The Newcomers: a novel of global invasion , human resilience, and the wild places of the planet

by Pamela Jekel

  It was a tall animal, about four feet in height, five hundred pounds, with a chestnut coat which was bright even in the dim light. Its neck, chest, and legs were slightly darker, and its chin was dark with white spots on its cheeks, large ears, and wavy white vertical stripes down its body as though someone with a paintbrush had free-handed lines from its spine to its belly.

  After deciding that the breeze held no threats, the bongo moved to a blackened tree stump and began to feed on the charcoal. Chase was so focused on the animal, that when he heard Baako’s slight intake of breath, he glanced at him first rather than out into the forest. And then he saw a calf emerge from the undergrowth and join his mother at the burnt tree.

  The female must have heard Baako’s slight gasp as well, for she turned so that her rump faced them, glancing over her shoulder for the source of the noise. As she changed her posture, clearly a defensive signal, the calf froze as well.

  Baako and Chase did not need Jomo’s glance to know to stay completely still.

  For long moments, she seemed to look right at them. But hearing and seeing nothing which disturbed her further, she then dropped her head and began to nibble at the charcoal once more. The calf moved closer to her, now hidden by her flank. Chase thought the bongo was the most beautiful antelope he’d seen in Africa. The white stripes on her coat made the light seem to shift around her, and her horns were graceful and long, her face a mask of light and dark.

  Jomo hissed, and Chase followed his gaze to the far side of the thicket. Another creature was moving out of the shadows, low to the ground. It crept at ground level, its coat camouflaged in the dappled dawn light, a tree limb moved in the breeze, and then Chase saw the leopard crouched with its hindquarters bunched and poised for attack. The bongo heard Jomo and turned. The leopard kept its focus on the bongo calf, and suddenly Jomo stood and said, “No,” calmly and clearly.

  Two loud crashes of foliage from different directions, opposite thickets, and the clearing instantly emptied of anything but man. Chase stood up then, and Jomo said, “I just couldn’t let him take that calf.”

  “Leopards have to eat too, though,” Baako said.

  “Let them eat dassies.” Jomo shouldered his rifle. “Couldn’t stand it. Sorry.”

  They walked over and looked at the prints left behind, gouged where the bongo had leaped to safety. The calf’s prints were melded with her own.

  “Why was she eating the burnt tree?” Chase asked.

  “Salt. Lightning strikes the tree, burns it to charcoal, bongos come for the salt. There aren’t as many sources of salt in the highlands as down on the plains. Leopards know that and lie in wait.”

  “Did you know the trees were here?”

  “I did, indeed. So now you’ve seen your bongo, lads! A cow and calf, no less. I call that fortunate! Let’s go have a proper breakfast; I’m famished.”

  For the next three days, they hiked, stalked, explored, and tried their luck in the stream for trout and spot-tails. Jomo took them up a mountain to a rocky cliff to see a troop of baboons, and he showed them how to find food by watching what the baboons ate, fruits, seeds, and the early buds of ferns. They explored a small cave with a spring and ventured within, carrying torches and daring each other to turn them off altogether. They snared some guinea fowl and trapped a hyrax, but then let him go rather than listen to his mournful screeches which were certain to attract the leopard to camp.

  On the last night, they feasted on fresh trout and francolin with a pudding Jomo made of powdered milk and imbe fruit. Chase put his feet up to the fire and realized that he felt completely happy in that moment. Blissed out. He could not recall feeling that way in so long, that it startled him to put a name to it. The dassies had quit their chorus for the night, and the bush was still, nothing but distant night noises and the sparkling gurgle of the stream. His eyes had adjusted to the dark over the past week, and he felt that he could sense the individual heartbeats of animals around him, the breathing of the trees, a kind of night music that gave him an indescribable sense of well-being and peace.

  “I’m whupped,” Baako said. “Early start tomorrow?”

  Jomo nodded. “I think we’ll get some rain later in the day.” He gestured to the sky. “Clouds around the moon. We should be off the mountain by midday, if we can.”

