by Chad Oliver
The three dust-covered trucks, loaded down with equipment, jolted around the bend in the road. They went on through the Baboonery grounds, showering dust, and turned right toward the Tsavo. Donaldson always camped on the near side of the Kikumbuliu, where the bush opened up after the tsetse fly-infested area.
Royce waited. The Land Rover came along in about five minutes, hanging back to keep free of the dust kicked up by the trucks. Donaldson was at the wheel and he stopped when he saw Royce and Kathy. He jumped out, leaving his clients to stew for a moment in the sun.
“Ho!” he called. “Good to see you again.”
He shook hands with both of them. His lean hand was as hard as a rock. Royce stifled his dislike and welcomed him.
Matt Donaldson stood an even six feet but he looked taller than he was. Royce, who topped six feet by three inches, felt short in his presence. Donaldson was lean and sinewy and he moved like a cat. His long hair was the color of straw and his eyebrows were burned to the shade of white gold by the sun. He exuded vitality like a healthy animal. His thin face and his watery blue eyes could be cruel, but he knew how to turn on the charm that was so necessary in his business. He was dressed casually but neatly: khaki shorts and shirt, heavy boots, and a floppy brown hat that he carried in his left hand. The hat was battered with wear and it was not equipped with a leopardskin hatband. The dashing hatband was strictly for the hunters who did their stalking in the bars of Nairobi.
“I have a bit of a favor to ask of you, Royce.”
“Ask away.”
“You remember old Wambua?”
“The political hotshot? I’m not likely to forget him.”
“Well, it’s like this. The old boy has got wind of the fact that I have a couple of rich American clients out here. He has decided to honor us with his august presence.”
Royce groaned. “Another dance?”
Donaldson grinned. “Bang on. He can’t be far behind me with his merry men. I have a camp to set up. Will you stop them here and let them get their drums heated up in the clearing in front of your baboon cages? Then we’ll come back in a few hours and we’ll all watch an exciting, authentic native dance. How does that strike you?”
“You really want to know?”
“I knew you would respond with your customary enthusiasm.” Donaldson looked at him closely. “I say, you don’t really mind? I am in a bit of a spot …”
“Of course not, Matt. Glad to help.”
“Thanks so much. Back shortly!”
He trotted back to the Land Rover, climbed in, and gunned the vehicle after the vanished trucks. Royce managed a smile for the two Americans sweating in the front seat.
“There goes a day’s work,” he said sourly.
“We owe him a few favors,” Kathy said. “And we’ve got to stay on the good side of Wambua. Especially now.”
“I’ll buy that. Look, I’ll tell Elijah to get ready and I’ll keep an eye peeled for the corps de ballet. You better put the kids down and see if they’ll go to sleep this early—they won’t be taking any naps once the drumming starts.”
He walked off to find Elijah. He was not happy about the loss of time, but he was glad that Donaldson had arrived.
There were times when it was better not to be alone.
The two battered trucks, filled to overflowing with young laughing Africans, clanked into position in front of the baboon cages. The trucks were usually used in hauling produce to various local markets, but Wambua borrowed them occasionally for his dancers. Since Wambua was something of a wheel in the government, the owners of the trucks tended to give them up without undue protest.
The trucks disgorged Africans. All of them, male and female, were quite young. None of them looked over twenty, and some of the girls couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen. They were an attractive, healthy-looking group. The men wore shorts, in deference to their European audience, but were barefoot and naked from the waist up. They had on some beads—necklaces, armbands, anklets with rattles—but they weren’t dolled up like the girls. The girls wore short black skirts and little beaded bras—again in consideration of what they felt to be proper for a European audience—and they were bedecked in bright-colored beads and rattles. All of the girls had small silver whistles suspended on finely-wrought chains around their necks. Their hair, of course, was cut shorter than the men’s.
The dancers went right to work. They got two fires going almost as soon as they left the trucks. The fires weren’t just for local color; they needed them to heat the drumheads on the long cylindrical drums, to get them tight enough for proper playing.
Old Wambua came out last and advanced toward Royce. He was a heavy-set man, dressed in a baggy brown European suit with a stained red tie. He carried a fly-whisk as a symbol of his status. He was not really old in years—fifty or sixty perhaps—but he gave an impression of having been around. He bowed slightly and grinned. His front teeth had been filed to sharp points in the old Kamba style.
“Jambo, Bwana,” Wambua said. He was kidding, of course; he spoke perfectly good English, and the old deferential Swahili greeting to Europeans was a kind of a joke now.
“Jambo,” Royce said, going along with it. “Karibu, Mutumia.”
Wambua laughed aloud. Royce had mixed Swahili and Kamba in his reply, telling a tribal elder that he was welcome.
“The two Americans,” Wambua said, switching to English. “They are here?”
“In the safari camp with Mr. Donaldson. They’ll be along shortly.”
Wambua chuckled. “They have much money, very rich. They pay us well for our dance. We make friends for Africans and they see something new. How do you say it? Everyone is triumphant.”
