HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  His feet slipped on the soil muddied by his blood. Sun drummed on his head; the land spun round and round. Attentive and eager, the hyenas crouched cheerfully on their haunches, nostrils and jaws wide, as if it were a game, he thought, about to begin again. He glanced at the blood sliding down his shins: staunch it soon, he thought, or die. Again he saw his bones crunched by them, and he bared his teeth.

  The huge sun slid overhead, whitening the desiccated sky and searing the sulfurous soil, the tortured barren scrub. Flies buzzed at his blood; a hyena stood, stretched, sniffed the changing wind, and trotted swiftly northwards, angling downslope. One by one the others rose and followed. Unbelieving, the Samburu waited by his bush, but they were gone, gone away, a new wind raising dust devils and scuttling dead leaves like vipers under the thorn scrub, drying the blood on his lacerated legs and sucking the last moisture from his throat.

  He gathered up and re-shafted his spear, looked across the undulant, afternoon-hazed bitter brush wavering with heat, but could not see the hyenas. Baffled, he tore apart the rest of his cloak and tried to wrap his legs; it was difficult to walk with this flesh and muscle hanging in strips down the narrow white bones, with his broken ankle lurching sideways at each step, driving impossible pain up what was left of his legs. But N’gai had favored him still with life, this magnificent life with its aromas of bush, soil and wind, its bird songs and buzzard cries, its hum of flies and ants and butterflies and all that composes the cosmos in perfect harmony. And because his youngest sons needed their school fees N’gai had willed that he should live to carry back this lion pelt and it must be done as N’gai willed, to find a way to raise this pelt, steady it atop his head, to lean forward, take a step with these legs baring their bone beneath flags of muddy flesh, to raise this bandaged foot and place it on the crumbly soil, then bear the weight so evenly on the spear shaft, bringing forward the other foot, and all that mattered was to make each step possible, carry it through, then another, then another. He must cross the dead savanna of Lailasai, but if N’gai had spared him the hyenas it would not be to kill him in Lailasai, but to lead him home, where at the duka of Mohammed Amin Sala he would receive four hundred shillings for such a pelt, enough to send the boys to school, and with each step he repeated this thought, under the weight of the pelt and the heat of the sun.

  Each time he fell the sun’s heat woke him, and he dragged himself to the pelt and, kneeling, raised it to his head then forced himself up, steadying his stagger till he could again step, then step again, then step again, toward the ridges of the Ol Doinyo Lailasai hovering before him in the late afternoon heat.

  Again the sun had died. How cool the land, how soft the violet light, as he crested the last rise and Ol Doinyo Lailasai towered before him like the entrance to an immense mystery he was beginning to understand, in the clarity of pain and early starlight, when the birds are silenced by the sudden wall that falls between day and night and in the very far distance the rock mountain where N’gai was born guarded his manyatta. If the hyenas did not come he’d reach it before the sun grew hot tomorrow, if he walked all night, and yes, N’gai was good to him and his sons for he would reach it now, and taking a deep breath of this dry, chill sunset air he did not understand nor realize the shocking, crushing force that suddenly separated him from the earth and hurled him in scattered awareness among the bushes whose thorns no longer hurt, the pelt’s weight no longer bearing him down, and he tried to remember why he was carrying it, then could not remember what it was, remembering then, only, N’gai has been good, N’gai has been so good.

  Finger still on the trigger of his AK47, the young Somali slipped from his cover in the euphorbias and, hugging the dark places between the brush, crept to the Samburu lying gape-mouthed on the tousled sand. He was truly dead, this barbarian; the Somali wondered at the power of the rifle, seeing how the bullet had entered the Samburu’s chest just above the heart, and had come out the left eye, which dangled down his cheek on a trace of tissue; the impact of the bullet had forced brains like the insides of snails out the Samburu’s ears; a pool of near-black was spreading round his head.

  An uneven clump, clump-clump of hooves approached; shouldering his rifle the Somali turned to another leading a camel. “Ho, brother! Did I not shoot well?”

  The other smiled. “Yes, Warwar, it was well done. Now let’s load your pelt quickly. The shot was loud.”

  “It’s a shame to share this with the others.”

  “You would live alone?” The other dragged the lion pelt from the bushes where it had tumbled. “Check there’s no money on him.”

