by Pamela Jekel
She took her turn wading into the cool water, sighing deeply as it came to her belly. Osa noticed one of her sisters, heavy with calf, moving slowly and carefully into a shallow area, watching for enemies. Osa remembered with vivid detail her own pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. She closed her eyes, seeing herself once more, going to her knees to expel her calf, the strong contractions, feeling again the effort to push the life from her. She remembered her daughter’s first wet head shake, her ears still folded and wrapped, trying to stand and staggering as though the earth moved beneath her. Osa had taken the placenta to a nearby sandy space, dragged it through the dirt, smashed it to pieces, and then buried it, so that the scent would not attract their enemies. When she returned, the newborn had fallen over once more. Osa took her foot and gently lifted her up, ushering her away from the buried danger of blood and birth, moving her into shade and towards the herd.
Now, that same calf was ushering younger calves before her, herding them together and watching them carefully as they went to the deeper water, standing between them and any hidden water enemies. It would be some time before she would attain her full dignity, not until after her first breeding, but eventually she would take her place alongside the other sisters and daughters, perhaps even attain the position of leader one day. Everything in its own time.
Osa knew her own time was changing again. She was coming soon into breeding season once more, now that her daughter was well-weaned. She could feel the changes happening in her body, could sense the difference in her own odor, the change in her urine. For ten mornings, she had left scent marks in her area, which covered most of the region of the three rivers, and her loud subsonic rumbles told her sisters and aunts, as well as any mature bull in the region, that she would soon be ready to mate.
One bull had already approached her, as the herd fed near the acacia trees by the sandy slopes. He had ambled out of the bush, his ears high, his trunk curled upwards, tasting the air for her scent. Instantly, the older cows set up a protest of rumbling, ear-flapping, and trumpeting. He was not the one. He was not in musth.
He found her quickly, felt her between her backlegs, and tried to shoulder her away from her sisters. Osa shrieked in protest, wheeling back to the herd. He moved between her and her daughter, who had rushed to see what this stranger was doing, but Osa smacked him hard with her trunk, roughly pushed him aside, and ran back to the safety of the others. Her daughter flapped her ears at him in righteous anger and threat, but he ignored her, his eyes riveted on Osa.
For a day, the bull loitered near the herd, until finally the Old One grew impatient, ran at him in anger, and six older cows shrieked their rebuke. He had left them finally, and Osa continued to mark and rumble, wondering what next would emerge from the bush.
She did not have to wait long. One day after the first bull’s departure, an older, larger bull strode into their midst, heavy in musth. His tusks were large, probably extending two feet or more into his jaw and ten feet in length on both sides. His eyes dripped with moisture, making dark tracks down his cheeks; he dribbled urine as he walked, and his trunk quested the air only a moment. With no hesitation, he approached her, and the excitement in the herd was different this time. Her sisters rumbled and trumpeted and screamed, but they did not attempt to move between Osa and the bull. They made no threat displays with their ears or their tusks.
Instead, the Old One moved the younger calves away almost casually, as though she had been waiting for this bull to arrive, as though she had known him from another place and time. Then she turned her back on Osa and fed on the dry grass with concentration, plucking the tufts, dusting them against her knees, and jamming them into her mouth as though nothing else mattered.
The bull easily maneuvered Osa away from the herd, away from her daughter, and as he did so, his penis swung low and visible, lower even than his trunk. He was more than twice her size, but Osa was not afraid. She allowed him to nudge her into the thicker cover, and she did not look over her shoulder or trumpet to her daughter this time in protest.
Once in cover, his trunk roamed over her body relentlessly, examining her back legs, tasting her urine and her vulva with a probing yet gentle insistence. The tip of his trunk was never still, even during the mating, and she knew if she moved, he would quickly pull her back into place. She stood quietly, waiting. When he was ready, he crouched down with his hind legs bent, so that his penis could reach her downwards-pointing vulva. His penis was like a serpent now, moving surely to her opening, and he thrust within her while he held her still with his front legs and powerful shoulders. His trunk moved over her neck and head, still tasting and smelling her.
Osa swayed her head back and forth, but she kept her feet still. In only a few breaths, it was over, and he slid off her, straightening his knees, leaning against her rump. She moved away, and he followed her closely, deeper into the brush.
As the shadows lengthened, the bull stayed with her, mounting her three more times. She did not sleep that night, but she felt no fatigue. By morning, he had left her, and she searched for the herd, calling loudly to her sisters. She followed their scent until she found them, foraging close to the maize fields. As she approached, her daughter trumpeted to her, but she did not leave the young calves. Osa rumbled to her in reassurance. Several sisters approached and felt her lightly, running their trunks over her body, smelling the scent of the bull. They grumbled among each other for a few moments and then went back to their feeding.
They knew, as Osa did, that the mating would mean another daughter or son before the next dry season came round, and that each of them, in their turn, would go to the deep brush with a bull and come back with another calf for the Old One to lead. The bulls would come, and the bulls would go, like the rivers which went dry or flooded, which changed their courses and disappeared altogether. But the mothers and their calves were like the rocks, perpetual and unchanging. It had always been so; it would always be.
