Kid Moses

by Mark R. Thornton

  The days had been hard, hotter than normal, and hot early in the day too. He, Toroye, and the Maasai had set out early each day, walking, and at dusk they would stop, cook food, drink tea, and sleep. A few days earlier, they had bought a goat from a herder, and the men had taken it behind a tree where one of them had pinned down its limbs with his hands, while another pinned the head with his knee and then suffocated the squirming animal, its eyes bulging, until eventually there was no more than an occasional spasm. The men then sharpened their knives on the stones next to them, spread-eagled the carcass, gutted, skinned, and jointed it, and spread the pieces on the branches they had laid underneath. They paused to eat the warm kidneys, which they popped in their mouths like boiled eggs. One then returned from the bush with sapling branches, which he whittled into sharp stakes, green, fire-resistant, and flexible, for hanging the meat over the fire. To Boyd, this was a fair reward for the work and the long days on the hunt.

  Now, a few days later, the goat was reduced to nothing more than the fatty smell it had left on the men. That and the head, which one of them had carried on the trail, and which now they put onto the fire. Often, when it seemed that the last piece of goat had finally been eaten, someone would fish out a limb or the testicles, or some other odd little bit. Boyd looked at the charred hair and blackened ears and white teeth, grimacing at him from the fire, and knew that he would never carry goat testicles in his pocket.

  The sun fell that day behind the acacias, and the sunset was unremarkable over the flat country. The goat head, by now trimmed of its last edible bits, lay forgotten beside the fire, and the men were scattered on the ground, their rubegas wrapped around them, lost in a deep sleep. Boyd spat out what remained of the tobacco powder, took a swig of water, and got up. He stretched his arms behind his back and heard his sternum pop as it always did, then unbuckled his pack and took out a rolled-up kongoni hide, which he shook out and laid by the fire. He pulled out a blanket, took off his boots, and with his small pack for a pillow, he took a deep breath and rolled over to sleep.

  The sun came up as it had gone down. Birds sang, but not much, and the day came about reluctantly and without brilliance. The country was grey and monotonous and flat, except for some soft rises on the horizon and a far-off mountain range to the north. It was dry and the land was parched, well into the final push of the dry season, holding on until the November rains. The grass was tough and woody, the earth pale, the dust deep and fine. The smaller waterholes had long since been reduced to hard wallows of dried mud, showing the tracks of the last to drink there. Only the few larger, deeper waterholes still had a little water. No rivers ran through this country.

  Boyd and the men boiled tea in a sufuria and added a handful of maize powder to whiten it. They had run out of sugar several days earlier, and now carried only the essentials: tea, a sufuria, salt, some ugali flour, and the stale chapattis they had bought in the last village they had passed through days before. In his pack Boyd carried a five-litre water container, a drinking canteen, his blanket, and the dried kongoni hide for sleeping. They moved each day, and each day they set out not knowing where they would end up. They had left the truck some days before in a thick stand of brevispica brush by a waterhole they knew they could find again, when they had finished the hunt.

  The sky was still grey when they drank the last of the tea and set off. The three Maasai went one way and Boyd and Toroye another. The Maasai were from a nearby village. Some days earlier, Boyd had passed through their village, and they had told him that they knew where the buffalo came to drink at night, and where they were resting during the day. Toroye had shaken his head, but stayed quiet. Boyd, against his better judgement, took the men along. It turned out as he had feared, and as Toroye knew it would: no buffalo, just thicker country and hungry men. So on the last morning, Boyd gave them each some shillings and a farewell, and he and Toroye were on their own again in the bush and in the quiet. They struck out along one of the big elephant trails leading west.

  The trails were ancient highways blazed by generations of elephants connecting the scattered water sources that defined the landscape and gave it meaning. It was as if everything was designed with an emphasis on water and directions to it. On these trails, walking was easy, fast, and quiet, and this morning was no different. They had camped with the Maasai the night before between two waterholes. The last one they had checked showed no recent sign of buffalo, despite the insistence of the Maasai. At the next one they might see fresh tracks, rubs, but the country was hard going, and the distances long.

