by Mike Bond
The bull had run with his head to the wind, and now the wind stayed in Warwar’s face and the bull would not smell him. Unless he circled. His blood thick on the grass, splashed over the splintered thorn trees and chunks of volcanic rock like disinterred skulls, filling up cracks in the earth like a river overflowing. It stuck leaves and broken grass to the soles of Warwar’s feet. There were huge clumps of dung mixed with orange blood: gut-shot. The fury of such pain. The fury of being plucked from life, for no reason. He will not want to die until he’s killed me.
The breeze blew hot in Warwar’s face, smelling of hot grass and hot blood and stones breaking under the sun.
With an explosive whirr of wings a flock of sunbirds scattered in shattered golden shards before him. Again he loosened his grip on the rifle. Over against the trees an old man baboon watched from a red termite mound; Warwar imagined him laughing, and pointed the rifle at him; the baboon ducked into the grass. Pinned to the top of the sky, a single eagle circled, alone and complete.
What you never learned, old bull, is don’t get trapped by love. For two days didn’t we follow the old cow with her bull calf and the two young cows? We could have had their ivory, but we waited, hoping you would come. The young cow, the one I shot, was in season; foolish as any man in love you came to her. Now you have paid. In agony, your body torn to pieces by bullets. Fool, didn’t you understand? If you don’t need, you can’t be trapped.
The bull’s path cut suddenly across the wind, towards the river. Gut-shot and thirsty. Or seeking cover in the riverside jungle, a perfect ambush for one last charge. No time to raise the gun, the tusks shearing, slicing, snatching me up, the spinning sky, over the bull’s great back like a mountain, the mountain’s great feet smashing me down, crushing, crushing. What Ahmed knew.
He thought of Ahmed bringing in the goats at night. Ahmed’s sinewy hand on Warwar’s shoulder, counseling wisdom, patience: you and I are outcasts, little brother. We are in the clan but not of it. We must not expect too much, must do more than our share. It’s not our fault our family’s dead, yet we must pay. We are alone, but we have each other.
Nearer the river the grass came up to his shoulders. The wind touched his right cheek, a warning. Now the bull will circle upriver and turn back, wait till I cross his scent.
A clash of branches overhead and Warwar leaped back, screaming up at the bull’s huge crushing mass, but it was only blue monkeys in the doum palms. Nothing but the somnolent chant of birds, wail of an ibis, bees bumbling in the brush, screee of a shrike over the savanna, seeking love or prey. A mamba greener than the grass watched him out of pit-black eyes. God split your tongue for lying, and you kill us for revenge. It is people who pay for God’s deeds. We and his animals, created to expiate His sins. Do you feel less guilty, Lord, now Ahmed’s dead?
Into the riverside jungle, sudden shadow cool as a knife blade on the back of his neck. Old leopard scat on a fallen trunk, trail of siafu, already feeding on the bull’s blood. We may live for years; our carcasses last only hours. I won’t be alone if Soraya is with me. But she’ll go to an old man with a drooping gut and many goats to give her father. And I’ll hunt pasture in the desert.
Leaves caressed his arm, softness of shaded soil against his soles, smell of cedar bark shredded by a tusk. I regret your pain, he told the bull. I would be you if I could. I did not shoot you. Yes I did shoot your young mistress. But without many tusks I could never have a young mistress of my own. Dark thick knots of blood now underfoot—choking on your heart!
That—moving in the trees! Gray like a cliff, taller, vanished. Warwar backed away, could not soothe his trembling wrists, the metal stock slippery, sweat in his eyes but he did not dare raise a hand from the gun to wipe them. When he comes it will be a mountain falling, unstoppable.
Sweet chirp of birds, insect murmurs, sough of branch on stem and leaf to leaf, steady susurration of the river like a woman sleeping, drum of his pulse, tick of sweat falling on the breech, whistle of a frond bent backwards. On the twisting wind the ravaged angry bull smell, blood and iron hatred.
