They had been wandering for several hours, increasingly lost and concerned, when Borobá started shrieking. The little monkey had adopted the habit of sitting atop Alexander’s head, where he clung to the young man’s ears and coiled his tail around his neck; from that vantage he could see more of the world than in Nadia’s arms. Alexander would shake him off, but given the slightest opening Borobá would leap back to his favorite perch. Because he was high on Alexander’s head, it was he who saw the tracks. They were only three feet away but were nearly invisible, the tracks of huge feet that flattened everything in their path, leaving a discernible trail. The young people recognized them immediately from having seen them on Michael Mushaha’s safari.
“Those are elephant tracks,” said Alexander, encouraged. “If there’s an elephant anywhere near, the Pygmies will be close by.”
The elephant had been pursued for days. The Pygmies’ method was to trail their prey, wearing it down completely, then herd it toward their nets and corner it; that was when they attacked. The only break this animal had had was when Beyé-Dokou and his companions were diverted while leading the foreigners to the village of Ngoubé. During that afternoon and part of the night, the elephant had tried to get back to its own territory, but it was fatigued and confused. The hunters had forced it into unfamiliar terrain; it couldn’t find its way and was wandering in circles. The presence of the humans with their spears and nets signaled the end; instinct told it that, but it kept running because it was not ready to die.
Over thousands and thousands of years, the elephant has confronted the hunter. In the genetic memories of both is inscribed the tragic ceremony of the hunt, in which each is prepared to kill or to die. The vertigo of danger is mesmerizing for both. At the culminating moment of the hunt, nature holds its breath, the forest falls silent, the breeze becomes still, and at the end, when the fate of one, or of both, is decided, the hearts of man and beast beat in one rhythm. The elephant is the king of the jungle, its largest and heaviest beast, the most respected; no other animal opposes it. Its one enemy is man, a small, vulnerable creature without claws or fangs that with one foot it can crush like a lizard. How does that insignificant being dare claim supremacy? But once the ritual of the hunt is begun, there is no time to contemplate the irony of the situation: Hunter and prey know that the dance can end only in death.
The Pygmy hunters had discovered the trail of flattened vegetation and ripped out tree branches long before Nadia and Alexander made their discovery. They had been following the elephant for hours, moving in perfect coordination to surround it from a prudent distance. This was an aged and solitary male, gifted with two enormous tusks. They were only a dozen Pygmies, with primitive weapons, but they were not going to let it escape. In former times the women had been the ones to tire the animal and drive it toward the traps where the men were waiting.
Years earlier, in the days of their freedom, the Pygmies always had ceremonies to invoke the aid of their ancestors and to thank the animal for submitting to death, but since Kosongo had imposed his reign of terror, nothing had been the same. Even the hunt, the oldest and most fundamental activity of the tribe, had lost its sacred meaning to become nothing but a slaughter.
Alexander and Nadia had heard loud trumpeting and felt the thundering of enormous feet on the ground. But now the final act had begun; the nets had immobilized the elephant and the first spears had been driven into its side.
Nadia’s cry stopped the hunters with spears uplifted as the elephant thrashed about furiously, fighting with its last forces.
“Don’t kill it! Don’t kill it!” Nadia screamed.
The girl stepped between the men and the animal, holding her arms high. The Pygmies rapidly recovered from their surprise and tried to push her aside, but by then Alexander had taken over.
“Enough! Stop! Don’t do that!” he yelled, waving the amulet before their eyes.
“Ipemba-Afua!” they exclaimed, falling to the ground before the sacred symbol of their tribe, which had been in Kosongo’s hands for so long.
Alexander realized that the carved bone was more valuable than the powder it contained; even had it been empty, the Pygmies’ reaction would have been the same. That object had passed down through many generations, and to them it had magical powers. The debt they owed Alexander and Nadia for having returned Ipemba-Afua was enormous; they could not deny anything to the young foreigners who had brought back the soul of their tribe.
Before he handed them the amulet, Alexander outlined the reasons for not killing the animal they had already trapped in their nets.
