by Ninie Hammon
He set his camera aside and scooted down until he could stand without being seen from the other side of the hill. He stepped to the sack and shooed the birds away. Then he reached down to pick it up.
They saw each other at the same instant: Ron as he leaned over to pick up the sack of crumbs, the Arab as he rounded the corner of the hill. Ron froze in midreach; the Arab froze in midstride.
Eyes wide, their gazes fastened on each other.
The frozen moment lasted only a heartbeat before the soldier started to back away. He took two steps, then turned and ran, shouting as he stumbled around the corner of the hill toward the trucks.
Ron leapt up the hillside, grabbed his equipment and hissed at Masapha, “Outta here, now!”
He slung the strap of the camera over one shoulder, the camera bag strap over the other, snatched up the camcorder and was running full-out toward the jeep within seconds. Masapha grabbed the sound equipment. His short legs pumped frantically as he tore out for the jeep only a couple of steps behind Ron.
Ron and Masapha reached the stand of scraggly trees and bushes that hid the jeep just as the Arabs started shooting. The guns sounded like cannons, and bullets sang through the air above their heads. The soldiers couldn’t see them; they were shooting wildly. But they were shooting in the right direction!
The two men chucked their equipment into the back of the jeep, pushed away the branches of camouflage in one quick sweep and dove into the front seats. Ron turned the key in the ignition, and there was a second of silence during which both men aged 10 years before the engine caught and hummed to life. Ron jammed the gearshift into first, smashed the accelerator to the floor and popped the clutch all in one movement. The back tires kicked out a jet stream of small rocks as the jeep lurched forward, fishtailed slightly in the sand and then took off like a jackrabbit, bounding and bumping over the rutted trail.
In less than a minute, they were out of range of the soldiers’ rifles. But the Arabs kept firing anyway. Ron and Masapha could hear the gunshots until they faded to distant popping sounds, like fireworks in the sky a long way off.
Idris lay in the dark in the tukul, fighting the despair in his heart, struggling to banish the haunting memories so he could rest.
He didn’t know that at that moment, he was the only man in all of Mondala who was trying to go to sleep. In fact, he was the only man in the village who was even lying down.
What had happened to Idris had been the lone topic of conversation in the village from the moment the men in the millet field spotted him trudging down the mountain path.
Shortly after the evening meal, Durak and several other men had gone from tukul to tukul throughout Mondala and announced that the village elders had called a special meeting—not just of elders, but of the heads of every remaining family in the village. The meeting would convene after sunset around a fire in the open space in front of the two large rocks that marked the entrance to the village.
The men began to arrive as the pink glow of sunset faded from the western sky, walking alone or by twos and threes out of the village into the flickering firelight. They squatted on the ground or leaned against the rocks and murmured quietly among themselves. Every family in the village was represented. Except one. Idris Apot, whose hut was on the back side of Mondala overlooking the river, had not been invited to the meeting and knew nothing about it.
Many of the men knew, or had figured out, why the meeting had been called. Others could not even have guessed. When everyone was present, Durak stood and addressed the group. There were no preliminaries; he got right to the point.
“We all know that our neighbor Idris is back and that he did not find his daughter,” he said. “We know the story, that a man took his money and cheated him.”
The crowd nodded in agreement. Yes, they all knew the story.
“Idris was deceived,” Durak said. “He failed in his mission. But failure does not make him wrong. It does not make his mission wrong.”
The crowd grew quiet.
“That is why we are here tonight. We have come together to talk, to decide if we”--he made a broad gesture to include the whole group--“if we as a village should help Idris get his daughter back.”
For those who didn’t expect it, the statement was stunning. The shocked silence was followed by a rumble of sounds. Surprised reactions. Grumbles. Half sentences. Questions.
Finally, a man spoke in a voice that could be heard above the rest, and the rumble died down. He was a young man, early 20s, and not as sure of himself as the wise, old elder. But what he lacked in confidence he made up for in passion.
“I do not understand why we would even talk about this,” he said, confused and exasperated at the same time. “What is the point? We could not fight off the raiders when they rode down on us. And many died because we could not.”
He stopped and looked around. They all were acutely aware of the empty spots, the blank spaces in the meeting and in their lives that were once occupied by good men now buried in the nearby field out there in the darkness. The young man who spoke had lost his father, his brother and sister-in-law in the raid.
“If we were helpless on our own land and in our own village, how could we hope to fight these monsters in their land?”
Heads bobbed up and down; the men muttered in agreement.
An older man, thin and wiry, without a single tooth, looked kindly at the young man and spoke with great patience. “No one is suggesting that we use sticks and clubs to fight a rogue lion, my son. To fight a rogue lion, you need a bigger lion!”
A third man’s words tumbled out behind those of the toothless man. “At least Idris tried,” he said. “He was not like a wounded dog that sits around and licks his sores. He had the courage to walk through the wilderness to the city, alone. He had the courage”--he glanced at the older man--“to go looking for a bigger lion.”