  Peak dry season had left little food for game, and most buffalo had moved on to higher country and the well-watered river lands and mountains far away, the big herds with calves seeking the security of reliable water and good grass. But the old bulls stayed, alone, or with a few other bulls. You would not see them, only their signs: dung, tracks, a single black hair stuck in the bark of a tortilis tree. The bulls moved only in the witching hours of the night, when the wind dies and the world becomes quiet and the air, for a time, warm. That time of night when whatever had tried to stay awake, waiting, falls asleep. And then, an old buffalo would emerge to drink and wallow. He would take his hour and depart well before sunrise, with enough time to return deep into the bush, into the dense bowels of hookthorn thickets or the dark places of a deep korongo to wait out the day.

  Here in the badlands, hunting was hard, and only for the purist. Old big bulls always seemed to choose the harshest and driest land, as if it offered some peace and quiet from the bustle of other game and movement and life—and hunters. Where a buffalo could live out his final days as a recluse. Here was a lonely place, and the only sense of community was among the birds.

  The day got hot and the land pale. They followed the trail all morning through the stuhlmannii thorn, along a drainage with higher trees, into thicker bush, until they reached the small remnant of a waterhole. Three gardenia trees gave good shade, and under them it was finally cool. Boyd picked up a fruit from the ground and threw it. He looked for pythons in the trees, as they sometimes were, but gave up after a few minutes. He knew if he continued looking hard enough, he would find one, but didn’t. Toroye walked to the edge of the shade to piss. Boyd sat on a gardenia root. The waterhole was dried mud, hard as if frozen. He looked down at the delicate antelope prints and the big potholes left by the elephants—and the old buffalo tracks. All old. “Zamani,” he said to Toroye. “Zamani sana.”

  They carried on through the acacia, and the going got slow and thick. At last they punched through to the edge of a great expanse.

  “Shit.” Boyd rested his rifle, stock down, barrel up, against his waist. He took off his hat and put it back on again. It was noon and before them lay the floodplain, spreading far and treeless. They could just make out some trees on the horizon. Ahead lay only tall grass and thistles and distance. A game trail led out into the expanse. Boyd raised his binoculars to scan the plain, but then lowered them.

  “Shit,” he said again, and sat, pulling out his tobacco. Toroye whistled at the distance and took a few steps into it before coming back into the shade of the last tree. Boyd handed the tobacco to Toroye, who took a pinch and then also sat. “Mbali sana,” he said, whistling again.

  They didn’t stop walking until they were halfway across the floodplain. They could see horizon trees to the east, west, south, and north. And in all directions, the trees in the distance shimmered with the heat. The game trail showed life from wetter times, the deep pits made by the feet of elephants that had passed months earlier, when the plain was a flooded marsh of black-cotton soil and green grass, a vastly different world from the thick grass and hard earth that it was now. Far out, they could see a lone hartebeest. Just a head and the shape of its horns bent out and up.

  “God bless the hartebeest,” Boyd said aloud, but to himself. “Out here, in the dry and nothing.”

  From four hundred metres away, the hartebeest watched them. Boyd raised his rifle and cradled his sights on
it, breathed in once and out once to take aim, said “poof” and lowered the gun. He leaned it against his waist, pulled up his binoculars and looked at the hartebeest again. He lowered the binos, took off his hat, and wiped his forehead with his arm.

  “Tuwende,” Toroye said, and the two started to walk, Toroye’s bow now crooked between his arms behind him, as he always carried it when the day got hot. Boyd knew a walk was long when Toroye stopped holding his bow in one hand, instead cradling it yoke-like behind his back, with his jacket, blotched black with grease and dirt, pulled back.

  They carried on across the floodplain under the heat of the day. When a faint wisp of breeze could be felt, Boyd would lift his hat to let the air pass over the sweat on his head and cool him for a moment.

  They didn’t talk. It was a time and place for the mind to wander, for ground to be covered. It was still hot when they reached the first stand of tall seyal acacias lining the edge of the floodplain, where the soil changed from black to grey to red, where the land started to rise slightly, where vegetation other than grass began, where life continued once again.

