Kid Moses

by Mark R. Thornton

  “No, it’s not, Kioso. I’ve been out here a hundred times. Just keep walking.”

  Kioso pointed into the bush.

  “But we never passed that tree before. I would have remembered it. Look at all those funny spikes on it.”

  “You just didn’t see it before.”

  “I’m thirsty. I want to be back at school. It will be dinner soon.”

  “Let’s just keep walking, Kioso. We just need to get out. First, we get out, then you can think about dinner, so walk faster.” Moses spoke sternly, but he hadn’t recognised the tree either. That river had better be ahead, he thought. And now all the cattle trails looked the same to him. In his body was the pang of fear that every lost person knows. The twitching in the chest, the panic, the questions in the mind, blurred by anxiety, about the merits of going forward and those of turning around. If he could just see beyond those trees ahead …

  “Let’s climb a tree.”

  “What?”

  “That one. Come on.”

  “Why?”

  “To see, Kioso. To see. Just to make sure we are going the right way,” Moses lied.

  The two boys climbed up a big acacia tree and looked out over the bush. But all they could see was a rolling landscape of low trees, all looking the same.

  “I can’t see anything!” Kioso wailed.

  In the undulating terrain of hills and valleys, Moses could not see any landmarks or mountains in the distance, which he knew would have given him a sense of direction. In fact, he could not see anything of use in finding their way back. And darkness was falling quickly now.

  Moses jumped down from the tree.

  “We must have gone a longer way. No problem, Kioso. Let’s just keep walking this way. Soon we’ll meet some herd boy or something.”

  Kioso looked at Moses with a look of fear that Moses had seen before.

  “Come on, Kioso,” he said, more gently this time.

  Very soon the light was only a deep blue disappearing fast around them. Moses stopped and sat on the ground. Kioso stood looking at him.

  “What do we do?”

  “Sleep here. Sijui. Nothing else to do.”

  Moses considered their situation—no food, no direction, night-time. It will get cold out here, and there is no road in this place. And I have not seen any sign of a cow for a long time. What about wild animals?

  “I am sure we’ll find some herd boy tomorrow coming through here. We just got to sleep here tonight. That’s all.”

  “This is like last time.”

  And like the last time, Kioso and Moses curled under a tree, trying to shield themselves from the cool air. They had no fire or blanket or light. They thought of lions and the things of the wilderness. Of warm, safe places like the school or the ship hull or, for Moses, Mama’s home or Grace’s room. It was the continual paradox for him—running from stability, seeking freedom, but when trouble fell, dreaming of the comfort of a small charcoal fire and a bowl of beans behind Mama’s shop. And as the night grew darker and the cool air got cold, the two huddled together for warmth in a shallow depression under some bushes.

  In the morning they set out early, for they had not slept during the night, and the predawn hours had been sharp and cold. They continued on the path—what else to do?—but saw no signs of herders or cattle. Just winding paths that meandered through the trees. Occasionally they saw impala browsing in the woodlands. Sometimes a path would stop at a dried river bed or fade out into tall grass. At these times, they would turn around and walk back, to try and find another way. Nothing looked familiar. It was a new world and an empty place. They were just guessing now, as if walking in the dark with their hands stretched out in front of them.

  Sometimes they would get demoralised and stop walking for a while. Kioso would cry and Moses would look at him and say nothing. His emotions were a mix of guilt at what he had led them into—again—and disdain for Kioso. As Moses would look in different directions for better paths, Kioso would sit on a stump and draw circles in the dirt. He looked, like always, to Moses for answers.

  They were hungry. It had now been two days since they had eaten anything. The water they found in the dried river beds smelled like animal piss, but they drank it. And they kept moving, always walking. For Moses, sitting, doing nothing, felt worse than anything else. It confirmed how lost they really were, how distorted their sense of time and distance was. Moses somehow knew to look at the sun for guidance, but did not know what to do with what he saw.

