Kid Moses

by Mark R. Thornton

  When Moses woke, Toroye was poking him with his bow. When he saw the two figures above him and Boyd’s large-brimmed hat silhouetted against the sky, he scrambled to his knees.

  “Whoa! Hakuna wasiwasi. Don’t worry. Easy, child.” Toroye crouched down to Moses’s level and reached his hand out to the boy. Moses slumped back to the ground.

  Boyd pulled off his pack and handed the water canteen to Toroye, who opened it and handed it to Moses. Moses drank and wiped his nose. After some time, Moses was able to tell the men his story, and they pulled out a stale chapatti, and he ate.

  Boyd looked out into the wilderness, then to the sky as a farmer might do when trying to judge the weather. He took off his hat, hung it on a branch, and walked into the sun to piss. Toroye came and stood next to him. He gave Boyd a look that said “Now what?”, and Boyd shrugged. “I guess that’s it. Lazima kurudi sasa.”

  It should have been easy. Moses now had food and water. Toroye knew the quickest way back to the truck. They could do it in three hard days’ walking and two nights, depending on how Moses’s strength held.

  Boyd squatted and lifted Moses over his shoulder, and carried him on his back. Moses bobbed up and down, looking at the man’s strange reddened and hairy skin and his big arm carrying the gun. He could see the different colours of the wood on the rifle stock, the grains of the original tree, and the stains from miles of sweat darkening the grip of the stock to almost black. He could feel the man’s sweat and could see the salt of it in white-crusted stains at his collar.

  Moses’s mind was still in a haze. He did not even feel elation at his rescue. He just watched Boyd’s gun and Toroye’s legs and feet. He noticed the scratches on them, and the faded grey of the tyre-rubber of his sandal straps. Toroye’s gait was practical, not graceful. He walked in hard, choppy steps, pounding the earth as he went. This was his stride for covering ground. When he hunted, however, the entire demeanour of his body would change. His crouch would lower, his steps soften.

  When they paused to rest, Boyd would lower Moses. And when they started walking again, Boyd would lift the boy back onto his shoulders. Nobody spoke. They trekked on into thicker woodlands of acacia and commiphora. The beauty of the flat-topped trees and golden grass went unnoticed. At dusk, they stopped to camp.

  The fire was bright that night. Toroye started fire under a thick log and added heavy branches. In the cool air, the heat was welcome. Boyd spread out the kongoni hide, laid Moses on it next to the fire, and rested the boy’s head on the pack. He handed Moses the canteen. “Listen, child. You need to drink water—a lot.” Moses drank and ate more, slowly, and at first it made him feel nauseated, but he continued.

  Moses slept deeply that night, warm, belly-full, snug under a blanket and between two men whom he did not fear.

  In the morning they set out, trekking uneventfully for most of the day. Baobab trees and their fruits were scarce in this country. They needed food. When they came across a lone male impala, Toroye motioned them to stop and Boyd lowered Moses to the ground behind a termite mound. He wiped the sweat off his hands, took off his hat and loaded two shells into the rifle. They could have saved shells by having Toroye shoot the animal with an arrow, and his .470 was far too heavy a calibre for an impala—but something made Boyd want to kill the animal. Frustration, or maybe a simple bloodlust that had never gone away. They needed meat, so at least he had a good reason, if he cared to have one.

  The wind was good and into his nose as he stalked the antelope. Terrain was good too, and he approached noiselessly. He had cover from some termite mounds as he crept up, rested his rifle on a fallen branch, and relaxed his back and neck. The impala was close and standing broadside. Boyd cradled the sights, aimed behind the shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun’s report was immense and louder than anything Moses had heard since leaving the orphanage. The impala fell in its place. No running. It wheezed, coughed up chunks of lung and bloodclot, and kicked once or twice. By the time Boyd approached it, life had already seeped from its eyes in a way that, despite the necessity of the hunt, made him feel remorse. The calibre of the bullet, designed to stop an elephant or buffalo, had made a violent wound in the animal, its front left shoulder dangling, broken and at an odd angle. Boyd lifted its leg and then laid it back to the ground. He cradled the antelope’s soft muzzle in his hand as one would hold a loved dog.

