A Girl Named Disaster

by Nancy Farmer

  But there were no people. Nhamo went ashore at midday. She built a fire and boiled mealie meal with the remains of the tomatoes. She wasn’t discouraged. She had only to keep going, and eventually the huts, fields, and brilliant lights of Zimbabwe would appear. Nhamo filled one of the pots with live coals and perched it in a pool of water at the bottom of the boat. There was no use wasting matches until she knew how far she had to go.

  After four days, she came to the end of the land. Nhamo was horrified. What had happened to the shore? Beyond lay nothing but featureless water. She directed the boat around a peninsula and began to paddle east. She searched the distance anxiously for the shadow that would surely connect the trees, the rocks, and the abundant animal life to the north shore. But it never appeared.

  “At least the current’s with me,” she murmured as the boat slid along. She camped again and hunted for food rather than depend on her stores. As long as she kept busy, she didn’t have to think about the significance of her new direction.

  Finally, after threading her way through a cluster of rocks surrounded by foam, she came again to an endless stretch of water. With a pounding heart, she turned south. When she spotted a small island at the end of a headland, she couldn’t avoid the truth any longer. There was the place she had taken a bath. There was the branch she had tied up to—the low-hanging tree was unmistakable—and yes, she even saw the same crocodile watching her with yellow, slitted eyes.

  “It’s another island,” wailed Nhamo. Lake Cabora Bassa was so huge, it could contain a place this large and still give no hint of where the shore might be. “I hate you!” she screamed at the big island. “What are you doing out here? Why aren’t you in Zimbabwe where you belong?”

  Snap! The boat jolted in a sickening way. Nhamo had been paddling rapidly, not paying attention. The boat had driven right onto a sharp-edged spur of rock just under the water. Nhamo wrestled it free, but water began to seep in at an alarming rate. One of Crocodile Guts’s old cracks had opened up! She had no time to waste, so she drove the craft toward the low-hanging tree. The crocodile fled into the lake as she approached. Nhamo dragged the boat out of danger and sat down to catch her breath.

  “I shouldn’t have insulted the big island,” she moaned. Aunt Chipo had often scolded her for speaking without thinking first. It was always dangerous to say bad things about an unknown place. Who knew what spirits were listening?

  “Well, I’ve really got myself into a mess this time,” she told Mother. “I’ve wrecked the boat, I’m nowhere near Zimbabwe, and my only neighbor is a big, hungry crocodile.”

  Nhamo soon discovered she had more than one neighbor, however. As she unpacked the boat, she saw a furtive movement in the bushes. She grabbed the panga and watched the shadows with her heart pounding.

  After a few moments, the bushes moved again. A shrill bark made Nhamo jump back with the knife raised over her head. This was followed by a soft churring as though someone were talking to himself. “Go away!” shouted Nhamo. The creature uttered four or five staccato cries and retreated.

  It was a baboon.

  Nhamo realized at once that she had a serious problem. Baboons could destroy her entire food store in a matter of minutes. Normally, she could have floated the supplies in the boat, but the crack made this impossible. “Why didn’t I see them last time I was on the little island?” she wondered. They must have been watching her from the trees.

  It was still morning, so she kindled a fire from the pot of coals and roasted yams while she thought. Baboons hated to cross water, she knew. They avoided it for the same reason people did: Crocodiles lurked under the surface.

  Nhamo considered the line of rocks between her and the large island. It would be just barely possible to leap from stone to stone—if you were a baboon. A person couldn’t do it. But why go to the trouble? The little island was too small to feed a troop.

  Nhamo ate the yams with an uncomfortable feeling that she was being observed. She turned quickly. The bushes moved as though something had recoiled, and she hurled a rock at it.

  She moodily watched the flames die down. A termite mound rose not far from where she was sitting. “I could fill the crack with clay,” Nhamo suggested.

  It’s worth a try, said Mother.

  “Of course, it would be better if I could bake the boat like a pot.”

  Don’t you burn my mukwa wood, Crocodile Guts cried. He stood in front of the craft to protect it.