Ahead a gray glimmer through spiring black trunks, green submerged light. Warwar aimed—no shot. He ran to the next tree, the next, lungs choked, arms shivering. Everywhere a cage of stems, vines, boughs, branches, towering trunks. Can’t see him. He was there, just beyond the camphor tree with the broken crotch, there, its bark scabby as old elephant hide—if he’s not a bull but a devil he can vanish, come up behind. Warwar shoved apart a faceful of broad blood-smeared leaves, twisting sideways through tangled creepers snatching at the rifle, the bull’s footprint deep in the soggy soil infilled with blood, wide round as a tree, wider than Warwar’s body this one foot, and he was trembling now but would not halt, wanted to climb this podocarpus with its comforting wide branches up to safety, taller than his head, to see him, his furious odor thick as metal on the breeze, the shifting breeze, and why was it changed? He turned his face to feel the breeze but it had not shifted, and as he realized this and understood what it meant, with a scream of roots the podocarpus behind him was wrenched from the earth, struck by the bull’s great raging chest as trumpeting he bore down on Warwar, shutting out the sun, tusks flashing, his mad red eyes and tortured mouth and savaged head and every detail of his monstrous flesh visible and clear, his great legs like trees reaching to smash Warwar down, and Warwar was empty and dead already, his soul fled the body that raised the hammering gun whose bullets beat like wasps up the bull’s chest and up the great tower of his neck and under the jaw and the sky was blocked as the vast tusks came swinging down shearing the rifle he raised to guard himself, and the weight of the world struck him and he was not there, was nowhere, did not care.
9
FOR A MOMENT the Ewaso N’giro, an arisen moon deepening its roiled unrolling surface, was a vision to which MacAdam held the key, then the vision was gone and he could not understand it.
He could hear his men’s voices, softened by the jungle and the night, from the circle where they sat round a fire that he could smell but could not see. There was the wake of a croc nosing for the far dark shore like an arrow pointing him to somewhere, as though he might rise up from his lookout here beside this fallen podocarpus and follow the arrow back into the vision. A spoonbill cried, frightened maybe by a snake; he turned back to the rippling moonlit river but could not grasp the vision, could only remember that he had grasped it and the moment had been lost.
With a light whistle Kuria signaled his approach, his rifle clinking as he swung his leg over MacAdam’s podocarpus and crouched down. “Anything?” he whispered.
“Leopard hunting the other bank—half hour ago. Croc just crossed, down there—watch out another doesn’t jump you. Vervets in the trees upstream, but they’re quiet now.” What he’d told all the men earlier he repeated now to Kuria, “If the Somalis turn back to hit us they may circle camp and come from this side, so watch the jungle.”
For a moment Kuria said nothing, then, “I hope they do, Captain.”
Getting up he squeezed Kuria’s shoulder. “Never hope for a fight till you start it.” He threaded his way silently towards camp, changed his mind and, averting his eyes from the glow of the fire, slipped upriver along the bank some hundred yards past camp to a second sentry, then circled behind camp to check two others in the jungle. When he returned to camp the men were talking quietly in groups near the fire, the Maasai in one cluster, the Kikuyus and one Meru in another, three Luo, tall and heavy-boned, in a tight clump on the edge of darkness. Nehemiah was crossing back and forth between them, checking, questioning—a mother hen, MacAdam thought, trying to link disparate tribes with the awkward artificiality of Swahili, dreaming that an Africa of warring clans can unite into the countries drawn once on a white man’s map.
Yet the squad was becoming one. In the week since he and Nehemiah had taken them into the jungle the men had grown quieter and faster, working now as a single body of which each was a member. Yet, MacAdam realized, he still felt an
interloper, for his white skin, and for his always keeping something in reserve the whiteman way, something even he could never touch.
A log in the flames crackled with termite eggs, sending up sparks, and again he felt irritation because of the fire. The poachers were too careful, too close to the land to show their presence like this. Wood smoke lingers on a man’s clothes and hair for days, can be smelled half a mile away. “We should avoid the fire,” he’d told Nehemiah. “Lions won’t come in on so many of us.”
“The men don’t feel right without one.”
Everybody changes, even Nehemiah. The Kenyan askari is no longer ready to run ninety miles in a day across the desert without water. Too much easy food and Coca Cola and motor vehicles have slowed even the Maasai. Every strength sows the seeds of future weakness: material advances destroy our defenses against the primitive.
