Bivouac!

“Army ants, found in the tropics, have no physical base to their colony at all. They simply hang in a cluster overnight, forming a bivouac around their queen.” I’d begun reading a book about ants so I could talk about it with my sister. What startled me more than the army ants’ lack of physical colony was the author’s use of the word “bivouac.” Just the day before, I had considered looking up “bivouac” in the dictionary, then decided it was a word whose meaning I didn’t need to know… But why was I thinking about bivouacs?

For several days, the teachers on break would begin watching Nigerian soap-opera-esque films as soon as the power came on. One day, they decided to watch an American film instead. The film had a title, The Hunt for Eagle One, but if anyone entered the staff room and asked what we were watching, the reply was always, “the American film.” The plot can be summarized, in the words of one teacher, as follows, “I understand American film now. Take two people arrested. Get people to free them. Abanta. Finished. People are arrested, then people free them. The film has been set. Abanta!”

This American film is filled with stressed-out soldiers, angry Arabs, guns, shouts, explosions, et cetera. Sensibly, someone had turned on the subtitles. At some point, I read the word “bivouac.” I remembered the word because I didn’t know the meaning and I hadn’t expected to expand my vocabulary while watching The Hunt for Eagle One. I thought about remembering to look the word up in a dictionary, but decided to save the brain space for other things because:

1. I wasn’t interested enough in the film to care what was happening
2. I was pretty sure ‘bivouac’ wasn’t a word I could incorporate into my daily vocabulary
3. Ooh—I should look up bifurcate, though, that’s a word I’m always forgetting! And it’s so fun to say!

Such went my train of thought. An incorrect train of thought, apparently, as “bivouac” was currently staring up at me from the middle of a paragraph about ant colonies.

Noun: bivouac ‘bi-vook,ak or ‘biv,wak


1. (military) temporary living quarters specially built by the army for soldiers

“wherever he went in the bivouac the men were grumbling”

2. A site where people on holiday can pitch a tent



Verb: bifurcate ‘bI-fur,keyt

1. Split or divide into two

2. Divide into two branches

“The road bifurcated”


Note: This story took place before my trip to Morocco. A few days after I first typed this blog post, I was looking through travel information about Morocco. A Saharan tour guide company advertised that participants in the overnight tour would sleep in a bivouac in the desert. So much for thinking I'd never need to know what a bivouac was.