THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  “Your ears are strong, brother,” MacAdam whispered.

  “I heard you leave camp.”

  “What’s new?”

  “Hippos breathing—middle of the river—noisy as trucks. I keep watching the jungle.”

  “Good. There’s one chance in a hundred the Somalis’ll attack, but any time you stop watching is when they do it.”

  The man wiped mosquitoes from his face, saying nothing, as if MacAdam had insulted him with this simple truism. “Guard well,” MacAdam added, squeezing his shoulder. “M’kele and I and the three others will come this way when we leave—don’t shoot us.”

  Hiss of a chuckle under the man’s breath. “What good would that do?”

  He checked the other sentries, all alert, then woke M’kele and his three men. They ate a handful of cold ugali each, shouldered their packs and rifles. He led them east along the river, on the poachers’ tracks, among branches, vines, creepers, stolid huge trunks, and saplings, then left the tracks and turned north, picking up speed as the moon climbed and the land rose and slowly the jungle gave way to brushland, then rolling savanna, and they could run steadily till the hills grew steeper and the soil sandy and soft, burying their steps. With a fire in his heart he drove himself uphill, gasping for breath but not slowing, seeing the dead elephants and the poachers’ laughing, miraa-smeared lips, hearing his own men breathing behind him, as if this were a race and he trying to extend his lead.

  The hills crested onto the cindery flat savanna south of Ouarges, “the place where the people gather to go raiding” in Samburu language, and again MacAdam broke into a run, the light pack with its sloshing canteens chafing his shoulders, the heavy rifle off-balancing his stride.

  Before dawn he called a halt, head spinning, legs sloppy with exhaustion. “You guys—too young for me.”

  “Shit,” Kuria bent over, holding his knees. “I’m beat.”

  Darius rubbed sweat from his eyes. “You run like a fuckin’ black man.”

  Dizzy, MacAdam hugged him, Darius’ sweaty temple hot against his own. “I am a fuckin’ black man. I just have white skin.”

  The men’s grins were like stars. MacAdam felt an incredible burst of love. Sun poured over the edge of the world inflaming the tan earth, gray thorn scrub and brittle grass. The lava rocks sharpened and glowed; birdsong and desert ambrosia rose from the soil, radiated from the air. He unscrewed his canteen and handed it around, drank last and sparingly, sweat trickling into his mouth.

  As the huge orange sun cleared the horizon its heat blasted across the savanna, inflaming the humped spines of Ouarges mountain and the taller Matthews Range behind it. “If they turned north…” MacAdam panted.

  M’kele took up the thought. “Not in the mountains, yet.”

  Exhaustion pooled gray circles under M’kele’s eyes, the thin shoulders of his camo shirt wet under the pack straps. “If they turned north,” MacAdam repeated, “soon we cross tracks.” M’kele raised his head slightly, meaning maybe.

  MacAdam wiped the sweat from his glasses, resettled the pack on his blistered shoulders, picked up the rifle heavy as concrete and walked fast towards the humped spines of Ouarges already dancing in the heat, the men in a tight string behind him. Despite the heat he felt good from the halt, for the taste of water and the new song of birds and the morning breeze whispering over warming rocks whose trace of night’s moisture brought to his nostrils the drying fragrances of sand and parched rock, the earth’s crust hardening over its core.

  The sun rose, its white wrath bearing down on his head and shoulders, searing his skin through the cotton shirt and his scalp through the perforated bush hat and his dusty, sweat-caked hair. By noon he was forced to halt them every hour, wild heat writhing round them like devils. In the illusory shade of a blistered thorn tree they sat, stunned and silent, the labor of opening a ration can almost beyond them. “Water,” MacAdam rasped. “How much?”

  “Two canteens,” Gideon said.

  “Sip each.” He forced himself to his feet. See, it’s not so bad, he told himself. I’ll walk up this hill, show them not to be tired. Officer’s job—shame them into what no sensible man would do.

  The hill was too steep; he turned round to scan the countryside as if this had been his intent. The men below did not look up, inanimate, a feature of the bristly lava savanna but for the weird collision of their jungle camouflage against the burnt soil. The rifle on his shoulder seemed the only thing linking him to earth; half-hating himself, he turned and climbed the hill.

