On the morning of the 18th of September, forty-two grade-fives from a primary school in the Bohlokong township climbed off a hired minibus at the trust's field station and stood in a tight, suspicious group on the gravel.
By lunchtime three of them had picked up bone fragments. By two o'clock one of them had a porcupine quill stuck in the rubber sole of her school shoe and was telling everybody who would listen that she had personally encountered a porcupine. (She had not. She had encountered a quill on the path. The porcupine was nowhere to be seen and almost certainly asleep. We did not correct her.)
Most school field days in the dome go wrong in small, manageable ways. The minibus's clutch goes. One child packs a sandwich and another packs nothing. It rains in spring when it isn't supposed to. The rangers' radios decide it's their day off too. We have learned to expect a rolling six or seven minor disasters and to plan around them. The kids do not notice the disasters at all. They notice the kudu they saw at first light from the pavilion. They notice the bones. They notice that the rangers wear boots that lace up to the knee and that one of the rangers has a scar on her cheek and that the scar is from a thorn, not a leopard, even though she will let them believe it was a leopard for ten more minutes before she tells them.
What the schools programme is for, we are clear about. We are not training the next generation of rangers. We are not even, primarily, teaching biology. What we are doing is breaking — once, for a single day, in a way that can never be put back together — the idea that the bush is somewhere only other people belong.
The kids who arrived suspicious of the gravel road will not all become volunteers. Most will not. A handful will. But all forty-two of them will spend the rest of their lives knowing that they have walked through this landscape with their own feet, and that nobody chased them out, and that an adult woman in lace-up boots and a green shirt told them the names of things, and meant it.
That is the work. That is enough.
We run the programme twice a term. Schools that would like to be on the list should write to [email protected] with the grade, the rough number of learners and a preferred month. We currently have a four-term waiting list. We are working on it.