“It bothers me,” he said after a while. “Intimations of mortality, to paraphrase Wordsworth.” She laughed and snuggled against him.
“He killed that zebra for its hide,” Donn continued. “I couldn’t kill a zebra to save my life. It’s too much like a horse. Hell, I couldn’t kill anything. It’s mean, it’s wrong, it’s cruel.”
“You kill the birds well enough,” Dawn said.
“That’s different. It’s like skeet, back at the club. And anyway they’re good eating.”
“Well, you can kill me anytime you want to,” she said. “In your own particular way. The little death, isn’t that what they call it?”
He gave her a taste of the little death.
10
THE ROPE OF GOD
To the west, the country gradually descended, drying as it fell. Dongas choked with whistling thorn wound down from the height of land. Salt flats and soda lakes shimmered, pink and white, in the midday mirage. No tire tracks marred this deep sink, just the ancient troughs of game trails, filled with a powdery dust that filled the sinuses and tickled the eyes. A few small herds of Beisa oryx trotted off ahead of the truck, stopping only at a safe distance to look back.
“There,” said Winjah, braking the G.T. “You see before you the source of the unicorn myth.” On a low rise to their right, outlined against a milky backdrop, an oryx bull posed amidst his hareem. The dume was immediately distinguishable by his greater bulk, his thick horselike neck and shoulders. He had only one horn, a yard long at least and nearly straight, curved just a bit like a black saber. His mulish ears twitched and peaked as he studied them. “The males frequently lose a horn in the mating battles,” said Winjah. “As they are almost always seen at too great a distance for proper observation, it’s easy to imagine that the horn grows from the center of the skull.” He opened and then slammed the door of the truck. At the sound, the bull turned and galloped away with a bucketing gait. His hareem followed sedately.
“I’ve got one on my license, don’t I?” asked Bucky.
“Yes,” said Winjah, “but we’ll take him later. The deeper we penetrate the desert, the larger the oryx.” He grinned at Dawn. “We’ll stake out the fair beldame here as bait. The unicorn is said to go weak-kneed in the presence of a virgin.”
In the midst of the desert, toward sunset, they came on a lone jebel rising like a rotten fang beside a soda lake. Donn, who was riding in back with the trackers, thumped on the roof of the cab, their signal that he wanted to stop for a photograph.
“Let’s give it a few minutes,” he said. “We’ll have some dynamite light pretty soon. What the hell is that thing?”
Winjah wheeled up to the jebel, which rose nearly a hundred feet above the flat desert floor, pink now in the waning light and bloodred near its peak.
“Actually it’s the stub of an old mountain,” Winjah said. “But I’m sure the Samburu have some mystical explanation for it. See all the graffiti scribbled on the shaft?” Stick figures, crude stylizations of game animals (among them an elephant, or perhaps a mammoth), and wavy squiggles, all done in ocher, adorned the granite pillar. Winjah asked Machyana what they meant. The young Samburu told the story shyly, ducking his head from time to time as if everyone knew the tale to begin with. The other Africans listened and nodded wisely.
“He says this used to be the Rope of God,” Winjah translated. “The sky was much lower then than it is in these evil times, and God—Ngai as they call Him—was quite close to the earth in those days, much closer to man. The Samburu, Masai, and Wandorobo were one people back then, and they all grazed their cattle here. The country was greener, too, and there was much game. Now and then, though, the lions and hyenas would grow too numerous for the people to protect their cattle, or else the Tok would come down from Kansdu, drive the cattle away, and eat the people. That was when the Rope of God came in handy.
“From it flowed milk and blood in quantities as rich and copious as the people extracted from their own herds. In bad times, the Rope of God kept them alive. Ngai had made it clear, however, that this was only an emergency service, offered out of friendship, and not to be abused. One day, though, a Dorobo who had lost his cattle to the Tok got to thinking. If all that milk and blood flowed through the Rope of God, then there must be plenty of cattle up in the sky. He climbed the rope and found great herds grazing amongst the clouds. They were beautiful cattle, red and white, and the clouds were spun of milk and blood. And the whole of heaven smelled of it. He went to Ngai and asked him for the loan of some of these heavenly cattle, promising that he would replace them once they had calved and replenished his own herd. Ngai said sorry, he couldn’t help the Dorobo. The cattle must remain in the sky, else there could be no clouds or sunset. The Dorobo must make his own way on the earth.