If you love your culture, he’d always argued, defend it or it will vanish. Hadn’t Toynbee counted twenty-six major civilizations in the history of humanity—and said of them only western Latin Christendom still survives? Fifty years ago it dominated Africa. Now only shreds of it remained in Kenya and South Africa; everywhere else the continent was turning back to tribalism, chaos, constant warfare, ignorance and superstition, just as the roads, schools, railroads, hospitals and homes the Europeans once built fell into disrepair and were abandoned. But how many times had he broken his heart over this, and to what good?
Nehemiah’s huge bulk settled beside him. “All quiet on the western front?”
“Not if you’re leopard prey…”
A chuckle. “I know this isn’t how you’d do it—”
“It’s not my say.”
“Sure—that’s why you’re here.”
“We’ve been tracking these guys for two days. We gain on them in the day and lose them at night.”
“Even M’kele can’t follow tracks at night, Mac.”
“Now that they’ve split up, we should too. Some of us to follow the three with the camels carrying the tusks and the one M’kele says was hurt, and the rest of the squad to follow the seven on foot.”
“We’re on foot, too. We can’t catch camels. We’ll be lucky to catch the ones on foot—in any case, they’re the ones looking for more elephants.”
MacAdam reminded himself to stop biting his lip, to breathe. “There’s something about the others—the one who killed the big bull. I want them.”
“We can’t catch camels, Mac,” Nehemiah repeated.
MacAdam shifted his knee from a sharp rock. “By tomorrow night we’ll be east of Wamba and into the Matthews Range—”
“If these guys leave the river, the jungle, go north—”
“They will, and that’s where they’ll lose us.”
MacAdam felt, rather than saw, Nehemiah nod, the admission of what they’d known all along. “The men’re tired,” Nehemiah said.
“So let’s take a chance, leave the jungle and cut north into the mountains, spread out and see if they run into us? Maybe they’re planning to meet up with the camels there, somewhere up in the Kaisut Desert.”
Nehemiah’s fear for his men was like a current in the air. No commander can be good who doesn’t dare to sacrifice some men, MacAdam thought. That’s why I’ve never been good. The fire crackled, spat, subsided. A pair of owls was hunting the river’s edge, calling to each other. Love, he thought. What else is there? He could hear Nehemiah’s stomach rumble. Three days of shit food, a hundred and fifty miles with a pack and rifle in the unbreathable heat, beating through the wall of whipcord vines and creepers of the jungle’s midday night, snakes waiting in ambush, or a lion following silently till one man drops a little too far back, the quicksand and mosquitoes and crocs along the river. And now we’ll lose them—three of the Somalis have fled with the camels, and the others will turn north for a run across the desert slopes of Naingamkama and into the bamboo jungles of the mountains where we’ll have to slow down to avoid ambushes, where they can split up and vanish.
“The men’re too green,” Nehemiah said. “I can’t deploy them out there alone, armed with Enfields, against seven experienced poachers with automatic rifles. Any guy who ran into the poachers wouldn’t last five minutes.”
“It’s your fucking elephants.”
“As if you didn’t care.” Nehemiah’s eyes twinkled in the firelight.
“So let’s split up—let me take two or three men and cut them off; you and the squad keep on their tracks till we link up again?” MacAdam watched a strip of bark curl into the flames, imagined what was going on in Nehemiah’s mind, how he’d balance the need to kill the poachers with his wariness of dividing the squad, his knowledge of the dangers of jungle versus open desert, balancing his hatred of the poachers with his desire not to lose any men, particularly now when the campaign was beginning and losses could slow it substantially. He shouldn’t push him. “When we all get G-3s…” He brushed his unshaven jaw against the cool barrel of the rifle Nehemiah had given him that stood loosely in the curve between his neck and shoulder.
Nehemiah gathered his legs beneath him. “The men don’t need to wait on automatic rifles.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Of course you did. Generosity is your ultimate weapon.” Nehemiah stood. “Take M’kele and three others. We’ll meet you at the upper end of the N’geng valley—”
“Below Musawa?”
“At dusk, three days from tomorrow. You’ll be on dry rations.”
“We’ll kill something if we’re hungry.”
“Don’t light a fire,” Nehemiah chided.