“Everybody wins.” Of course, they could have seen dancing for nothing almost any night out in the bush. But you had to know where to go, and you had to be careful about cameras. The Africans had the notion that tourists could go back home and make vast sums of money out of their photographs of African dances, and they wanted their cut. Civilization had many facets.
“They come now,” Wambua said, nodding.
Royce looked up and saw Matt Donaldson walking along the dirt road from the safari camp. His men apparently had set up the bathing facilities in record time, since the two people with him were no longer covered with trail dust. Royce eyed the Americans without pleasure. Somehow, he always wanted Americans to make a good impression here. The man was young and scrawny, dressed in very tight blue jeans, a fancy new bush jacket of the sort sold at Ahameds in Nairobi, and a hat with a leopard-skin hatband. The woman with him was a rather striking blonde in a green frock and open-toed sandals. She was puffing on a cigarette in a long black holder.
Donaldson made the introductions and chatted away glibly about the coming dance, going into his white-hunter-with-incredible-experience routine. “Jolly good, actually. Not up to your Kipsigis, of course, or your Masai. But fascinating, no doubt of that.”
Royce managed to swallow that with a straight face. The Masai weren’t any great shakes as dancers, and he knew that Matt loathed Kamba dancing. But a hunter had to be more than a crack shot. A good one was a talented bull slinger as well, and Matt Donaldson was one of the best.
Elijah slipped unobtrusively up behind Royce.
Royce turned. “What is it, Elijah?” If the man would only take those tinted glasses off, he thought. It was like talking to a mask.
“I thought you should know, Mr. Royce. Some of these men, these dancers, they are from the place where Kilatya has his wives and his cows. They say he is not there. He has not come home.” Elijah waited, shifting from one foot to another—waiting for praise, for instructions, for some indication of what he should do.
Royce could not help him out. He felt chilled by the news; he did not know what it meant. “Thank you, Elijah. There is nothing we can do now. The dance is about to start; you and the rest of the men might as well watch it. We won’t be working this afternoon.”
“Ndio, Mr. Roy
ce.” Elijah looked troubled, but he did not press the matter further. He walked away to join the rest of the African staff, all of whom were already standing in a line to watch the proceedings. Royce’s permission to take the afternoon off had been a trifle redundant.
Royce’s sense of unease returned very strongly. Something was wrong at the Baboonery …
The Europeans took their seats on folding wooden chairs. (In East Africa, virtually all white men were lumped together as “Europeans.” It made little sense to Royce, but that was the way it was.)
The dance began.
To Royce, the most amazing thing about the whole business was the speed with which he had adjusted to it all. He had been at the Baboonery for less than two years, and already he could take the scene before him almost for granted. It took a conscious effort on his part to see the strangeness.
The African bush was all around them, dry as tinder, flaked with red dust, enfolding its secrets under the vast afternoon sky. The world here had been old when man was young, and the animals that prowled through the dead grasses and the sleeping river valleys were very like the ones that men had known thousands of years ago. They were surrounded by miracles of life—the elephant, the lion, the rhino—that were making their last stand against the swelling growth of civilization.
And here, right before their eyes, was a bizarre collection of buildings and people and animals—a cluster of unlikely combinations thrown together as though in defiance of the laws of place and time. Thatched roofs and electricity, drums and radios, trucks and baboons. A professional hunter from England, Americans as different from one another as a Kamba from a Masai, Africans of all kinds: a cook in a kanzu, a headman in tinted glasses, a politician in a red tie thinking about an Africa newly born, young people with bare skins gleaming in the sun dancing a traditional dance for money.
There were three drummers, standing on the far side of the dancers. Each had a cylindrical wooden drum about three feet long which was suspended from a thong around the neck and supported on one bent knee. The drumheads were of cowhide or snakeskin, and the drummers played on both ends with the fingers of their hands. The beat was staccato and very fast, rattling out like rifle fire, reaching a crescendo, stopping, and starting again.
The dancers formed two columns with the men on one side and the girls on the other. They did not touch one another. One man faced the dancers, his back to the audience, and shouted out commands like a drill sergeant.
For half an hour or so, the dance was more like a series of rapid marching drills than anything else. The leader would call out his instructions, the drummers would hammer away with a sound like marbles poured out on a hard table, and the two columns would whirl and rush forward and backward with a fair amount of precision. Occasionally, the dancers would raise their hands and make barking noises as though firing imaginary rifles. Each drill was very short, lasting only a few minutes, after which the drums would stop and Wambua would smile benignly and the audience would dutifully applaud.
It got more interesting as the dancers warmed up. The military orders disappeared and the dancing reverted to an older style. Individuals stepped out of the lines and improvised dances based on the movements of animals: leaping antelope, pacing ostriches, lumbering rhinos, trumpeting elephants. The rhythm of the drums became more complex, with drums beating out counter-rhythms. The shrill whistles pierced the warm air and the rattles on the stamping feet added a fourth pattern to the beats of the drums.
Royce watched, caught up in it now almost in spite of himself. The Africans in the audience broke up into knots and began to perform dances of their own.
The dancing girls started to ululate, throwing their heads back and giving long liquid cries that trembled through the pulsating noise. The dust thickened and streaked the gleaming bodies with rivulets of rust.
