George Bush and the Hyenas

The last thing I wanted to think about on our summer vacation to Africa was George Bush....

Each day of our month-long trip was memorable, but one day, in particular, stands out: It was our son Ben's 17th birthday and we were on the Okavango Delta in Botswana. It was a clear, cold night where you could see the Milky Way cloud as vivid and bright as you could back in the days of the caveman. This was our last night in a tented camp without electricity in 30-degree weather. I thought..."Boy, if my friends could only see me now." Anyway, Ben was up for something really exciting, so we started off on our last safari.

Thank God the little kids had taken another jeep.

The first evening we arrived, Harry, the head of our lodge warned us to make sure we never walked alone at night without a guide and to make absolutely sure we zipped up our tents before we went to sleep or we could be in danger. A few of us were concerned that Harry was unnecessarily frightening the children.

Later he told us privately that a few years before an eleven-year-old boy in his own tent went out to take a photo of an animal he heard before he went to sleep and then forgot to zip it up. The animal happened to be a hyena who later slipped in and grabbed the child...it took them hours to find his mangled body.

As we left the lodge we heard a lion and followed his roar. He was looking for his mate like a big pussy cat, licking termites and rolling over, he seemed so harmless. It is a strange feeling to be in an open four wheel drive jeep just a few feet from a lion who ignores you and sees the car as a large, harmless animal. If, however, you got out of the car you would be dead meat within a few minutes. The male lion mates every 10 minutes for three days or so before he crashes. During this time the female has to make the kill and only eats after the male gets his fill. Once he is spent she often leaves to go find some other females so she can hunt and survive. It's a kind of jungle feminism.

Anyway, we got bored with the lion and headed back to the lodge. A few minutes from the camp we heard a scream and the guides thought we should check it out. It was dark and as our jeep veered off the road we pitched head first into a huge aardvark hole and all of us in the back were thrown forward almost out of the vehicle. Then our flashlight showed a lioness off in the distance pacing angrily because something had stolen her kill. Suddenly, everywhere we looked we saw huge, giant-jawed hyenas moving toward a small mound around the delta. Incredibly, our guides got the jeep out of the ditch. Some of us wished to return to camp, but Ben wanted to check out what was going on. The guides told us that since it was a single lioness the hyenas frightened her off. We moved forward and in a minute we came upon a buffalo with 15 to 18 hyenas starting to tear it apart. They were like maggots, fighting and screeching, biting pieces of the meat and each other. It was like a shark frenzy on land. We were just a few feet away and it was pretty terrifying. The stench of the eviscerated animal was disgusting. I dry heaved over the side of the jeep. It took them only 45 minutes to eat everything but the horns and skull.

We were all stunned and silent as we headed back to the lodge. I was thinking that I had never seen anything like this in my life. But then I thought of how the Bush Administration had stolen America's $86 billion surplus that could have been used to nourish our country, support our infrastructure, create food and health care for the poor and elderly, protect our environment, educate our young and provide greater security for our citizens. I realized that unlike the hyenas, who are nature's scavengers and no matter how ugly they might be, provide a useful service in our world, our current administration doesn't just steal from the present for their own greed. Instead they have put our whole country and its future generations in debt to the amount of $567 billion and counting. Our children and grandchildren will be paying for the rest of their lives for these few years of undisciplined self-gratification.

As we got closer to the safety of the camp and a dinner I couldn't eat, I thought, "Happy birthday, Ben, from the hyenas and George Bush."