  From its summit the land appeared bereft of life but for his men under the scraggy thorn tree, like four ants hunting shelter among the crags of a seared moon. Beyond the earth’s eastern edge, almost beyond space itself, the stark red tree-crested abutments of Ol Doinyo Sabichi, the inselberg of God, home of N’gai, towered over the razor-edged land as though imposed from above.

  To the southeast lay the Shaba’s endless plateau of black coals beneath the sun, beyond it the vast baked Merti plateau tilting down into the boundless miasmic marshes of Lorian Swamp where even the great Ewaso N’giro dies in sand. To the northeast the Woyamdero Plain unrolled across countless gorges and inaccessible chasms and dust-choked steppes into the lost regions of Gora Kudi and Bokhol, till somewhere, in the land of mirage and imagination, rose the purple-black Ethiopian escarpment.

  And northwards, as if implanted from a different universe, were the muscular heights of the Matthews Range, a green Ararat above the rising desert. But closer, where the savanna vanished suddenly into the dry forests of the mountain’s first slopes, why that tiny shifting clump of bush? MacAdam put down his rifle, snatched off his pack, tore it open and yanked out his binoculars.

  Heat and mirages danced in the lenses. One eyepiece had been knocked; he couldn’t focus it. There—not brush, but figures, moving. He dashed to the edge of the summit, whistled down, waving his hand. Like a sleepwalker M’kele arose, adjusted his bush hat. MacAdam beckoned wildly. M’kele grabbed his pack and gun, ran upslope, the others after him. Huffing, they burst over the top, eyes wide with effort. “It’s them!” MacAdam shoved the binoculars at M’kele.

  M’kele did not take them, turning to peer across the rippling canyons of heat where MacAdam pointed. “It’s them.” With the back of his hand he wiped sweat from his lips. “Seven men with rifles. Moving very slowly.”

  11

  IS IT ALL DREAMS and loneliness, with no purpose? Ahmed would never have admitted this. How awful to die never having scratched the surface of your soul.

  Warwar watched the truncated, bloody-stumped tusks of the dead bull rise and fall with the jerking stride of the camel before him. This bull, who wanted so much to live, instead perished ignobly, in horrible pain, so that squat two-footed animals could carve his great tusks into trinkets: I don’t believe you, Lord, that man is king. Man’s a scorpion, dangerous, solitary and unloved. Only a God could care about man.

  The dawn desert savanna was bereft of life but for the wind-hunched commiphora, a distant hyena cringing out of rifle range. Step after step, the camel’s rump up and down before you, his hemp tail twisting aside to deposit dung on your path: freedom is a lie.

  Judge not, Ahmed would say. And Allah would say I was chosen to succeed Ahmed because he was wrong. I must not succumb to the weakness of understanding.

  Warwar swung the AK47 to the other shoulder, liking how it tightened the sore chest muscles where the dying bull’s tusk had knocked him. Opening his mouth, he slid his jaw from side to side to feel the pain snake up his face and into the skull; anyone could be pretty, but to have such a scar made a man.

  The wind swung, bringing the stench of rotting flesh from the tusks. Eat well, flies; lay your maggots, like the vermin that will buy these tusks and wear pretty bracelets and think they carry the spirit of the king.

  If I want I can leave them, Ibrahim and Rashid. Just as the three of us split from Suli and the others, after the killing of the elephants. They have gone north to seek more ele
phants, leaving us the duty of returning home with these tusks—but who is to order that I stay with Ibrahim and Rashid?

  As Ahmed said, I am in the clan but not of it. If I left now, they would have to give me my share. I who killed the big bull. Then I could follow my own path west across the great Chalbi, the maneater desert, not northwest with Ibrahim and Rashid into Somalia. Warwar let his mind wander like a hawk over the vast Chalbi, being there. But if I separate the paths, I will not have a camel to carry my share. And what will happen to Soraya?

  He stopped short, his eye caught by a trace of something across the distant western sands—elephants? “Cousin!” he called. “Wisdom must be blind—you have not seen those tracks?”

  Nearing, they saw it was two sets of parallel wide lines cutting evenly into the desert crust. Painfully Warwar knelt to fondle the sand. “Whitemen?”

