Red Strangers

by Elspeth Huxley

  This was an omen of the worst possible kind. The hyena consumer of corpses, was wholly evil, a very part of death itself. If ever a hyena should enter a compound and leave its dung inside the fence, the huts must be destroyed completely and new ones built elsewhere. Last night the maggots of death had crawled into the homestead, into the hut, even into Wanjeri’s own bed; the sorcerer who had summoned them had left his warning at the gateway. An enemy, thwarted by Irumu’s protective magic in his attempt to destroy Waseru, was striking at Waseru’s home and family.

  In Wanjeri’s ears the sound of sorcery filled the air like the whine of angry bees. The forest shamba had become unsafe. Later in the day she gathered together some skins and pots, filled a small sack of millet from the granary, and called to her sons to follow her down to their grandfather’s homestead. Until Waseru returned, until the hut could be purified and the thahu driven away, she would not sleep alone behind such weak defences.

  CHAPTER V

  The Hunters

  1

  MUTHENGI was delighted with this twist of fortune, for it meant that he could spend his days herding goats. He refused to help his mother any further in the shamba. She pleaded with him, but he would not listen; and when she asked for Mahenia’s help the old man chuckled and said:

  “The boy is strong and will soon become a warrior. Why do you ask him to do woman’s work? He has no love for the shamba; already his feet tread in the dust of the cattle. Leave him alone, and let him look after my goats.” Wanjeri looked sulky, but she could say no more.

  Every morning she would go back into the forest with Matu, the baby on her back, to weed her own shamba. The earth was moist and the sprouting maize spread over it a soft film of green like the moss on a fallen tree-trunk. But every morning she shook her head and grumbled under her breath at the damage done over-night by bushbuck and dikdik. They nibbled the shoots and trampled the young plants with sharp hoofs, for there was no one now to scare them away.

  Round the edge of the field stood some poles with bunches of leaves on top, to protect the crop against bewitchments.

  “And what is the use of such charms?” Wanjeri complained. “What does it matter that evil magic is averted if my crops are destroyed by the feet and teeth of wild animals?”

  “I will make a bow and arrow and shoot the bushbuck,” Matu suggested.

  “And become like an Athi,” Wanjeri retorted, “contaminated by the flesh of wild beasts. Your father is not a rich man, but he has not come to that. Nevertheless I should have done better to have married an Athi, it seems, for then I should have lived in the forest as I do now, but at least my husband would have kept the bushbuck away.”

  A few days later an Athi hunter came to the shamba for the first time. It was early in the morning, when earth and leaves were still cold with dew and shafts of sunlight, soft as a note from a distant herdsman’s flute, slanted through the trees. Matu, who was weeding beans, heard no sound, yet suddenly he looked up, conscious that eyes were upon him. There, standing motionless in the shadow of a tree, was a little, wizen-faced man, who stared for a long time in silence. The man was small, no taller than Muthengi; his hair was cropped and dusted with white, and his eyes were as bright as those of a mongoose. He carried a long bow in one hand, and from his belt hung a leather quiver full of arrows. He wore a thick cloak of monkey skin, and the specks of dew that quivered on the tip of each hair were lit by sunlight streaming into the clearing, so that when he moved he glistened like a fish.

  When he had gazed for some time at Matu he stepped forward and said:

  “Greetings, my grandson.”

  Matu, still squatting on the ground, stared back in silence. He felt afraid. This apparition was undoubtedly a spirit, come out of the mists of Kerinyagga. He said nothing.

  The monkey-like face of the old man puckered in a grin, and he laughed: a very low, almost inaudible sound.

  “Do not be afraid,” he went on, “I am not a spirit. I am the brother of Mahenia, your father’s father, and you are my grandson. , I have come to visit my son, your father.”

  “My father is not here,” Matu replied. He was reassured by the old man’s explanation, but still not quite convinced. He remembered now that he had heard how one of his grandfathers, called Masheria, had gone to seek food in the forest during a famine and become a hunter who ate the flesh of wild beasts Matu looked at him with round, awed eyes. He could hardly believe that he was really face to face with an Athi. This man looked exactly like a Kikuyu, except that he was small, and wore unusual costume.

