Chapter 4

I did get my shower. I did get the hamburger and the fries. The catnap never happened.

The adrenaline was still sitting too high in my system, like a turbine that refused to spool down completely. Even under the hot water I could still feel the ghost of the cyclic in my right hand and the dull ache across my shoulders from that long hover over the river.

By the time I stepped out of the ablutions block and walked back toward the SANParks offices at Skukuza, the rain had finally stopped. Not cleared — just paused. The sky still hung low and heavy, a dull pewter ceiling that promised more.

Along the perimeter fence the bush was steaming. Patches of fog lifted lazily off the soaked grass and thorn trees, rising in slow motion like breath from a sleeping animal. Every leaf held a drop of water. The ground squelched under my boots. The air had that thick, humid Lowveld weight — warm and clammy against the skin, carrying the smell of wet earth, mud, and waterlogged vegetation. Even the dust roads had lost their colour, turned into dark ribbons of paste.

There was no wind at all.

After days of storms the stillness felt unnatural, as if the whole landscape was holding its breath.

In that window of calm, both the South African National Defence Force and SANParks were moving fast. Two Atlas Oryx helicopters thumped in and out of the strip, their rotor wash flattening the wet grass in great circles, while a SANParks Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel darted between them like a dragonfly.

People who had decided they’d had enough of flooded camps and uncertain supply lines were being lifted out with duffel bags, camera cases, and the tired, shell-shocked look of tourists who hadn’t signed up for a natural disaster. Rangers moved among them with clipboards and radios, efficient but gentle, shepherding families toward the waiting aircraft.

Every now and then the deep thump of an Oryx starting up rolled across the airfield, followed by the rising whine of turbines and the heavy, chopping beat as it lifted away toward the south.

Inside the SANParks office building there was that familiar “siege” atmosphere again — maps spread across tables, radios crackling, mugs everywhere. Wet boots stood in rows by the door. Someone had rigged a drying line with flight suits and rain jackets.

Gustav was standing by the small kitchenette, sleeves rolled up, looking as if he’d been there for twelve hours straight.

“Coffee?” he asked, already reaching for the kettle.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’ll be good.”

He poured it strong and black into a chipped enamel mug and handed it to me. The heat soaked into my fingers, chasing away the last of the damp chill that had settled into my bones during the flight.

Through the open window we could hear another Oryx lifting, its rotor beat echoing over the sodden bush.

“Patients?” he asked.

“Both alive,” I said. “Female’s in a bad way — lungs, hypothermia. But she made it.”

He nodded once, the way people do when that’s the only reaction they can afford.

Outside, the fog kept lifting in thin veils, revealing the dripping trees and the dark, swollen Sabie floodplain beyond. The storm hadn’t gone. It had just stepped back for a moment.

And everyone was using that moment as if it might be the last one they got.

The park was closed to visitors. Not the usual quiet-season closed—this was a hard, operational shutdown. Gates locked. Radios on emergency channels. Every movement logged.

The damage reports coming in over the SANParks net were staggering. Multi-million rand, they said, and that was a conservative number because nobody could even reach half the affected areas yet. Camps from the southern boundary all the way up to Punda Maria had taken water. Some only ankle-deep through the reception areas; others had rivers running through the ablution blocks and staff quarters.

Gravel roads were simply gone. Not damaged—gone. Where there had been a road there was now a raw brown scar, culverts ripped out and lying downstream like discarded tin cans. In places the Sabie and the Sand had jumped their banks and cut entirely new channels. Access roads to low-lying camps were impassable, which meant fuel, food, and medical supplies had to go in by air or not at all.

Fences were flattened in long, sagging lines, posts uprooted or buried under debris. Not that a fence means much to an elephant at the best of times, but now the boundaries were theoretical. Trees—big Leadwoods and Jackalberries that had stood for a century—were lying on their sides with the roots clawing at the sky. Floodwater does that: it undercuts the soil, then the whole mass just gives up and falls.

Vehicles had fared no better. Ranger bakkies stood nose-down in mud up to their axles, doors open where someone had abandoned them in a hurry. A few tourist cars had been recovered, their interiors coated in that fine brown silt that gets into everything—gear levers, radios, seat fabric. The smell of wet upholstery and river mud hung in the air.

Bridges were the real problem. Low-level crossings had been overtopped and scoured. Without those, the park was a patchwork of islands. Logistics became aviation.

Over the radio you could hear the strain in the ops room voices. Not panic—never panic—but that tight, clipped tone of people doing mental arithmetic: fuel versus payload, daylight versus tasking, who still needed extraction, who could wait.

Floods don’t just damage buildings; they break systems. Water gets into electrical reticulation, into pump houses, into sewer lines. Suddenly you’re not just dealing with mud—you’re dealing with contaminated water, no potable supply, and the risk of disease in camps that normally run like small towns. Infrastructure loss cascades into health risk, and every ranger on the ground knows it.

Standing there outside the SANParks office, coffee warming my hands, I could feel that shift from rescue mode to recovery mode beginning. The urgency was still there, but now it was layered with assessment: which airstrips were usable, which helipads were still above the waterline, where we could stage fuel, how to reopen supply lines.

Gustav handed me the mug, and we watched an Oryx lift off heavy with evacuees and their luggage piled like sandbags inside.

“Going to take weeks,” he said.

“Months,” I answered, thinking of the roads that had to be rebuilt from scratch and the bridges that would need engineers, not graders.

Out in the bush the fog kept lifting in slow sheets, revealing pieces of the park like a curtain going up after a storm—first a line of drowned grass, then a stranded log, then the glint of standing water where there should have been dust.

Beautiful, still. But wounded.

“Oh,” Gustav said, and we both paused at the window as the little SANParks Squirrel lifted in a tight, neat departure and turned toward Kruger International Airport, its rotors flicking mist off the grass in a widening halo, “I forgot to tell you. They found a rust-brown skorokoro of a four-tracker about eight hundred metres from the confluence of the Sand and Sabie.”

For a moment I just watched the Squirrel shrink into the grey, then I looked back at him.

“Washed away, probably?” I said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Belonged to that deserted fly-camp you and Wolfie stumbled onto.”

That pulled me up short. I could still see the place in my mind — the abandoned fire ring, the canvas half torn loose, the tyre tracks in the mud leading away in a hurry.

“How can you be sure?” I asked, lifting the enamel mug and draining the last of the tar-strong coffee.

“The tyres,” he said. “Same pattern Wolfie photographed. Same wear on the outer lugs. It’s a match.”

That put a weight in my stomach that had nothing to do with caffeine.

“Great,” I muttered. “Now we need to find whoever was inside.”

Gustav leaned one shoulder against the window frame and looked out toward the invisible rivers beyond the tree line.

“Wolfie reckons they tried to punch north out of the camp,” he said. “Probably thought they could still make the Sand before it came up. Got caught mid-crossing. Once the water took the vehicle, it would have rolled, filled, and gone with the surge. The Sand feeds straight into the Sabie there — hydraulics would carry it across and dump it on the south bank where the flow slackens.”

I pictured it: brown water, debris, a vehicle tumbling end over end like a toy, then snagging in reeds or against a fallen tree.