BY this time the Karens (big and small) the dog (big) and I had been waiting by the causeway for three-and-a-half hours. Our only distraction had been a herd of noisy cows, which prompted small to remark that the “moos” were “barking”.
At last, the first truck came past, a crew from Parks and Gardens Department, going to cut turf from the river bank for planting in Orapa. They were coming from the wrong direction to have seen anyone, but I flagged them down and asked them to keep their eyes open for any sign of our survivors. Twenty minutes later the truck returned with Byron, who had walked 20km since dawn. He said that the others were not far away and he wanted to go and pick them up.
At this point I did an incredibly stupid thing.
When you are part of a search party and you have a plan, you must stick to that plan. If you don’t, you can cause chaos, or worse. If I had picked up the others, the boat crews would have gone on searching all day, thinking they had missed them. If I had broken down in the bush, another search party would have had to be called out. The only reason I did not cause chaos was that I failed to achieve my objective and returned to the causeway and the status quo.
Byron directed us back the way he had walked – over ploughed fields, in and out of dongas and through reed beds.
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It was quite the roughest going I had ever experienced and it was the first time I had ever put Katie in low range four-wheel-drive. She took it very well and we proved that Land Rovers really can lean at an angle of 44 degrees without falling over. It was not the same route that Ted and I had used the previous night, but we finished up in the same place.
Byron said that we must look for four huts and a signal fire. There were groups of four huts at every point of the compass and no less than five fires on various parts of the horizon. We tried making for each of them in turn, but the reed beds kept getting in the way. We decided to go back and I found the track which we had used the night before.
It was much shorter and, in most places, easier going, but we did get stuck at one point and had to take the trailer off before we could reverse out.
Miles from where we were looking earlier, but in a very similar area, Byron recognised the four huts. We found footprints and the remnants of the fire, but missed Corrie’s message, laid out in firewood ‘gone home’. Even without the message, it was obvious that they had been rescued.
By 3pm we were all back at Mopipi, enjoying a late lunch of fillet steak sandwiches and sharing our last four beers and two cigarettes.
After that little episode, we formed the Orapa Bush Club!
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