The Sky And The Forest

by C. S. Forester

  They hurried from tree to tree, waiting to look and to listen, and then hastening on. They had just had the best possible lesson in the results of incautious movement, and they took it to heart. Loa saw a footprint in the soft earth beside a tree, and leaped aside instinctively as if it were a snake, but it was only a pygmy's footprint, as the small size and the high instep proved -- perhaps it had been made by the man he had just killed. At another moment Lanu held up his hand imperatively for them to stop, trying the air with his nostrils. The others imitated his behaviour. Faint upon the air was a scent of wood smoke, the tiniest trace of it. There was only the gentle air of wind through the forest, which must be carrying to their nostrils the smoke of the little people's cooking fires. The camp must be upwind in that direction, with the women and the little children and the old men; the line they had broken through was composed of the hunters. Loa swung round and headed off in a fresh direction, for he had no wish to come to the camp -- there might still be some hunters there. They crossed a broad lane trampled through the forest by a herd of elephants -- the air was redolent with the fresh droppings -- and pushed on without pause. They were hungry and thirsty, but there was neither time nor opportunity to gather food when from behind any tree the feathered death might come without warning. Later in the day came a storm, when Loa's brother the sky raved above the treetops, his face dark with rage, until within the forest everything was nearly as black as night, and streams of water poured down upon them, chilling their naked bodies and wetting their braided bowstrings until it would hardly be possible to send an arrow thirty yards.

  They camped in misery, huddling together, all three of them, at the foot of a tree where the earth was not quite so damp, but they had hardly lain down when a terrible event brought them to their feet again. The sky had demonstrated his rage in a final access of mania. The roar of the thunder was accompanied by a flash of lightning which played all round them; they were deafened and blinded, and the thunder's roar was accompanied by a rending crash. The tree next to theirs had been smitten by the sky's lightning-axe, and had split from summit to bole. The paralyzed seconds which followed were punctuated by the sounds of wreckage falling. In the pitch-black night a great branch fell with a crash beside them, shaking the earth. Above them the blasted tree slowly tore through the spider web of creepers and crashed sideways down, shattering the branches of its neighbours, until it hung at an angle, unseen, over their heads, while the smaller fragments, falling from branch to branch, rained down all round them.

  They clung to each other in terror, with Lanu howling loudly in the middle until Musini quieted him. Indeed the sky had been very angry with them, and they were lucky that he had missed his aim. Yet what had they done to rouse his anger thus? He was still very angry, for his ravings could still be heard overhead; at any moment he might return and deal another blow -- Loa clung to Musini at the thought of that. What could it be that had infuriated him so? What had they done differently from usual? Loa searched his memory and his conscience. They had killed the little man, but surely the sky would not be angry with his own brother for the killing of a mere forest pygmy, and yet -- was the sky his brother? The old habit of believing it, rudely shaken when the slavers captured him, had asserted itself again lately, but never with its old force, and now Loa's doubts returned redoubled. He might be--he probably was -- only one more inconsiderable ant creeping about among the trees. He thought of the dead body of the pygmy, lying in the abandon of sudden death, the red blood oozing from its wounds. The little people were malevolent magicians. Perhaps by spells and incantations they had roused the anger of the sky. Maybe his victim, after death, had ascended to the sky and himself clamoured for vengeance in a way that had admitted of no denial. Maybe he had returned and was creeping about even now in this utter blackness that surrounded them. Loa thought of the uncounted dead of the forest and the numberless ghosts -- why, even Nessi might be among them -- that might be stalking between the trees until terror overcame him and he howled as loudly as Lanu had, and he searched urgently for Musini's embrace, shaking with fright.

  “Peace, peace. Lord,” said Musini soothingly.

  Her hands stroked his shoulders and his spine and by their soothing touch moderated his terror. Such a little man that he had killed, a full two feet shorter than Loa's own massive bulk. The low growl of thunder, far distant now, that responded to this thought was in its way reassuring. The sky may have been angry, but his anger was clearly subsiding. He may have struck a mighty blow, but, when all was said and done, the blow had missed. He, Loa, was still alive. He had once been enslaved, but now at least he was free; a homeless wanderer in the forest, but free. The pygmy may have invoked the anger of the sky; but the pygmy was dead, and he was alive, with his flail ready to his hand to kill any other little magicians that might cross his path. He would not only kill them but he would eat them, roasting their bloody joints at a fire and champing them up with his teeth. A magician roasted and eaten and borne within his own belly could do him no harm -- the idea of it appealed to Loa's comic sense and set him off in a roar of laughter that startled Musini far more than his howlings had done, for she was a level-headed person and her husband's eccentric hysterias still occasionally took her by surprise.