Chapter Three
Chase Cummings
Nyeri, Kenya
2025
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in
seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
Chase watched the landscape of Africa change from the flat, almost barren plains outside Nairobi to the rolling hills of the highlands as they drove north out of the capital. Waves of heat shimmered over the horizon, and a lake seemed to float in the distance, but he guessed it was only a mirage. The interior of the Escalade was cool and shaded from the sun. If he had to walk out there, he wondered if he’d make it. A dust devil moved far off, and the land was baked and red. He thought he’d spot herds of zebra, giraffe, and wildebeest, but to his disappointment, all he could see were some gazelles far from the road.
“Glass them,” Jomo said and handed him a set of binoculars from the console.
Chase put the lenses to his eyes, and he began to see more detail. There was a small family of warthogs rooting and browsing in the scrub, and he could see several piglets going in and out of a den in the earth. Strange birds flitted around the stunted trees and flew across the front of the car, screeching in panic, but the road curved and bumped, and he soon took the binoculars from his eyes, thinking the last thing he wanted to do was get carsick.
To his relief, Jomo didn’t seem to need to talk constantly. Adults did that, Chase noticed, when they were alone with kids. Had to keep the conversation going. Ask questions, give advice, whatever. The usual buzz-kill.
“Find some music,” Jomo said, nodding to the radio.
Chase fiddled with the buttons and digital display until he found a Nairobi station playing old classic rock. He was surprised how happy that made him, just to hear something familiar, even if it was ancient. Lame stuff his Mom and Dad usually listened to now sounded great. American English. The last day they’d been together, they couldn’t get any radio reception at all. Not on a single station.
He glanced
at his watch and counted back, as he did many times a day. Eleven in the morning here; three at night there. They were all asleep. He tried to picture them in their dorm room at the college, where they said they were staying last. Mom with her arm over her face like she usually slept, on her side, her dark hair spread on the pillow, Dad on his back, legs wide, snoring. Miranda would be on the floor next to them in her Tinkerbelle sleeping bag, curled in a ball with her blue blanket clutched in her fist. Their last letter said they were being moved to a different part of the city, but that was more than two months ago. He put the binoculars back to his eyes. It sucked to think of them. Made his throat tight like he was going to cry. He was getting pretty good at not doing that.
“So what would happen if nobody came to pick up a kid?” he asked.
Jomo leaned forward and turned down the volume slightly. “I should imagine they have some sort of plan for that.”
“Well, what?”
“No doubt they’d put them temporarily at the Childrens House, until they found a foster family.”
“What’s that?”
“Like an orphanage, I suppose. For children who have lost their parents. Run by the Catholic charities. You’re Catholic, are you not?”
Chase nodded. “But we don’t go to church much.”
“Well, now you will. Do you good. We’ll go tomorrow, in fact, to Mass in Nyeri. Give you a chance to see a bit of the town as well.”
“Are you going to get more kids?”
Jomo was silent for a moment. Chase wondered if this was another of those questions he wasn’t supposed to ask adults.
“Perhaps,” he said finally. “We’ll consider it. My wife and I will discuss it again.”
“Because you said you had plenty of room.”
“Indeed. I’m curious, Chase, what are some of your interests? Hobbies?”
“Soccer. Zbox, like I said. Dad and I used to build some dinosaur models. I don’t know. Normal stuff, I guess.”
“What are you particularly good at, would you say?”
“Fixing things. Mom said when I was five, I took apart her blow dryer and put it back together again. And I made a solar engine for our science fair. I like to build stuff. Tinkering, Dad calls it.”
“I understand your father is a mechanical engineer?”
“For Lockheed Martin,” Chase said. “They call him Doctor Cummings.”
“Ah, so he has a doctorate, then.”
“Yeah, but he’s not a doctor doctor. You know. Mom’s got a Master’s in Management. She worked for Holiday Inn.” He studied Jomo’s profile. “Do you know why I was one of the ones they selected?”
“I should say because you’re very bright,” Jomo said.
“Yeah. I am. In the camp, there were kids who were amazing artists or they could play the violin or something. But most of us were just smart.”
“Well, when you get to St Mary’s, they’ll test you and put you in the appropriate level. I’m sure you’ll fare well. What were some of the things you were taught in the camp classes?”
“A little Swahili. Mostly ecology and hygiene stuff. Like we learned the coolest thing about predators, want to hear it?”
“Certainly.”
“Well, it’s all about how they killed all the wolves in Yellowstone National Park, because they thought the predators were bad, right? Like wolves and grizzly bears and cougars just attacked the livestock and made it hard on the buffalo and the elk, so they killed them off, mostly. And then after about twenty years, the rivers in Yellowstone were all messed up, the banks were all eroded, and they flooded the valleys all the time. So they figured out that when they took out the wolves, the elk ate all the willows that used to line the banks and keep the rivers where they were supposed to be. When the willows were gone, all the beavers left Yellowstone because they need willows to eat and build their dams. And then there were too many elk, so they started to eat everything else, too, and then the songbirds left. The soil changed, because the land got dryer because the rivers were more shallow and wider, instead of deeper and not so wide. So the grass dried up, and the buffalo were starving. All of that because they killed off the wolves. So then they decided to bring back the wolves. And of course, the ranchers who lived close to the park had a fit, but they did it anyway, and now the willows are back, the beavers are back, the buffalo grass is healthy, and they figured out that if you take one piece out of the puzzle, the whole thing falls apart.” He was almost breathless with his eagerness to tell Jomo what he’d learned.