  Toroye approached and slit the impala’s throat without ceremony. He and Boyd then set about field-dressing the carcass as Moses looked on. He watched them cut it up the middle and saw Toroye reach inside, take hold of the trachea, and heave out the mass of organs in one long pull, taking care not to puncture the stomach. He and Boyd then turned the impala on its side to empty the gathered blood. They butchered the carcass crudely, slicing tendons, cracking joints, separating legs, extracting the backstrap. Toroye then made a fire while Moses helped Boyd hang the body parts from a tree to be loaded into plastic bags and carried the next morning. Toroye roasted the liver and kidneys and heart on a skewer and laid some meat over the flames.

  It was almost evening by the time they had all eaten, but as they settled down for the night, they heard gunfire in the distance. Several rapid, chaotic shots. Rap. Rap rap. Rap, rap, rap. Rap. Toroye and Boyd looked at each other and then in the direction of the shots, and listened for more. Perhaps it was another hunting party with a vehicle that could drive them out.

  Hoping to find the other hunters before it became fully dark, they jumped up and walked quickly into the thick brush in the direction of the shots. Game trails wound narrowly through the thick stuhlmannii, and the land got flatter and the bush thicker. They walked for some time. At last they heard voices ahead and saw flashlights. They carried on through the thick tangle of brush to find the people.

  When they emerged into the small clearing, they came upon the dead elephant. Poachers were hacking at the giant carcass, which lay on its side in a dark pool of blood. If they had been able to view the scene without surprising the men, they would have seen the pangas, axes, and saws at work extracting the ivory, the men standing high up on the carcass with flashlights, the others smoking nearby, the automatic rifles leaning against trees. They would have noticed men’s feet covered in blood, their arms painted with it, and shards of flesh sprayed upwards and into the men’s hair by the chopping and cutting and tugging.

  The elephant lay violated on the earth amongst the men. Bloodied handprints lay on its skin like ancient rock paintings. Two large men in hats, one wearing a beret and the other a floppy hat full of holes, stood to the side directing the men. Most of the others wore rags, sarongs, and sandals.

  If Moses had had time to observe, then the size of the beast would have been truly evident and the violence of the butchery clearer as well. He would have seen the trunk in a paste of blood and mud unfurled and flat and stepped over and on by the poachers.

  If Moses could have watched the scene unnoticed, he would have been amazed at the length of the tusks, the whiteness of the fat around their roots, and the deep, wide cavities left in their places. He would have seen the men stuffing grass inside the tusks, and departing with them, leaving the rest of the beast to the silence of the circle of trees.

  But when they emerged into the clearing, there was no time for observation. They came into the poachers’ private scene, and the startled men reacted with panic. When the men saw Boyd and his rifle, they lunged for their AK-47s, chambering rounds and firing wildly. Chaos erupted.

  Moses heard bullets passing by his head and the snapping of branches and shattering of tree bark. He would later struggle to understand how, in the frenzy of the scene, he would be able to remember the feeling of wind, the breeze of the flying bullets. Boyd yanked him back behind his body, shielding Moses from the gunfire. And the shower of bullets continued.

  It was perhaps two, three times that Boyd was hit, or maybe more, and he cursed and held his stomach and continued pulling Moses behind him and down.

  �
�Go there!” Boyd pointed into the darkness, and Toroye grabbed Moses by the arm, and they ran and dove into the brush on their bellies.

  Boyd crouched behind a fallen tree. The poachers took cover at the end of the clearing, frantic and shouting and rattling off their guns.

  When Moses heard the first deafening report of Boyd’s .470, he pressed his face harder into the ground. He looked up to see a poacher with his left shoulder blown off. Toroye snapped off a couple of arrows, struck one man, and the AK-47s rattled back at them, sending him and Moses back to the ground. Among the clatter of machine-gun fire, Moses heard Boyd fire twice more, then pause, then fire twice again. Aside from the man with no shoulder or arm, two others lay dead. Another knelt screaming, cradling his entrails in his hands.

