by Calvin Baker
Nothing was different but a feeling in our cells, and then there was the sound of the river, not yet seen, but the clear swell of water rushing somewhere down below, which we knew would lead us to the lake.
As we pressed on we heard a single bird call and beat its wings from high in the trees, but we did not know if it was of the night or of the morning, but soon after that the buzzing of bees, as a colony of them moved somewhere in the still darkness.
“It is morning,” I said.
“It is still dark,” she answered. “There are at least another two hours before day.”
“It is morning,” I said with relief.
“How can you be sure?”
“The bees are matutinal. They are up with the day.”
“Like monks,” she said.
“Yes,” I nodded.
I felt her heart lighten a little, and she tried to buoy mine as well. “Do you think they can marry us?”
“Monks cannot administer rites.”
“Their abbot can,” she said. “Just promise you won’t make me a widow. It would not be right, after you made me love you like you did.”
I rested the gun in my waistband and took her hand for comfort. But she stopped dead all of a sudden, screaming with fright as something larger than us moved out of the jungle directly ahead.
Before I had time to get the gun it was rushing right in front of us without fear and, at the sound of her scream, only answered it with a long, low cry, and was right on top of us before we saw it was nothing but one of the cows from the village.
Our chests collapsed with relief, but we were put on guard again, seeing how easy it was for anything out there to come upon us.
“We should hurry. This is still their territory. As soon as it is light they will come for us.”
“They will not bother with us now.”
“I’m afraid they will,” I said. “We know where they are.”
37
We kept along the river’s edge through the last of the cloud forest, the trees growing shorter and shorter, turning first to shrubs, then to grass. The red earth of the plains began to show, and the sky grew slowly lighter, as the morning flowers began to open and spread their perfume, masking the rotting jungle.
We were in an area with only a sparse copse of trees here and there, and could make our way through easily. The air sweetened and I had the sensation we were nearing the lake, though in truth, I had had that sensation many times already, from wishing it so.
The sound of the sluicing river off in the distance was soothing in our ears, even as the trees thickened around it. The ground was flat, at least, and it was light enough that we could see plainly. We hugged the sound of the river, and hoped just to whistle down the darkness until daybreak.
Our phones did not have reception, making it impossible to map our location or call for help, but we felt sure the lake was getting closer, and even the throbbing pain of my shoulder had turned to a white noise against the blue darkness. It was sufferable as long as I did not think about it but stayed focused on walking and fighting off the weariness and creeping hunger, until I ceased to care anymore about what would happen.
Sylvie looked at me tenderly, and tried to mask the pain in her eyes as she took my free hand in her hand. “Just walk with me,” she said, holding my hand and leaning into me, trying to ease my weight as best she could.
“Do you want to rest?” she asked, as we came upon a place a little further on that was open and dry.
“Just a little while,” I agreed.
We sat down in the dew-jeweled grass to take water and rest. It was good to feel my muscles relax, but the pain in my shoulder had started throbbing with greater urgency.
Sylvie handed me the canteen, and the water was cool from the metal and sweet to taste, making me feel we would make it.
We sat there awhile in tranquility, collecting our strength. As we prepared to leave, though, the air became charged with the sense we were being watched. We scanned in opposite directions, and when Sylvie stopped moving I turned slowly to where she was focused, and saw in front of me a pair of deep black eyes, staring at us in pensive silence.
It was a massive blackback, with an enormous head and those preternaturally large eyes contemplating us without blinking, nailing us to where we were. We did not have the sense to be afraid at first, it was so uncanny an intelligence behind them, making us feel less threatened than that we were made of glass, and being turned around in the sun to see how we were composed. When fear finally stirred, it was bone deep, and I moved my hand slowly toward the pistol without thinking. The gorilla saw my movement and charged, shrieking as she rose up onto her two legs so that she was half a head taller than me, and roared close enough that we felt her breath. If I had moved any more she would have taken me from life, but I stayed still, resigned to the worst, as my fear settled and there was nothing to think of except how my life had been. Whatever unfolded, so it was and so be it.
She stopped when I did, and I realized her vocalization had been a warning, as she dropped back to all fours with slow composure, all the while keeping me in her gaze, with a stare of fiery intensity that seared the wall separating us. I was glass and the wall was glass, and the glass thinned and thinned until I felt seen through completely, and it was only a bent note across.
I stood held in her stare, not knowing if she would attack, but feeling at peace with whatever happened. I released the breath I had held, and she let loose a ferocious screech that wakened the birds, making them flock from the trees overhead as she soared up on her feet again, before returning back to all fours on the ground, still staring at me. But I had lost my fear of her, because there was no life beyond that point, simply what I had already had and already was or had been and the shape of her claw. I was content for it to go either way, but knew somehow, or thought I knew, we would be let to pass.