  The wilderness was a large and lonely place. It was not a place of giraffes and sunsets, like in the storybooks at the school. It was not a place for humans at all, Moses thought. It was long and hot and far from everything. The monotony of the landscape added to his feeling of desperation. There were no indicators, no street signs. The land was merely as it was—a flat dusty stretch of trees, which all looked the same.

  Another night fell cold as the moon rose in a clear sky. Moses did not notice the brilliant stars above, or the rising of Jupiter. Beauty is irrelevant to those who are lost. The boys curled together again through the late hours of the night when the air got hollow and cold. But when morning came, the world soon turned hot, and they walked on. They moved more slowly this day, their energy low from hunger and fatigue. After only about an hour, they stopped to rest under a tree. Moses leaned against the tree with his hand over his forehead and Kioso lay down on the ground.

  They had slept hungry for much of their lives, but this time their suffering was greater and they were weak.

  Moses left Kioso and walked off to find something, anything to eat. He did not recognise the fruits of the bush, the edible plants. He did not know how to dig for tubers, how to eat grubs, or how to find wild honey. However, he saw monkeys eating a broken fruit from a baobab tree, and went to investigate. He had seen these fruits in the market in the city, and on some trees outside the towns. It was the first familiar thing he had seen in this wilderness, and he threw sticks into the branches until he dislodged the few remaining fruits, which he gathered in his shirt and took back to Kioso. The two ate and their hunger eased a little.

  “Let’s go.” Kioso did not reply. He simply rose and followed Moses. He did not speak any more, and neither did Moses. They crossed a small swamp and stopped to drink. Then they walked into tall yellow grass that reached to their chests. The path began to fade under their feet as trails in the grass tend to do, until they were simply wading through grass, sightless and resigned. Just going forward, onwards into the abyss.

  When the snake struck Kioso below the knee, he jumped back and fell and squealed like an infant. It was not the burning, electric sensation from the venom that made him jump, but the sight of the puff adder shifting and recoiling.

  “Kioso! Get away from it.” Moses yanked Kioso away from the snake, which moved under a bush. Kioso did not say anything, just held his leg and looked up at Moses. He did not scream from the understanding that the venom would take only a few hours to destroy his leg, then his body, then his life. No, he just held his leg and looked at Moses.

  The two shuffled back out of the tall grass. They sat under a tree and looked at Kioso’s leg, and the two fang marks deep in the skinny black leg of the boy. Moses was wide-eyed. He touched the skin on the leg. Kioso could feel the pain from the bite, stinging unlike anything he had felt before. Moses wiped some blood from the bite, but nothing more. What could he do? So they sat, scared, in the shade of a perfect acacia tree on the edge of the grasslands in the late afternoon.

  Chapter 6

  Much later they sat under a tree, looking at the place where the snake had bitten Kioso. They had given up walking not from being tired, or from the pain in Kioso’s leg, or from any understanding of how snake venom worked. They stopped because they were just not getting anywhere.

  Moses sat doing nothing, not able to fix a venomous bite on a kid with no chance. They didn’t know much about snakes or any animals really, but they knew enough to understand that they had
reached a point they had never been before. The view before them seemed different. They were not philosophical enough to wonder if this valley would be the last thing Kioso would see, or if the ground under this tree would be the last place he would visit, or if there would be any final moment of transition or clarity. They did not seek frantically for a solution, a way out, a cure, or a poultice to prolong Kioso’s life. They could not run, and there was no place they could go that seemed better than where they now sat.

  Kioso’s leg swelled fast, reminding Moses of the bloated, dead-men legs of the homeless people back on the streets of Dar es Salaam. The leg bulged and took on odd shapes. The skin was tight and hard and its surface smooth, like the stomach bladder of a slaughtered goat.

  The leg kept changing. Moses would look away at the valley, then at the land behind, then at Kioso’s face. And when he looked back at the leg, a new bulge would have appeared under the skin, or a new kind of seeping stuff would be dripping down his leg like cooked fish fat. The leg took on not just a shape, but a life and evolution of its own. Both boys just sat back and watched it. Almost as if putting some distance between them and the leg would prevent it from jumping altogether on top of them.

