women walking alongside the road.  They passed roadside stands selling fruit and vegetables, pineapples lined up in rows.  As they got closer to their destination the offerings were less essential, aimed at tourists:  carved wooden animals and painted cloths hung on trees, their bright colors flapping in the hot wind.  Rob stopped and they wandered in the dust, looking at the tall wooden giraffes, the carved white roosters, the colorful wooden birds.  A man eventually shuffled out from behind a shack, where Elizabeth saw other men squatting in a circle, lounging, smoking.  Smoke from a campfire twisted into the bright air, incongruous in the heat.  The man nodded, murmured something.  “How much?” Elizabeth asked, gesturing toward the cloths.  “Hundred and eighty rand,” he whispered. 

Rob stopped before one of a charging elephant.  It was batiked and hand-painted, the colors vivid and strange in the sunshine.  “I’ll give you a hundred for this,” he said.   The man shrugged, said nothing.  On a table against the hut carved narrow masks rested.  Three holes:  two eyes, and a mouth.  The carved faces seemed meaningful to her, seemed to carry a message she couldn’t quite understand.  That was what they were about, she supposed; to hide what was, to make it seem something else, something less easily comprehensible, perhaps something more truthful.  “Fifty rand,” the man said.  Less than ten dollars.  They were carved in patterns and stained different shades of brown, except for one which was carved more bluntly and painted bright colors:  black, green, yellow, red.  It drew her, its bright colors against the black reminding her of the bright clothes the women walking by the road had worn, of their shining skin. “That one forty rand,” the man said.  He said something else, which she thought was the word “Ancestors.”  She held the mask to her face, smelling the sharp scent of carved wood and something smoky; it was carved by a campfire.  Worn to invoke the ancestors, to mine their wisdom.  And she pictured a spiraling twist of ancestors, like DNA, twirling back into infinity, attached to each of them by an invisible cord like an umbilical cord.  His ancestors taught their children to carve masks, to make faces for the ancestors to look through, to pass them onto people from the other side of the world, who pay rand.  On her chain was her grandmother, who taught her to make quilts.  Her father, who had died when she was five.  At the end of her chain of ancestors was her mother, who died four months ago.  Whose face, brown eyes thoughtful behind glasses, would never be seen again, whose voice Elizabeth will never hear.  When Elizabeth handed the man the two twenty-rand notes he grinned at her as if they shared a secret, and in the dusky hut his eyes glittered in his dark face. 

    They were to spend the night at a hotel outside the park gate, one Rob had chosen online.  They were celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary.  For their honeymoon they’d traveled to Europe.  When they returned she became ill, with a virus that turned into a miscarriage.  It was to be the first of three miscarriages.  Rob said he was ambivalent about children, anyway, and this was probably a good thing.  Elizabeth pictured the word “miscarriage” as an old-fashioned stagecoach, elaborate and embellished, overturning on a dusty road, spilling in blood its precious cargo.  

She knew, without speaking of it, that Rob hoped this trip would repair something in her.  He was a doctor, and an inveterate home repairman:  he believed in fixing things up.  It was clear to both of them that, since her mother’s death, Elizabeth needing some fixing up.  She thought that what was broken could not—or should not--be fixed, but she kept this thought to herself.  She adjusted her sunglasses and leaned back into the seat. 

    They stopped at the gate to the hotel, where a woman approached Elizabeth’s side of the car with a clipboard in hand.  She stood, waiting for Elizabeth to speak.  “We have a reservation . . .” but the woman was gone, pushing a button which made the gate slide open.  Their skin, their accents were passports enough. 

    Beyond the drive overhung with palm trees and ferns they parked next to a concrete fountain.  They followed a curving path into the lobby, which was one large elegant porch, open on all sides, under a high thatched roof.  The dark hardwood floor gleamed.  Under the roof Europeans lounged on overstuffed leather couches, drinking wine, chattering in Spanish and French.  While Rob spoke to people at the desk Elizabeth walked to a railing, overlooking a small stream.  Below her a small gray monkey scratched in the rocks at the water’s edge.  The creature looked over his shoulder now and then, nervously, at something in the brush. A screeching noise erupted from behind him and the monkey scampered away.  It was only then that she saw what was close, just before her face:  the giant spider web stretching from branches close to her across the creek, nearly eight feet across, strands shining golden in the slanting light.  At its center the spider, enormous, like a plastic Halloween spider.  Her eyes shifted focus and she saw the other webs behind it, two, three, each with their own giant spider in the glittering sun.  

    She jerked away, to a corner of the leather couch.  When Rob returned, holding the key to their cottage, she didn’t mention the spiders.  She followed him over a small wooden bridge, wondering if she was being selfish, not pointing them out, when all he would have to do is turn his head and see them hanging in their monstrous glory.  Instead she said “I saw a monkey.  Down there,” and pointed to the spot of sand, now empty.

    Their cottage was set back from the others, close to the trees and brush behind it.  It reminded her of the cabin her parents used to rent for a week in northern Maine, and the sense she always had there of being away from civilization, of being close to something mysterious and sacred and unknown.   There she would hear the call of the loons at night.  Now she sat still on a chair on the deck, listening to the rustling of leaves around her; was it the wind, or something else, stepping through the brush?  She caught a glint of metal and saw that the sturdy electrified fence extended behind their cottage, around the entire area, keeping the animals out, the humans in.  

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