  “Well, call me when you get camp packed up.” He went into the tent.

  “I have to write that biology paper tomorrow,” Chase groaned. “Crap.”

  Jomo chuckled. “Poor sod. What on?”

  “Invasive species of Kenya. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Sure,” Jomo said. “We’re always getting district reports on biological pests and problems. Like the lantana camara that came over on some boat from South America and poisons our cattle and chokes out a lot of the understory species. And the conflict tree, the water hyacinth, the congress weed, from God knows where, but all of them destroy native species. And then, of course, there’re the parasites, like the rinderpest that came from Europe and killed off the game and our cattle, the Asian Tiger Mosquito that brought us dengue fever and the avian influenza virus from China. Why don’t you write about the Louisiana crayfish?”

  “What does that do?”

  “Well, we brought it in to control the snail hosts for bilharzia, which causes Schistosomiasis. That’s a truly ugly disease, it’s caused by a fluke, swims in the water and uses the snail as a host, gets in your groin area and crawls right up a man’s penis, kills almost as many as malaria. Which is why we boil water even up here. At any rate, we brought in the crayfish, they ate all the snails and the waterlilies and then got to work on the clams, and pretty soon, the crayfish were a bigger problem than the snails had ever been.”

  “Plants and animals where they don’t belong,” Chase murmured. “Best intentions, and all that.”

  “Quite.”

  “Alien species. Newcomers.”

  “I see where you’re going with this. But I doubt it’s what your biology instructor is looking for, lad.”

  “Yeah, but it’s the same thing! Our planet is being invaded all the time by living things that test the boundaries of their ranges, right? We’ve built this global system of transportation, planes and trains and ships, transporting animals over barriers that were supposed to keep them in their place, like oceans and mountains and deserts. And every invader can wreck what was a balanced ecology. So now we go into space, right? Maybe somehow we opened a door and invited them to invade. I’m going to write about that.” He grinned. “And crayfish, too. Sister will love it.”

  Jomo nodded. “I hope she’ll appreciate the creative mind at work.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve been thinking about my future, Baba.” Chase paused. He didn’t often use that word, but somehow it seemed right to do so now. “I want to buy some land from you.”

  Jomo raised his brows and leaned forward on his log to gaze at Chase directly. “Why ever in the world?”

  “Because I’ve decided to stay in Kenya. I’ve decided there’s not much to go home to in America. You have about two hectares at the edge of your fields that you don’t have in py plants. It’s got good drainage and some river frontage. I was hoping you would sell it to me. About five acres.”

  “What would you do with it?”

  “I’d build a small house on it. A shamba, maybe build more algae tanks.” He grinned. “Maybe Asha would let me have a few hens.”

  “And how would you pay for this land?”

  “Well, that’s the part I haven’t figured out yet. I’d work it off, if you’d let me. I figure, I could maybe work for five years, and then I’d own it.”

  “And you’d live there all by yourself?”

  “Some day,” Chase said. “Maybe by the time I’m twenty, I could have it all done.”

  “You’d take a wife? Start a family?”

  Chase grimaced. “I’m not figuring on that anytime soon, but
maybe someday.”

  “Why wouldn’t you just live with us until you choose to marry?”

  Chase shrugged. “I’d rather have a place of my own. My own land. My own house.”

  Jomo shook his head. “You Americans are so odd in some ways. You have more choices than anyone in the world. Why would you choose loneliness?”

  “I don’t think I’d be lonely. And I don’t see a bunch of choices out there for me anymore,” Chase said. “Not now.”

  Jomo was silent for a moment. “Well, I’ll think on it, lad. I must say, you’ve surprised me. You always said you were planning on going back home. Not that we want you to, of course. I had hoped you’d stay. I know Asha feels that way as well.” He poked the fire with his stick. “I’ll discuss it with her. I should think I can have an answer for you soon enough.”

  “Thanks,” Chase said. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful. You all have been really good to me. Probably, you saved my life. But I want something of my own.”

