Page 70 of Sheltering Instinct

“Thanks, Dad, that’s good to know.” Gwen laughed. “Or, like I was talking to a colleague and found out WorldCares is investing in a research initiative that sprays modified bacteria DNA on corn seeds so they don’t need as much fertilizer.”

“Okay, well, good,” Craig said. “The sooner, the better. A healthy planet is something everyone would aspire to.” He leaned toward Gwen. “I’m stuck on wobbles, Angola, and its impact here in Namibia. Our vines are desperate for a long drink.”

“No one has any idea. It’s a stranger wobble than normal. But in a normal El Nino year, this sometimes happens,” Gwen said. “Our colleagues are saying with the combination of El Ninoplus the temperatures in the northern Atlantic, we might as well use a Magic Eight Ball.”

“To Gwen’s point,” Tess said, “when you hear the term “breaking records” it means we’ve never seen the event before. If we’ve never researched it, it’s hard to model. We don’t know how to interpret the data. The predictions that Gwen and I generate are becoming more an art than science. Basically, we’re taking an educated guess.”

“And now?” Enrico asked. “What’s the guess?

“Personally, I’ve had my eye on a spaghetti model that dipped into Angola. I’d lay my money on the outlier.”

“The outlier,” Enrico repeated. “Then Namibia would come into play. If there are heavy rains in Angola, the flood basins in northern Namibia will fill.”

“Which could help with our drought situation,” Craig smiled.

“Maybe, Dad, but if it’s too much, it’s too much.”

“El Nino, that will pass,” Craig said. “Things should be right as rain next year.” He turned toward a baby elephant, curving its trunk around the dry leaves.

“I’m not completely convinced it’s all El Nino,” Tess said. “The winds aren’t getting that spin they need to get into the Atlantic. If they sit here, Europe gets slammed. If they move over to the United States, then the storm gets energized by the heat in the Gulf waters and becomes the mega storms that tried to skate your Aunt Pat down the mountain, Gwen.”

“We saw that this summer’s European flooding was probable and warned the Mediterranean countries’ governments. Well, our org warned them nobody would have answered the phone if I said, ‘Hey, it’s Gwen Metz. Y’all are going to flood in August.’ But WorldCares staged to go in and help in several areas where resources might be stretched thin.”Gwen caught Tess’s gaze. “I think we did a pretty good job calling it.”

“Did you catch the flash flood in Spain?” Enrico asked.

“No.” Tess turned, looking over her shoulder at him. “A flash flood is hard to predict and hard to prepare for. In general, we leave that level of granularity to the governments. Our goal is to project out between three and six months. We’re looking at trends that will affect mobility—will people need to flee an area? That’s something that is best to avoid. We have other specialists that consider the present government to predict how long recovery might take. From there, WorldCares positions resources in places where the weather will have the biggest effect on population survival.”

“And you’re here in Namibia.” Enrico let out a long, low whistle.

“To be clear,” Gwen said as she lifted her binoculars, leaning past Levi to scan, “things happen that we have no ability to predict—some aspects of war, some natural disasters mostly around geological issues like volcanos and earthquakes, and the resulting tsunamis. Morocco, last year, we were unprepared. It took us weeks to get help to the people stuck on the eastern side of the Atlas mountains.”

“Houses made of mud in that area,” Craig said. ‘You know, if we had a torrent like that in Namibia, the suffering would be immense. You may not know this, Tess, I don’t know if you went on a tour or not, but in cities like Windhoek, after the Nazis left the region, the South Africans took over governance. And South Africa Apartheid laws impacted the native people.”

Iris added, “Namibia just got its independence recently. It’s only a few decades old.”

“Ancient and yet brand-new,” Craig said. “The good people of this land have followed the laws regarding what kinds of shelter they can build and where. In the cities, they’recompressed into a small area of packed earth. Their homes are neatly built, but they were allowed little more than wooden pallets and plastic tarps. They remind me of pictures of back in the Great Depression and the Hoovervilles.”

With Gwen leaning across his lap, resting her elbows on the side of the vehicle as she scanned with the binoculars, Levi could see Tess. And he saw that look in her eyes she got when she was fighting down some memory from her past that had inadvertently sparked.

It might be that she recognized the structures from her past. It might just as easily be something he had no clue about. But there was a certain veil that closed over her, a dimming of the light that he looked for in her eyes, the muting of her normally gentle countenance. It was as if she could do something that made her disappear from sight, like an animal that sank into the environment to camouflage itself.

Levi knew that when she got like that, she needed a moment to remind herself that she was safe. He’d wait it out, keeping his hands visible, sitting still, and protecting her space.

He’d guess she was thinking of the children in harm’s way. The kids who didn’t have an Abraham who, as a teenager, swept a child into his arms and ran pell-mell for safety instead of dropping her to save himself.

Or a Mama Ya who took Tess under her wing in the years of unrest and kept her alive even though it put their family in lethal danger.

In Levi’s experience, people like that were uncommon.

Right now, in his heart, Levi was right back to loving Tess with the same fierce devotion he had when he’d left for that fateful deployment.

It was as if these last years were parenthetical for him. A sentence began (information was added) and now he could continue with his thought.

He was also right back in the raw pain of knowing how much he loved her when she didn’t feel the same. If she had, she would have sought him out at some point over the last fourteen years since she’d been widowed.

That had been the double-edged sword that stabbed him all the way down the steep hillside when he didn’t know if Tess would live.

To find her and lose her again wasn’t something Levi thought he’d survive.

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