“Angered, the Dorobo climbed back down the rope, took his simi, and cut the Rope of God. Great floods of blood and milk cascaded over the land, and the Rope itself, severed now, flailed like a beheaded python, thrashing away the grass and the cattle and the game. Then the Rope shriveled up, rising into the sky and taking the sky along with it. Contact with God was lost forever, and the Dorobo and his kinfolk from that time on were forbidden to keep cattle. God allowed them only to herd bees. Bees, he says, are their only cattle.”
Machyana laughed and nodded shyly as the hunter finished his translation. Lambat, the Dorobo, smiled proudly as Donn posed him, spear and sword in hand, beside the stub that was once the Rope of God. Off in the distance, a single saddle-billed stork padded slowly through the mud puddle—all that remained of that cataclysmic flood.
“A beautiful story,” said Donn.
“Yes,” Winjah replied, “but don’t get carried away too easily by African romance. This spot, in more recent years, was a way station on the slaving route from the interior to Mombasa. I once met an old man, a true Swahili, who had been through here many times. The Tok would come down from the hills to buy slaves to eat. The slavers had them chained to the base of the Rope of God—there, see the rusty bolts protruding? The slavers marked the choicer cuts with chalk, so much for a tender buttock, so much for a juicy arm. The head, though, was the most expensive, as the Tok like brains better than lean meat. This old Swahili slaver waxed quite nostalgic as he recalled the good old days. ‘Plenty food, plenty women,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’”
They camped that night beside the Rope of God, and after dinner they sipped brandy around the campfire and admired the play of firelight on the ochered stone. Donn worked on his notes. “Paradise Lost,” he wrote. “I can see now the source of Bucky’s fascination with Africa. It lies in the contrast of sheer ugliness with unbearable beauty, of real death with undying legend. I didn’t think he was that poetic, but he still has a lot to learn about the niceties. This is no Lindblad Tour.” He paused. “Though it certainly is comfortable.”
That night, Bucky woke with the fever. Shivering and sweating in alternate waves, he managed to light the candle beside his bed. Outside he could hear the African night scratching and tearing in time to the chattering of his teeth. He threw back the covers and listened while the ache spread down his neck and spinal column. When it reached his lower legs, he felt the Guinea worm move. He waited.
The Guinea worm emerged below his left ankle. It waved its pointy head at the candle flame and slithered farther, farther into the open air. Bucky could see it shiver to the exposure, or perhaps it was merely reverberating in time to his own shakes. Just before its tail cleared his skin, the Guinea worm rose to its full length—two feet at least—and swayed its cobra dance one last time. Bucky was too weak to grab it. It seemed to him in his fever that the Guinea worm was waving good-bye. He wanted to shake its hand.
Then the Guinea worm fell away and Bucky dropped into a sleep full of horror.
11
THE ORPHANED COLT
In the fever dream, Buck and his buddies were stalking the giant Abyssinian forest impala. It moved ahead of them through a dingle that darkened to their ever
y step. Now and then they caught glimpses of its roan back, bulging and warped as the muscles flowed red in the scattered light, like some huge deflating medicine ball that rolled ahead of them through the jungle. Once it stood looking back over its shoulder. Its neck, twisted at attention, seemed far too slim for the massive body beneath it, or the massive head above, the eyes too large for the foxy face. Between its lyrelike horns grew a smaller rack—resembling that of a starved Virginia whitetail—spread like a poor man’s Christmas tree.
“Quick,” said Winjah. “Take him.”
At the shot, the guard hairs on the ram’s neck puffed and flew, but he did not go down. Instead he lurched off into the dim wood. They followed, slowly, their feet leaden with the gumbo of Buck’s nightmare. Then the thorn forest thinned and they came to the edge of a lumberyard.
