“Criminy!” Anna exclaimed, outraged. “Boy, do you guys ever have sick minds!”
Before Hugo could lay into Anna for this impertinence, a set of headlights flashed into view behind them and bore steadily up the highway toward Pete’s truck. When this vehicle pulled abreast of them, they could see that it belonged to the state highway patrol. Pete cursed under his breath.
“Everything all right?” called the trooper, leaning toward his passenger window. “Need a lift or a tow truck?”
“No, no,” Hugo replied. “Jus’ had to get my kids settled. We’re doin’ jus’ fine.”
The trooper went on his way, having defused Hugo’s anger by scaring him to death.
To give the patrol car time to draw off toward Chugwater, Anna made sandwiches for Pete and Hugo. Neither she nor John-John could eat another bite, but they each downed a soft drink and washed off their hands in the ice water in the bottom of the Styrofoam cooler. Eventually, Pete again felt brave enough to put their poaching operation back on Go, and they forsook the highway’s shoulder for the highway itself. John-John watched the corn chips dancing on the loadbed.
The truck bounced over a cattle guard and turned onto a rutted access road blockaded by a barbed-wire gate. Pete opened the gate, Hugo drove the truck through, and Pete returned to the driver’s seat. John-John and Anna felt the metal beneath them vibrating as the pickup, tilting first to one side and then the other, climbed an easy grade through empty pasturage.
“Where are we?” Anna called.
Pete kicked open his door, leaned out, and flicked on the spotlight he had installed that afternoon. Its beam swept the top of the opposite ridge and immediately struck fire from a pair of distant eyes. They shone like amber match heads there. The animal to which the eyes belonged stood unmoving, transfixed, in the trembling circle of the beam. An adolescent buck, by the look of the knobby points on its head. It was so still, so statuesque, that John-John tried to believe that a taxidermist had already mounted the creature.
Aloud he said, “I hope it isn’t real.”
“Of course it’s real,” Hugo responded, sotto voce. “What do you think, maybe it’s a piece of cardboard?”
Pete took his rifle from the cab of the truck, drew it out of its zippered scabbard, and sighted over the top of the half-open door. The deer gave a high, off-balance bound that carried it out of sight beyond the ridge top, whereupon the report of Pete’s rifle—so sudden it made Anna and John-John jump—echoed across the prairie like a thunderclap. John-John cried out, but Hugo reached over the truck’s sideboard and held his hand over the boy’s mouth until the night was quiet again.
“You missed him,” he told Pete.
“ ’Fraid not. He was dead when he jumped. Let’s go see.”
Doors slammed shut, and the truck bumped through a narrow draw and labored to the top of the ridge from which the deer had leapt. Pete cautioned the Monegals against stepping on loose stones, cactus clumps, and live rattlesnakes, then led them down the far side of the ridge with his flashlight. John-John, hoping that Pete had missed and his deer had gone pogo-sticking into the open wilderness, struggled along behind the men. Twenty or thirty yards down the slope Pete directed the flashlight beam under the dry skirt of a piñon tree and got back the glitter of a glassy eye. Anna turned aside, but John-John stared at the shadowy carcass in disbelief.
“I’m gonna gut this little Billy Buck,” Pete informed Hugo. “You can cut off the legs and head. There’s a bone saw in the truck, under the seat. We need to finish up and skeedaddle before anyone spots us.”
Heedless of cacti, stones, and rattlesnakes, John-John bolted back up the ridge. Wind scoured his mouth and eye sockets. He hurled himself headlong over the rear tire well of the pickup and crawled to the quilt crumpled on the floor near the cab. He cocooned himself in this, curled up like a shrimp, and began to cry.
Anna reached him a minute or two later, coaxed him upright, and held him against her as the men went about the business of preparing the deer’s body for the trip home. The door to the truck’s cab opened once or twice during this work, but John-John paid no attention to what was going on. When Hugo and Pete emerged from the darkness for good, they were swinging the gutted, dismembered carcass between them like a bloody hammock. They laid it out in the rear of the truck on a painter’s drop cloth, then covered it with another piece of stiff canvas that Pete conscientiously lashed down with ropes.
