Serengeti Serenade Unbuttoned

By Anne Knowles

Writer Cinn Wyatt-Jones arrives in Africa with Edwards Production Company to film a documentary about zoologist, Dr. Colin McCullough, and his research on the lions of the Serengeti. On her first morning in the National Park, Cinn hikes up a rocky hill to get a view of the land. She runs into double danger: a large, male lion and a tanned, muscular, where's-your-common-sense-young-lady man. He scares off the lion. She has no idea how to scare off the man. He insists on helping her down the hill. She stumbles. He grabs her waist band to keep her from fallng--and Oops!--grabs the strap of Ms. Thongy as well. Pleasurable, but flat-out embarrassing. Once they're down, she asks, "Who are you?" He, of course, replies, "Dr. Colin McCullough." Oops! Her scientist. For two months, Cinn will have to spend her nights with Dr. McCullough in his Land Rover. She finds herself struggling with the realities of life on the Serengeti and with the complications of her love for Colin. They try to be professional, but they just can't seem to keep their hands off each other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Knowles
• Release date: Dec 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301621279

Anne Knowles

I'm a former Vista Volunteer, zookeeper, and teacher. I write books and poetry for children.

Book preview

Serengeti Serenade Unbuttoned

Anne Knowles

Cover Art by Laura Shinn

Copyright 2012 Anne Knowles

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Dedication

For my friend

Pat

Chapter 1

I stepped onto the veranda of the Seronera Lodge. Acacia trees, their trunks wrapped in white, hovered in the air like ghostly umbrellas. The few scattered buildings of Seronera were softened in the early morning fog that moved over the Serengeti National Park.

I took a deep breath of the moist, clean air and leaned my elbows on the railing that surrounded the veranda. My robe fell open to the sash. I looked down. Oops! Cleavage, breasts, the works. I quickly pulled the robe closed at my neck.

No woman had ever--repeat, ever--experienced as many absent-minded catastrophes with her clothes as I had. From as early as first grade, when I’d forgotten to put on my Tuesday fruit-of-the-looms before walking to school, I’d had a tendency to wander out in public with clothing unbuttoned, unzipped, or forgotten altogether. My mother, a performance artist and kook in her own right, put it down to daydreaming. My grandmother, Victorian and queenly--she said things like Hush children--put it down to a lack of social graces. My father, a novelist, put it down to the stream of words that filled my mind and left the rational part of my brain inebriated. I loved words and I loved to write.

At any rate, I held my robe closed and listened to the silence on the Serengeti. It was so profound that I was convinced I heard the fog whisper along the ground. I closed my eyes. In the distance, a thunder of hoofs moved into the silence and grew louder and louder. I opened my eyes and the wildebeest came, huge, buffalo-like animals, appearing as if from nowhere, west of the lodge. Their legs nearly invisible in the milky air, they seemed to float by me. I was mesmerized. It was a full fifteen minutes before the last of them disappeared into the fog.

I had turned to go back into my room when I heard a car door slam. A motor rumbled to life. Soon the noise disappeared in the distance.

Dr. Colin McCullough, I whispered. As principal creative writer for Edwards Production Company, I had been corresponding with Dr. McCullough for months concerning a documentary to be filmed about him and his research on the lions of the Serengeti. I get up with the sun, he had written in one letter. And I don’t intend to have my schedule disrupted by your film crew.

Pompous… I paused. Why bother to pollute the morning with a base anatomical term? ...scientist! My thoughts were interrupted by a low moan that grew in power and intensity until the air rang with a succession of full-throated roars, coming at two-second intervals. As one series of roars died down, another started, reverberating through the early morning sky and shaking, it seemed to me, the foundations of the earth. At last, as abruptly as it had started, the roaring stopped.

The vast silence once again wrapped around me. The long airplane trip to Nairobi and the dusty bus ride yesterday from there to the village of Seronera had seemed unreal to me. It was the roaring of the lions that told me, emphatically, that I was in the Serengeti.

I hugged my robe to me and returned to my room. My roommate, Randi Coates, was still asleep. With breakfast an hour away, I sat on my bed and opened a large map of the Serengeti National Park. I knew that the lions of the Serengeti couldn’t be understood apart from the land, but the last thing in the world I wanted to write was a travelogue. I didn’t intend to take the easy way out. I would settle for nothing less than the total involvement of the movie audience.

With my finger, I traced the Mbalageti River as it flowed westward across the National Park to Lake Victoria. From my research, I knew that the thin, black line I traced, in reality, pulsed with life: fever trees and Phoenix palms capturing the sun and handing it down to the river in shafts; baboons frolicking in fig trees; Egyptian geese raucously ka-ka-kaing to one another; pied kingfishers diving time and again for fish; and, of course, the crocodile guarding, as always, the ancient river.

I moved my gaze along the map from Lake Victoria through the western woodlands of the Corridor to the village of Seronera, located in the middle of the park, on the edge of the great eastern plains. As I looked east of the village, I was reminded of words I'd read in my research, something Fritz Jaeger, the first European to see the plains, had written, And all this a sea of grass, grass, grass, grass and grass. One looks around and sees only grass and sky.

On the map, the words Olduvai Gorge, on the southeast border of the National Park, caught my eye. The gorge had fascinated me ever since a college anthropology class had exposed me to the work of the famous Leakey family, anthropologists who had discovered, in the gorge, fossils millions of years old. The name Olduvai Gorge had come to suggest to me the vast and ancient cycle of life—birth, death, and always the inexorable passage of time.

A small travel alarm buzzed. Randi stirred, reached an arm from under her covers, turned it off, and snuggled back into her pillow.