The trail led through the fence, past tall piles of fresh-sawed cedar as bright as the blood itself, almost as sweet.
“You’ll have to track him out on your own,” Winjah said. He looked at his watch. “I have to go. Another client is waiting.”
Blink.
Gone.
Bucky ran into the lumberyard office to get permission, but no one in the maze of cool marble corridors seemed to know where the boss was. Saws buzzed hollowly in the distance, a humming counterpoint to the clack of typewriters. Otiego ran up to report that the giant Abyssinian forest impala had left the lumberyard at the far end. Bucky could not find his rifle. Perhaps he had left it in the anteroom of the main office. A secretary, cool and brusque, could not help him. Had it been stolen? Then he found it, leaning against a water cooler, and he ran through the corridors, fumbling in his pockets for tokens to work the subway turnstiles that blocked every turning of the labyrinth.
At the far end of the lumberyard, beyond the slat fence, out in the eye of the sun again, he saw that the land dropped away into a deep industrial valley. A freeway ran past, and down below he could see factories spinning smoke into a yellow sky. The giant Abyssinian forest impala lay dead beneath the freeway overpass. Three figures crouched over it, knives winking in the smog. Spears stood stacked against the solemn, lopped-off head.
As Bucky trotted up, working a round into the chamber, the butchers turned to face him. Short, broad, their green eyes set deep in boulder-sized skulls, they began to click….
It was hot in the tent, hot and apple green with the smell of old canvas and the hard midafternoon sun slapping down between rainclouds. Part of it was the fever. Winjah was right, Bucky thought. I shouldn’t have tasted that blood. But it was a low-grade fever and Buck had hunted despite it. The combination of fires—sun on the outside, the slow peat bog smoldering in his veins—had tried the fat from him swiftly: A good twenty pounds now, he exulted. Fever-bright and giddy, he felt so slim that he was sure he could run the veldt with the easy speed of the trackers. Whatever weakness his fever had caused was more than compensated by the weight loss. Except for his shooting and the nightmares, he felt terrific. He had been shooting miserably.
First the impala—four easy standing shots in a row, each within two hundred yards, following a slow, crouched, energy-conserving stalk behind the cautious eyes of Lambat the Dorobo. And each shot had fallen short to the left, kicking dust from the brick-hard plain, the ram and his hareem pronking off at first in fear, then on the last shot merely cantering away, bored, bored at the persistent recurrence of this loud inept fly that always bit the earth before it reached them. “Let’s give him best,” said Winjah when he returned disgusted to the truck. “We’ll go on back to White Legs and have some lunch and a bit of a lie-down. You feeling all right, Bwana? You’ll have to shoot a lot better than that when we get up in the bogo country.”
But that was nothing compared to the humiliation of the following evening. Walking a dry watercourse toward dusk, they had spotted three eland bulls grazing in a mixed herd of impala and Burchell’s zebra. The eland stood mountainous and gray among the lesser animals, the largest of them half again the size of the others. Even at half a mile, Bucky thought, I couldn’t miss that big a target. But he did—and worse.
After pussyfooting up to the cover of a termite mound, Winjah had erected a bamboo tripod for Buck to use as a rest. The eland’s shoulder filled the scope, gray and grainy, so close that Bucky felt he could count the ticks crawling on the animal’s belly. He looked up from the scope to ask Winjah about shot placement: He meant this one to be perfect. “On the point of the shoulder,” Winjah said. “Break him down. That’s the .375 you’re shooting—should do the job.” Buck brought his eye back to the scope and concentrated on the cross hairs. When he had them steady on the gray field, just where the bulge of the shoulder blade turned, he began his squeeze: slow, smooth, gradual, so that when the rifle slammed back into his shoulder it came as much as a surprise to him as to the others.
“My God!” yelled Winjah. “You’ve shot a zebra!”
Buck cleared his eyes and stared. A striped heap lay still in the short grass. The rest of the herd pounded off, tails high, with the three unscathed eland bringing up the rear.
When they walked over they saw it was a zebra mare, taken cleanly through the shoulder.