By John-John’s imperfect reckoning, the trip back to Cheyenne took twice as long as the trip out. He and Anna had a grisly fellow passenger in the loadbed, and this passenger reminded him of the otherworldly carnage of his dreams. For the first time in his life, thanks to Hugo and Pete, he understood a few of the implications of that carnage. The implications frightened him.
Chapter Twelve
Among the Minids
EXHAUSTED AND SHAKEN, I RETURNED to New Helensburgh with the habilines. The trip back included a detour through the acacia grove where I had made my headquarters. Here I picked up much of the gear—rope, jacket, shaving bag, and so on—that I had not carried to Lake Kiboko with me. (Malcolm and Roosevelt were toting the uneaten portions of my kill.) I had explained the need for this side trip by improvising finger lingo, snatches of pidgin Phrygian (an ignorant king having once decided that Phrygian was the oldest human language), and a range of facial tics and tremors that would have done Mary Pickford proud. These ploys, in combination, had persuaded the Minids to follow me to the place where I had stowed my gear, for, to communicate with one another, they were themselves dependent on hand signals, vocalizations, and a subtle repertoire of eye movements. While gathering my belongings together I was especially conscious of how much information they appeared to be able to transmit through glances, blinks, and brow furrowings. They could “whisper behind my back” without having to face away from me.
Once in New Helensburgh itself, a wide ledge on a hillside overlooking the steppe, I had to contend with the curiosity of the children and the mistrustfulness of their mothers. The male habilines had ceased to regard me as a threat, but the women did not want me touching their offspring, bribing them with sugar cubes, entertaining them with the narrow beam of my penlight. That the children—especially Malcolm and Miss Jane’s little imp, the Gipper—enjoyed being terrified by this strange instrument, and came back again and again to have their minds teased and their pupils shrunken, did not soften this maternal hostility. I was not allowed to enter any of the four clumsy huts on the ledge, or to partake of the women’s food stores, or to wander too near when Odetta took her toddler Pebbles up to the hilltop for walking lessons, which always occurred under the vigilant gaze of Fred, Roosevelt, or Malcolm.
In short, I was a second-class citizen. My sophisticated wardrobe aside, I was the Minids’ resident nigger, only begrudgingly better than a baboon or an australopithecine. The role was not altogether unfamiliar.
My survival kit contained a six-foot tube tent and a windscreen. I pitched the tent and erected the windscreen about thirty feet from the citadel’s main thoroughfare. A dwelling of bright yellow plastic, the tent invited—yea, demanded—the curiosity and admiration of the Minid children, who liked to play inside it whenever I left it untended even for the duration of a whiz in the weeds. On my third day as a semihonorary habiline, in fact, I returned from emptying my bladder to find Jocelyn, Groucho, and Zippy entangled in twenty feet of fishing line. My Bible-cum-field guide, meanwhile, lay three quarters of the way down the slope, its pages riffling in the breeze like the wings of lazily mating moths. I had to cut the young Minids free with my pocketknife, thus ruining the fishing line, while Groucho kept baring his teeth and screeching. After releasing the children I looked outside my tube tent to find it surrounded by fretful Minid hunters as well as their wives. Thereafter, despite the inconvenience, I rolled up the tube tent every morning and redeployed it in the evenings when I was ready for bed. My knapsack became a permanent daytime fixture between my shoulder blades because I di
d not dare leave it anywhere else. Quasimodo Kampa.
If I fit into the Minid band at all, it was because of Helen. She took a special interest in me, I think, because I simultaneously mirrored and magnified her own predicament vis-à-vis her conspecifics. Granted, she had once joined the hunters in attacking me, but her participation had probably resulted not so much from a fear or a mistrust of me as from her own innate allegiance to her people—even if her lot among them was decidedly peculiar. I had ceased to be a complete outsider to the habilines because their own outsider-in-residence had chosen to acknowledge my existence. We were two of a kind, Helen and I. Our similarities transcended even the gross and arbitrary dictates of taxonomy.
