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

Supporting herself against the lid, Granny explained that years ago a spitting cobra had slithered into the maze of pipes at the back of the freezer. When, after several hours, the snake had shown no signs of wanting to come out, Grandpa had dragged the Deepfreeze outside. He had never got around to taking it back indoors.

Grandpa, unabashed, just laughed, "We're hoping it'll work by solar power!" he announced, patting the Deepfreeze and dislodging a small cloud of dust.

Granny and Grandpa slept in a converted veranda at the front of the house, the strangest bedroom I had ever seen. At one end of the long narrow room stood Granny and Grandpa's sagging double bed; at the other, a warped Ping- Pong table, piled high with a jumble of pipes, wood, rolls of plastic, old radios, and unrecognizable machines. Beneath the table, several dusty engines squatted on the concrete floor, crammed tightly beside each other and an assortment of smaller unmemorable objects tossed in among them.

At this, the Ping- Pong table side of the room, casting the chaos in a strange soft light, faded green shade cloth stretched from a three- foot- high wall to just below the eaves. Clearly visible through these gauzy windows, just outside the front of the house, stood a haphazardly packed shed the size of a single garage. In the center of the shed, surrounded by more engines and more junk, rested a battered old airplane fuselage. The wings of the airplane had been removed. Suspended by fraying loops of rope, they now hung inside, from the bedroom roof— one above the Ping- Pong table, the other above Granny and Grandpa's bed.

To reach the lounge from the driveway, you passed through this oddest of rooms: table on the left, bed on the right, wings above— meeting at their tips in the middle of the roof. Sometimes, when the door banged closed, the ropes creaked gently.




On that first day in Botswana, nearly everything about the house was surprising. But it was the passage through the front and back doors that would preserve its wonder. Even years later, it would be impossible to walk beneath the old Aeronca wings or pass beside the lonely Deepfreeze without the fleeting sensation that everything wasn't quite right; that, as with Granny's jigsaws, the last pieces were missing or misplaced.

Nearby, where the bare dirt ran into thorny bush, a second airplane— winged but even more damaged than the first— lay beneath a scraggly thorn tree, disintegrating into the scrub and dust. The red- and- white wreck was the Piper Colt, a part of family legend that, like the Aeronca, I'd felt I had known long before the day the two airplanes left the realm of stories, appearing as real objects in this strange new world.

Airplanes starred in most of our favorite tales about Grandpa Ivor. And although he'd first flown in the South African Air Force during World War II, the backdrop to these jaw- dropping flying stories was always Botswana, which did not become his home until the early 1960s. After the war, repelled by all associated with a time that had seen the loss of a brother and many of his dearest friends, Grandpa had started a string of unsuccessful businesses, and it was not until his forties, when he left South Africa— and with it Granny Mavis, his first wife, and his three young sons, Henry, Keith, and Jonathan— that flying again became his livelihood.

Based, initially, in a remote bush camp near the Okavango Delta, Grandpa Ivor worked as a commercial pilot, flying the first road builders, the last of the great white hunters, game department officials, mining prospectors, and, for a time, Sir Seretse Khama, Botswana's late, great, beloved first president. With a single plane, a Beechcraft Baron, he established the impressive-sounding Okavango Air Services, one of Botswana's first charter flight businesses. With the Aeronca, he began to teach flying, going on to found the country's first flying school.

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.