  “Two Land Rovers, lightly loaded,” Ibrahim answered.

  “Rangers!” Rashid said.

  “It is not the right footprint for soldiers.” Ibrahim pointed his toe at the tread marks. He followed them fifty paces or so, returned. “They passed yesterday; there’s not much dust in the ruts.” He scuffed sand over a track. “But why go north, across the Kaisut, when they could pass around it?”

  Where Warwar knelt a cobra had crossed, its own track more recent. “If Allah has favored us with fortune, how can we refuse it?” He rose carefully to his feet. “Follow them, and they will tell us what they do, and what they have to offer.”

  The sun rising behind him threw his huge shadow far ahead on the reddened, sparkling sand, to the right a more massive shadow formed by his two companions and the three camels. The tracks vanished in the tan elaborately rippled land, its gray bushes and jirme cactus gleaming on tiny pedestals of crust, its distant stony outcrops that seemed always to be waiting, and which he had come to think of as marabouts, places where mullahs, holy men, lay.

  The others had removed prayer cloths from a camel saddle; he knelt near them on the sand facing northeast, waited a moment for his mind to clear, noting a siafu that was attempting to climb a ridge of crumbly sand at the edge of his cloth. The ant scrambled up the loose, tiny slope that gave way as it neared the top, and it tumbled to the bottom again, immediately renewing its ascent. Why did it not shift to the right, and climb the easier, lower edge? Why did it always return to the most difficult point? Why did it strive? He let his eyes drift shut, seeing and not seeing the desert, mountains and arid sky, letting the Prophet’s thoughts like rain nourish his heart.

  When his mind was free he returned to the camels, stepping round the stocky, thick-bearded Ibrahim, who was bent checking a front hoof. “I’ve seen what they’re doing, these whitemen!” He touched Ibrahim’s shoulder. “Like the siafu, they’re trying to take the most difficult route, to North Horr.”

  “What siafu? Speak sensibly!”

  “Allah has shown me, how they are doing things!”

  “This is not the way to North Horr.” Shading his eyes, Ibrahim studied the tire tracks converging ahead into a single shimmering line.

  “Why else do they cross the Kaisut, only to turn north into the Chalbi? Why run from one desert into another?”

  “They are blind, or fools.”

  “Or like the siafu, they think they must always go straight ahead.”

  “Then we’d cut them off by turning north, where their vehicles cannot travel.”

  “Precisely.”

  Ibrahim reflected. “We’ll do it, then. Otherwise we’ve lost them.”

  “Exactly!” Warwar felt a rush of joy, as he always did when he had shown his elders how well he thought. The feeling built into a steady elation as he followed them north, contented to be last, no longer fearing as the youngest to be scorned, but perceiving all with a brightness precise as this sapphire sky and flawless desert.

  At midday they halted in a dry, sandy laga. While the others rested, Warwar untied an empty water gourd from a saddle and walked up the laga till he found a vertical sheet of basalt. He dug with his hands at the base of the rock. At first the sand burned his fingers; further down it was cooler and compact as he scooped it by handfuls from the hole.

  The sand stuck to his fingers; he raised them to his lips and felt their momentary salve against the blistered skin. He lowered himself into the hole and dug deeper, dry sand at the top tumbling back in. A shadow crossed the pit. “Nothing?” said Ibrahim.

  “Not yet.”

  “You’re wasting time. Come!”

  “Pull me out!” Warwar called, but Ibrahim had gone. He pushed himself up from the pit, brushed damp sand from his hands and clothes, and returned to the camels. The sun weighed dizzyingly on his scalp; the air was torpid, too hot to breathe; he thought of herding goats in the shade of doum palms and fig trees on the cool banks of the oasis at El God God.

  Beyond the laga the black land stretched infinitely westwards to a line of magenta buttes that were certainly a mirage, for nothing could be so far away and yet so clear. The soil was rubbled with volcanic detritus, a sea of bituminous lava sucking in the sun, as if they rode across the still-live cinders of the earth’s last conflagration.

