The Sky And The Forest

by C. S. Forester

  Everything he could see of it told him that it was in use; it seemed to be complete, and no one would trouble to rebuild a pen when the victims had been taken out. But if the inmate, or inmates, were lying down -- as was to be expected -- he would not be able to see them. Loa looked all round the village and the open space. He was as near to the pen as he could ever get unobserved; there would be no advantage in a further change of position. He set himself to wait, to see what would happen. The sun blazed down into the undergrowth around him so that he was in a steady trickle of sweat; insects plagued him and hunger and thirst assailed him, but he forced himself to lie there waiting; he called to his assistance all the endless patience of the forest.

  If there was a victim in the cage it might well be Musini or Lanu -- they even might both be there. He had not realized, when they camped the night before, either how near they were to the town nor how near the town was to the river. It was confirmation of his previous theory. Being as near to the river as this the town might easily be populated by the canoe-using people whom he knew to exist, and if it were, it seemed far more likely that it was a canoe from this town which had captured his wife and child than one from any other town. If that were the case it would be Lanu and Musini who would be in that cage. Their captors would certainly fatten them before eating them; Loa remembered realistically how worn and thin they both were. He called forth fresh reserves of patience.

  At last the drum ceased to beat and the dance stopped. At first in ones and twos and then in an increasing stream people began to leave the place of the dance and distribute themselves through the town. Loa lay very close to the earth and peered out with only one eye, for there was much more chance of detection now that there were idle eyes to glance round the circle of vegetation that hemmed in the town. People entered the houses near at hand; Loa could hear the voices of the women, sometimes raised stridently as they chided the children. Then an old woman emerged from one of the houses; on her white hair she carried a big wooden jar; in each hand a wooden dish. Loa watched her with tense excitement. Straight to the pen she went, squatted carefully with her head still upright to put down what she held in her hands, and then lifted down the jar. Then she began to unfasten the pen. She passed in the big jar, and received it back again -- Loa could not see from whom. Then she passed in one of the wooden platters, and proceeded to open the pen at another point. She passed in the jar, took it back, and passed in the other platter. She went to the first place again, took out the platter, passed in the jar again, and received it back. She fastened up the pen at that point, and then exactly repeated her actions at the second place. Then, with empty jar and platters, she made her way back to the house again. There could be no clearer proof that there were two people in the pen -- a child could have made that deduction. Loa was quite certain. And the fact that two people were there made it more likely that they were Lanu and Musini; pairs of victims must be rare.

  Loa lay in the undergrowth while the sun mounted over the town and the heat rose to its hideous maximum. It was plain enough that if he intended to rescue his family he must wait until nightfall -- a child could have made that deduction, too. But it was not so easy to make detailed plans. Loa had to make his unaccustomed mind think; what was harder still, he had, almost for the first time in his life, to set himself consciously to work observing and learning. He had to study the town and its ways, basing his plans on what he saw and on the deductions to be drawn from his observations. His forehead wrinkled with the effort. And he was very thirsty, and if he had not been so acutely conscious of his thirst he would have been unpleasantly hungry. It called for all Loa's reserves of character to make himself lie there and rivet his whole attention on what was going on before him.

  On the far side of the clearing, over on his right, there seemed to be an entrance into the town, by which numerous people came and went. Yet the river must be very close at hand there. Yes, of course. There were women coming and going, and without any doubt they were bearing water jars on their heads; to judge by their gait, empty jars when they went out and full ones when they returned. There was a house concealing the actual pathway from Loa's view; he could only see people as they emerged from it and as they entered into it. Yet there was just a subtle difference in their manner of walking the moment they appeared or disappeared; Loa strained his splendid eyesight to make sure. There could be no doubt about it. At that point there was a steep downslope, and that house must be built on the very lip of the bluff running down to the river, and up that slope the town's drinking water must be carried.

  Men used the same entrance frequently. Loa saw a little group come striding in with something of triumph in their manner. One of them bore a string of glittering white things which he displayed for inspection to the passers-by before disappearing into a house. Loa could not imagine what they were, for he had never seen fish before, but he did at least reach the conclusion that the town's canoes must lie at the water's edge at the foot of the path there. He could think of no other reason for men to use the path.

  When, during the coming night, he had freed Musini and Lanu, they would have to escape from the town. Over there was one possible exit; so much he knew. At least half of the town was closely ringed in by tangled second-growth forest, such as was sheltering him at the moment. It might offer shelter, but it offered small possibility of escape. No one in darkness could possibly make his way into the undergrowth for more than a yard or two. It might be that the three of them could hide there during the darkness, and with the coming of light make their way out through the tangled belt -- the way he had come -- to the freedom of the forest. That would be very dangerous, all the same, because the moment the escape was discovered there would be a serious search, and they might be tracked and hunted down in the undergrowth. It was a possible scheme, but not a very good one. Loa's utterly untrained mind struggled frantically with these alternatives. It was a terrible effort to deal thus with theories, for he had done hardly any theoretical thinking in his life. To weigh one intangible against another was for Loa an exercise far more unusual and exhausting than the schoolmen had found the theological speculations of the Middle Ages.

