WITH our gas cylinder gone, we had to rely on a campfire, both for cooking and to give us light to keep marauding animals away. Consequently the rest of that day had to be spent towing dead tree trunks into the camp to feed the flames.
It was hot, dusty work, and our afternoon bathe in the river was the highlight of the day.
For some reason or other, Corrie and Karen went down to the water ahead of me.
At the point at which Corrie was totally immobilised, by virtue of having his underpants wrapped round his ankles, Karen decided to jump in alone.
By the time he caught up with her, she was a metre under water and several metres downstream. Luckily, she came up laughing.
Corrie was amazed. I had never told him about the time, when she was about six months old, that she had nearly drowned in the bath. She hadn’t for gotten the lesson learned from that experience.
The next day we drove a couple of miles out of camp and stopped to watch a herd of zebras grazing near the road. Corrie took Karen onto the roof, while I remained below, in case the vehicle had to be moved.
And that was how the ‘Great White Hunter’ found us.
I was rather sorry for him. He had undoubtedly been telling his client how terribly dangerous everything was around here, and now we had spoiled his story by sitting out in the open, with an 18-month-old child and armed with nothing more deadly than an 8mm cine camera.
While we had been talking to the hunter, I had noticed something sticky dripping onto my foot. Further investigation proved it to be an oil leak. Not, as one might expect, from the brake or clutch pedal, but from the instrument panel.
Corrie couldn’t believe it. How did oil get into the instrument panel? I couldn’t answer that one, but I knew for sure that it was coming out. All over my foot. It turned out that the lead to the oil pressure gauge had fractured. Well, we carry quite a lot of spares in the bush, but not one of those.
We did, however, have two very useful commodities in the toolbox – masking tape and epoxy resin glue.
Corrie’s makeshift repair lasted until we sold Katie, over a year later. I wonder how long she went on running around with an oil pressure lead made from masking tape and Pratley?
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