A stocky man, short by Dinka standards, spoke then, trying to offer a voice of reason. He had an ugly, still-healing slash across his back, courtesy of a raider’s machete. “But we don’t know where she is,” he said and turned to the last man who had spoken. “Our trackers lost their trail in the rocks. Even if we had, as you say, a bigger lion, what good would it do if we don’t know where she is? She could be anywhere.”
Another man shot back, “So we don’t try? So we just sit here and do nothing?”
The man’s name was Magok and he was notorious for his hot temper. His wife and only son had died in the attack. “We let them have her without putting up a fight? She is alive! Alive! We cannot help those who have gone beyond the sun...”
There was a moment’s hesitation as his own pain took his words away. Then he went on more fiercely than ever.
“But she is not there,” he pointed into the darkness in the direction of the burying field, “in the ground, cold under the dirt. She is still alive! She is one of us, a child of ours.”
“She is not the only child of ours who needs our help,” said the younger man who had spoken first. His two-year-old had escaped with only minor burns when the raiders torched their tukul, and he’d taken in his dead brother’s two orphaned children. “We need to do all we can do for the children right here in the village who have lost mothers or fathers, or both.”
Magok weighed back in again, his voice rising: “If Akin had been cornered by jackals, would we say, ‘We cannot go and help her because there are other children in the village to care for?’ No! We would grab our weapons and fight them off and bring her home. We would not sit here and do nothing and let them tear her to pieces!”
For several minutes, the men hotly debated the opposing viewpoints. The mood of the group went first one way and then the other, swayed back and forth, persuaded by one speaker and then convinced of the opposite view by the next. Both sides presented reasonable arguments, but after almost an hour of furious debate, they were no closer to reaching a decision than when they started.
The big man had not said a word since the start
of the meeting. He had only listened, leaned back against the tree in the shadows just outside the puddle of light from the fire, chewing a blade of grass.
In the silence that followed a particularly impassioned speech, he put down his straw, stepped into the light and walked purposefully the few steps to the fire where everyone could see him.
Akec Kwol stood quiet for a moment and thought about what he was about to say before he spoke.
“You all know I am the richest man in the village,” he began.
Spitting on the ground in contempt, one of the men leaning up against the rock spoke with derision, “Akec, this is not the time to squawk like a parrot!”
Akec’s demeanor didn’t change. His next words were as carefully chosen as his first, “I am not here to squawk like a parrot. I am here to speak from my heart.”
That got everyone’s attention. His tone of voice was quiet, not belligerent. He seemed different somehow, though no one in the crowd could quite put his finger on how. They didn’t know that they were responding to the nonverbal, to the big man’s body language. He was not standing chest out and arrogant. His head was down, his hands palm-up.
“I have been a proud and boastful man,” he said quietly. “I have”--he looked at the man who had made the remark--“indeed, squawked like a parrot, making sure all who heard me knew that my herd of zebu was the largest herd in three villages or that my millet crop was twice as large as the crops in the next fields.”
He stopped, and let out a long breath. “I do not squawk now because none of that matters now.”
As the tallest man in a village of tall men, the force of Akec’s presence made an impression. He could look down on every other man in Mondala, and did. All his life, he’d used the force of his presence to press his advantage. Tonight, he knelt on one knee and fed sticks into the fire as he continued.
“I have lived in the tukul beside Idris for many years.” He stared into the flickering blaze. “I know better than any of the rest of you the measure of him. He is a fine man.”
As Akec watched red hot sparks float into the black night sky, he thought of the times Idris stopped and talked to him when other villagers avoided him. All the men gathered around the fire had known Idris all their lives; each plugged his own memory into the momentary silence.
The man whose daughter had been snatched by the raiders was not a splashy man, a man who stood out as a leader, a chief. He’d been a quiet, in-the-background neighbor so interwoven into the fabric of the community it was only when the men began to look at the individual threads that they realized how many ways Idris’s presence had knit the village together or kept it from unraveling. When he became a Christian, Idris had not changed dramatically. He had simply become more the man he already was.
“Idris is not just a good man, he is also a wise man,” Akec continued. “Wiser than we realized. He is a hunter, the best shot among us. But it was not just his skill with a bow and a spear that made him a good hunter. He could track and kill gazelle and reedbucks because he knew their habits, knew where to look for them, knew where they were likely to hide. That is why he knew he must find a hunter who understood his prey.”
His voice darkened. “A lion who knew their habits and their hiding places to track down the rogue lions that attacked us without warning and killed without cause or remorse.”
Akec reached for a larger stick that was lying beside where Durak squatted in the dirt, listening intently. He placed it in the fire, then rose to his feet.
“Idris was deceived and lost all he had, but who among us has not been deceived at one time or another? Sometimes we even deceive ourselves.” He spoke the next words softly. “I have deceived myself for most of my life.”
There was a questioning murmur in the crowd.
“I told myself that my cattle, my crops and my wealth were all that mattered in life. I told myself that it wasn’t important that none of you liked me.”
Many of the men looked away, didn’t want to make eye contact with Akec. But Akec didn’t notice; he wasn’t looking at them anyway.