  But the laughter was a more cheerful and reassuring symptom than howlings of terror. All three of them gradually subsided into sleep as the rain ceased, despite their fright and the wet and the hunger, and when daylight came there was something oddly cheering in the sight of the shattered branches all round them, and the huge tree hanging almost directly over their heads -- the whole top of it, and a portion of the trunk, while the rest of the trunk was split and rent nearly to the ground. In truth the sky had dealt a mighty blow and had missed. It was even possible that Loa's brother the forest had come to their rescue, for was not the treetop sustained by the creepers and branches of the rest of the forest?

  All the same, the forest might not really be their friend, for with their awakening came the realization that they were utterly lost. Today there was no friendly stream at hand to give them the comfort -- even perhaps the false comfort -- of a sense of direction. Their wide detour of yesterday, forced upon them by their encounter with the little people, had taken them far away from it, and in which direction it now lay was more than any of them could guess. All the glades of the forest looked alike to them, and they could not tell by which one they had arrived the night before in the darkness of the storm, and the deluges of rain had washed away all hope of recognizing their trails.

  “Which way. Lord?” asked Musini; her ignorance led her to address him with the honorific, instead of as any wife might speak to any other husband.

  “I will tell you,'‘ said Loa, heavily.

  Really he had no notion at all, but admitting it would be of no help to anyone, and certainly not to himself. He squatted down and pressed his fists into his eye-sockets in the old gesture. It helped him to shut out distracting influences; for that matter it helped to stop him from thinking sensibly, so that his instincts and his subconscious memory were allowed full play. In the inner recesses of his mind calculations took place without his knowledge or volition, estimates of how far, and in what directions, they had gone in their circuit round the little people. Something was stirring in his brain when he stood up again and peered round him. So slight was the trend of the ground about them, as far as they could see through the trees, that no cool, thinking mind could have noticed any at all, but all Loa's physical sensitiveness was active. He had not thought at all -- he had not even made the simple deduction that downhill would lead to water -- but he could tell which was the way, and he could point to the right direction. He wanted to go downhill, and he knew which was downhill.

  “Come,” he said, and he started off, so that the others had to collect their poor impedimenta and hasten after him.

  The thought that was in Loa's mind as he led the way was quite irrelevant; he was thinking that if Nessi were still with them this would be
just the moment for her to say that she was hungry, and his recollection of her peevishness went far to reconcile him to losing her. For Musini never complained, bearing hardship and danger without a word -- Loa was thinking idly at this moment about how poorly Nessi would have come through the ordeal of yesterday -- and Lanu was a hard-bitten veteran. It was Musini and Lanu who contributed the whole sum of their small knowledge of how to live in the forest. It was Lanu who knew how to make a bow, Musini who knew how to braid bowstrings. Loa did not even yet know which creeper it was whose juice made arrow-poison. Musini had the domestic knowledge, which was of great use; Lanu, thanks to his boy's experiences in a childhood spent wandering about and around the town, and his observation of what men did, knew of the other arts. But Lanu's cheerful endurance of hardship, his fatalist carelessness about the future, his manual skill and ingenuity were qualities beyond all price. All that Loa could contribute to the partnership was his physical strength and his mind, which thought quickly after his recent experiences; and, above all, the fact that he was Loa, the born god, accustomed to lead and to be obeyed, with a natural assurance that might command confidence or at least blind faith.

  Confidence and faith were put to the test during the next several days, for it was not that day nor the next that they came back to the stream. The forest undulates very slightly; it is to be presumed that Loa led his party on a course far from straight, while the necessity for seeking food naturally made their progress slow. They were hungry all the time -- hardly sustained by funguses and white ants -- white ants took long to collect and were not at all sustaining. The forest fruits did not even cheat their stomachs, but rather mocked them. They saw traces of the little people here and there, which keyed them up and set them peering fiercely about them, and not only because of the danger. The little people were meat, meat on two legs. Loa's starving stomach yearned for a pygmy, and he longed to meet one alone in the forest -- away from his fellows-- so that he and Lanu could kill him and make a fire on the spot to cook him. But chance brought no little men their way.