Come on, Randi. Rise and shine.

Jet lag. Five more minutes, she mumbled from under the pile of warm blankets.

This Dr. McCullough isn’t going to put up with lazybones. Randi didn't budge. You might as well get used to it.

I’m the business manager, Randi protested. I probably won’t even have to deal with Dr. Early-Riser.

That’s true. But if you don’t get up soon, you’ll miss breakfast.

That made her sit up, put her feet on the floor, and finally smile. She was a petite, happy woman, loved by the whole crew. She had a head of short, curly, red hair, and, although she wasn’t a beautiful woman, her blue eyes sparkled with amusement, no matter what the weather or the state of world affairs. She was ten years older than my twenty-six years, and I treasured our friendship. Ever since I had started working for Edwards Production Company, three years earlier, she'd been a rock of stability in my life.

In no time, Randi had slipped into a pair of jeans and a blouse. I'm supposed to meet Patch early, she said. Want me to wait for you? Patch Whitney was the soundman for the shoot and Randi's fiancé. I told her to go on to breakfast. I'd be there in a minute.

I took a quick shower, rubbed myself dry, pulled my blond hair over one shoulder, and braided it. I slipped on a black thong and a black, lacy bra. I do like thongs and stretchy, lacy bras. I told myself it was because they were cooler, in the temperature sense, but it's the feeling of womanhood that I treasure. It had been three years and six months since my fiancé died. It had been all work, loneliness, and grief since then, and, I don't know, somehow the lacy, thongy garb helped me to remember the feminine me that, at times, I thought had died with him. What I'd wanted to do was wear comfy jeans and baggy t-shirts, hide in a cold garret for the rest of my life, and write depressing novels about death and lost love. So I wore thongs and skimpy, lacy bras as a survival technique.

I glanced at myself in the mirror. Where Randi was petite, I was curvy. I didn't mind being curvy, but sometimes I wished I had Randi's figure. Her tight pants fit neatly across her bottom. I was always worried about too much curvature. And Randi's bosom seemed to contain itself much better than mine did.

Oh, well. Enough of this, Cinn Wyatt-Jones, I said out loud. I pulled on some blue jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, slipped on my sneakers, and headed out the door for breakfast.

The dining room was nearly full when I entered. Randi was sharing a table with Patch. He was all elbows and knees. If his black thatch of unruly hair hadn’t been flecked with gray, he would have looked like a gangly adolescent.

Perry Kellogg, the director, was at a table with four of the technical crew. The table erupted in laughter. That would be Perry, serving up his joke of the day.

Cinn, over here!

I saw Howard Edwards, executive producer and owner of Edwards Production Company, at a table beside the large window. Although, at fifty-five years old, Howard had developed a slight paunch, sported a pair of owlish horn-rim glasses, and had only a fringe of gray hair around his head, he had a way with women that was legendary.

I loved the man dearly. He’d hired me just out of graduate school three years earlier solely on the basis of my student writing and one film I’d scripted on the Nebraska prairie dogs. My fiancé had died six months before I was hired, and when my parents died in a car accident only three weeks after I'd started working for him, Howard became as much a father to me as a boss.

Sit, he said. He pointed to the chair opposite him and took a crunchy bite of toast.

Good morning to you, too, I said. I poured a cup of coffee from the thermos server on the table.

Got an email from NASA this morning. They OK’d the use of their film for your opening. Are you going with it or not?

Not sure, I replied. I was happy that the option was now available for the opening I'd originally envisioned for the movie. The audience would see first the earth, a blue ball in an immense ocean of black space, then the continent of Africa, then the Serengeti, and finally an acacia tree, sheltering a pride of lions. I don't dislike it, but I don't know. There’s something more here than Universe-Africa-Serengeti-Lion.

And?

I don’t know, yet.

Answers, Cinn. Are you giving up your original idea?

Not sure.

NASA?

Tell them maybe.

I can’t tell them maybe. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with his napkin. You’ve had months to think about this.

But I just got here last night.

He put on his glasses and looked intently at me. Magic. Right?

Magic. Stall them. I stood up, went to the window for a plate of eggs and toast, and returned to Howard's table just as Randi walked up.

Howard, I'm on my way to the office. I have the Land Rover lease papers for you to sign whenever you’re finished with breakfast.

I’m finished, he said as he gulped the last of his coffee and stood up from the table. Twenty-four hours, Cinn, he said. Not waiting for a response, he followed Randi out of the room.

I gazed out the window at the land that stretched endlessly before my eyes. The sun sparkled in the dewdrops that covered the carpet of gently waving green grass. In the distance, I saw the slopes of Nyaraswiga Hill, lavender in the early morning light. I had the whole morning before we had our first meeting with Dr. McCullough after lunch. I wanted to get out into the Serengeti. I wanted to climb that hill and have a look around.

I finished my breakfast, drank the last of my coffee, and hurried back to my room. Because the morning was warming up, I thought I'd take the time to put on something cooler.

The room telephone rang as I opened the door to my room. Howard here. McCullough just radioed and is moving the meeting up to 11:00 this morning.

Whoa! Bye-bye to two of my hours. I, of course, told Howard I'd be there, but I refused to give up my plan to hike out to the rocky hill. I surrendered to my in-a-hurry frame of mind, stripped off my jeans and long sleeve shirt, grabbed a pair of cool, loose, white linen shorts--forgot the belt—and a loose white shirt that was cropped at the waist. I put on my hiking boots, grabbed

Reviews for Serengeti Serenade Unbuttoned

[lcrabtree-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It had a good storyline and would have got 4*'s if not for all the "m'ladies", "downtown" and "nubbins" and other stupid words used for areas of the body