  Warwar’s wounded head was pounded by the sun, his shoulder aching unconscionably from his AK47 with which only days ago he had killed the elephant king who had murdered Ahmed. The sharp lava sliced through his sandals and they stuck with dried blood to his soles. The lion skin did not matter, nor the dung of the camels he stepped on because it was cooler than the rock, nor the rifle he longed to throw away but would not, for the others would then kill him. He stumbled into the back of camel and it kicked quickly, splitting his shin. He fell down holding his leg. Laughing, Ibrahim offered a hand. “Come, nestling, and get a drink. We’ve stopped till night.”

  “There’s still light!”

  “We’re at the Chalbi’s edge. If we’ve planned well, the Land Rovers’ll be below—we don’t want them to see us coming down.”

  Warwar followed Ibrahim to where the third man, Rashid, held a nervous camel. With his simi Rashid sliced open a neck vein, the camel jerking back its head, the blood spraying into a leather jug till it was half full. Rashid pinched shut the vein, blood trickling up his arm, the camel’s breath hot on Warwar’s cheek.

  From a camel heifer whose unweaned calf had been left behind they squeezed milk into the jug and shook it with the blood, each one then holding the jug above his lips and pouring his share into his mouth without touching the rim, Ibrahim first, Warwar last. The hot tang of the blood mixed with the sweet, creamy milk made his body shiver with delight; exhaustion and dizziness falling away like a djellabah discarded in the coolness of night.

  The first star, the shepherd’s, flamed above the eastern hills. After prayers the others rested and Warwar wandered with the camels as they nibbled at scraps of thorn bush and occasional blades of bitter grass. His mind drifted to Soraya’s face as she had glanced up at him before her father’s door, how her black eyes had taken him in. Unless she loved him she’d never look at him that way.

  He could see her now, even from a distance, as she walks proudly home from market after sunset, her black cloak rippling with the movement of her body underneath, her eyes above the veil full of mirth and understanding, the bundle of corn or firewood balanced so easily on her erect, elegant head—never in El God God or all the Marrehan had he imagined anyone like her. But soon an elder would give her father thirty goats, five cows and ten sheep, and Warwar would lose her forever.

  If so, he would not marry. As in the story of a desert spring with water so sweet once men have tasted it they never can forget it, nor want any other, after he had seen into Soraya’s eyes no other girl enticed him. His temples hammered; his palms sweated, wasting precious moisture. The camel heifer they had milked was straying; he whistled and ran after her, tossing stones to turn her back. The sun had fled; timid stars had sneaked in from the darkness.

  The camels followed him, their hoofbeats loud and uneven on the stony so
il. Ibrahim rose, stroking his beard. “Let’s go.”

  Leaning his gun against a euphorbia, Warwar quickly loaded the camels, Rashid holding each one by its halter down on its front knees. Again Warwar was last as they turned west towards the last orange flare of sunset on the ancient hills where man was born, the stars which had seen him born still staring down tonight. True, he reflected, I’m young and have no money, but my share of the tusks and the black-maned lion’s skin will bring a cow or twenty goats; it was I who first saw the twin Land Rover tracks. If there’s bounty to be found among these whites, half of it should be mine.

  Warwar led the male camel with the bull’s tusks and the lion skin. The others moved faster; holding the AK47 sling away from his sore shoulder, Warwar trotted after them, tugging the male camel’s halter. Before him the star-splintered bowl of night sank suddenly into unfillable depth, as though they’d reached the earth’s end and stood facing dark space. “The Chalbi!” he murmured; the male camel whinnied its assent and Warwar clapped a hand over its muzzle. Far below on the desert floor glinted the spark of a single campfire.

  12

  HE LED the male camel down, its front hooves dislodging chunks of hardened sand that pounced against his calves, its head jerking up the halter. For hours they descended bare slopes whose stones still held the day’s heat, whose sand burned his soles and rasped round his ankles, the dark forms of the other camels weaving back and forth below him, their grunts, the creaking of their saddles, and the slither of their hooves loud against the silence of the stars.

  The Lion had risen high above the moon when they reached the gentler slopes stretching to the desert floor. The distant campfire was hidden now by intervening dunes, but like the others Warwar had fixed its location against the stars. They halted to tighten the camels’ saddles after the long downslope, mounted, and rode fast northwest, as if to flee the Scorpion’s tail arching up out of the desert behind them.