Here is a sneak preview to the book that I've been writing up at Kora .....
‘Lucky’ the doctor,
Kevin Martin, told me ‘a few more days on the river and that appendix would
have ruptured and you’d have been one dead kid,’ he shook his head and placed
his hands in his pockets. ‘You should feel better by late this afternoon. Don’t
over-do things, try having a short walk,’ he motioned over to where a
zimmerframe stood in the corner of the small hospital room, ‘maybe go and visit
Norman. But mind, only a small whiskey.’
Norman and his wife Gilly
were Reilly’s grandparents and were iconic in Zimbabwe for their work in
running livestock and wildlife on the same ranch. It was they who had built up
Imire to the game park status it now held.
Reilly turned up later
that afternoon and together we ever-so-slowly walked the hundred metres or so
over to Norman and Gilly’s house, we joked all the way until my laughter so
hurt that we had to turn serious.
‘Reilly man, imagine if
we had still been on the river, if we hadn’t have gotten to that camp, if Alan
hadn’t have been there in his plane? You’d have had to be doctor and cut me
open with your Leatherman. Do you even know what an appendix looks like?’
‘Of course I do Jimbo,
isn’t it that long thin thing that hangs low between the balls?’
‘Reilly, punda wewe’, you donkey, I grinned,
‘No Jim, I’d have done
it. We had the blades, we had the book, and I’d have followed instructions man.
No worries’
Norman was an old, wise
man who shook his head at the whole imagined scenario and with a sparkle in his
eye said ‘No Jimbo, you don’t want to trust my grandson, he’d have chosen the
right acacia tree to lay you under and that’s it’
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