Free Danger in the Dust by Sally Grindley Page B

make them easy to see, wouldn’t you?’ Joe said thoughtfully.
    ‘Shadows make trees and grass appear dappled, which plays tricks with your eyes, and that’s why leopards and cheetahs are hard to pick out with their spotted coats,’ Peter explained. ‘But the safari guides know where they’re most likely to be sighted, so we might be lucky.’
    ‘It would be so cool to be a safari guide,’ said Joe. ‘Can you imagine spending all day tracking animals in the wild and watching them hunting and playing?’
    ‘I bet it would soon get boring,’ Aesha responded.
    ‘I don’t think it would get boring at all,’ Joe said hotly. ‘It’s nowhere near as boring as working in an office, is it, Dad? Is this tidy enough now?’
    ‘I think it should just about pass your mother’s high standards,’ Peter said, picking up two large suitcases and signalling for Aesha to open the door.
    Foggy, who had stationed himself on sentry duty on the other side, leapt to his feet the moment he saw them and looked up, as though expecting some sort of treat for his dedication.
    ‘All done?’ Binti enquired, when they walked back into the house.
    ‘It’s spick, span and spotless,’ Peter assured her.
    Joe disappeared up to his bedroom, in case his mother had any other chores for him. He wanted to immerse himself in a book about African wildlife that he had found on her bookcase. He knew about ‘the Big Five’ – elephants, rhinos, lions, leopards and buffaloes – and that they would see zebras, wildebeests and lots of different antelopes, but he was keen to find out if there were any lesser known animals that he could keep a lookout for.
    Stretching out on his bed, he was thrilled to read that he might see hippos, and giggled at a photograph of a group of them wallowing in a muddy river. He wondered if there were crocodiles as well.
    It would be so cool to see a crocodile , he thought to himself. Crocodiles must be the scariest animals ever!
    What surprised Joe most was the discovery that ostriches live on the savannah, and he hadn’t realised they were so big until he came to a photograph of one standing close to a giraffe.
    ‘I hope we see an ostrich and a cheetah and a leopard and a crocodile and a hippo,’ he said to Peter, who had poked his head round the bedroom door to ask if he wanted to go to the shops with him.
    ‘I don’t think Surrey is renowned for its wildlife!’ Peter said, chuckling loudly.
     
    It seemed no time at all between the day they retrieved their suitcases from the garage and the day before their departure, when Joe carefully cushioned his camera in the middle of his case. In just a few hours they would be on their way to Kenya and a whole new world of adventure would open up before them. Joe was certain that this would turn out to be one of their best trips ever, especially since there were so many animals to be spotted. He had checked his camera over and cleaned the lenses, taking special care with the long-distance lens his father had bought him for their trip to India, where they had helped with vulture conservation.
    I’ll definitely need that . He grinned. I definitely won’t be taking close-up shots of a rhino!
    Joe hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps as a wildlife photographer, though sometimes he thought he would prefer to be a vet like his mother. Either way, he wanted to be involved with helping animals. His friend Adam had told him he was the luckiest boy in their school because his parents’ professions gave him the opportunity to go to such amazing places. Joe couldn’t help but agree. In the past few months he and his family had been to eastern Russia, the Philippines and India. Now they were about to go to East Africa.
    On the last day of school it seemed no one wanted to talk about anything else! Everyone asked Joe about the animals he was going to see. They even devised a rowdy game where they charged around the school field in teams, some of them rhinos and some of