“There are very few elephants in the jungle; soon there will be none. What will you do then? There won’t be any ivory to buy your children out of slavery. The solution isn’t more ivory; the solution is to eliminate Kosongo and free your families once and for all.”
He added that Kosongo was an ordinary man, that the earth didn’t tremble when his feet touched it, that he could not kill with his gaze or his voice. The only power he had was the power others gave him. If no one was afraid of him, Kosongo would be reduced to normal size.
“And Mbembelé? And the soldiers?” the Pygmies asked.
Alexander had to admit that he hadn’t seen the commandant, and that it was true that the men of the Brotherhood of the Leopard seemed dangerous.
“But if you are brave enough to hunt elephants with spears, you can defy Mbembelé and his men,” he added.
“Let’s go to the village. With Ipemba-Afua and our women, we can defeat the king and the commandant,” Beyé-Dokou proposed.
In his role as tuma—greatest hunter—Beyé-Dokou could count on the respect of his companions, but he didn’t have the authority to force them to do anything. The hunters began arguing among themselves, but as serious as the subject was, they still burst out laughing from time to time. Alexander felt that his new friends were losing precious time.
“We will liberate your women so they can fight alongside us. My friends will help, too. I’m sure my grandmother will think of something; she’s very clever,” Alexander promised.
Beyé-Dokou translated his words but was not able to convince the other Pygmies. They believed that this pathetic handful of foreigners would not be very helpful when the moment came to fight. They had not been impressed by the grandmother; she was just an old woman with spiked hair and crazy eyes. As for them, they could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and they had no weapons but spears and nets, while their enemies were numerous and very powerful.
“The women told me that during the reign of Queen Nana-Asante, the Pygmies and the Bantus were friends,” Nadia reminded them.
“That’s true,” said Beyé-Dokou.
“The Bantus in Ngoubé are terrorized as well. Mbembelé tortures them and kills them if they disobey. They would do anything to be free of Kosongo and the commandant. Maybe they’ll come over to our side,” the girl suggested.
“Even if the Bantus help us and we defeat the soldiers, there’s still Sombe, the sorcerer,” Beyé-Dokou argued.
“We can beat him, too!” Alexander exclaimed.
But the hunters emphatically rejected the idea of challenging Sombe and listed some of his awesome powers: He swallowed fire; he walked on air and over glowing coals, he could turn into a toad; and his saliva was lethal. They got tangled in the limitations of mime, and all Alexander could make of that was that the wizard would get down on all fours and vomit, which didn’t seem to have much connection with the powers of the other world.
“Don’t worry, friends, we’ll take care of Sombe,” Alex promised, with an excess of confidence.
He handed them the magic amulet, which the Pygmies received with emotion and joy. They had awaited this moment for years.
While Alexander was discussing tactics with the Pygmies, Nadia had gone over to the wounded elephant and was trying to calm it, using the language she’d learned from Kobi, the safari elephant. The enormous beast was at the limit of its strength: It was bleeding from
the ribs, where two of the hunters’ spears had pierced the flesh, and from its trunk, which it was pounding against the ground. The voice of the girl speaking in the elephant’s tongue came from very far away, as if in a dream. It was the first time the elephant had confronted humans, and it hadn’t expected them to speak as they did. It listened, finally, from pure fatigue. Slowly, but surely, the sound of that voice penetrated the dense barriers of desperation, pain, and terror and reached its brain. Gradually it grew calmer and stopped thrashing about in the nets. Soon it was standing quietly, sides heaving, its eyes fixed on Nadia and fanning its large ears. The smell of fear was so strong that it hit Nadia like a blow, but she kept on talking, sure now that the beast was understanding her. To the Pygmies’ astonishment, the elephant began to answer, and soon there was no doubt that the girl and the animal were communicating.
“Let’s make a deal,” Nadia proposed to the hunters. “In exchange for Ipemba-Afua, you will give the elephant back its life.”