  They did not stop at the treeline but continued past it, as if they had still not put enough distance between themselves and the misery of the open country. They spooked a hare and kept walking, carrying on up into the brush, the gradual rise giving the land slight relief and elevation. They stopped under a gnarled commiphora tree. Toroye squatted and Boyd sat on the ground. Boyd scanned the country behind them with his binoculars, grimacing at the barren distance. Toroye pulled dried sap from the tree and chewed it.

  “Let’s find something to eat and a place to sleep.”

  They rose and walked further up to higher ground. They flushed some francolin and marked where they landed. Boyd then stood still while Toroye took from his quiver a bird arrow with no metal head, only a wooden shaft whittled to a fine point. He crossed one leg over the other, planted firmly, his body leaning forward, head straight, posture strong. He then snap-fired in one fluid movement, and the arrow struck home and the bird became a frenzy of flapping feathers.

  The impaled bird tried to run with the metre-long arrow through its body, but could only flap wildly and run in one direction. Boyd watched the bird twist in circles and thought that when he was younger, he would have found the sight funny. Toroye snatched the bird, removed the arrow, wrung its neck, squatted, and pulled a thin firestick from his quiver. He broke off a piece of dead wood from a fallen branch, laid it flat, placed the end of the firestick on it, and began spinning. He stopped, spat into his hands, and continued spinning. Soon there was smoke from the friction and then small ashy coals, which he placed in a fistful of dried grasses. He then waved the grasses in his hands, passing the air through them, until he had created a small flame. He placed this small fire on the ground, added more grass and sticks, then placed the splayed bird on the fire.

  The heat ended when the sun set. The one reliable thing. He and Toroye sat on the bedskin around the fire, silent, feeling no obligation to make small talk.

  Toroye was a hunter-gatherer whose people lived in the bush in small nomadic communities, moving with the seasons, moving with game, and living at other times in small, dismal villages of the bush. His people were largely dispersed and overrun by the aggressive and powerful cattle people of the area. But in the remote wilderness, they endured. Avoiding conflict, collecting honey. Life was hard, but unlike almost all other peoples, they had never experienced famine. They lived off the land, and even in the driest times, the land always provided just enough to survive. Scorned by many as outcasts, as poor and worthless, they were people whose inclination was simply different, whose culture was not bound by the structures of pastoral life, the rules, the hierarchy, the societal demands. Rather, they were free—turning their eyes to the wilderness as a place to live, a place that was home.

  Boyd had known Toroye for many years through hunting in the area, and always sought him out to join him on hunts. Sometimes, coming into the area, he would find him easily, deep in the recesses of some shady drinking-place, inebriated and alone in the silence. Other times, Toroye would be gone, somewhere off in the bush, living off what he shot and what he found. In the past, he would have worn hides and skins. Now he wore cut-off pants, a ragged shirt and jacket, all stained with blood, sweat, fat, and ash. But his craft remained the same, and the bush was still his home.

  “And tomorrow?” Toroye asked.

  Boyd shrugged.

  “Just carry on,” Toroye suggested fatalistically. Boyd chuckled to himself. That’s about right, he thought.

  “There.” Toroye pointed north with the twig he had been using to pick his teeth. “Water there. Must be.”

  There was no noise in the night. Boyd hated camping in a silent place. It made him feel that there was no game around. And here it was true. They were in a stretch of bush where all things traverse, and none remain.

  When morning came, they did not bother with fire or tea, but left the place quickly, leaving only the cold coals of the previous night’s fire behind them.

  The early morning was cold and they walked fast for two hours to make ground. When it started to warm up, Boyd shed his jacket, stopping to put it in his pack. A lone hyena observed them from a distance, facing them head-on. Toroye and Boyd looked back, all three of them assessing each other in silence. Boyd lost interest and pulled the tea out of his pack, and Toroye made fire and boiled water. The hyena backed off a little, then stood broadside and watched them again. When they packed their things and rose to leave, the hyena loped off into the bushes and disappeared.