  Nhamo chipped off a portion of the termite nest with Uncle Kufa’s knife, while watching carefully for the mambas that inhabited such places. She crushed the clay between two rocks and made a thick paste with water to smear over the outside of the boat. She would have to wait for the seal to dry.

  “Go away!” she screamed, hurling a stone at a baboon. He had almost reached the food stores. She rained missiles at him as he scampered clumsily into a tree. He clambered to the top branches and hooted at her with a grimace of fear.

  “I don’t like you either!” yelled Nhamo. She noticed that the baboon’s tail ended in a lumpy scab: Something had recently chopped it in two. His left hind paw was twisted to one side like Tazviona’s foot. It looked like a birth defect, not an injury, so it could have been caused by a witch.

  Did baboons even have witches?

  The longer Nhamo studied the miserable creature, the more certain she was that he was the only member of his troop on the island. He was too nervous to have companions. By now she should have heard the barks of the other animals.

  He must have been chased by something extremely frightening to make him cross the water. She wondered what it was. Now he was trapped. Unless he worked up the courage to return, he would starve.

  “It’s not my problem,” Nhamo said, turning her back. She applied another coating of termite mud, turned the boat over, and winced when she saw the damage caused by the spur of rock. Outside, the crack was tiny, but farther in it grew as wide as her little finger. She forced clay into the opening.

  One baboon wasn’t a serious problem, especially such a timid one. He wouldn’t forage at night. The crocodile might be out after dark, but it wouldn’t be interested in her food stores. “Although I’m sure it would be delighted with me,” Nhamo said bitterly.

  She built a large half-circle of fire in front of a rocky bluff. The crocodile wouldn’t attempt to crawl over hot coals. The baboon would spend the night cowering in a tree. Feeling reasonably safe, Nhamo settled down inside the half-circle of fire with her head on the shrinking mealie bag. She stared up at the stars as she thought of a story to tell Mother, whose jar rested at the base of the cliff with the rest of Nhamo’s belongings.

  “Once upon a time there was a man with two wives. The senior wife, whose totem was the baboon, gave birth to many daughters. But the junior wife, whose totem was the zebra, gave birth to many sons. Because of this, everyone treated the junior wife with greater kindness and respect. The senior wife was so unhappy, she became thin as a rake.

  “In our family,” Nhamo remarked to Mother, “Grandmother had only daughters, and no one complained about it.” At the thought of Ambuya, Nhamo felt such a wave of lonely-sickness sweep over her, she had to swallow hard several times to keep from crying out loud.

  “One day,” Nhamo said when she had recovered, “a hen belonging to the junior wife wandered into the senior wife’s hut and broke three pots. ‘Eh! See what your animal has done,’ the older woman cried. ‘An ordinary chicken wouldn’t hunt out my things to break them. A witch must have trained it!’

  “‘What kind of family do you come from?’ retorted the younger woman. ‘Your father begged on the roads, and your mother’s roora was a basket of stale millet! My roora was a herd of fine cows.’

  “‘Be quiet! You bring shame upon us all with your fighting,’ the wives were scolded by the oldest woman in the village.

  “The two wives went into their huts to sulk, but the next day the older woman sang a loud song as she ground mealies into flour:

&
nbsp; “Why am I plagued with someone

  Whose mother is a witch,

  Who scoops up water with the tail of a hyena?

  Ihe! Ihe! Her ears are round as dinner plates,

  And her skin feels like the bark of a tree!”

  “The junior wife heard the words, as she was meant to do, and became very angry. The next day she ground mealie meal and made up a song:

  “Ihe! Ihe! The women in this area have no brains.

  Their lips hang open like cooking pots,

  Their hair is grass left over from the dry season.

  Their skin feels like burned logs,

  And their nostrils yawn like old warthog burrows!”

  “Every day one or the other of the wives would make up an insulting song. Everyone in the village was secretly amused by the battle, and only the husband was unaware of what was happening. Finally, the junior wife became so angry she crept into the senior wife’s hut and dropped a chunk of baboon meat, the older wife’s totem, into her cooking pot.

  “That night at dinner the senior wife suddenly began to grow hair. She sprouted a tail, and her nose stretched out long. Barking like a baboon, she ran off into the forest. Everyone was horrified. They suspected what had happened, but no one had any proof.