The dancers paired off, male and female, and the style of the dance became explicitly sexual. The dancers still did not touch, but they came very close. First a man would dance before the girl, then the girl before the man, and then they would face one another, breathing heavily, stamping their feet, jerking their heads like turtles back and forth over the shoulders of their partners.
Money had been the cause of the dance, but money was forgotten now. The dancers ignored their audience. They were in a world of their own, a world Royce could never enter. This was an older Africa, an alien Africa, an Africa divorced from the world outside. The dance went on and on until it seemed that the dancers must drop from sheer exhaustion. The sun dipped into the west and long shadows crept across the land.
It was dark when the drums stopped. The lights of the Baboonery were feeble sparks in a night that stretched away to infinity. The sudden silence beneath the emerging stars was taut and explosive.
Royce was emotionally numb. The noise and the dust and the strain had gotten to him. He was dog tired. He kept going somehow until all the visitors were gone. He arranged with Elijah to set up a watch for the night. He ate a cheese sandwich, washed it down with a bottle of beer, and was in bed by nine o’clock.
He slept instantly, but it was a light and troubled sleep.
The drums started up again, somewhere lost in the great African night.
He reached out for Kathy and pulled her close.
Kathy lay awake in his arms, watching the blowing white curtains that fluttered like ghosts on the open windows, listening to the distant drums.
Royce slept late the next morning and he woke up feeling drugged and fuzzy. When he joined Kathy at the breakfast table it took him three cups of violent coffee to get the cotton out of his head.
He noticed that there was something different about the light. He walked to the door and stared out. There were heavy black clouds in the sky, blowing in from the coast of the Indian Ocean. There were still patches of blue and the sun was shining, but the vast vault of the African sky was broken by the drifting mountains of clouds. The wind had freshened, kicking up the red dust, and the air was cooler than it had been for a long time.
“By God,” he said. “Look at that.”
“It’s too early for rain, isn’t it?” Kathy asked.
“That’s what they say back home just before one of the frog-chokers hits. You’re right—the short rains shouldn’t start before the end of October. But nothing else in this country operates on schedule. Maybe the short rains are coming three weeks early.”
“I don’t believe it. It never rains here.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it, sugar.”
He stood there, staring at the sky. Unbidden, the memory of what he had seen in that sky crept into his mind. Fireball? Meteorite? Way down deep, he couldn’t accept it. It had been something else …
He stepped outside and shaded his eyes. He looked away at the sky, off in the direction of the trapping trail that led to Mitaboni. The lines around his mouth tightened.
“Look at that!” he said.
She joined him and followed his pointing finger. She saw them at once and felt a stab of irrational fear she tried to conceal.
The sky was stained with the black dots of birds, hundreds of birds, wheeling in great lazy circles on the wind. The birds were miles away but there was no mistaking them. They were buzzards.
“Maybe Matt took his clients out hunting this morning,” she said. Royce shook his head. “Not there, baby.”
He went in and took the .375 from the gun safe. He checked the rifle, stuck some extra shells in his pocket, and climbed into the Land Rover. He picked up Mutisya and drove as fast as he dared toward where the buzzards were circling.
Speed was important. Scavengers were notoriously efficient in Africa.
Something was dead out there. Royce wanted to get a look at it before it was too late. He tried not to think beyond that.
It took him nearly an hour of rough, jolting driving. He had to leave the trail finally and cut across open country. It was high noon before he reached the kill.
The buzzards took off at his approach, flappin
g into the sky with their naked turkey-necks extended like snakes. He drove right up to the thing on the ground. There were some twenty obscene marabou storks tearing at the dark dead figure; they rose heavily into the air, like deacons with wings, as the Land Rover jerked to a halt. The smell of death was thick in the sunlight, a smell of meat and blood and bloated flies.
Royce and Mutisya climbed out of the Land Rover. They did not speak. They walked over to the body in the dirt and looked down. Royce’s eyes widened in horror. He swallowed hard to choke back the impulse to vomit.
“Kilatya,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Royce. We have found him.”
Royce stared at the thing that had been a man. The eyes had been pecked out of the skull. One leg was nearly gone, with the greasy white bone showing through the strings of flesh. Kilatya’s chest, naked to the sky, was bloody pulp.
An inane phrase kept repeating itself in Royce’s stunned mind. How about that, sport fans. How about that …
“Get the tarp from the back of the Land Rover,” he said. “We can’t pick him up the way he is now.”
Mutisya got the tarp. The two men managed to slide the body onto the thick canvas. There was no way to get rid of the flies. They folded the tarp over Kilatya, hiding him, and lifted the body into the back of the Land Rover.
“Mutisya. We must take great care. If there are tracks, we must find them. Understand?”
“Ndio, Mr. Royce.”
The two men separated, searching the ground. There was no point in looking for signs where the body had been. The birds had messed the place up too much for that. They had to backtrack, find the trail. Something had found Kilatya here, and something had gone away again …
They were lucky. The dust was thick enough to take a track. Mutisya found where Kilatya had come on foot, walking from the Baboonery. That was easy. They fanned out from that point, working both sides of a circle.