  In the end chance -- or Loa’s instincts -- brought them back to the stream again. For some time their course had lain along a minor watercourse, a mere thread of water winding through boggy undergrowth. And then the boggy area grew more extensive, the character of the forest changed perceptibly in a morning's march, and they found themselves beside what they had come to look upon as their own stream -- if indeed it was the original one; it may well have been some other. That did not matter, and the thought did not occur to them. Here was a tree round whose base had fallen ripened pods of forest beans; that was what mattered most, while they could hear bullfrogs croaking in the distance. They camped at once, and lit a fire, and Lanu and Loa left Musini beside it to pound and roast beans into digestibility, while they went off to catch frogs. While there were beans and frogs no one need despair.

  CHAPTER 12

  For four or five days more they followed the course of the stream. The water surface of it was wider than before; here and there it even widened into marshy pools a hundred feet across, so wide that the trees did not meet over them and they could see the sky overhead, and with reeds and weeds growing thickly in them, wherein lived a myriad birds and a myriad mosquitoes. On one occasion Loa found Lanu crouching intent and anxiously on a bit of firm ground beside one of these pools. Lanu gesticulated for silence and Loa crouched beside him obediently. A big grey parrot came flapping across the lake, and settled on a branch within range, and Lanu trained his arrow round upon it inch by inch, the motion almost imperceptible. At last he released the arrow, and with a sharp hum of the cord it sped true and straight at the parrot, which dropped stunned into the still water of the pool. Lanu gave a cry of triumph, and started towards the bird; his feet were actually in the muddy water at the edge when there was a surge upon the surface. A huge evil head emerged with gaping jaws, the jaws armed with large conical teeth -- the most frightening, the most horrible sight they had ever seen. The jaws engulfed the floating parrot, and the head disappeared, to be replaced momentarily by a long tail that swept the water and then vanished in a flurry; the ripples broke against Lanu's legs as he stood petrified in the shallows. He fled back terrified to cling to Loa, and Loa embraced him to comfort him, although he was terrified as well. No transmitted memory of hairy devils could equal that sight, and the unexpectedness of it added to the horror.

  “What was it? What was it, Father?” asked Lanu, his frightened hands clutching at Loa's bare skin.

  “Some snake or other, without a doubt,” said Loa, with all the calm he could muster; he was preventing himself from shuddering at the memory only by the strongest exertion of will. It was his love for Lanu that made him exert this self-control when he had never tried to control himself in his life.

  “Let us go away from here, Father,” said Lanu. “Let us go quickly.”

  “We shall go,” said Loa, as soothingly as he could; he still made himself retain his calm in the face of the infection of panic. “First pick up your bow and your arrows and your axe. We need not leave those for the snake.”

  The matter-of-fact words went far towards calming Lanu. He obediently picked up his weapons with one hand while he wiped his beslobbered face with the other. He was in no panic as he led the way from that fatal pool, so that Loa walking in his footsteps felt that they were not walking fast enough, although he refrained from saying so. That water-dwelling devil had turned a cold, horrible eye upon them as he swallowed the parrot; Loa, shuddering, wondered if that glance would cause them to waste away, would cast them into the sleeping sickness, perhaps, or bring them ill fortune in the matter of food or in their next encounter with the little people. It had brought them ill fortune at the moment, for the matter of that, because all they had for supper that night were the beans Musini had bruised and toasted for them.

  Musini listened to Lanu's voluble account of the horrible apparition in the pool.

  “Big, mother. Big -- big -- big!”

  Words failed Lanu when he tried to tell of the ugliness of the creature, or the frightening effect it had upon him.

  “Indeed a big snake,” said Musini, looking at Lanu's outspread arms.

  She glanced at Loa, who was chewing beans, and the glance told her a good deal about Loa's feelings; she knew him too well to be deceived by that stolidity of manner.

  “Such things live in the water,” said Musini, indifferently, “as elephants do in the forest.”