  “Have you no mother?” the old man asked. “Surely you do not cultivate here alone?”

  Matu shook his head, sprang to his feet, and ran as fast as he could to the compound to tell his mother the news. She came out and greeted the stranger respectfully, addressing him as husband’s father; and they talked in the shade of the trees. Matu observed that the old man’s face was not properly plucked and that tough, scraggy hairs grew from his chin. A long, shiny scar ran up the calf of one muscular leg, perhaps where an elephant or buffalo had gored him.

  After a little he came gradually to the point of his visit. He owned a flock of goats, he would not say how many. Since goats could not thrive in the forest, they were tended by a relative and kept on the land belonging to his clan. But lately a dispute between him and the man who looked after them had arisen, and he was thinking of transferring the care of the goats to another relative. Waseru, who ranked as his son, was a possibility, and he had come to discuss the proposition. Waseru would, of course, get some reward for his trouble in the form of a small share in the natural increase. But since Waseru was absent, he would return some other time to talk it over. His own home was not very far distant; a little deeper in the forest, he said.

  2

  Matu was fascinated by the queer old man. He did not speak because no uncircumcised boy might address an elder; but he followed the visitor a little way along the path, until Masheria turned and smiled at him, and said:

  “I see you walking behind me: do you wish then to come with me, and learn how to trap bushbuck and to spear elephants, and to become a hunter?”

  Matu shook his head dumbly.

  “Then you must return to your mother,” Masheria added. “Only boys who are very brave can become hunters. I see that buck are coming every night to eat your mother’s beans. Do you know how to set a snare to catch them?”

  Matu shook his head again.

  “You have a lot to learn, then,” the old man remarked. “Go home now, or your mother will be anxious.”

  Matu’s fear was evaporating like dew before the sun, for Masheria spoke and walked like an ordinary man and not a spirit; and he was not annoyed at being followed by a boy. At last he found his tongue.

  “It is true that the bushbuck come every night to the shamba,” he said. “They are eating all my mother’s crops. Can you make a magic that will keep them away?”

  Masheria chuckled again in a curious silent way, and his face was cobwebbed with laughter. “Ho, now you wish to know the secrets of the Athi,” he said. “For indeed we know many secrets. We have seen the saltlicks to which the black bongo come, and the copulation of the elephant; we have heard the talk of bees within the hollow tree, and the songs of spirits who hold circumcision ceremonies upon the mountain above the bamboos. Well, my grandson, perhaps I will return, and teach you to trap the buck that feed in your mother’s shamba.”

  He turned and walked with long, bent-kneed strides into the green shadows, his feet soundless on the twig-crossed floor. In a very short time his slight form had dissolved into the sun-flecked darkness.

  When Matu returned to the shamba his mother was angry. She reproached him both for his bad manners in standing openly before an elder, and for speaking to an Athi, one who was held in mingled contempt and dread by all respectable people.

  “If he comes here again you should stay in the hut,” she told him. “Do you not know that you must always hide yourself from
the sight of a senior elder? Besides, an Athi might offer you the meat of wild animals, and if you eat it, do you know what will befall? The flesh of your limbs will turn pale and soft and will slough away, and you will die; that is the consequence of eating the flesh of game.”

  “But you spoke to him politely, mother,” Matu said. “You asked him to come back when my father is here.”

  “That is another matter—father,” Wanjeri said. “He wishes to talk of business affairs. Besides, although I warn you not to associate with these hunters, you must always be polite to them. You must offer an Athi traveller food, and step from the path to make way for him, and treat him with great civility. For these people know a very deadly curse, as deadly as that of a smith. If a person insults one of them, that Athi will take a wild animal and he will break each of its bones, saying, ‘May the bones of the person who insulted me be broken as the bones of this animal.’ Then the man will fall sick and he will die. It is hard for a mundu-mugu to remove such a curse, for the Athi utters it in secret and no one knows that he has done so. For this reason beware of the Athi and always be courteous to them, so that you may escape their curse.”

