Through Moremi, the way a trip runs

A green fan in a dry land

From this height the subcontinent is a shape — two coasts, the Kalahari pale between them, and one green fan on the sand: a river's end, a thousand kilometres from any coast. Moremi is the reserve in that fan's eastern half. Everything in this story happens inside it.

The journey changes aircraft

Maun is where the tar ends. The jet that brought you turns round; a light aircraft takes you on, low enough that the change is plain under the wing — cattle land, then floodplain, then no fences at all.

The reserve's boundary is somewhere beneath you. Most trips cross it here, from the south, with the Mopane Tongue ahead.

The dry spine

The Mopane Tongue is a triangle of tall, even woodland forty kilometres to a side, South Gate at its base and the reserve's tracks running up through it. The road crosses the channels on log bridges, and in the dry months what water there is sits in the pans.

From June the herds come to the pans — elephant first — and the heat turns the mopane to copper.

Where the woodland ends

Past the Tongue's tip there is no more woodland, only water: reed beds, channels, and the wide lagoon the Khwai spreads into, there in every month. The camps on its shore run a drive at first light and a boat once the heat comes, from one ground.

The blue is a typical July, the flood at its fullest: the lagoon and the channels the satellite record finds filled in that month. Leopard hold the riverine trees along the water.

The ground the delta is measured by

West over the channels, Chief's Island: seventy kilometres of dry ground raised on a fault line, the wetland all round it. No road reaches it; the same small aircraft does.

The July water is the same layer, seen from a new vantage, and here it surrounds. The island was a chief's own hunting ground until the 1970s, and since no one else ever hunted it, its lions pay a vehicle little mind.

The river is the boundary

Back east, the Khwai. The reserve's north-eastern edge is a river, not a fence, with community land on the far bank and game crossing whichever way it likes. More trips reach this corner than any other.

The water drawn is a typical October, the last of the dry: the flood back to the river line, the floodplain bare, and elephant and buffalo down to what is left.

The year decides

Behind the river, in the mopane, is the dogs' ground. From around June a pack goes to earth — one den, a litter, three months on one patch of woodland — the one season anyone can look for them with hope.

Which June, which den, how long — the pack settles it afresh each year, and thirty years of research has never made it predictable. The map goes quiet here: nothing in this chapter can be promised.

Where the water ends

East past the boundary the trees are gone and the ground is a pale clay bowl: the Mababe Depression, the floor of a lake that dried thousands of years ago, its old shore a sand ridge.

From December the rains fill the marsh and the herds come in — buffalo by the thousand — and the story has left the reserve. Savuti and Chobe are on beyond the ridge.