  The venom finally reached Kioso’s brain. The formula of toxins designed for the simple destruction of a field-mouse had crept northwards, from leg to knee, up thigh and through the vast interior of his body to arrive in his head, his brain, and the sensations of his mind. Kioso would mumble, sweat, panic, grab Moses’s arm, and then fall into a dreary sort of sleep that was not real sleep, but respite for a period of time from reality.

  Death crawled into his bones. Or rather, gnawed its way there. Kioso did not know he was dying. He just knew he was scared, and did not have the strength to do anything. He looked up at Moses with eyes like those of a begging dog. Some drool slid from his mouth. He was thirsty, then had brief jolts of pain. Death took him as he gazed skyward into the thin canopy of acacia trees.

  Had it been three days or four? Six? Moses tried to count the days by remembering where he had slept each night, what the place around him had looked like. Or how the sky had looked before he had slept. He knew there was that one cloudy night, and the one with the big tree above him, and the one when it had been so cold that he had never slept at all. He wandered, in his mind and with his legs. Sometimes when he looked out into the grasses, he saw him, the man. He was old, with a cane, and wearing a dark suit and a nice hat. Like a churchman, Moses thought. The image was peaceful. Moses would walk towards him, sometimes run to him shouting, but the man would get up slowly and walk away, and then Moses could not find him again. He would become frantic and angry. He also saw the churchman near some hills, sitting with his back to Moses on a fallen tree out in the sun in the middle of the day. Moses walked quickly to the tree, but again, the man was gone.

  He saw brown parrots eating marula fruit. The ones that had fallen on the ground were full of insects, so he had to climb the tree and pick fresh ones. He carried some with him for later. He saw other fruits on a tree near a sandy river with no water, just a bed of sand and tracks and sticks, left behind from the rainy times. Some other birds, black-and-white ones, were eating these fruits. So he tried these too.

  Lying down at midday to be out of the sun, he would dream. The harbour, then I’ll go to the road. Get food, walk. Sleep, back to the harbour, lie back in the old ship hull and look out at the water. And Prosper! I’ll hit him again. In the grasses, I see people pulling fish nets, and I walk towards them, but they always disappear. They are hiding somewhere with the churchman.

  After some time, the sun no longer occurred to him. He would walk through the fierce heat of midday, exposed under the sun, and only after hours—how long?—would he wake from his spell and seek shade and rest.

  Then he found strength again, without knowing that it was not from food—not real energy—but rather from the body entering the mode of survival. Any energy stored in his muscle, fat, organ or bone now fuelled his onward movement. His body allowed itself to be sucked, his flesh burned as the last source of fuel. Fruits gave energy, but not enough. Water was scarce, and only in a few mud holes, and then not for a long distance.

  Then he found the eggs.

  Eggs: a scavenger’s gold. In the middle of a plain of dead grasses, there they were. Three beautiful eggs. Mottled brown, with an exquisite design no artist could create. Moses lifted one gently with his fingers and placed it in the cup of his other hand. He took it and the other two to the shade of a nearby tree and rested them gently back down on the earth. He chose one and cracked it on the tree, and it spilled out into his hand, most of it falling on the ground. Moses cursed and scrambled to slurp the yolk from his hand before it all slipped to the ground. He was furious at himself for wasting it. The next egg he held in his hand while he thought. He would not be stupid this time.

  The simplest solution was the best, so he tilted his head back and cracked the egg into his mouth, filling it entirely, not a drop wasted. He swallowed it, and the next egg, then went back to the nest he had pilfered. He saw the sand grouse, francolin, plovers, larks, cisticolas all around him, but where were their eggs? He found none, and fell into despair again, head in his hands on the ground in the open sun next to the empty nest.

  He searched harder. He decided to look over every patch of earth in that field for eggs. There must be more. On hands and knees, he looked under bushes, parting grasses, peering into scrapes in the dirt. He found another two, which he ate. Then, before the sun went down, he found another three. He slept that night, nauseated, under a tree near the field.