  As the fire died, Chase went to his bedroll. He settled down and in the darkness, he saw Baako watching him. Clearly, he had heard every word of the conversation. His eyes glittered; his face was cold.

  Chase started to speak, but before he could, Baako rolled over silently, his mouth grim, facing the other side of the tent.

  * * *

  In Tsavo West National Park on the slopes of the Taita Hills, Mzima Springs created an oasis of life. Flowing from the northern Chyulu Hills, the water took several decades and twenty-five miles to seep, trickle, and gurgle through the volcanic lava rock and ash to create finally the four springs that gushed more than fifty million gallons a day into Mzima’s clear stream. But it was a short life for Mzima, for less than two kilometers downstream, the waters were blocked by more lava flows and disappeared beneath the surface again.

  However, for its short distance, Mzima, which means “alive”, was a refuge for a large population of hippos and Nile crocodiles, which kept an uneasy stand-off on the subject of territory. During the 2009 prolonged drought, starving zebra and antelope herds overran Mzima as the only source of water for miles, trampling the surrounding grasslands into desert. Hippos, which depended on the nearby grazing areas for food and ate nearly a hundred pounds of grass a night, nearly starved to death. By the end of the drought, only five remained from their herd of seventy. And then the drought lifted, the grasses returned, the herds departed, and the hippos began to recover.

  The hippo was vital to the health of the entire food chain of Mzima. They browsed the surrounding vegetation by night and filled Mzima’s pools with their dung by day. That dung, a bounty of nutrients with the consistency of wet hay, fertilized the water and fed the fruiting date and raffia palms, waterberrys, and figs which grew alongside the spring. Vervet monkeys ate the fruits, birds nested in the trees and added their droppings to the water, and large schools of barbells, carp, killifish, and turtles ate the insects and snails which lived in the dung piles and in turn provided prey for the cormorants and crocodiles.

  In a shallow pool near the bank, Kiboko stood alone, waiting to give birth. She was eleven years old and weighed three thousand pounds, one of a harem of ten female hippos controlled by a dominant bull which had mated with her eight months before. Called Hippopotamus amphibious from the Greek “river horse”, she was more than ready for this birth to come, her second, and she was determined that this newborn, unlike her first, would live.

  Kiboko was the third largest land animal in the world, after the elephant and the rhino, more than ten feet long and five feet high at the shoulder. She was a semi-aquatic herbivore and a close relative to the whale, from which her kind diverged fifty-five million years ago. She had a barrel-shaped torso, a huge mouth, oversized teeth, and an aggressive nature to go with them. Her stubby legs were capable of out-running a man, and she had a nearly-hairless body that was extremely sensitive to the African sun. Consequently, she spent most of her time underwater, emerging only to feed on grass at night, and it was underwater where she felt at home, safe, and even calm.

  Kiboko had one unique defense, besides her great teeth. Alone of all the animals in this tropical land, her skin secreted a natural sunscreen substance which was reddish in color and helped to block the light absorption in the ultraviolent range. As an added bonus, her sweat inhibited the growth of bacteria on her skin, so although she might look like a giant pig and wade through her own dung all the day, she was actually one of the cleanest mammals in all of Africa.

  Unusual in an aquatic mammal, Kiboko could not swim, and she was not naturally buoyant, despite her bulk. Like all hippos, she favored water deep enough to barely cover her back, shallow enough that she could wade it easily. Even when she slept underwater, she rose and breathed without waking every four minutes, closing her nostrils again when she submerged. Now she waited in the shallows underwater, but she was not asleep. In fact, she was more alert than usual, as she felt the beginnings of the labor which would push forth her new calf. She grunted softly to herself, watching the crocodile that waited motionless in the middle of her birthing pool.