  “Him?” the young Somali scoffed. “It’s a barbarian in rags—an old simi and a worn spear.”

  They lashed the pelt atop the camel and continued leading it south as the last rays of sun receded across the lilac sands. Just before dark they crossed a furrowed trail coming from the northwest. Warwar knelt, fingering a round, deep print. “It can’t be!”

  His brother walked alongside the tracks, noting the different sizes and strides. “Three females, one old. Plus a calf.” He scanned the back trail, the rough scar in the earth’s reddish eroded crust shadowed by the fading horizontal light. “The last of the northern herds. Driven by thirst down out of the mountains, headed for the Ewaso N’giro.”

  “How many days?”

  “Weeks. We won’t catch them till the river.”

  “Perhaps they’ll find us a bull.”

  “Hush, you dreamer! Don’t bring bad luck.”

  “Since when would it be bad luck,” Warwar laughed, “to come home loaded down with ivory?”

  4

  BY READING, MacAdam realized, he had enlarged his awareness but impaired his vision. Now to see the world clearly he was forced to look at it through a wall of glass.

  He unbuttoned his shirt and wiped dust from his spectacles, watched the camels milling in the paddock where the Rendille woman had driven them. Not even eight o’clock and already the sun hot on the back of your neck. The grass underfoot not too brittle for December: so far the short rains had been good.

  Under a thorn tree by the paddock the dismounted cab of a Land Rover served as a shed from which he took two bottles of hydrogen peroxide and a large antibiotic tube. This probably would not work but was better than that mixture the Rendille woman used that killed four camels last year.

  A string of Samburu kids lined the stockade, their fuzzy hair paled with dust kicked up by the camels shuffling nervously and swinging their heads to snap at flies along their haunches.

  The Rendille woman climbed the stockade and jumped in, her head barely to the camels’ bellies. With a switch she drove one into the chute; Isau, the Samburu foreman, dropped the gate behind it. MacAdam slipped a noose of sisal round the camel’s knee and as it lurched forward against the front gate of the chute he yanked the noose tight, jerking up its knee. It brayed and tried to pull back, tautening the noose that he then tied off against the stockade. He threw a halter rope around its head, tossed the end to Isau who looped it once around a beam and held it tight.

  With the camel neighing and jerking at the halter MacAdam washed a large boil on its neck with hydrogen peroxide, took a knife from his pocket and sliced the boil open. The camel screamed, craning its neck, green grass spittle frothing its yellow teeth and pale gums. MacAdam squeezed the boil, blood and pus running down the camel’s rough, dusty fur. Wiping pus from his fingers on to its neck, he screwed a syringe top on to the antibiotic tube and squeezed some into the wound. He slipped the noose from its knee; Isau tossed free the halter; MacAdam opened the front chute gate and the camel trotted, swinging its head angrily, into the pasture. The Rendille woman drove another camel into the chute.

  It was nearly noon when he finished. Dust and sweat caked his face; blood and pus streaked his shorts and knees. He thanked Isau and the Rendille woman, who nodded, her eyes on the savanna, as if he had not meant his thanks and therefore to accept them would further demean her, or tha
t neither his thanks nor he were significant. For an instant he saw himself as they must see him, an easy-smiling, hearty man with a booming voice and nothing to say, with a fine home and wife and possessions that inoculated him against others’ joys and sufferings and his own. A gregarious fake. Oi meninisho k’kiri nememe: flesh that is not painful does not feel.

  He put the last half-bottle of hydrogen peroxide back in the Land Rover shed, rubbed his hands clean with dust and walked past the thatch-roofed sheds where several ancient Land Rovers rusted calmly on blocks in the tall grass, past the long stone barn with its galvanized roof, toward the slate-roofed house under flame trees, frangipani, bougainvillea and jacarandas, a candlestick euphorbia towering cactus-like on either side.

  Dorothy was not downstairs. He entered the parlor cool and dark after the blast of the sun, poured gin and tonic water into a glass and wandered into the kitchen for ice, then out on the veranda, sipping gin and watching the heat seethe over the wide golden savanna; behind it, blocking the horizon, the blunt, vast bulk of Mount Kenya was cloaked in clouds.