  “Yes, mother,” Matu said obediently. His fear of the old man returned and he marvelled that so friendly a person should possess such awful powers. He took his small knife and followed his mother to the shamba. The dangers which crowded around the feet, he thought, were truly as numerous as soldier ants.

  3

  Every night bushbuck and wild pig robbed the shamba, until Wanjeri was in despair. She complained loudly of her husband’s neglect, that he should desert her while the crop was in the ground. And rats had found their way into the granaries; they were devouring the millet; they would multiply until all the grain was eaten. She raised no objection when Matu made himself a bow from the wood of the mugiti shrub and strung it with the dried sinews of a bushbuck. He practised his aim by shooting at the fat-breasted pigeons that strutted among the young plants. And all the time that he was weeding he watched for the small, long-striding figure of the Athi to materialise out of the forest, like a flower springing fully grown from a bush, or an eagle swooping from the rocks.

  And then the old man came again. At one moment the shamba was empty save for many birds; at the next he stood there blinking in the sunlight, exactly as Matu remembered him, except that on this occasion his head was covered with a soft, ochre-dyed helmet made from the stomach lining of a goat. He stood before Matu and smiled just as before, and said :

  “Greetings, my grandchild. Did I not say that I would come to teach you to make snares? And do you still wish to learn?”

  Matu looked nervously around. His mother had gone into the forest to strip the shrub mugeo of bark for twine. He stood up from politeness, and nodded his head.

  “Yes, grandfather,” he said nervously, “but I do not think that my mother will let me. She says that you … that I … that it is dangerous. I do not know …”

  His voice tailed of in doubt. The vision of a buck with broken, dangling legs came into his mind.

  Masheria laughed again. “Do not be afraid of me,” he said. “Am I not your grandfather, an elder of the clan into which you were born? Should I then wish to hurt you? Come with me, and I will teach you how to make snares in a place where she cannot find you. Then you shall set traps around her shamba; and when she sees how you protect her crops she will be delighted and praise you with trills, as if you were a warrior fresh from triumphs in battle.”

  Matu hesitated, glancing first towards Masheria, then towards the forest where his mother was. He knew that he was doing wrong. But had not his mother, only that day, been bewailing the ravages of bushbuck? And if he could protect the crops, would she not be pleased, as the old man said, and praise him for his resource—praise him, for once, instead of his brother Muthengi, whom everyone extolled for his strength and courage?

  “ Come, follow me,” Masheria said. “ It is not far, and before nightfall you shall return home to your mother.”

  Matu took a sudden decision. A great curiosity about the life of the old man filled him and mingled with the desire to display resource and to merit praise. The old man turned and strode into the forest, moving as swiftly as a bongo; and Matu padded after him, clutching his small weeding-knife tightly in one hand, his heart pounding like the beat of a mortar against a hollowed tree-trunk when the old women ground sorghum into flour.

  Matu was amazed at the manner in which the old man made his way through the forest. The undergrowth appeared to open before him as water yields before the swimming fish. It seemed as if the forest moved with them, that no world existed save this small circle of towering trunks, thick undergrowth, slim hanging lianas and dappled sunlight. They twisted and turned continuously, following faint game-tracks, until Matu had no idea of their direction. He walked in a sort of daze in the old man’s footsteps, ducking under branches, scrambling over logs, and trying to place his feet silently among the fallen twigs. Suddenly he became aware of light on his eyes, and a moment later they stepped into an open glade. Unmasked sunlight struck into his face like a sword.

  “We have arrived,” Masheria said.

  4

  Matu looked round and could see nothing save brown tufted grass bent sadly towards the west, as though the weight of the sunlight lay too heavily upon it. Masheria chuckled and strode on a little farther; then he bent down and dived into the undergrowth, his follower at his heels. When Matu straightened his back he found himself standing by the door of a round hut, built like his mother’s. In front was a little clearing flooded with sunlight, and a granary, and a second hut; and all around was a low woven fence.

  He gave an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. The huts had been invisible ten yards away; yet here they were, substantial enough, compressed editions of his own home.

  Two women were busy in the compound. One was old and wrinkled with flat, shrivelled breasts; the other was about his mother’s age. She was grinding millet on a stone and the older woman was tending a cooking-pot. Two small children were playing around the compound in the sun.