  It was Loa whom she was trying to cheer up; she herself was frightened by Lanu's description, and in other circumstances she might have allowed herself to indulge in her fear, but as it was she cunningly set herself to minimize the occurrence. Her allusion to elephants was apt and effective, for the elephant, huge and terrible though he was, was not the object of utter fright such as this new creature inspired. Elephants were the lords of the forest, roaming where they would; if they chose to enter the town's banana grove and strip it of its crop nothing could deter them, and yet elephants were not supernatural. Once in a great while one would fall into the pits dug for them, and would die upon the poisoned stakes and under the poisoned arrows shot into them by brave men. Loa had eaten roast elephant, and a man could hardly cherish superstitious fears of something he had eaten and whose tusks had for so long adorned his house.

  “That is so,” agreed Loa, parentally pontifical, and Musini could see that this time it was not all a pose. Being married to a god for a dozen years had given her a curious insight into the supernatural.

  They went on down the stream, skirting the marshes that bordered it. The marshes grew wider and wider, compelling them to keep farther and farther from the water, until at last, without almost no warning, they came to the great river. Walking in the twilight of the forest, they could see a growing whiteness beyond, shafts of light penetrating between the tree trunks; they smelled the raw smell of the decaying river vegetation, so unlike the faintly musty smell of the forest, but they were not ready for the full revelati
on when they reached the river, when they stepped out from the last tree into the immensity of the daylight. The river was huge at this point, gleaming metallically in the sunshine. The farther bank was a mere dark strip on the horizon, and Loa, looking across at it, felt the familiar inward shrinking and vertigo at the brightness and the immense distances. He wanted to cower back, but Lanu was beside him troubled by no misgivings. Overhead Loa's brother the sky, the vastest thing in all their experience, glared down at them; but at their backs was his friendly brother, the forest, ready to afford them shelter and protection. With the moral support of the forest, and with Lanu and Musini beside him, Loa was willing to meet the sky's unyielding stare -- the sky that had flung lightning at them, the sky which made them miserable with rain, the sky under which that awful creature had emerged from the lake to swallow the parrot. But Lanu and Musini were paying only scant attention to the sky; it was upon him that they were conferring their blinking respect, for he had led them through the trackless forest through all these endless days and had brought them out here to the river, which they knew and recognized. Neither of them knew how much chance had had to do with it; neither of them had followed the obscure reasoning in Loa's mind -- more instinct and superstition, if the truth must be told, than reasoning -- regarding the flowing downhill of water, which, combined with his memory of the trend of the country, had determined him on their course.

  Neither Loa nor his family knew about the possibility of rivers flowing in great arcs; they had no means of knowing about it. They turned and set their faces downstream along the great river. They had a definite route to follow, and were much the happier in consequence. They knew that it was possible for someone lost in the forest to wander for a lifetime in an area ten miles square, and they could be certain this at least would not be their fate. It was not easy to travel at the water's edge -- in fact marshes and the obstructions of the forest made it almost impossible -- but it was easy enough to find their way along a short distance from the river, certain that it was on their right hand. Often they were within sight of the water and its marvels. They gazed breathlessly one day at a herd of vast creatures disporting themselves in the shallows, snorting and grunting, swimming with deceptive ease and lumbering through the reeds like elephants in a manioc patch. More than once they saw canoes upon the water, the paddles flashing in the sunshine. That meant men were there, and not the little people of the forest, either. Loa knew much about canoes as a result of his experience in the slavers’ camp, so that he could give answers to Lanu’s eager questions about them -- conveying information that was satisfactory, if not correct. At the water's edge there was more chance of a fair shot at one of the birds which flew in clouds among the trees, and once Loa himself managed to hit a monkey with an arrow. The little brute fled straight up a tree before the poison began to work in him, and he clung for a long time to a branch, crying pitifully -- Loa and Lanu would have laughed at the amusing sight if they had not been so desperately interested in the chance of getting fresh meat -- as the paralysis crept over him, and even when he showed no signs of life he still clung on, far out of reach, while Loa and Lanu waited below, almost in despair before the muscles relaxed and the dead monkey came tumbling down through the branches to fall with a satisfactory thump to earth. That night they ate fresh meat and rejoiced; it was fortunate, from the point of view of all forest hunters, that the minute amount of poison introduced into an animal's circulation paralyzed its brain but had no effect on the human stomach, at least after cooking.