“That is fascinating, Chase.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it? And the same thing goes for Kenya. If you kill off all the lions, the whole thing falls apart.”
“So they sent you here to save the lions?”
“No,” Chase said in a tone of infinite patience. “They sent us here to save everything.”
“Ah. That’s marvelous. Well, far be it from me to argue conservation with an expert, but we have begun to poke around a bit on the subject ourselves. For example, it’s been illegal to kill the larger predators for some time now.”
They went up a hill then, and for an instant, Chase forgot that they were on the proper side of the road. He must have gasped because Jomo chuckled. “Steering wheel’s on the right, drive on the left. You’ll get the hang of it by the time you go to driving school at eighteen.”
Like I’ll be here that long. Chase turned away again to watch Africa pass by. He noticed Jomo’s hands. They were very dark and quite pink on the underside. Didn’t look like he did a lot of physical stuff with them. “How old are you?” he asked.
“I was born in 1980.”
“Are your parents still alive?”
“They both died in a plane crash when I was very young. I was raised by my mother’s sister. I took her name, finally.”
Chase thought about that for a moment. “So you’re a foster kid, too.”
“I suppose I am, yes. Mind you, I never thought of it as such. My mother’s father had several wives, and so when my parents died, it was a natural thing for my aunt to add me to her household. All the same clan.”
“But you have only one wife.”
“Ah, yes, we’re completely civilized now.” Jomo’s smile was teasing.
Finally, they turned off the main highway and drove a few miles back towards the hills on a dusty, dirt road. They reached a gate, and Jomo got out, opened it, drove through it, and then closed and locked it again. Chase looked around, but he could see no sign of a house or barn, or even grazing animals. “Do you keep that gate locked all the time?” he asked.
“Habit more than anything. We’ve had our share of shifta around here in the past, not much anymore, but one can’t be too careful. I guess you’d call them ‘bandits.’ And besides,” Jomo said, deadpan. “A tembu, what we call an elephant, can stroll right up the road, if we don’t keep it locked.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Well, perhaps just a jot. Come to that, if the packies want to get in, no gate will keep them out. And they don’t fancy ‘no trespassing’ signs much. They pull them up deliberately and dump them in the bush. One would think they could read.”
They drove on and when Chase saw the small plane parked at the end of the dirt runway, he asked, “You got a plane?”
“Yes, indeed. Just a single-engine, but she’ll do.”
“Are you allowed to fly it? I mean, with all the alien ships and stuff?”
“There are none over Kenya, lad.”
“Why didn’t you pick me up in it, then?”
“I don’t fly after dark.”
They drove up the road around a low hill, and there at the rise, Chase saw a wide expanse of lawn, a long white cluster of buildings, and a few cows and horses in a field. Jomo honked his horn, and as they got closer, a pack of baying, barking dogs came out to greet them, jumping up the sides of the Escalade in excitement. Now Chase could see the main house, with flowers planted around the corners, and at the door a woman stood with two
kids next to her. Another woman and a man stood just to the side, waving to them as they approached. He was disappointed that the house looked like any ordinary farmhouse he’d seen in Georgia, not run down but nothing special. Solar panels lined the roof. In the distance, low green crops of some kind spread over a valley, and a river glint flashed through small trees as it wound downhill. The heat was less brutal here, but the air was still thick with humidity.
Jomo parked the car, calmed the dogs, and then Chase got out, feeling suddenly shy.
“Come on, lad, leave the bags,” Jomo said. He walked over and put his hand on Chase’s shoulder. “No worries, they’re looking forward to meeting you.”
He kept his hand on Chase’s shoulder as they walked up the rise to the house, and the dogs barked and capered around them.
The woman stepped forward and put out her hand. “We are so happy to make you welcome, Chase.” Her smile seemed genuine.
He shook her hand and tried to return her smile. “Thank you, ma’am.”
“You must call me Asha. And this is our daughter, Desta, and our son, Baako. These two lovely people are Peter, our headman, and his wife, Jata, our cook and housekeeper.”
Chase shook hands with each of them, murmuring hello or thank you or whatever else he could think of to say, and for the first time, he realized that this was not just a visit. Not just an adventure which would soon be over. This was actually to be his new home, and these strangers were to be his foster family, and that was ten shades of suck.
“Well, I for one am famished,” Jomo said, with a hearty clap of his hands. “Is luncheon almost ready?” He herded them all inside, Peter went out to get the bags, and the cook disappeared down a long hallway into what must be the kitchen.
“You’re always famished.” Baako rolled his eyes.
“Yes, he is,” Asha chuckled. “I’m certain Chase would love a wash up and perhaps a moment to catch his breath before we sit down. Come with me, Chase, and I’ll show you to your room.”