When she settled on the ground, she started moving away in a great rush, until she was twenty feet back, where she stopped at the wall of trees by the bank. We saw the rest of her family then, which we had not before, another blackback, and two infants, who rushed to her and began crawling on her, which she indulged. When she had made it to the far field we could see also another figure in the dirt, a gigantic silverback stretched out immobile, in a snare.
She sat in front of it, pulling the leaves off a branch, which she gave to the juveniles, and did not move any further. We knew what she did not, however, that the poachers would return soon, and we could not be there when they did.
The two matrons both looked at us as we began to back away, and started to rush toward us, but they stopped short and wailed to end the world, before returning again to the corpse and the cubs, who did not understand and wished still to play.
It was the damnedest thing I ever saw.
We were transfixed and watched them, and the matriarchs watched us, until we took another step away and they paid us no mind, but stripped the leaves from a low tree and fed their young. We were like that for one second or else one year, until the light made it clear we had better keep moving.
When we felt safe to turn our backs they hooted again and began fleeing up the mountain, in the opposite direction.
“They are people,” Sylvie said, as we pressed on toward the lake. “I did not know they were people.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Those poor people,” she said. “They look so wise, like ancient old people. Those poor people.”
“It’s a rough business,” I said.
“The poaching?”
“Peopling.”
“They are gentle, and it is the same thing that happens to all wise people.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think they have souls?” she pondered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They do. I know it. I felt it. They are souls. They rise from the earth, just as we do, and have the same spirits, just like us.”
“That’s for the cosmologists,” I said.
“That’s just something clever to say. You think I’m being irrational, and are damming it off. But I don’t care how clever anybody tries to be. They have souls.”
“Maybe.”
“God—”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Don’t be petulant, honey. God is a metaphor. I thought you knew things.
“And the same God holds them, just like us, and rocks them, just as whatever you want to call It does us, in the hollow of His hand.” Her eyes were bright with tears, which she wiped away as they slipped down her face. “I don’t care what else anyone says. I know it. The way you just know some things. The same way I know I love you.”
38
The sapphire water of the lake twinkled in the distance. The sky blazed with bands of teal, saffron, red, and the pure gold of first light in that part of the world, as the wavelets on the water rippled in the dawn, reflecting the sun like veins of fire.
We reached the bank, and began searching around for a boat to hire or borrow without too much fuss. But there was no one on the shore, and we walked the rim a long while in silence, before we spied a low line of houses, set back among the trees. We stopped in front of the first one, where there was smoke rising through a hole in the roof, and called out.
We did not know who the people on this side of the lake were—what part they had in the fighting, or how they kept themselves out from the vise of it—but there was no other way. We called at the door until a little boy came out, staring at us in a moment of dazed wonderment before running back inside for his parents in fear.
From deep inside the smoky room a tall thin man, wearing a red sarong around his waist and a T-shirt that had been washed to a single cellular layer of material, walked out to us. The man was blue-black, like the boy, and looked at us with the same bewilderment, trying to figure out where we had come from.
“We need a boat to take us across the lake,” I explained.
The man looked at me, and it was clear he did not understand.
I pantomimed what I wanted until he grasped my meaning. He shook his head, though, making clear he would not take us anywhere, and did not want anything to do with us.
“Where can I find a boat?” I asked, scanning the horizon, then paddling the air with my hand. As I made the motion I saw him look suspiciously at the bandage around my shoulder, and wag his finger no. He was fearful and I tried to make him understand I did not need him to risk his neck for us, I just needed the boat.
Still he shook his head no, and began walking away. I pulled out the stack of notes from my wallet, which I held all out to him. It was a little more than a thousand dollars and, I would wager, more cash than he had ever seen in his life. Still he refused.
As I offered him the money Sylvie pointed to my shoulder and made him understand we needed to find a doctor. He looked at both of us, and nodded once, slowly, before leading us around to the back of the hut, where there was a dugout that did not look too unsafe.
“Hii ni bei gani?” I asked in Swahili. “How much does this cost?”
He panned his hand flat across the plane of the ground. He would not take money. I did not want to be in his debt, and thought it was stupid of him to refuse, and held out again the mixture of currencies, pushing them toward him. We stood staring at each other, neither of us yielding to the other’s way, but trying to figure each other out.
“It is of no use to him,” Sylvie shook her head, grasping his position. “They do not have money.”
“They do on the other side,” I said, refusing to believe he could not make use of it.
“Give him the gun.”
“No,” I said.
“He is giving us his boat.”
“I am trying to pay him.”
“He cannot use money here.”
“Somewhere he can.”
“How will he get there without his boat?”
“We may need the gun.”
“The boat is how he feeds his family.”