  As soon as the sun rose the next morning, Moses went out into the grasses and began hunting again. He found no eggs that morning, but rested in the shade when the sun got hot, and searched again in the afternoon, finding two more eggs. He slept under the same tree again, sheltered on one side by a termite mound. The earth was soft, but as usual, it got cold at night. The next morning he set out again, and the morning after that. Then there were no more eggs. He spent another full day searching and found only grass, bushes, and flappet larks mocking him overhead.

  Moses left his field and walked away.

  Day, night, day again. He found water in a muddy patch, but hunger came back fiercely. The eggs were of the past, and there was nothing for him now but land. He walked as a soldier might, simply onwards, his body feeding off itself again.

  Moses curled under trees for long periods of time, sometimes a whole day, sometimes awakening in fear and urgency to walk again. At other times, he would wake up and look up at the sky and the tree branches over his head and not think of anything. He started seeing the churchman again, and then never again, and he stopped thinking about him altogether. He would see other things, small things like soda bottle-tops, which ceased being soda bottle-tops when he went to pick them up. He would toss the flat bits of stone into the bushes or just let them fall from his hands. He did one time find a shred of plastic bag, which was real, and he carried it with him without questioning where it might have come from.

  Moses and his strip of plastic reached the foothills of giant rocky outcrops emerging from the earth. They were hard granite, and Moses climbed the trail leading up and in between them through the oleleshwa trees that others might have known how to cut an arrow from, or a bow, or a firestick. But Moses knew nothing of bush-tools or plants, and when he reached the top of the peak, two eagles took flight, as if jumping from the cliff’s edge. They dipped and flapped and picked up wind and rose and left him. Moses walked to the edge. Below him was an expanse, a distance vast from above, but narrow when on the flat ground below.

  Moses had no intention of searching any more. He looked for no solution or direction. He did not squint to try and work out where he had come from, which trails he had followed, what his next move might be. He watched the eagles return and turn and disappear again. He watched flat thin clouds far away.

  There were many small rodent-like creatures on the rocks. Like
fat rats, Moses decided. They squealed at him. There were also many bottle-tops, which he spent time throwing into the emptiness below him. Nothing else seemed to be there, and he saw no animals out in the bush below. Just trees and grasses.

  When Moses climbed down from the rocks, he curled under a tree and slept. He woke in the night, hearing noises, and was nervous, but then sat watching shapes and shadows cast by the moon passing above. By morning, he was asleep again, and he slept through the day, rising once to piss and stand in darkness looking at the rocky mountain. That night he did not dream of people, but rather of himself walking. He walked, searched, walked. There were no details in his dream. There were no elements of his past life at the harbour, at school, or even with Kioso. His dream was exactly like his life when he walked: a solitary existence wandering through the bush with hunger and thirst, and his only occasional emotion being one of failure.

  Part 2

  Chapter 7

  The men sat laughing. They had stopped early to spend the afternoon resting and eating the last of the goat. The Maasai men in the group laughed and talked around a fire with tea and shade and company and goat meat. One of the men, Toroye, was not a Maasai, and sat to one side, a little outside the circle around the fire. Each time they stopped to make fire and tea, Toroye would sit with them, listening but not talking much, and then he would go to the side and lie down, on the ground, on his side with his arm bent under his head as a pillow. Sometimes, if the flies were bad, he would pull his shirt over his face to keep them and the light out. And if there was a nice smooth rock nearby, then he would lie on that instead of the ground, as long as it was in the shade.

  Boyd took a small fold of greasy newspaper from the pocket of his shorts. Inside the paper was a square of plastic, torn from somewhere. He unfolded the plastic and took a pinch of tobacco powder between his thumb and forefinger, which he tucked up high between his upper lip and gum. He sucked and spat once, and leaned back against the tree. He flicked a few ants off his leg and listened to the men’s chatter.