“She’s still in milk,” said Winjah. He pressed a boot toe against the teats and a bluish trickle seeped out. “Maybe you should drink some of that, Bwana. It might ease your fever.”
“Well,” said Donn. “At least she didn’t suffer. The shot was right on the money.”
As they walked up the thorny rise after the fleeing eland, Buck heard a shrill, almost hysterical moaning echoing back toward them. It was the colt, Winjah explained disgustedly. Calling for its mother. They followed on for another mile before coming up to the eland again. This time the shot was longer. Buck put a round into the big bull, but after lying down for a minute it got up and walked off into a grove of fever trees. Gut-shot. They followed again. Lambat and Otiego circled upwind of the thorn thicket, casting for sign, while Winjah, Donn, and Bucky made their way slowly along the blood trail, which was spotty at best, the crushed dry earth soaking it up as quickly as it dropped. They heard Lambat and Otiego yelling and then the wounded bull emerged from a patch of cover to their left, angling away from them. Bucky raised the .375 and snap-shot, swinging on the shoulder at a scant seventy-five yards. He heard the bullet smack and saw the bull stagger, but it kept on going and before he could jack another round into the chamber had disappeared into thicker thorn along the dry riverbed.
“We’ll let him lie down for a while,” said Winjah. “That’s what he was doing when the trackers jumped him. Once the adrenaline is up in these larger animals, they can go forever even when they’re dead.” He shook his head. “That’s why the first shot is so important.” There was a bite to the words more bitter than the bark.
Buck smoked a cigarette. He could hear the colt crying in the distance. It was starting to cloud over and he could smell rain on the light southeasterly breeze that had sprung up. Down the rise to the right, he saw a figure approaching them—tall and skinny, wrapped in a dirty red blanket and carrying a spear.
“A Samburu,” said Winjah. “Heard the shot and hopes to collect a bit of meat for the old manyatta.” When the man came up to them, Winjah spoke to him in Swahili and the Samburu smiled. He had a long bony face with only a few yellow teeth remaining in his jaws, but he was very friendly. Lambat and Otiego took him with them as they set off to track out the wounded eland. Soon they heard a whistle.
“They’ve found him,” said Winjah. “Let’s go.”
The eland lay at the edge of a thick thorn copse, still alive. Its head swayed, large as a Volkswagen it seemed in the fading lemon light. The eyes were already glazed, sick, and the tongue lolled. Buck took the .22 magnum Anschutz rifle and walked around behind the bull, then put a bullet into the base of its skull. Still it would not die. He put in another. And another. At each shot, the bull flinched, then resumed its metronomic head-swaying. Finally Winjah took the .22 and on his second shot the bull sl
umped, dead at last. It began to rain.
Buck stood in the rain, thinking about botched bullfights he had seen years ago in Mexico. He felt sick. The truck came up with Dawn and the driver. It was nearly dark now. The Samburu was inside the eland, working at guts as thick as firehoses. An ankle-deep pool of blood, black in this light, covered his broad splayed feet. He sliced small chunks of fat with his simi and wolfed them down surreptitiously, eyes flashing incandescent in the sweet darkness for fear that he might be caught at his thievery. Buck walked over to the G.T. and got in next to Dawn. She smelled crisp and fresh in her starched khakis, and her long pale hair shone in the gunmetal dark. He put his head on her shoulder.
“You’re burning up,” she said, stroking his forehead.
The colt cried again in the darkness, and Bucky wept for the Guinea worm.
12
NIGHTWATCH
“In this best of all possible worlds
Rousseau’s father repaired watches
in a Turkish harem
which brings up the question of time
and why so much trouble with watches
when there’s nowhere to go
“No moon
and the light of all these stars
collecting in me
as some sniperscopes collect the light
of stars for killing
“Killed by the starlight
to be made infinite
drilled by the light of a star
dead for a century
to be loved by a woman
known as legend to my grandfather
“We are drawn to that space between stars
the insatiable blackness
consumes us
“I couldn’t sleep
so I got up and changed my name
with no excuse
anything’s possible
The Diamond Bogo Page 6