Excerpt from Twenty Chickens for a Saddle by Robyn Scott, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Grandpa glared at us. "Stand behind your father if you're scared," he bellowed.

At least as scared of Grandpa's disapproval, Lulu, Damien, and I reluctantly slid off the sofa and squatted behind Dad, who, with his legs as far back as possible, leaned forward and began to pivot the chair slowly sideways.

Holding our breath, poised to flee, we peered under the rising base.

A black creature, a little smaller than my hand, crouched statue-like on the concrete floor. At one end were pincers, evil- looking but tiny compared with the fat, hairy tail, sharply pointed at the tip, which curled up and forward over the wide body. Perfect, regular seams joined shiny black segments of the tail, body, and pincers, making it seem more like an exquisitely made machine than a real animal.

Dad whistled. "Black hairy thick- tailed scorpion," he said, emphasizing each word. "If you can't see a snake on your first day, this is as good as it gets."

"Could easily kill one of you chaps," added Grandpa. But the scorpion didn't seem to be in the mood for killing anyone. It took off with ungraceful speed, scuttling toward the wall, where it disappeared under a bookcase. Dad offered to try and catch it, but Grandpa said there were so many in the house already that Dad should just "leave the little bugger where he is."



Botswana is more than two- thirds desert. Selebi— Grandpa's home and our destination on that first, bewildering day just before Christmas in 1987— is in the other third, which gets just enough rain to miss out on the glamorous distinction of desert, and much too little to settle the ubiquitous red dust or support any but the hardiest of plants. Except for a few months of the year, that is, when the occasional storm cloud bursts and fat raindrops puff dust into the air and pummel sheets of water that flood the baked ground. In a good rainy season, the dry riverbeds that thread their way east to the Limpopo River might flow. Often they don't. For nine months of the year, it is hot; for the rest, it is dry. There is no time of year when it is not hot or dry.

A hundred and fifty kilometers from Selebi, the borders of Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe meet at the country's easternmost tip. Here the Limpopo peels away from Botswana and heads toward the Indian Ocean. Botswana is securely landlocked. At any point in the country you are at least four hundred kilometers from the sea. But making up for the absence of sea and lakes, spilling hundreds of kilometers across the dry sands in the north, lies the world's largest inland delta.

The bush surrounding the exquisite Okavango Delta, the "jewel of the Kalahari," teems with all of Africa's biggest and most impressive wildlife.

The bush around Selebi teems with cows, goats, and donkeys. There are few fences, and the animals wander mostly unimpeded across the flat land. They are frequently killed on the roads, hit by local cars or huge trucks passing through on their long journeys between southern and central Africa. The land is overgrazed, and any lions, elephants, and rhinos that weren't hunted down left long ago in search of places with more food and fewer people. Only the small, dangerous animals, like snakes and scorpions, which don't mind living alongside humans, are left. For by Botswana standards— a country the size of France with fewer than two million people— the region is populous. Cattle posts of five to twenty huts are sprinkled across the bush, and there are several bigger villages, the largest of which have electricity and running water.

Selebi, which appears on maps as Selebi- Phikwe, consists of just three old houses and several concrete slabs that were once houses. A relic from the early years of the nearby copper and nickel mine, Selebi is the ghost part of town. By the late 1980s, when my parents abruptly decided to return to Botswana— ending a peripatetic decade that had spanned South Africa, England, and New Zealand, and produced three children— Grandpa Ivor and Granny Betty had long been Selebi's sole residents.

Excerpted from Twenty Chickens for a Saddle (chapter 1, pages 1-14) by Robyn Scott. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Robyn Scott, 2008.