  On the far side of the town, beyond the point where the dance had taken place, women appeared every now and then carrying hands of bananas on their heads. At that end of the town, as far as Loa could vaguely make out, there was some sort of street running into the open square, and it was from this street that the bananas were being brought in. That must be the way to the cultivated ground, to the banana groves and the manioc gardens, and it was another possible way of escape to the forest. But Loa ruled that out as soon as his mind was able to weigh the pros and cons; it was a long way over there, it involved going down a street, and there was no certainty that the way would not be barred by clearings, or that they could find it in the dark if it were not. Loa began to pay more and more attention to the exit from the town to the river. He was not consciously learning its bearings -- his imagination was not lively enough to lead him to do that -- but he was learning them subconsciously.

  Another old woman was carrying out food and drink to, the pen. Loa watched all her actions, which were just similar to those of the old woman who had preceded her. He saw the big jar of water being handed in, and he groaned with desire. His unexercised imagination was quite capable of visualizing the cool water in that jar his parched tongue moved over his dry lips at the thought of a long drink. As thirst began to consume him, Loa almost came to envy Musini and Lanu in their pen. The temptation began to come to him to withdraw again into the overgrown clearing, to find his way out through it back to the river where he could slake his thirst in the hope of returning to his present hiding place before dark. Loa resisted the temptation; everything about that scheme was too dangerous. It was for the sake of Musini and Lanu that he forbore; peril to him meant peril to them, and in that case he was prepared to endure his thirst.

  Thirst at least made him forget his hunger. The appetizing odours that came
from the cooking pots excited no emotion in him at all; he analysed them with curiosity and interest, but they did not make him hungry as he lay there slowly roasting -- simmering, rather -- in the shade. The strange unknown smell of cooking fish came to his nostrils, and he observed it with distaste, for to him it was unpleasant; it heightened the prejudice, the hatred, he felt towards this town, so that when a stronger whiff of it than usual reached him he unconsciously wrinkled his upper lip in a snarl and his hand went out to the axe that lay beside him. The great heat of the day was over now for him; it was a grateful moment -- a moment almost sharply defined -- when the sun ceased to glare down on him and the tops of the trees behind him interposed between him and the sun. The shadows in the open space of the town became longer, and with the movement of the sun he could see the pen more clearly. It was very like any pen that would have been constructed in his own town, except that it had been given little gable ends and ridgepole roof, almost like the houses in his own town and in contrast with the houses in this town. The roof was thatched with leaves, presumably to keep out the rain, for the tree under which it stood gave it shade. Certainly this town gave much attention to its captives. Even as Loa watched he saw a third meal taken out to the pen, and how many had been given before his arrival he did not know. Musini and Lanu were being well fed in preparation for their feeding of others. And as the shadows grew longer still, Loa saw the same old woman who had brought the last meal escorted over to the pen by a couple of men. They took lengths of creeper and tethered her to the pen, by the waist and by the ankle, apparently -- it was too far off for the smallest details to be seen -- and left her there. That was exactly the way Delli had been guarded after her capture; it ensured that the prisoners would not pick apart during the night the fibres that caged them in. That was all that was in the minds of the townspeople -- it was all that had been in Loa's mind when he had given the same orders regarding Delli -- but it was a complication when it came to a question of rescue from without. Loa grimly noted on which side of the pen the old woman chose to lie down.

  Evening was nearly at hand now. The shadows of the trees were stretching far, far, across the open space. A couple of boys gathered together the half-dozen goats that had been tethered to browse on the edge of the town, and herded them away to some unseen destination where presumably they would be safe from the nocturnal attack of leopards. Everybody in the town, it seemed, chose this time of day to come out to gossip and exchange news, just as they did in Loa's own town. There were passers-by innumerable in the open space -- a few of them clustered now and then about the pen to view the curious couple confined there. Loa thought from their movements that they laughed heartily, and this puzzled him a little. Even if he had remembered how everyone had laughed at Delli it would not have helped him to draw the right conclusion. He had not learned yet to be objective enough to think of Musini and Lanu as figures of fun to strangers. He saw the spectators slap their thighs and prance in apparent amusement, and he could not think why. But he did not let that problem bother him; he conscientiously devoted those last few minutes of daylight to a final study of the ground, so that when darkness came he was ready for action.

