Comfort in the Deep

The bus smelled like diesel and sunscreen, and the seat cushion had a tear in it that kept pinching the back of my thigh. I didn't care. Twelve hours of travel and I was still the first one awake, watching the sun come up over the Drakensberg through a window smeared with somebody's handprint.

We'd left Johannesburg at midnight. There were eleven of us plus Sipho, the guide, a wiry man in his fifties who drove with one hand and pointed out landmarks with the other, even in the dark, even when nobody could see them.

"On your left, the Vaal River," he'd said at two in the morning. "Very important. Very dirty."

Nobody had laughed. We were all too tired. But I'd liked him immediately.

Now the mountains were turning gold and pink, and the person next to me was finally waking up. Daniel. Early twenties, I'd guessed. He'd spent most of the night curled against the window with his hoodie pulled over his face, and now he was blinking at the light like a man who'd forgotten where he was.

"Breakfast in twenty minutes," I said. "Sipho knows a place."

Daniel nodded, rubbed his eyes. He had that look, the one where you can tell somebody's running through the last twelve hours trying to figure out how they got here. I'd seen it before on these trips. People sign up for something and then spend the first day wondering why.

"You sleep okay?" I asked.

"Not really." His voice was rough. "The road's pretty bumpy."

"Yeah, it is." I stretched my legs into the aisle. "You'll sleep tonight, though. First night in the bush, everybody crashes hard."

He looked at me then, a quick glance that took in my size, my shoulders, the way I filled more than my share of the seat. I'm used to that look. Six-four, two-forty, most of it from hauling timber on my uncle's farm from the time I was twelve. People notice. I've learned to make it easy on them.

"Grant," I said, offering my hand.

"Daniel."

His grip was firm but quick, like he wasn't sure how long to hold on. I let go first.

"You here with anyone?" I asked.

"No. Just me."

"Same."

That wasn't quite true. I had friends in Joburg, people I could call if I needed something. But nobody who'd want to spend a week in the bush looking at animals. My ex, Maria, would've loved it. She'd have been the one pointing out birds and asking Sipho questions he couldn't answer. But she was in Cape Town now with a guy who sold insurance, and I was here, which felt about right.

The breakfast place was a roadside diner with plastic tablecloths and a menu that hadn't changed since the eighties. Sipho ordered for us, which meant we all got the same thing: eggs, sausage, toast, a pile of grilled tomatoes that nobody touched.

I sat across from Daniel. He ate slowly, methodically, like he was working through a list. The other people at the table were a German couple in their sixties, two British women who'd been friends since university, and a young guy from Cape Town named Thabo who talked nonstop about cryptocurrency.

"You see the mountains?" Thabo asked nobody in particular. "That's where they filmed something. I forget what."

"Lord of the Rings," one of the British women said. "No, wait. That was New Zealand."

"It was not Lord of the Rings," Sipho said from the next table. He didn't look up from his eggs. "It was a commercial for beer."

Everyone laughed except Thabo, who looked like he wanted to argue.

I watched Daniel during all this. He smiled when the others did, but he didn't join in. He kept his head down, cutting his sausage into tiny pieces, and I noticed his hands. They were shaking. Just a little. Not enough that anyone else would see.

I didn't say anything.

We got back on the bus at eight. The road turned to gravel after another hour, and the bus started bouncing so hard that the British women gave up on their conversation and just held onto the seats in front of them. Daniel had his forehead pressed to the window again. I could see his reflection in the glass, his eyes open, watching the landscape slide past.

"You okay?" I asked.

He didn't answer right away. Then: "I've never done anything like this before."

"First safari?"

"First anything. First time out of the country." He paused. "First time I've been away from home, really."

I nodded. I knew what that meant. Some people grow up in a house and never leave. Some people grow up in a house and can't wait to get out. Daniel looked like the first kind.

"Where's home?"

"Pietermaritzburg."

"Not far, then."

"Far enough."

He said it quietly, almost to himself, and I understood that this wasn't about geography. I didn't push. I've learned that much. You don't push people on the first day. You let them come to you.

The camp was called Ndlovu, which Sipho told us meant elephant. It sat on the edge of a private reserve, a cluster of canvas tents arranged around a central fire pit and a dining area with a thatched roof. No fences. No electricity after nine. Just solar lanterns and the sound of something moving in the brush.

We got there in the late afternoon. The heat was thick, the kind that sits on your chest and makes it hard to breathe. I grabbed my bag from the back of the bus and found my tent, which was small but clean, with a cot and a wooden shelf and a view of the waterhole about fifty meters away.

I dropped my bag and went to find the shower block. Cold water, which was fine. I stood under it for a long time, letting the dust run off me, and when I came out, Daniel was sitting on a bench outside his tent, staring at nothing.

"Water's cold," I said.

"I know."

"You going to eat?"

"I don't know."

I sat down next to him. Not too close. Just enough.

"I used to be like you," I said.

He looked at me. "What do you mean?"

"Scared. Nervous. Whatever you want to call it." I leaned back, stretched my arms over my head. "First time I went anywhere, I was nineteen. My uncle sent me to deliver a truckload of timber to a guy in Lesotho. I got lost, ended up in some village in the middle of nowhere, and this old woman took me in for the night. Fed me, gave me a bed, didn't speak a word of English. Next morning, I found the road and made my delivery. But I'll never forget that night. How scared I was. How I thought I'd made a huge mistake."

Daniel didn't say anything. But he was listening.

"The point is," I said, "you're here now. You made it. That's more than most people do."

He nodded slowly. Then he looked at me, really looked at me, and for a second I saw something in his face. Not gratitude. Something else. Something harder.

"I didn't come here because I wanted to," he said.

I waited.

"I came here because my brother died."

The words hung in the air between us. I didn't move. I didn't say I'm sorry. I've learned that much, too. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just sit there and let the silence do its work.

"He was supposed to come," Daniel said. "He booked this trip six months ago. Then he got sick. And then he died. And I took his spot."

He looked away, back at the waterhole, where a family of warthogs had appeared, snuffling at the edge of the mud.

"I don't even know why I'm here," he said. "I don't like animals. I don't like camping. I don't like being away from home."

"But you came."

"Yeah."

I nodded. "That's something."

He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. "That's nothing."

"It's not nothing."

We sat there for a while longer. The sun was going down, and the sky was turning orange and purple, and somewhere in the distance something was making a sound I didn't recognize. A low, rumbling call that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

"Lion," I said.

Daniel looked at me. "What?"

"That sound. It's a lion. Probably a couple kilometers away."

He listened. The call came again, closer this time, or maybe it just seemed that way.

"Are we safe?" he asked.

"Yeah. The camp's fenced."

"I thought you said there were no fences."

I smiled. "There's one fence. Around the whole camp. You just can't see it."

He shook his head. "That doesn't make me feel better."

"It's not supposed to."

He looked at me then, and this time I saw it. The thing I'd been waiting for. Not trust. Not yet. But something close. A crack in the wall.

"Why are you being nice to me?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Why not?"

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got."

He held my gaze for a long moment. Then he stood up, brushed the dust off his shorts, and walked toward the dining area.

I stayed on the bench. The lion called again, and the warthogs scattered, and the sky went dark.