  “The daughters of the senior wife went into the fields to work the next day. They took the youngest girl, who was only a baby, with them. She cried loudly for food, and at once a female baboon burst out of the forest and snatched her up. She breast-fed the baby, laid it on the ground, and ran away.

  “After that the daughters took the baby to the baboon-mother every day. Still, they were afraid the creature might run away with the child, so they told their father what had happened. He went to the nganga for help. The nganga put poison on bananas and left them where the baboon-mother could find them. She vomited up the chunk of baboon meat and turned back into a human at once.

  “Now everyone learned about the nasty trick the junior wife had played. The husband sent her back to her parents, and gave all her jewelry to the senior wife.”

  Nhamo added wood to the ring of fire. In spite of the precautions she had taken, she was too nervous to sleep. Her father’s totem—and therefore hers—was shumba, the lion, or so Grandmother believed. “That’s what he told me, anyhow, ” she said. “In my opinion, it should have been the hyena. Don’t look like that, Little Pumpkin. I’m sure you aren’t related to hyenas.”

  Nhamo’s clan name was Gurundoro, which, Grandmother explained, meant “the people who wear the ndoro.” Ndoro were round disks worn by kings. Nhamo rather hoped this meant she came from a royal family, but Grandmother said the old kings had dozens of wives, so of course they had a multitude of children. Some of the descendants were fine people, but some inevitably turned out to be lazy parasites. “Like your father,” Grandmother added.

  Because Nhamo’s totem was the lion, she wasn’t permitted to eat one. “As if I would try,” she said, smiling at Mother’s jar. People who ate their totems lost their teeth or went blind or became sterile or occasionally turned into the forbidden animal. It was extremely easy to avoid eating lions, so Nhamo never worried about it.

  Grandmother’s totem was moyo, the heart, which meant she wasn’t allowed to eat the heart of any creature. Aunt Chipo, Aunt Shuvai, and Mother’s had been shiri, the bird, which would have been an enormous problem if it had meant any bird. Fortunately, the ban applied only to the fish eagle, who carried Mwari’s messages. Uncle Kufa—and therefore his children—weren’t allowed to eat the gumbo, or leg of the cow. They could eat any other part of the animal, though. Since cattle were almost never killed, the difficulty rarely came up.

  Nhamo listed the totem, mutupo, and clan name, chidao, of everyone in the village. It was important to remember this information so she wouldn’t marry a relative by accident. “Tazviona’s mutupo, let me see, is—” Nhamo stopped in consternation. Tazviona’s totem was the baboon. If Tazviona ate a piece of baboon meat, she would turn into the animal, and because she had a twisted foot—

  Nhamo sat up and scanned the dark trees at the top of the cliff. Don’t be foolish. It’s only a stupid animal, she thought. But she couldn’t ever remember seeing a baboon that deformed. It wouldn’t have survived.

  “It’s not my problem,” Nhamo decided, firmly putting the idea out of her head. She lay back down and presently drifted off into the first of many fitful periods of sleep.

  22

  The lake water softened the clay Nhamo had so carefully applied. She had to paddle furiously after the crack opened again. She managed to grab an overhanging branch when she got close to shore, but the baskets got wet and even the mealie bag was dampened. It was nearly empty, anyhow.

  Nhamo scrambled onto the large island and pulled out her stores before they were ruined. She guided the boat along the shore until she was able to drag it up a sandy beach. Then she rested under a musasa tree to consider the situation.

  “At least I’m not in as much trouble as the baboon,” Nhamo said to Mother. She could see him going over her campsite on the little island. He smelled the ground where she had prepared food, and devoured the pumpkin skins ravenously.

  Nhamo’s new home was able to support a baboon troop, monkeys, and many kinds of antelope. It could support her, too. The problem was what else lived on the large island. Something had frightened the baboon over the treacherous rocks.

  “Maybe it was a snake,” she said hopefully. Baboons went into screaming fits if they saw a snake. Nhamo was capable of going into screaming fits herself, for that matter, but she did have common sense. Snakes left you alone if you didn’t upset them. Most of the time they ran from you just as fast as you ran from them.