The amulet meant much more to the Pygmies than the elephant’s ivory, but they didn’t know how to remove the nets without being crushed by its feet or impaled upon the very tusks they had meant to take to Kosongo. Nadia assured them that they could do it without being harmed. In the meantime, Alexander had moved near enough to examine the slashes in the animal’s thick skin.
“It’s lost a lot of blood, it’s dehydrated, and these wounds may become infected. I’m afraid it’s facing a slow, painful death,” he pronounced.
At that point Beyé-Dokou came over to the beast, amulet in hand. He removed a small stopper in one end of Ipemba-Afua; he tipped the bone and shook it like a salt shaker, while another of the hunters cupped his hands to catch the greenish powder that spilled out. They gestured to Nadia that she should apply it; neither of them dared touch the elephant. Nadia explained to the beast that she was going to heal its wounds, and when she saw it had understood, she sprinkled the powder onto the deep cuts from the spears.
The wounds did not close magically, as she had hoped, but within a few minutes the bleeding ceased. The elephant turned its head to feel along its side with its trunk, but Nadia warned it not to touch the injuries.
The Pygmies worked up their courage and removed the nets, a task considerably more complicated than the act of dropping them, but eventually the aged elephant was free. It had resigned itself to its fate, perhaps it had even crossed the frontier between life and death, only to find itself suddenly, miraculously, freed. It took a few tentative steps, then staggered off into the thicket. At the last moment, before it disappeared into the jungle, it turned toward Nadia and, looking at her through one incredulous eye, lifted its trunk and trumpeted.
“What did it say?” Alexander asked.
“If we need help, call,” Nadia translated.
Soon it would be night. Nadia had eaten very little in recent days, and Alexander was as starved as she was. The hunters found the tracks of a buffalo but didn’t follow them, because those animals were dangerous and moved in a herd. Their tongues were as rough as sandpaper: They could peel off a man’s flesh by licking him, they said, and leave nothing but bones. They couldn’t hunt buffalo without the aid of their women. At a trot, the Pygmies led Alexander and Nadia to a group of tiny huts made of branches and leaves. It was such a miserable little settlement that it didn’t seem possible that humans could live there. They hadn’t built anything sturdier because they were nomadic, they were separated from their families, and now they had to travel farther and farther in their search for elephants. The tribe owned nothing, only what each individual could carry. The Pygmies fashioned the basic articles for surviving in the forest and for the hunt; everything else they obtained through trading. Since they weren’t interested in civilization, other tribes thought they were very primitive.
From near the huts, the hunters unearthed half an antelope, thickly coated with dirt and insects. They had killed it a couple of days before, and after eating part of it had buried the rest to prevent animals from dragging it off. When they found it was still there, they began singing and dancing. Nadia and Alexander learned once more that despite their travails, the Pygmies were happy when they were in the forest; any pretext was an excuse to joke, tell stories, and laugh uproariously.
The meat smelled ripe and was greenish in color, but thanks to Alexander’s cigarette lighter and the Pygmies’ skill in scouting out dry tinder, they built a small fire and roasted the meat. The natives also enthusiastically ate the larvae, caterpillars, worms, and ants cooked along with the meat, true delicacies in their minds, and they all topped off the meal with wild fruit, nuts, and water from nearby puddles.
“My grandmother warned us that unpurified water would give us cholera,” said Alexander as he gulped from his cupped hands; he was dying of thirst.
“You, maybe, you’re so delicate,” Nadia teased him. “But I grew up in the Amazon; I’m immune to tropical diseases.”
They asked Beyé-Dokou how far it was to Ngoubé, but he couldn’t give them a precise answer; for his people, distance was measured in hours and by how quickly they traveled. Five hours walking was equivalent to two running. Neither could he point out the direction, because they had never used a compass or a map and didn’t know the four cardinal points. The hunters oriented themselves by the surrounding nature; they could recognize each tree in an area of hundreds of acres. Beyé-Dokou explained that the Pygmies had names for all the trees, plants, and animals; everyone else believed that that the forest was one huge green, swampy morass. The soldiers and the Bantus ventured only between the village and the fork of the river, the place where they maintained contact with the outside world and negotiated with smugglers.