MacAdam grinned. “We may just eat your poachers. Alive.”
Nehemiah rose and stepped to the cluster of Maasai, bent to speak. He and a smaller, slender, stooping man returned. “Are you tired, Uncle?” Nehemiah said, respectfully, in Maasai.
“Hapana kabisa,” M’kele answered in Swahili to include MacAdam. “Never.”
“Don’t mind, Uncle, this whiteman understands Maasai tongue. Do you think we’ll catch them?”
“Not soon.”
“Ian thinks they’ll head into the Matthews Range, wants to head straight north and cut them off.”
M’kele said nothing.
“What do you think?” MacAdam said.
“We are not catching them like this.”
“Who would you take?”
M’kele turned towards the fire. “Gideon and Joseph from the Kikuyus, the Meru Kuria, the Maasai Benjamin and Darius.”
“Would you go also?” MacAdam said.
“I would go happily. These poachers are not Maasai, they are not even Kikuyu. They are Somali people.”
“Then we take Gideon, Kuria and Darius,” MacAdam said. “With you and me, M’kele, that makes five. Have someone replace Kuria on forward sentry. Tell the three of them to sleep. We leave at 2400.”
He lay awake beneath his blanket, the thunder of his pulse drowning the whine of mosquitoes, the chirr of crickets, the dissatisfied roars of lions impatient beyond the firelight, the rustle of men settling into sleep. Strangely he felt like praying, closer to the universe and farther from man. He thought of Dorothy soon to be in distant London and reached out of his blanket to knock on wood, a stick by his head, that she was not fearing, in danger, too alone.
For an instant his vision watching the moonlit Ewaso N’giro returned, but again he could not grasp it. Life seemed so full of chances for love yet so empty of love itself. What do I do, he wondered, to keep it at bay? With a sudden surge of peace he felt that love’s best found in doing what you need to do, to be free. But freedom, underneath it all, is death.
As the fire dimmed the lions crept nearer, the mosquitoes redoubled their efforts; between the high, thick leaves the stars glittered with the cold mockery of space.
10
THE LIONS were silent; hyenas wailed on the distant barren slopes of Louwa Warikoi. A blanket over his face to deter mosquitoes, his breath wet-hot inside it, MacAdam lay thinking of
the elephants the poachers had slaughtered: the old matriarch and her bull calf, the two young cows, less than ten years old, one in heat, an old bull courting her. The poachers had stalked them upwind—so easy—had opened fire as the elephants grazed a deep grassy slope above the Ewaso N’giro; the bull and one young cow, the one in heat, had charged the poachers, face into the vicious penetrating hail of AK47s—maybe only a soldier could imagine what it was like to charge into those guns. It doesn’t help to think about it, he told himself, but it would not go away, would not let him sleep. If we get those guys, then I was right to go with Nehemiah. No matter what.
He saw the poachers laughing, already counting the money as they chopped away the tusks, their teeth and lips frothy green with the leafy miraa they chew to give them endurance. Now three had split off and taken the camels and tusks, and it was them he wanted most, the young one who killed the bull. At least the bull had killed one Somali; MacAdam smiled thinking how his men had removed the stones covering the dead man so the scavengers could have him. “You will be the shit of hyenas,” they had laughed. “The shit of jackals.”
And now the seven on foot were only two days ahead. He saw how he might corner them among the steep peaks and rugged defiles of Ol Doinyo Lenkiyio, the Matthews Range, how the poachers, desert men from Somalia, forced now into the mountains, exhausted by pursuit, might make the elemental mistake of sticking to the valleys rather than climb the slopes. He would lose one man, he sensed. Jesus, let it be me. Of all of them I’m the oldest but M’kele, have the least to live for, except for what I can teach them. The feeling came back he’d had weeks before, gazing on the sunset savanna from his house on the Lerochi: a good day to die. No, he told himself, as if to make it so by willing it, I will not lose a man.
23:52. The three-quarter moon clear, no clouds, thirty degrees above the horizon. He stretched, checked his rifle, folded his blanket. Something was wrong in this silence. He watched the sleeping men, bent to wake M’kele, but instead took his rifle and went upriver to the first sentry, who stood to check his approach.
