Cry of the Kalahari

After we read Where the Crawdads Sing (See my post of 12/30/18.) by Delia Owens, one of my book club friends talked about a book that had made a huge impression on her a number of years ago: Cry of the Kalahari - An American Couple's Seven Years in Africa's Last Great Wilderness (#802) by Mark and Delia Owens.  She had lived in Africa for a number of years serving in the Peace Corps and was familiar with their work.  Our local library doesn't own a copy, but I was able to obtain one through inter library loan.

Although I found this book interesting, by the end I found myself anxious to be done with it.  I even skipped reading the acknowledgements and Appendices at the end of the book, a rarity for me; I generally read everything.  I can't quite put my finger on why this was so.  Although both Mark and Delia contribute chapters, the preponderance of the book was written by Mark.  Maybe I don't find his voice as appealing as Delia's, or perhaps, towards the end, the narrative veered away from anecdotes about the Owens' time in Botswana towards a more clinical scientific observational style of animal behaviors.  That was certainly an outgrowth of their time spent in the wilderness on their own, but to a casual reader like me, considerably less interesting, even if the results of their observations are horrifying, spelling the end of a centuries-old way of life.

It was really a wonder to me, reading this memoir, that either of them managed to survive for seven years in the Kalahari Desert, with no resources to speak of, on a starvation diet with no hope initially of even getting funding for their projects.  Their encounters with assorted predators - jackals, brown hyenas, leopards, wild dogs and lions among them- are astounding to read.  Life in the wild ultimately outshone anything they could hope for in "civilization".  Yet even the Owens could read the future in the blue plastic mineral prospector's ribbons tied to the trees in Deception Valley, and it did not bode well for the animals around them.  It's a sobering read.