She pointed at my waistband, nodding to the pistol. He followed her gaze and nodded at it.
“It is a fair trade,” she said.
I took the gun reluctantly from where it was holstered snug against me, and slowly began handing it over, and I could see he saw what I thought, which was if I wanted to have the boat by force I could easily overpower him. But he had already given it to me and I felt guilty for my thoughts. I think he saw that, too, as I turned the barrel, and put the stock in his hand. He closed his fingers around it, feeling its metallic weight.
He turned it over several times, then nodded solemnly. I was not sure if he would use the gun, or barter it for something or bury it in the earth, but it was his now, and without it I felt immediately our vulnerability.
I was seized then by second doubts and fear, chagrined I had done the trade without further barter, and opened our pack, to offer him the camera instead. But Sylvie stopped me. It was the fair thing.
“We have the boat,” she said, seeing my worry. “That is all we need now.”
As we completed our transaction the little blue-black boy came out to the yard, trailed by a scrawny goat, so I saw how poor they were and did not feel so badly about the trade. The boy pulled at his father’s clothing, and said something in their language. The father nodded and asked in Swahili if we were hungry and wanted food.
“Yes,” Sylvie said. “Ndio.”
“We should find out what it is.”
“Poor, fatherless, motherless child. You cannot ask that.”
I asked what there was.
“Ugali.”
“Ugali is very good food.” Sylvie beamed. “We would like some very much. Thank you. Tell him thank you, honey. Tell him thank you very much.”
“Thank you,” I said, nodding.
The blue-black man spoke to the blue-black boy and the child went to the house to tell his mother.
“I will go help,” Sylvie said. “Do you think that would be okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think it would be fine.”
She followed the boy inside the house as the man showed me how the boat was outfitted. He was proud of it, I saw, and I was glad then he had gotten a good price for himself. Afterward, he started to drag the boat toward the water, pulling it down a worn little path from the side of the house toward the lake. I attempted to help, but he pointed at my shoulder and solidly refused, as the boy returned, along with two smaller children, who giggled and were shy of me as we headed toward the water.
It was time to go, but I did not see Sylvie, and it was only when we reached the bank I saw she was already there waiting. It looked as though she had been crying, but I was not sure and did not say anything.
The sky was ablaze, red-golden by then, tearing through the final darkness as we loaded ourselves into the boat. The sun fired harder, rose-gold and copper over jeweled water, and the iron mountains in the distance were beginning to glow, as the fog draping the silent water slowly burned away. Soon it would be full light and beautiful, and fill all the people along the shore and all those out on the lake with the awe and wonder of how perfect and well loved they were, in the way certain mornings make you tremendous with the knowledge of just how beautiful life is, and how connected all life is—everything that has been alive and everything that ever will be alive—and how magnificent it would be to live forever.
Sylvie was holding the porridge, which was wrapped in a broad leaf, and still steaming in the morning chill as the heat rose from it. My shoulder was beating full of pain, so I knew I could not suffer it much longer, and was anxious to go.
Sylvie saw I was hurting and trying to hide it, and I knew she knew it. I smiled at her, and we thanked the blue-black man for the boat, and the blue-black woman for the food, and the blue-black children just for being, in a state of thankfulness.
It was our boat now, but for one piece of business. As he pushed us off into the water, the blue-black man paused and made a staccato chanting we were not expecting,
which was a prayer and blessing, or at least I took it to be.
He shoved us from the shore then, pushing us out until the water came to his waist.
“I will row,” Sylvie said. “You need to rest.”
“No, it will go faster if we both do. At least until it becomes too difficult.”
“Do you remember the way?”
“I think so. Do you?”
“Yes.”
“We are safe now.”
There was a dull, brass sheen to the air at the horizon, and to the smooth white stones and pale birds all along the shore and the mountain’s blue iron still in the far distance, as Sylvie arranged herself facing the shore, and took the port scull. I faced the prow, with the other scull in my left arm, which when I swept the water did not aggravate the wound too much.
“You will tell me if it gets any worse,” she said. “You don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”
“I will be fine.”
“Do you promise me you will be fine? This time I really will not know where home is anymore without you.”
“We are headed north,” I told her. “The sun should always be at the right, and we will only be about eight and a half miles to the other side. If we stay on the hypotenuse it will only take three or four hours.”
“That is a long way, what with the bullet still inside of you.”
“It’s not far,” I said.
“If anything happens to you—just promise me you will not die.”
“I promise,” I said. “I will never die.”
“Don’t make me cry. We have to take care of each other, just as they do. It is what our lives are for. If you die we won’t be able to, and everything will be meaningless.”
“I won’t die. I promise.”
“I believe you.”
“May I ask something?” We had finally pulled beyond sight of the shore.
