In the early nineteen-seventies, Mark and Delia Owens, two graduate students in biology at the University of Georgia, were seized by the idea of resettling in remotest Africa. They organized an auction, sold their possessions, and used the modest proceeds to buy camping equipment and a pair of one-way air tickets to Johannesburg. When they arrived, in January, , Delia, the daughter of a Georgia trucking executive, was twenty-four years old.
Mark, who grew up on a farm west of Toledo, Ohio, was twenty-nine, the divorced father of a four-year-old boy named Christopher. Mark and Delia had scoured the map of Africa, searching for a site so isolated that its wildlife would have no knowledge, and no fear, of humans. They eventually found their way to a place called Deception Valley, in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana.
It was a perfect spot for the Owenses to make camp. The wildlife there had not been depleted by poaching, as it had been in other parts of Africa, and though the valley was in many ways an unforgiving placeβtemperatures can climb above a hundred and twenty degrees in summerβit was distant enough from the capital, Gaborone, to insure that they would be left alone to do their work.
The water from the drums tasted like hot metallic tea, and to cool it for drinking, we filled tin dinner plates and set them in the shade of the acacia. Despite penury, loneliness, and drought, they established a viable research station, and, over several years, they gained the trust of several prides of lions and clans of brown hyenas.
By writing about the exploits of these predators in vivid and accessible prose, they attracted popular attention and funding for their work. They cultivated reporters who came to Deception Valley, and told their story not as one simply of carnivore research but as a tale of young love in a hard land.