  Matu stared at them silently while Masheria explained his presence. The women were delighted. The younger one—who was, it transpired, the wife of Masheria’s son Watengu—came over to welcome him and opened her granary to give him food. He shrank away in terror, thinking that she would offer him the flesh of game; but to his immense relief she took out a familiar-looking calabash and handed him a chunk of bean paste and some cold sweet potato. This restored his confidence at once. Everything seemed normal, just as it was at home—the huts, the granary, the food. The women’s clothes were the same, and their ornaments and speech; and this woman was, after all, a sort of mother.

  He did not return to his own mother that night. He stayed the next day and the next, looking about him with wondering eyes, entranced by a way of life so different from his own in its essentials and yet so alike in its details.

  He learnt that there were several families of Athi living close at hand. All were Kikuyu who had left their shambas, as Masheria had done, during times of famine, and gone to live by hunting in the forest. Once they had eaten game they could not go back to the life of cultivators. Long ago, Masheria told him, the ancestors of the Athi had put a curse upon them that they must not leave the forest, nor stop eating game; if ever a man should do so, his legs would wither and flake away and leprosy would consume him.

  The days passed as smoothly as clouds moving across the sky. Matu went everywhere with Watengu and his eldest son, a cheerful, friendly boy of about Muthengi’s age. Together they set snares—loops of wire on the end of whippy sticks—for the little dikdik in the game paths. They followed with cautious feet the tracks of bushbuck from the shambas which most Athi women cultivated (in a rather slapdash manner) in the forest glades, until the dark chestnut gleam of the antelope’s coat flashed for a second in a thicket, and a swift arrow skimmed through the air with silent precision to bury its poisoned tip in the victi
m’s flank. Matu learnt how to boil down the roots, branches and bark of the murico tree (which did not grow in the forest, but below, where the Athi went to strip it) into a thick, glutinous paste, highly charged with poison, into which arrowheads were dipped. Watengu showed him the tall creeper whose roots were dug by elephants to sniff through their trunks when they suffered from colds in the head, and the shrub whose roots were boiled down by the Athi to cure the same complaint in humans. But he knew of no way to keep off the big, savage buffalo-flies that settled noiselessly on Matu’s limbs and neck, burying their sharp fangs in his unprotected skin.

  5

  Luck seemed to have turned against the Athi. For almost a month their skill and patience brought no harvest save a few bushbuck to their arrows. Then, one day at noon, a man came to Masheria’s homestead with exciting news: elephants had been sighted in the forest near at hand. They were feeding, travelling slowly along the mountain slopes, and were not yet aware of the presence of men.

  This time Matu was told to stay at home, for boys had no part in an elephant hunt. But the tang of excitement in the air was too much for his obedience. He slipped into the forest when no eyes were on him and followed a faint game-path (a month ago he could not have recognised it) until he heard voices ahead. With a fast-beating heart he practised the art of noiseless movement that the Athi had taught him. He drew closer, and heard the hunters discussing a plan of attack. Often they dug big pits in the paths the elephants would take, but now there was no time for that. They decided to organise a hunt.

  All the able-bodied men of the community, young and old, were soon gathered in the glade. Each man brought a weapon called.a thia : a heavy wooden pole made from the mugiti tree. At one end was a knob and at the other a sharp tapering knife with barbed sides, freshly dipped in poison. Watengu selected seven young men and led them cautiously towards the feeding elephants. Excitement as tense as a tautened bowstring was in the air. The young men spoke in low voices and moved as silently as shadows among the trees. The loud squawk of a monkey checked them in their tracks. They stared upwards, waiting with frozen patience for the aerial spy to swing on to another tree, or to forget its interest in the moving figures below. They moved on in a wide circle, keeping down-wind, until a crackle of undergrowth across a ravine paralysed them again. More crashes followed, and on the far bank they saw a tree-top wave as if shaken by a gust of wind. They listened in utter stillness while the sun climbed a little higher above the trees. The elephants, unsuspecting, were feeding steadily as they ambled down the side of the ravine.