Explore its windy forest
Following its red edge with old, man-set traps
Crunching its dry litter of leaves under our feet
Greenbuls and sunbirds, disguised in olive pelage, chatter
Coastal meets montane
The night brings foot-taps of a four-toed, near a pile of leopard dung
And an orange-tailed Rondo, stilled by the light of our torches,
upon which a neon moth will perch
As our guide animates stories by firelight.
We awaken to concerts of scrub robins and yellow flycatchers
A honeyguide calling at us
to follow him?
Through the spiny, zigzag lianas,
perfumed duiker latrines,
and spilled Albizia pods by ndovu dung
which overflows with orange monkey fruit seeds.
We awaken to telephone calling - of a broadbill.
Waiting for endemic akalat
Instead we are haunted by beats of black-masked batis
and ever-changing vocals of energetic drongos.
This plateau rumbles of elephants,
and smells of civet musk,
and echoes with grantii's advertising calls
silenced by a band of fowl.
We sleep deeply then shallowly as leaves - and more - stir.
Hypervigilant at morning we admire the strangler fig
flanked by obligatory hornbills.
We stand still as a morph sprints across our path
which leads where we want it to
following a compass bearing, only roughly
We feel relief at the lack of stumps and tall figures of Mvule
and trees we cannot identify, on which dangle black weaver nests and dicot fruits.
In the southern plateau,
a crowned eagle descends as the woman below glances up at him from her spuns of purple-inked fronds.
Our lights dim
before dawn, a blotched genet visits the campfire's warmth and food scraps.
and then
we depart
not yet ready to
to a sky of mackerel clouds
not knowing if and when
we will re-acclimate.