  A scatter of bullets swept over where Boyd was hiding, and he cried out again. Moses saw him scramble for better cover behind the elephant carcass. Toroye continued to shoot arrows. Beams from dropped flashlights shone along the ground. In the fragmented light, Moses could see Boyd, crouched in the pools of elephant blood, dark and shiny. The sound of the gunfire was almost drowned out by the shrieking of the wounded man. Trapped in the crossfire, he knelt trying to gather his intestines until he caught another bullet in the arm, then another that sent him to the ground.

  Before Moses could hear Boyd fire again, he and Toroye were sprayed by machine-gun fire. Toroye jerked him away by his arm, forcefully and fast and into the darkness of the bush. The noise went on, the clatter of machine-guns and the booming of the .470, the cries and the shouting. Moses and Toroye stopped to look back just long enough to make out the shapes and shadows of the poachers now converging on Boyd and the giant dark heap of the elephant. Boyd was hunched over, clutching himself. One of the men shouted above the rest, and a shot was fired and then another. Boyd dropped to a knee and slumped to the ground. Toroye pulled Moses away and into the bush.

  The man in the beret wiped Boyd’s gun clean. If there were any bullets remaining in Boyd’s gun, he would have taken them as well, but there were none.

  Toroye pulled Moses onto his shoulders and ran. They passed for a long time through a wide thicket of low acacia. Every few minutes, Toroye would stop, tilt his head to listen, and then carry on walking fast. Once they heard snapping branches and once Moses thought he heard a voice.

  After some time, they exited the acacia, and Moses could hear the soil beneath Toroye’s feet change from fine dirt into coarser earth with small stones. He could feel the gradient change, as they rose out of the depression of thickets. Moses no longer had a sense of time to determine how long they had walked. His mind wandered as he recalled Boyd shielding him from the bullets.

  Night was full now and darkness complete. There was no moon and an overcast sky blocked out the stars. They knew men were chasing them, and they moved quickly through the darkness on game trails that Toroye followed not by sight, but rather by touch and rhythm. He navigated the trails blindly, his feet guided by the terrain, as if they were floating on a river, taken by the current, their course determined by rocks, eddies, sand bars, bends in the winding path of water. Toroye’s eyes sought not landmarks, distance, or details, but were turned inwards, into the centre of his mind. His body moved where he felt it pulled.

  Deep into the night, Toroye finally slowed. He came to a halt, and then, with delicate movements, he picked his way through the brush, moving each branch from in front of them. He clambered over rocks, and Moses felt cooler air. They had arrived at a cave. At the entrance, Toroye lowered Moses. He coughed to alert any leopard possibly hiding in the cave, and then snipped leafy branches from the bushes by the entrance. Moses then felt Toroye’s hand on his head pushing it lower, telling him to crouch down, as they entered the hollow of cold darkness.

  The floor of the cave was cold sand. Toroye spread the branches he had cut to make a bed for Moses. The two then lay down, Moses on his bed and Toroye next to him in the sand. It was cold, but Moses’s head was resting on branches of wild sage, their soft leaves cushioning his head and comforting his body and mind so that he could finally fall asleep.

  In the weak blue light before dawn, Moses woke and saw Toroye sitting at the cave’s entrance. Moses rose and sat next to him, and looked down into the world below them. Nothing moved. The earth was like a giant reptile waiting for the sun’s heat to give it enough energy to begin the day.

  “I know where we are,” Toroye told him, pointing to scattered bones and ashes near the cave’s entrance. “From Ndorobo people,” he said. “I am Ndorobo.” Moses looked at the bones of what had been a small antelope, and the place where it had been cooked some time earlier.

  “How are you feeling?” Toroye asked. Moses nodded. Toroye threw a bone down into the bushes. A scrub robin shrieked out a call, the sound of buzzing flies began, a pair of doves took off from a bush, and the light arrived suddenly, as it does on some days in the wilderness. The two rose and descended to flat ground.

  They walked waist-deep through the yellow grasses that feathered their sides with their arrowhead tips, discarding ticks and seeds. With their movement, they pushed into a wave of silence and concealment. Whenever they stopped, however, to eat sap gathered in the elbows of the commiphora trees, to stand under their thin shade, to watch and listen, to feel and to not move, the world would come into its rhythm, embracing them. They had become invisible to it, for they had become part of it, able now to see it from the inside out. The land had accepted them, and now it concealed them.