Helen’s status among the Minids derived from two unusual conditions. The first was her size, which made her either equal or superior to her male counterparts in speed and strength. She could outrun even Alfie, and although he might have been able to overpower her physically—a dubious speculation at best—he tended to avoid situations pitting him head to head against Helen or any other habiline. He ruled by force of personality, the hint of intimidation. If Helen submitted unquestioningly to his preeminence, she may have done so because her speed and strength did not yet give her a psychological antidote to the social dictates of gender. A big, strong, swift-footed, and cunning female was still a female.
The second circumstance determining Helen’s status among the Minids was her barrenness. She had no child. She showed no signs of ever conceiving one. In fact, she stood outside the more or less formal pair-bonding relationships structuring the habiline band. Undoubtedly she had had paramours among the males. Alfie had almost certainly plucked from her the fresh gardenia of her maidenhood, for his chieftaincy of the Minids gave him carnal access to almost every female who had attained menarche. Those exempt from his lust included Dilsey (probably his mother) and, among the younger women, both Miss Jane and Odetta (perhaps his sisters). But if Helen had coupled with Alfie or any of the other hunters, she had apparently never conceived. Her breasts were high and small, her loins lithe and undisfigured.
At present, whatever her sexual behavior in the past, she seemed to avoid engaging in amorous dalliance with the males. In view of her vigor and appetite in other areas of physical indulgence—running, killing, eating, excreting, climbing, and rough-housing with the Minid children—this scruple puzzled me. Had her barrenness, exiling her from the tender domestic concerns and the friendship of female habilines, inflicted upon her an aversion to the woman’s role in the sex act? Well, possibly. She ran with the males, and cocks of a feather may sometimes celebrate the joys of treading their jennies.
Together, Helen’s size and barrenness permitted her to fashion, within a social structure predicated on cooperation, a lifestyle of surprising autonomy. It would be false to argue that she had the best of both worlds (male and female), for only Guinevere and Emily on the distaff side ever treated her with affection; whereas among the hunters she had achieved “equality” not as another competent comrade but as a potent secret weapon (the bipedal equivalent of a Remington 30.06) against the merciless enemy Hunger. Still, being childless, she came and went pretty much as she chose; and, although Roosevelt or Alfie might occasionally go on solitary hunts, Helen was the only Minid who regularly ventured well beyond the citadel for longer than an hour or two.
Once, in fact, Helen disappeared for an entire afternoon, and I worked myself into a lather imagining that she had fallen to predators. She returned a little before sunset carrying a baboon infant, still alive, which she cuddled and unintelligibly wooed for several hours. How Helen was able to cull the baby from its troop without sustaining a scratch or setting off a riotous chase over the grassland, I cannot guess—but somehow she had managed. For most of the evening, the other Minids—with the exception of the children—kept their distance. Finally, however, Alfie sauntered into the little creature’s field of vision, frightening it so badly that it bit Helen. This incident ended Helen’s brief tenure as madonna, for Alfie, after fussing for a moment over her wound, insisted that she relinquish her baby to Jomo. Jomo and Malcolm carried the infant baboon into the darkness, and that was the last any of the rest of us ever saw it. I derived some consolation from the fact that it did not come back to us in bloody sections.
* * *
Helen liked me for my oddness, I think. In my own way, I was as peculiar a Minid as she—tall enough to discomfit Alfie, sufficiently fleet and steadfast to run at her side without lapsing, and enough of an inveterate loner to chafe under the sometimes onerous burden of habiline togetherness. For these and other reasons she would occasionally tolerate my company on one of her private foraging expeditions. The benefit to me was twofold. I got out of New Helensburgh without having to follow the men, and I learned some clever food-gathering techniques that made it possible for the Minids to remain where they were when drought seemed to demand that they pull up stakes for a happier hunting ground.