  The first impulse was to move at once, but he resisted it sternly. He had to wait until the town was asleep. The limitations of his vocabulary and the culture in which he lived expressed themselves in his lack of any idea corresponding to the word “hour.” He could divide the day from sunrise to noon, from noon to sunset, but he could not express to himself the idea of waiting a couple of hours. “As long as it would take a man to get hungry” would have been one of his ways of expressing the period of time it would be desirable to wait, but Loa was hungry already and any such term would have appeared absurd to him in consequence. In the utter darkness of the night there were a few gleams of light in the town, but only two or three. On the far side there was the glow of a fire, and near it were two small points of light. There could not well be more, not even in this town where fish from the river supplemented an almost purely carbohydrate diet. Oil to supply fat was far too scarce and precious to be wasted in lamps, although even Loa was acquainted with lamps -- a wooden saucer of oil in which floated a lighted wick of vegetable fibre. If men wanted to stay awake, they could sit in the dark or by the light of a fire; but few men did. The night was the time for sleep, eleven hours of it at least, and any light at night time attracted so many insects as to make it undesirable to stay near it.

  It was not surprising to see the lights soon go out and the fire die away to nothingness, but Loa still waited. Now his brother the sky came to his help -- the sky which so often before had malignantly plagued him; furthermore, the help the sky brought was in the form of the rain which usually distressed him. There was a very distant rumble of thunder, so distant that not even a glimmer of lightning was visible in the town, and then came the first heavy drops, falling like pebbles on his back. Loa blessed the rain. He turned over and opened his mouth to the sky, and the rain that fell into it eased his frightful thirst. Soon it was raining with African violence, deluging down as if the whole atmosphere had been made of water. The roar of it was tremendous; he allowed himself to wriggle out from the undergrowth into the open space, and he instantly found a puddle from which he could drink his fill. While the rain fell nothing could be seen or heard; now was the time for action.

  The string of his bow had long been released. He slid his arm into the loop and slung the bow over his shoulder, and then with axe in one hand and two arrows in the other he proceeded to crawl forward towards the pen. The roar of the rain made elaborate precautions unnecessary, but Loa took no risks. He inched himself forward through the mud into which the bare earth of the open space had immediately been converted. The very houses between which he first passed were invisible on either side of him. Chance depressions made big pools in which he had to be careful not to splash, but all the same he went straight through them. There was the danger that in the night he would not find the pen; although his sense of direction was acute and although he had studied for so long the line he had to follow he could not possibly risk making any detour from the straight. He crawled on and on in the roaring darkness, on and on, until, inevitably, the doubt began to grow in his mind as to whether he had taken a wrong direction and had passed the pen by. For some moments he stopped to consider that possibility, with the rain deluging upon him, soaking his woolly hair so that the water poured into his eyes and incommoded him. There was nothing for it but to crawl on; if his luck had been bad he would know it when he reached the far side of the open space, and that would be the time to think what he should do next. He put forward his hand to resume crawling, and snatched it back as if it had touched something red-hot. What he had touched was a wet and bony human foot. During that time when he had been considering he had been lying within a yard of the old woman tethered to the pen. As the realization came to him he drew up his knees to spring. The old woman uttered a bad-tempered squawk. She must have been nodding off even in the rain, for she did not appreciate the significance of that slight touch on her foot. Perhaps she had not felt it, perhaps she attributed it to a wind-blown leaf, or perhaps in her stupefied condition she did not react quickly to it although she knew what it implied. That little squawk, almost unheard in the rain, was her instant undoing. The touch of her foot and the sound of her voice told Loa -- told his instincts, for he acted quicker than thought -- how her body was lying, and his spring carried the weight of his body upon her with a crash, and his hands sought urgently for her throat. His knees in her skinny belly squirted all the wind out of her. His hands found her hair, her face, her throat, and closed upon it. But the struggle was frightful. She was only a skinny old woman, but the pangs of suffocation called out tremendous efforts from her limbs. Her first convulsion threw him off her, but his hands luckily retained their grip on her throat, wet and slippery as it was. It was a lean and skinny throat, and his hands almost encircled it so that their grip was not easily broken, and his thumbs sank de
ep between the stringy cords on each side. She thrashed about, her legs striking against the pen, but it did not last long. The convulsions died away, and Loa squeezed with his powerful hands until his thumbs almost met round her flattened windpipe. He maintained his grip until he was long certain that she was dead, and then he rose up on his knees, hitching back the bow that still hung from his shoulder.

  “Musini!” he whispered.

  “Loa!” came the instant reply. “Lord!”

  “Father!” said Lanu.

  It might not have been they, after all -- Loa had no certainty of it -- but not then nor at any subsequent time did Loa ever think of that possibility.

  “Be quiet,” he ordered, and he turned aside in the darkness to feel for the little axe where he had left it; the little axe which Litti the worker in iron had made so long ago at Loa's order as a gift to Lanu, and which had been so immeasurably valuable to them ever since. He approached the pen with it, and felt in the rainy darkness to ascertain what he should do. The pen, as was to be expected, was constructed of stout stakes and crossbars fastened together with vegetable fibre, and he set to work with the axe to sever the fastenings. It was not easy, for those fastenings were of split cane which almost turned the axe's edge. Loa chopped and tugged; he tore the nail loose on his left forefinger almost without noticing it, before he managed to cut through three sets of the fastenings. Then he laid hold of the upright and put out all his strength, tugging, with his eyes starting out of his head in the darkness, until a final ounce of effort tore the upright free.