  They walked quickly all morning. They stopped for a brief rest under a tree, thirsty but with no water. Then Moses heard it. Something different, like someone knocking on a door. It stopped and then started again, and Toroye turned to Moses. “Ndorobo,” he said motioning with his chin in the direction of the sound. “Let’s go.”

  The man did not see them, but the woman did. The man was halfway up a tree, standing on a wide limb, slamming his honey axe into the side of the tree, not concerned about his surroundings, or the approach of Toroye and Moses. The woman stood below him.

  At first Moses did not know what to think of the man and woman. They looked like the poor, homeless drunks at the harbour, those ones who scavenged through the rubbish bins along the harbour road. They wore rags and had rough hair with grass stuck in it, and bits of cloth wrapped loosely around their waists.

  Toroye walked towards them, speaking in a language that Moses had never heard before. The woman responded without surprise, as if people appeared from the bush all the time. And for them, this was indeed normal, since they and other Ndorobo roamed the wilderness gathering and hunting, and seeing each other from time to time.

  The man in the tree stopped chopping and leaned against a branch to look down at them. Toroye sat down next to where the woman was standing as they continued talking. She handed Toroye some water and food, a bit of meat.

  “Come here.” Toroye motioned to Moses. “Eat this. They are Ndorobo. I know them. Come, drink water, eat. We’ll go with them.”

  The man waved smoke from a smouldering stick with one hand, and chopped into a beehive in the side of the tree with the other. The bees swarmed, dispersed by the smoke. The man reached into the hole, all the way to his shoulder, so far that the side of his face was pressed against the tree. He pulled out heavy chunks of honeycomb, dripping with honey and pollen, and passed them down to the woman.

  The woman took a large piece of comb full of succulent bee larvae and stuffed it in her mouth. She ate it, then another as large, and another, and handed some to Toroye, who devoured large chunks, the honey dripping down onto the few wiry hairs on his chin. He handed a piece to Moses.

  Moses looked at the comb, licked the honey and ate it savagely. He paused to break off another piece, and only then realised he was eating the larvae. He picked up one of the white maggots, held it out and looked at Toroye for confirmation. Toroye just motioned for him to eat, and Moses did.

  He continued to eat until he felt sick, like the time he had been los
t before, when he had eaten the leaves. He drank the water they gave him, managed not to vomit, and slowly started to feel better.

  The man descended from the tree and they all moved to another place some distance from the hive. The men and woman ate most of the hive, incredible portions of honey and larvae, and the man then lay back under a tree and looked at the boy properly for the first time. Toroye told them the story of the poachers, and the man turned to Toroye, speaking seriously and pointing a stick in one direction.

  Chapter 9

  Moses spent his twelfth birthday on the floor of a temporary grass structure. It was more of a shelter made of gathered sticks, mud, and grass than a proper hut. And he woke up on his twelfth birthday thinking about Boyd. He thought of being carried, and of Boyd’s eyes and his hat and his gun. To Moses, Boyd was a mysterious thing, a person he had known only for a flash of time, but one who had saved him.

  Moses sat up. He then thought of Kioso, but quickly put him out of his head. The thought of Kioso meant returning to nothing of value, for he saw no value in his life as it had been, or as it now was. Boyd was a mystery; Kioso was sadness.

  He had stayed with Toroye and the Ndorobo couple for several weeks. He rarely left the hut of twigs and grass. He was ill. He had a problem with his stomach, and everywhere else in his body, it seemed. The Ndorobo had a name for what he had, but he forgot it. Mainly he was tired. But for the first time he had no anxiety, and the tension that he had held in his chest for so long was gone. He was just tired.

  He spent a lot of time with the woman. He would walk with her near the huts and dig up tubers and other edible things from the ground. Some of these things she would peel and boil for a long time, and make him drink for his stomach. Others they would eat right out of the earth. Sometimes they went to the big baobab trees to gather the fruits, the same kind he remembered eating when he was lost. They would throw sticks up into the branches to dislodge the fruit, which they would collect and bring back to camp. The woman also had a series of pegs sticking out of some of the trees, like a ladder, which she would climb up to look for honey hives.