AFTER we had waited three hours for them, we were getting worried.
Another hour and we were getting very worried.
Resolutely rejecting the thought that they might all have been eaten by crocodiles, we plugged in the spotlight and shone it upstream.
There was nothing.
(Meanwhile, back in the boat, they had been fishing and had lost track of the time. It was now dark, and they were faced with an impenetrable barrier of reeds.)
We decided to give them another half-hour before going back to Mopipi to radio for help. Using the company’s emergency radio may seem a pretty melodramatic plan to anyone who has not seen the area.
To the north was 200km of uninhabited salt pans. To the south and west lay the Kalahari Desert. There were no facilities in Mopipi village for organising a search party – very few serviceable vehicles or boats, no shops at which to buy emergency rations and certainly no telephone.
The chances of our finding any other fishing parties in the area were so remote as not to be worth considering.
It was not simply that it was now getting very late. The main problem was that the river spread out into a dozen different channels, affording a hundred different fishing places, so one just did not know where to start looking. So the radio was our only option.
We discussed the talents of various Orapans, and agreed that the man we needed most, right now, was Ted. He had a bushworthy Land Rover, a sturdy boat and a better knowledge of the river than anybody else we could think of.
In half-an-hour’s time, we would put out a radio call from the pump station and try to get in touch with Ted.
No sooner had we agreed that our chances of finding help in the neighbourhood were absolutely nil than a vehicle appeared on the main road.
There was no time to get to the road to flag it down, so I took the spotlight up on Katie’s roof and signalled SOS, in what I fondly imagined to be impeccable Morse code.
I was later told that it was quite unrecognisable as Morse, but it did have the desired effect. The vehicle swung off the road and headed towards us.
Our guardian angels must have been working overtime – this could not just be sheer luck – the man at the wheel was Ted!
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