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

The school's students included Grandpa's own sons, who made yearly visits to Botswana during their school and then university holidays. By the time he came to teach Jonathan, his youngest, Grandpa's infamously scant reserves of patience had been severely depleted. He was by then living in Selebi, where he'd moved in the early 1970s, with the start of the mine. He instructed Jonathan in the Piper Colt. The Aeronca— after a forced landing due to engine failure— was by then languishing in a farmer's field, where Grandpa had simply abandoned the old plane, surrounded by cattle, on the dirt.

After six hours' flying time, father and son were barely speaking. Jonathan protested angrily at Grandpa's intolerance of mistakes. "Fly it yourself, then," yelled Grandpa. Jonathan did, making several uneventful solo flights. Then one day, as he touched down and taxied in toward the Selebi airport building, a whirling tunnel of dirt and leaves sped across the bush toward the runway. Unsure how to handle a dust devil, Jonathan was caught at the wrong angle and the wrong speed. The plane flipped several times, landing upside down on the grass beside the tar.

Jonathan escaped with a few cuts and scratches. The Colt, a wreck, was left there, as it landed, an unsettling welcome for new visitors to Selebi- Phikwe. After many months, Grandpa finally got round to towing it away, with the intention of repairing the battered fuselage and wings. He never did. The day we arrived in Botswana, the little airplane lay under the thorn tree in a sorrier state than it had been in, all those years ago, when a bruised and bewildered Jonathan had crawled out.

Scattered around the wreck stood another small shed, an empty kraal with a ramp for loading cattle and two lopsided trailers— the same trailers that Grandpa Ivor had lived in, decades earlier, in his first bush camps. A short distance away was one other house: a small, squat building, its walls barely recognizable as once white, its broken windows gaping forlornly. A little farther away, hidden by a clump of trees from the main houses, was an even smaller, equally neglected old building where Grandpa said his staff sometimes stayed.

Encircling the houses, trailers, sheds, and plane was a rickety barbed wire boundary fence. Beyond this, in every direction, was bush, stretching endlessly and almost uniformly until it became sky at some faraway point on the fl at horizon, interrupted only by a few distant purple hills.

That was all.

The only reminder that anyone else still even existed was a railway track that ran parallel to the fence behind Grandpa's house. Every few hours, passing close enough to rattle the kitchen windows and suspend all conversation, an old black steam train chugged along the line. If the driver saw us waving, he'd wave back, a loud hoot piercing the din of the passing ore- piled carriages. Then the train would rattle out of sight, the lone man in the caboose shrinking to a blur, and the bush's gentle noises resurfacing.

After sunset, shadowy figures shoveling coal into the flames twisted and straightened across the red glow of the furnace.

That train was to become a beloved part of our Botswana. The deafening clatter, the black smoke streaming into bright blue sky, the flame- lit passage across the darkness— sounds that would become as comforting as the calls of dawn francolins, dusk owls, and the ever- tinkling cowbells, an occasional dramatic presence that, like the poisonous creatures that slithered, crouched, and scuttled everywhere, would soon be utterly natural and reassuring.

That was later, though. Come nightfall on our first day, the lingering image of the furnace only deepened the sense of wondrous danger, of a surreal place in which the strange and the fierce had collided, oddly, where barely believable reality slid effortlessly into the imaginary.

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.