  Backing closer to the bank, Kiboko gaped her mouth at the crocodile in a threat display, but he did not move away. She could not tell whether it was the same crocodile which had taken her first calf, slid in behind her and snatched the newborn right as it emerged from her body, but she knew this one waited for her to make the same mistake. She would not do so. With her backside to the bank and her head underwater facing her enemy, she sensed that he would not be able to slide around her or under her to catch her calf. She could bite the crocodile in half if she could catch him. She was not agile in the water as he, she was not quick enough to turn and bite him and also defend her calf, but she could position herself in such a way as to give her newborn the best chance at survival. The crocodile would have to pass her to get her calf.

  Kiboko concentrated now on pushing her calf from her body, silently straining, her legs well apart, her backside well under water, for she knew that her calf must swim to the surface to take its first breath. She watched the crocodile throughout her labor, and when he moved slightly to one side, she swiveled to face him. She could not know it, but her kind were well-known to the ancient Egyptians, who prayed to the hippopotamus-headed goddess, Tawaret, the guardian of pregnant women and those in childbirth, a symbol of the protective nature of a female hippo toward her young.

  The calf suddenly emerged, sliding forth in a small cascade of fluids and blood, the crocodile darted forward, and Kiboko backed nearly over her calf in a desperate effort to keep her body between her enemy and her newborn. The crocodile hesitated, and Kiboko threat-gaped again, positioning herself now at her calf’s side, blocking any approach with her own body. She grunted loudly, the sound carrying both underwater and through the air, signaling to the herd that her calf had been born. Of course, no other females came to help her, for that was not their way.

  The calf swam to the surface to breathe, and Kiboko rose with it, still guarding it with her bulk, nudging it onto her back for safety. It was a male calf. With the calf on her back, she moved directly towards the crocodile, bellowing a warning. The reptile swam off at last, its tail making lazy s-curves in the water.

  Kiboko did not rejoin her herd. She knew that her calf would be safer if she kept him away from the adults for the passing of one moon. Once the crocodile had departed, she let the calf slide off her back into the water and helped him maneuver to her teat so he could suckle. The calf made a seal of his tongue and upper jaw to keep water out while he nursed, so that he could take milk and not drown. Every few moments, he had to rise again to breathe, and Kiboko patiently waited while he learned to do so.

  Two weeks passed, and Kiboko and her calf had bonded well. Her newborn was already adept at swimming up and down as he needed to do, to suckle and breathe. He had learned to climb her back to rest and could now climb from her back to a nearby rock where he perched and rested, watching the rest of the herd in the nearby pool. One d
ay, the dominant bull approached them, as the calf stood on his rock. Kiboko moved between the bull and his calf, for she knew that the bull could be dangerous to her young.

  The bull gazed at the calf suspiciously, instinctively drawn to challenge any stranger in his territory. After grunting loudly, however, he moved off. Kiboko did not relax her vigilance, for she knew that a rival bull in the next pool was threatening her newborn’s father, and that both males would be more aggressive and irritable until the rivalry was settled.

  For two more weeks, Kiboko kept her calf from the herd. She walked a solitary path each night to graze on grasses a mile or more from the water; her calf suckled on land and underwater. He then began to eat the dung at the bottom of the spring as his first solid food, using the half-digested cellulose to grow larger and stronger each day.

  One morning, Kiboko hesitantly approached the herd, with her calf by her side, sliding close to the dozing females in the deep water. Relieved at their acceptance and blissfully comfortable with her calf resting on her back, half-in and half-out of the cool water, she was suddenly aroused from her nap by the sounds of fighting bulls. The bull from the neighboring pool had thrust himself into the group of females, and Kiboko’s dominant male was enraged. Bellowing and gaping, they reared up out of the water, fighting for purchase on the slippery spring bottom, and the females groaned and grunted, trying to get out of their way. The strange male lunged over Kiboko to get to his rival, and the calf was knocked off her back. The strange bull snatched the calf and tossed him into the air, where he landed among several females. He sank beneath them, gasping and trying to keep his head above water, but the thrashing and twisting of the females pushed him under again. The bulls rushed each other, locked, twisted, and crashed back into the water, making tidal waves in the pool, and a third male was coming as well.