“Traffic in ivory is prohibited in almost every part of the world. How do they get it out of the region?” asked Alexander.
Beyé-Dokou informed him that Mbembelé bribed the authorities and counted on the help of a network of cronies along the river. They tied the tusks underneath the boats, and because the contraband was underwater, there was no difficulty transporting it in broad daylight. Diamonds left in the stomachs of the smugglers. They swallowed them with spoonfuls of honey and cassava pudding, and a couple of days later, when they were in a safe place, eliminated them, a rather revolting procedure, but safe.
The hunters told them about the old days before Kosongo, when Nana-Asante had reigned in Ngoubé. In that time there was no gold and no traffic in ivory. The Bantus earned a livelihood from coffee, which they took downriver to sell in the cities, and the Pygmies stayed most of the year in the forest, hunting.
The Bantus cultivated vegetables and cassava, which they traded to the Pygmies for meat. They celebrated the same festivals. They shared the same poverty, but at least they were free. Sometimes boats came bringing things from the city, but the Bantus bought very little—they were too poor—and the Pygmies weren’t interested. The government had forgotten them, although from time to time they sent a nurse with vaccines, or a teacher with the idea of starting a school, or an official who promised to install electricity. They soon left; they couldn’t live that far from civilization. They got sick; they went mad. The only ones who had stayed were Commandant Mbembelé and his men.
“And the missionaries?” Nadia asked.
“They were strong, and they stayed, too. But by the time they came, Nana-Asante was already gone. Mbembelé ordered them out, but they didn’t leave. They tried to help our tribe. Then they disappeared,” the hunters reported.
“Like the queen,” Alexander noted.
“No, not like the queen . . .” they replied, but they didn’t want to explain any further.
CHAPTER TEN
The Village of the Ancestors
FOR NADIA AND ALEXANDER, IT was a very long night in the forest. The night before they had been at Kosongo’s celebration, then Nadia had visited the Pygmy slave women, stolen the amulet, and set fire to the royal hut before leaving the village, so the night hadn’t seemed long. This one seemed eternal. Benea
th the treetops light faded early and returned late. For more than ten hours, they were huddled together in the hunters’ pathetic shelters, enduring dampness, insects, and the proximity of wild animals—none of which disturbed the Pygmies, who feared nothing but ghosts.
The first light of dawn found Nadia, Alexander, and Borobá awake and hungry. Nothing remained of the roasted antelope but burned bones, and they didn’t dare eat more fruit because it had given them stomach cramps. They were determined not to think about food. Soon the Pygmies were awake, too, and they talked among themselves in their language for a long time. Since they didn’t have a chief, decisions required hours of discussion spent sitting in a circle, but once they reached an agreement, they acted as one. Thanks to her amazing gift for languages, Nadia captured the general sense of the conference. Alexander, on the other hand, caught only a few names: Ngoubé, Ipemba-Afua, Nana-Asante. Finally the animated discussion ended, and the young people were informed of the plan.
The smugglers would be coming to get the ivory—or the Pygmies’ children—in a couple of days. That meant they would have to attack Ngoubé within a time frame of thirty-six hours. First, and most important, they decided, was to hold a ceremony with the sacred amulet and ask for the protection of their ancestors and of Ezenji, the great spirit of the forest, life, and death.
“Will we be anywhere near the village of the ancestors when we go to Ngoubé?” Nadia asked.
Beyé-Dokou confirmed that in fact the ancestors lived in a place between the river and Ngoubé. It was several hours’ travel from where they were at the moment. Alexander remembered that when his grandmother Kate was a young woman backpacking around the world, she often slept in cemeteries because they were so safe; no one came there at night. The village of the ghosts was the perfect place to prepare for their attack on Ngoubé. They would be a short distance from their objective and completely safe; Mbembelé and his soldiers would never come near the place.
Forest of the Pygmies Page 12