  “I might have to live here until someone visits the island,” Nhamo decided. She couldn’t possibly attempt a long trip with the boat in its current condition. The thought of the crack suddenly opening out of sight of land made her feel sick. She had seen no one fishing in all the time she was on the lake, but that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.

  “Or I could make a boat,” she said.

  “Now you’re talking,” said Crocodile Guts from his seat by the njuzu hut at the bottom of the lake. “You make a boat out of mukwa wood. It’s so strong, even the termites won’t touch it.” He scratched his hair, and ghost lice crept over his fingers.

  Nhamo shook her head. She was on friendly terms—so far—with the spirit world, but she found its presence frightening. For a moment she actually saw the fisherman as he lounged in his watery kingdom. An njuzu girl poured him a pot of beer.

  “Thank you. It’s good advice,” Nhamo said politely as she made sure she was surrounded by real trees and real sunlight. She had a panga and Uncle Kufa’s broken knife. Surely, with careful work, she could fell a mukwa tree and carve it into the shape of Crocodile Guts’s boat.

  She felt immensely cheered by the plan. All she had to do was survive until the craft was finished. It might take a long time, though. To be on the safe side, she ought to plant her uncooked pumpkin and mealie seeds.

  She balanced the baskets in the branches of the musasa tree. It wasn’t a good storage place, but it would have to do. She needed to find a campsite and shelter before dark.

  Nhamo cautiously made her way away from shore. Now and then she stopped to memorize her surroundings. The lake quickly became hidden behind trees, only occasionally appearing when she climbed over a boulder. She picked a large fig tree near the water and an oddly shaped pillar of rock as landmarks.

  The farther she got from the lake, the more nervous she became. The place was too quiet. She flicked off a few ticks that had brushed onto her dress-cloth. They were large and hungry, probably left behind by antelope. She could see more of them clinging to the grass, waiting for dinner. She found a game trail that meandered until it met a wide grassland divided by a stream. Beyond rose a sizable cliff, topped by trees. She made out the prints of kudu, waterbuck, and duiker, the splayed mark of guinea fowl, the looping trail o
f a burwa lizard. Nothing dangerous.

  The stream, lined with bushes and small trees, rushed along with a lively chuckle. The water was too shallow to hide crocodiles, so Nhamo sat down for a drink. It was clean and surprisingly cool. She washed her face and arms.

  When she got closer to the cliff, she saw it was pitted with small caves. Many crevices and cracks, filled with plants, ran down its face. She found much evidence of baboons, although they were absent at the moment. In a clearing between the stream and cliff were two enormous mutiti, or lucky-bean, trees growing close together. Heavy branches stretched out almost at right angles to the thick trunks and gave Nhamo the idea of making a platform. Lucky-beans didn’t attract animals, because their seeds, although beautiful, were poisonous. The trees would make a fine refuge.

  The platform would take days to build, though, and Nhamo needed a place right now.

  She set about exploring the cliff. Everywhere was the stink of dassies. They perched on boulders and squealed at her furiously before retreating. Their favorite places were painted with a thick coating of urine. She climbed farther up. She could camp inside one of the caves and watch the grassland for predators.

  Predators.

  What had frightened the baboon to the little island?

  Nhamo couldn’t hope for the luck she had had on the njuzu island, where she had found so much food. This place was too large. One excellent reason for living close to dassies was that they would give a swift warning of anything dangerous in the neighborhood. And provide an alternate meal for whatever was hunting.

  Halfway up, Nhamo found a low cave partly filled with a drift of sand. She poked the panga around inside to drive out anything that might be lurking. The only thing she dislodged was a large scorpion, which she hurriedly flicked down the cliffside with the knife.

  Well pleased, Nhamo returned to the musasa tree by the lake. Termites had already found and attacked the baskets. She knocked them off, getting several bites from the soldiers in the process, and hauled her belongings to the cliff. When she had everything stored at the back of the cave, she built a fire, boiled pumpkin, and toasted a few soldier termites she cornered in the baskets. It gave her a melancholy pleasure to eat the creatures that had so recently tried to bite her.