  Another stand of stuhlmannii thorn, another mbuga, another endless plain. The cool morning sky left them, and the sun returned overhead. The ground was now parched and white, with a crusty surface like snow. They found some giraffe bones, ancient, white, cracked, and scattered. The white bones on the white ground made Boyd wonder what the scene had looked like when the animal had died. Maybe it had been green.

  The hyena appeared again. Boyd lifted his binos and looked at it. It was the same hyena as before—old, alone, one ear chewed off. Worn teeth, maybe some infected wound. As they walked through the morning on the white plain, the hyena trailed them. When they stopped, it stopped. When they rose to walk on, it followed. Eventually it disappeared from view.

  Boyd carried a .470 double-barrel rifle. New, it would have been an expensive gun, well beyond his means. But he had bought it secondhand from a Portuguese professional hunter. The man said he was selling all his belongings to start a new life. He said he was moving back to Lisbon to open a restaurant. Carved into the stock were the initials M.A.R. for Manuel Antonio … something. Boyd had forgotten the last name.

  The man who sold it to him said it had belonged to a friend of his who had been killed by a buffalo. He had shot it twice, but the buffalo had kept on charging, crushing the man into the ground, pushing his broken body deeper into the mud and thrashing from side to side to stab him with its horns. At the time, he had wondered if it was a bad omen, but he bought the gun anyway.

  When they saw the hyena next, it lay dead as a stone out in the open plain ahead of them. It lay on its back, its legs spread like a dog wanting its belly rubbed. Toroye poked it with his bow. Boyd touched its eye with the barrel of his rifle. Two men standing over a dead hyena in a dry plain far from anything. The hyena’s teeth were bared in an eerie grimace. The animal was old, but uninjured. No wounds, no reason—it had just up and died. Toroye leaned on his bow to rest his legs and looked at it without expression.

  They carried on, leaving the hyena where it lay. No vultures circled. Soon its belly would swell, ballooning with the trapped gases. There didn’t seem much to scavenge it here, nothing to break into the carcass, no vulture to eat into its eye sockets and anus, no jackal to tug at its belly and pull at its entrails. Eventually, it would be a dried-out piece of skin, a taut canvas over a frame of bones, its meat hard-cured leather. Insects would get to it at some point. Botfly, ants. Perhaps only
ants. A lonely death.

  The men passed through a woodland and descended into a slight valley, where there were signs of game. It was more of a depression than a true valley, but it held seepage and underground water and greener vegetation. A dried river bed ran along through it, filled with old tracks. Boyd and Toroye sat in the shade of a large sausage tree, its heavy fruits hanging above them. They sat, sucked on tobacco, rested, both thinking of the next move. Under the tree were tracks from a lone kudu, which they knew had come to eat the flowers of the sausage tree. Toroye picked one up, twirled it by its stem, and let it fall.

  Boyd rested his elbows on his knees and looked through his binos. He scanned the treeline on the other side of the valley. He lowered the binos slightly, looked, and then lifted the binos to look through them again. Toroye also looked into the distance, at the low lump under a tree in the shade that Boyd had spotted. It looked like an animal sleeping in the shade. Like a lion escaping midday heat, but much smaller. Just a dark bump. It reminded Boyd for a moment of the hyena.

  “Tuwende kuangalia,” Toroye said, and they rose to investigate. They approached slowly out of habit. They stopped every few moments to look through the binos again. After the third pause, Boyd jerked his head back from the binos. He looked again quickly, then handed the binos to Toroye. All they could make out was a shirt and an arm visible through the branches. When they approached, Moses was motionless.

  Chapter 8

  In sleep, lost and far, Moses walked on a flat plain looking for eggs. In his dream, he knew he had already searched for days without finding any. As he crawled on all fours to peer inside a big bush, he felt the branches scraping and knocking against his legs as he crawled further and further into the bush. Inside it was dark and he could not see, only feel. He groped the earth, in branches, always thinking of snakes, but needing eggs.