  On the equator the days pass one like the next. You come here young, marry, raise a family, die, and leave no tracks. Occasionally you go “home”, to London and the Cotswold mists, the old streets of Cirencester, the city’s bookshops, movies, pubs, museums, the facile English conversations. After a few weeks you wake up one day and decide to go back to Africa – the rest is just a game.

  Like malaria, Africa. Once bitten you can never shake it. They used to call acacias “fever trees”, thinking malaria came from them. Now they “know” malaria comes from mosquitoes. Some day they’ll realize malaria comes from the continent itself: Africa is a fever. For Africa there’s no chloroquine. No matter if you leave it, it’s engraved in your blood.

  Yet Africa is dying, taking the fever with it. Have no attachments, MacAdam knew the Maasai said: see the world as it passes, not siding with lion or gazelle. A century ago the whites came, ploughed and fenced the savanna, cut the forests, grazed their ignorant cattle where the wildebeest had roamed. They killed the warriors and made the docile ones clerks, told them we nailed God to a tree because He threatened to free us of our sins. “What are sins?” the Maasai answered. “God is the land, the trees, the mountains, the animals, the sky, the rivers and the rain. How do you nail this to a tree?”

  Now the land, the trees, the animals are gone; the whites were right—God’s not so hard to kill. And most of the whites had gone, too, leaving behind them a plague to finish off what they began. This plague, MacAdam had reflected so many bitter times, was medicine without birth control. It allowed the weak to live, populations to explode, the limitless savannas and jungles cut into tiny shambas where swollen families burnt and hacked the vegetation, then clung to the malnourished soil till it eroded to bedrock. Without the grass and trees the soil dried, the rains died and you could see a man coming miles away by the dust he raised.

  But don’t see a lion’s killing a waterbuck from either side, he reminded himself. He should not try to attribute “good”. Learn not to care, again and again he had told himself, about the death of Africa.

  Dorothy’s footsteps upstairs. Africa, that still enslaved the black woman, in MacAdam’s experience wore the white one down, made her either passive or hard. In the first years of their marriage there’d been friends, other ranchers, with a common longing for an England whose mirage grew ever more entrancing as the reality was forgotten. But now the neighbors and her own children were gone, Dorothy couldn’t stop talking about going “home”.

  The Samburu distinguished between house and home. A house was what the Europeans had, here in Africa. It was not their home. Home was where the family lived, generations, the familiar soil. A place which had no written history because it was in their bones, as their bones were in the soil. The Mau Mau had come because the Africans got tired of waiting for the white man to go home.

  When MacAdam and Dorothy went down to Nairobi she perked up, but said she hated it. As the other white ranchers left the Lerochi plateau, Kikuyu politicians had bought their ranches and resold them in tiny parcels whose buyers could not make enough from them to live. Their goats tore up the last grass; the rains scoured the broken topsoil into dirtied streams that gnawed gullies through parched valleys. Now MacAdam and Dorothy were the last whites on the plateau. When the rains were good their cattle prospered. When there were no rains he cut the herd to two hundred heifers and a few bulls, and wandered northern Kenya with them like a Samburu nomad.

  Dorothy’s tread was listless on the stairs. When they were young there’d been so much passion, joy in each other. Now they were old friends and passion a trick of memory. He felt himself turning into sinew. “Take a second wife,” Aiyam the Samburu elder had counseled. “Look at me – at more than seventy years I have four wives – I keep them happy!”

  He’d take no other wife. Once yes, with a joy that bordered on abandon. But those days were dead. Dead and buried. The other wife had never been his own, and they’d been right to kill it. But when he dared to think honestly about her, he saw that only then had he lived down to the bottom of his soul, with a joy so hot and bright it cut him to the bone. He’d acted like a fool, he would tell himself, a teenager lost in visions of himself. It never would have lasted; he would have ended just as badly off as he was now.

  In the kitchen he took three ice cubes from the fridge and plunked them into his glass. How soon they start to melt, he thought. Have I reached the age when nothing is enough? What else is there? When you’re young it’s so easy: you love danger. Look for it. But once you test yourself, face fire, you never have to doubt again. Then you see that courage is so little. In any case I’ve got no danger now. No risk means no joy.

  He tucked the gin bottle away and hid his glass in a corner of the sink as Dorothy slippered into the kitchen. “Hullo,” he smiled, hating his smile and the timbre of his voice. “Another lovely day.”