Here is one such technique:
Over a stretch of savannah from which the snow-clad peak of Mount Tharaka rose skyward like a colossal, milky diamond, Helen led me into a glade of whistling thorns. Inside this copse she took pains to move as silently as she could. Although less adept at such stealth, I took pains to follow her example. I soon realized that she was searching for bird nests lodged in the thorny branches of the shrubs. I did not understand how we were going to be able to grab any birds, though.
A thought hit me. “Eggs?” I asked Helen. “Huevos?” I made an egglike circle with my thumb and forefinger, then made a show of extracting this sign from between my legs. Helen merely curled her upper lip back in negation and maybe disgust.
By creeping up beneath a nest, squinting long and hard at its bottom, and then snatching from it a fine, fat mouse—which she deftly squeezed to death while withdrawing her hand—Helen demonstrated what our task was and how to proceed with it. Empty nests permitted light to pass through them. Nests sheltering mice, however, appeared tightly woven from the bottom. If you reached into a twiggy domicile through which no light shone, your reward was usually a rodent.
We crept through the whistling thorns evaluating every nest we chanced upon, and at the end of an hour we had five furry mice for our pains. I cached them in the enormous, snap-down pockets of my bush shorts, which were now so frayed and seam-worn they hung upon me like an overelaborate breechclout. Twilight sifted through the thorn bushes, for we had begun this outing quite late; and the coming of darkness, which my newfound avidity for mouse snatching had pretty much disguised from me, was suddenly plain. Helen was still not ready to go—despite the fact that the darkness was going to invalidate our method of discovering occupied nests. Although I tried to hasten our departure from the thicket, she continued to tarry.
The problem was that for Helen this thicket was an irresistible supermarket of tree mice. In early starlight, because her vision was so much keener than mine, she managed to sniggle two more of the hapless rodents. My pockets bulging, my brain bugling retreat, I could not persuade her to leave off hunting. Maybe the only way to win her over was to let her get her fill.
I found my penlight in my pocket, under a warm, bleeding mouse, and showed Helen how to operate the gizmo. She handled it with such enthusiasm and skill that she could have prolonged our hunt almost indefinitely, spotlighting nests and nabbing any occupants. However, the sight of that tiny beam stabbing upward through the thorn branches reminded me of another spotlight, a spotlight seventeen years into my twentieth-century past, and I grabbed the penlight from Helen’s hand and brusquely returned it to my pocket.
Helen’s astonishingly luminous eyes said, “Indian giver,” but she did not try to reclaim the instrument. Because it was now too dark to mouseknap by the Helen Habiline Method, she reluctantly gave up her sport and led me back to the Minid citadel.
* * *
Among the hunters Genly was Alfie’s sole rival for undisputed leadership of the band. However, he was a rival who had apparently fa
iled to achieve victory in some pivotal past confrontation. As a result, Genly bore a deep scar on one forearm (habiline teeth marks, if I was any judge) and carried himself with a kind of saintly diffidence. He had redirected his aggressive instincts into the hunt, during which he could sometimes behave so belligerently—battering a warthog to death, driving a troop of baboons out of an attractive foraging area, snapping the neck of a colobus monkey with his teeth—that even Vince Lombardi would have quailed before such meanness. On these occasions, gentle Genly unloosed scads of repressed hostilities, bees out of a jostled hive, and Alfie would glance nervously sidelong, bemused by the intensity of his former rival’s rage.
In New Helensburgh, on the other hand, Genly was deferential, glad to be of use. He never pushed for his share of any kill toted among us by another, never withheld so much as a wishbone from the importunate little beggars clamoring for a bite of his guinea fowl. You could easily wonder how he stayed alive on so little food. In fact, the vertebrae of his spine locked like broken wing nuts, and his face was more haggard than his comrades’, with a hint of sagittal crest running like an embossed central part in his frowzy hair. While watching the others eat or handing an antelope thighbone over to a youngster, he would sometimes rub a finger along this crest, as if absentmindedly trying to press it flat. An endearing gesture. It made me think that he was trying to assist the hit-and-miss laborings of evolution.
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