The Attacks, Analysed

Nobody in the last chapter gets blamed for dying. That is the rule this one runs on, and it is not softness, it is accuracy, because when you go through those ten cases looking for the decision that killed the person you keep finding that the decision was made years earlier by somebody who has never seen the river. A missing bridge. A borehole nobody came back to fix. A loan approved and then frozen. Those are choices, they were made by people with names and job titles, and they belong in an assessment of why these deaths happened at least as much as anything the victim did in the last ten seconds.

So each case gets looked at twice: what happened at the water, and what had already happened long before anybody got there.

Coetzee

This is the one case in the ten where the person who died had a genuine choice about being on that water and took it knowingly, as his profession. Two things stand out. The first is the tight-cluster tactic, three boats four feet apart reading as one large animal from below, which sounds sensible and has no evidence behind it, and against an animal that reads the water through pressure receptors in its skin and jaws rather than by making out a silhouette, the whole logic of it is doubtful. The unmarked kayak settles the argument. Whatever the three of them looked like from underneath, it was not something too big to take a run at, and the crocodile picked a man off a boat without so much as scratching the boat.

The second is what was behind them. Nothing. When it was over they had to paddle downstream and borrow a phone in a village, and the evacuation ran through an aid agency because that is what exists there. If the strike had left anything to save, there was no system in place to save it, and a professional working remote African rivers is accepting that condition every day whether or not he has ever said so out loud.

Sianene

Five elephants closing on a man on a small island, and ten metres of river on the other side. Anybody who wants to call that a bad decision should say out loud what the good one was. There wasn't one. He was alone at the moment it mattered, his three companions having moved off along the water, and that is the only thing in the whole sequence a person in his position could plausibly have done differently.

Everything else that happened to him was done to him by a state. Four hundred and thirty-six kilometres to Mpilo Central Hospital. Amputations that failed and left bone exposed. A second round of surgery in a different country because his family carried him there. And then nothing afterwards: no compensation, no medication he could keep paying for, no transport money to make a review appointment he missed by two days. He survived the crocodile. He has not survived the aftermath, and he is still in it.

Nyirenda

This is the correctable one, and it is the reason this slate exists in the shape it does. He got away. He hit the animal with a stick, it let go, he pulled himself out onto the bank under his own power, and then he died at a fishing camp of blood loss from a thigh wound while the people with him pressed on it and tried.

A crocodile taking a thigh does not make a clean cut. It punctures and tears, deep, and the femoral artery runs deep on the inner thigh where a hand pushing down on the outside of a leg often cannot reach it. Depth is the problem. That is the mechanism the emergency chapter of this book already covers, and the callback here is the whole point: a tourniquet, high above the wound, tightened until the bleeding stops, and the time noted. We do not know whether that would have saved Dean Nyirenda, and it would be dishonest to say we do. What we know is that the record shows no clinic was attempted and does not say how far one was, and that a man who beat a crocodile bled to death in the company of his own brother.