“I deceived myself into believing that I was a happy, successful man.”
He turned and gestured toward the village.
“My tukul was not burned; my cattle and goats were not lost. And yesterday, my daughter brought my new granddaughter here for me to see for the first time.”
He smiled at the memory. The child had been born in a village downstream on the day Mondala was attacked.
“I held Aleul in my arms.” He paused, emotion making his words thick. “If someone took my Aleul away, to beat her and abuse her and turn her into a slave, I would give every possession I have, every cow, every goat, every stalk of sorghum, to get her back. It is the same with Idris.”
He turned slowly and looked into the men’s faces, lit by the dancing firelight.
“I saw many of you in the church when Pastor Maluong came to talk to us,” he said. “Do you remember the last time the pastor spoke? Do you remember what he talked about?”
Some of the men nodded. Most just waited for Akec to continue.
“I remember. He told us that God gave richly, without holding anything back. He gave his son, everything He had, to set us free. Idris held nothing back. He sold his cattle, took all his money, gave everything he had to bring his daughter back out of the mouths of jackals and lions.”
Akec looked back at the sleeping village and watched its few remaining fires send sparks into the velvet night.
“As the sun was setting, I held my Aleul in my arms. I would have given my life to keep her safe! But where was Akin at sunset? Where is she now? Who is taking care of her? What terrible thing might be happening right now, this minute, to little Akin?”
He stopped and turned back toward the other men and the steel of determination was in his voice.
“It will cost much to get her back, whether we hire someone to find her or pay a ransom ourselves. But let my words and this day be a witness that I will give as many cows and as many possessions as it takes to bring back Akin Apot, the daughter of Idris.”
When he finished speaking, there were no dissenting voices. No arguments. There was only silence.
The next morning Akec appeared at Idris’s door shortly after sunrise.
“You must come with me,” he said simply. “Both of you.”
With no further explanation, he turned and headed down the path that led along the outside of the village toward the road. Idris and Aleuth looked questioningly at each other and then followed, confused. When they looked around, they saw no one. The village was empty.
When they passed the tukul that sat a short distance back from the big rocks at the front of the village, Aleuth and Idris stopped in their tracks. They were too surprised to do anything but stand and stare at the wide, flat area where the preceding night a meeting had been held to determine the fate of their family.
Stretched out silently before them, several people deep, was every surviving member of their Dinka village, every man, woman and child. No one had stayed behind to tend a fire or make a meal. No one had gone to the field to work their millet crop or stake out their cattle.
At least 10 zebus were tethered to the tree Akec had leaned against the preceding night. Nearby, several goats were roped together, held by two small boys. Laid out in the dirt in front of them were woven reed baskets that contained everything imaginable, everything the other villagers considered valuable. Assortments of nuts and fruits, open baskets of threshed millet, knives, a pair of scissors, dried animal skins, all were neatly spread out like an elegant tablecloth on the ground.
Idris said nothing. His mind stumbled, fumbled for a frame of reference to figure out what it all meant.
Durak made his way through the grand display of gifts toward the stunned, speechless couple.
“Idris, you were right,” the old man said. “To save your daughter, you went looking for a hunter who understood the prey you were seeking. You went looking for a bigger
lion, and you failed to find one. But you were right to try. Take this”--he spread his arms in an expansive gesture that took in all the valuables the villagers had gathered--“all of this, and try again.”
Idris felt his knees go weak, and he struggled to remain standing. Beside him, Aleuth cried softly.
“We will help you search for Akin until everything of value in the village is gone,” the old man said.
Chapter 10
After half an hour of frantic flight, Masapha turned around and sat down in the seat. He’d been peering through the dust the jeep’s back tires shot into the air like a plume of water behind a racing boat.
“What?” Ron dared to take his eyes off the trail for a moment.
“We are not being chased by somebody,” the Arab said matter-of-factly. “When we came up that last hill, my vision could look a couple of miles. No dust. Behind us, nobody is coming.”
Gradually, Ron’s heart rate returned to normal. The speed he was driving didn’t. It was more than an hour after they had leapt into the jeep with bullets whizzing over their heads before Ron let off the accelerator.
The two rode along in silence as the afternoon sun dropped slowly toward the horizon. The landscape gradually changed. The desert sand dotted by scrub brush in varying shades of brown gave way to patches of farmland and clumps of stunted trees.
“Now what?” Masapha finally asked. “What is the next happening in your life after you present to your friend at the BBC the film and the words you will write?”
Ron gave Masapha a big grin. “Surely, you don’t think we’re finished with this story.”
“Well, yes. We came to do a thing and we have done it, didn’t we?”
Ron wagged his finger in Masapha’s face. “Oh, no, no, no! As somebody important, whose name escapes me right now, once said, ‘We have only just begun to fight.’”
“Fight what?”
Ron considered trying to explain that one but thought better of it. “You and I, we’re going to get it all, the big Kahuna. I want interviews with slaves. And their masters. Shoot, I’d interview a slave trader, too, in fact, if I could get one to talk to me!”