The Newcomers: a novel of global invasion , human resilience, and the wild places of the planet

by Pamela Jekel

  “No, lad, I didn’t. It wasn’t worth the paperwork.”

  “Will you go out again today, Bwana?” Peter asked.

  “What do you say, lads?” Jomo asked, gesturing with a large piece of bacon. “Shall we have another go?”

  “Oh yeah,” Chase said. “This is how we roll!”

  “The Great White Hunter.” Baako grinned. “We’ll make a Kikuyu out of him yet.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, Jomo took them to the edge of the plains where the forest began. It was a bumpy ride for several miles, and as they reached the cooler thickets, Desta asked, “Shall we find the packies, do you think?”

  “I’ve no doubt,” Jomo said. “One can mark their work here, well enough. See the way they’ve cleared the bush here, Chase? They’re destructive feeders, pushing down the trees when they graze, opening up the canopy, and that makes for secondary growth which the other animals can use. That’s why there is more diversity of life at the riverbank than in the forest, because the elephants clear the woods back a bit. And the birdlife! Likely more diversity of birds in a mile than you’ll see over the whole Mara plain.” He drove as far into the forest as he could and parked. “Here’s where we foot it. Leave the guns; bring your glasses.”

  “Leave the guns?” Chase cleared his throat.

  “Quite. Mine is enough.” Jomo shouldered his rifle, and the three silently followed him into the dense bush. The trails were narrow, and the light was shaded by the tall thick trees. Spider webs dangled before them, and they brushed them off their faces. Desta said nothing, but Chase heard her hiss once behind him in disgust. Butterflies in jeweled tones danced over small pools of water left in muddy tracks, and at last they came to elephant spoor. “Fresh,” Jomo said, his voice low. It had a musty, sweet odor, very different from the dung of the carnivores. He pointed to a clear footprint. “Double that circumference, and that’s how tall the packy stands at the shoulder.” From a slight distance, they heard a sudden crack of a tree, the best evidence that elephant were feeding nearby. “We’re downwind for what it’s worth, but look smart. They can hear you clear your throat from a half-mile away and smell you twice that far, so they surely know we’re here.”

  They walked farther along the trail, more slowly now, peering all about them. After long moments, Jomo suddenly stopped, halting them with his hand. Before them in the canopy, a tall dome appeared, gray as granite and just as silent. They stood and held their breath, suddenly very aware that they were in the bush, probably a half-mile from the jeep and their weapons. The dome turned slightly, and a curling trunk rose in the air, questing for scent.

  A low gut-rumble warned them not to come closer, and the elephant turned again so that her small eye was now visible. She swayed slightly, and they could smell her heavy, dusky odor, a mix of crushed vegetation and dust and hide. She flapped her ears slowly like a delicate great fan, and her trunk coiled and probed the air for information. She turned a bit more and sighed, a heavy, musty sigh of lassitude, and then suddenly seemed to realize that they were there all at once. She whirled to face them and spread her ears wide, her head now large and looming larger. Suddenly she trumpeted, a shriek that split the forest air around them. From a short distance, another trumpet answered, and instantly, the woods came alive with moving gray forms and cracking branches.

  “Back up,” Jomo murmured, “and keep facing her.”

  They backed up so quickly that Desta almost stumbled, and Chase reached out to grab her shoulder lest she fall. Silently, the elephant cow now emerged on the trail and eyed them suspiciously, her trunk rising and falling, searching for their scent and their intent, her ears flaring in challenge. Her legs were stone columns, her head impossibly high above them. She raised one forefoot, swaying it back and forth like a pendulum. They continued to back up, now perhaps one hundred feet from her. Suddenly the cow turned on the nearest tree and ripped it open from top to bottom, using her foot and her trunk to unearth the remains, splattering them with mud.

  “Nervous energy,” Jomo said. “Keep backing. This one doesn’t mean it.”

  She screamed again, more in dismissal than in annoyance and turned ponderously, as though they were of no more significance. Once she had disappeared like gray smoke into the bush, Jomo said, “That’s quite close enough, I should think. On foot, at any rate.”

  “You got that right,” Chase said, his eyes still wide. “What would you do if she charged?”

  “Flap my arms and scream ‘sod off,’ I would imagine.” Jomo brushed off his shorts calmly. “She never has.”

  “You know that elephant?”

  “Of course! Think I’d bring my children to see a strange packy? Same herd’s been here for years.”

  “Never gets boring though,” Desta said. “Mind you, she doesn’t seem to remember us very well.”

  “Sure she does,” Baako said. “If she didn’t, you’d look like that tree.”

  “Does Asha know you do this?” Chase couldn’t help himself. He pictured what his own mother would say if his father took his children on such an adventure.

  “Absolutely. Mind you, she’s hardly sanguine about it, but she’s resigned. Kikuyu youngsters thrive on adventure.”

  Desta rolled her eyes at Chase. “What would your mother have said about such an adventure?”

  “Not a happening deal. She’d never allow it.”

  “Did you wet your panties?” Baako asked innocently.

  Before Jomo or Desta could say anything, Chase laughed. “Yeah, I may have, a little. I have to admit even that fake charge made me sweat.”

  Jomo stopped glaring at Baako and shook his head ruefully. “It’s meant to. Elephants have spent millions of years getting it just right. She can smell your fear, and that tells her it’s worked. So then she can leave off and go back to what she was doing. After so many years of killing them, it’s a miracle they can stomach us at all. Wouldn’t blame them if they massacred us on sight.”

  After six days in the bush, unwashed but content, the Maathai family began the trek back to Nyeri. The hunters had taken three zebra, four gazelles, and an impala. Chase had killed another gazelle, and the third time he shot an animal, it finally began to feel without sin to do so. They had permits to kill more, but Jomo said just because they could didn’t mean they should. He added, “Man was not meant to only till the earth. Even the Bible says so. Neither was he meant to take more than he needs. There is an order to these things, and I’ve no doubt we upset it at our peril. I rather think you agree with that now, Chase?”

  “Yeah, but I still don’t see why we didn’t take the zebra skins,” he said. “It would be cool to have one in my room.”

  “Ah, a trophy. Well, I’ve rather gone off trophy shoots. We’ll leave them for the scavengers and the land, yes? Besides, it’s a bit more work to tan a zebra hide than you might imagine, lad. We’ve got better things to turn our hands to at home, I should hope.”

  They climbed into the Cessna, waving goodbye to Jata, Peter, and Mano, who had two days of hard travel with the truck and the jeep, carrying the meat back in generator-powered coolers. Much of it, they had cut into biltong, the dried strips of jerky which would keep through the winter months, but the rest would go to the freezer for roasts and chops. As they banked up and over the Mara River, headed to the east, Chase took a last glimpse of the plains and the hundreds of thousands of animals spread out below him.

  “Can you see your lion down there?” Baako asked with a grin.

  He shook his head. “That’s one skin I won’t leave behind, next time.” He raised his voice so that Jomo could hear him over the drone of the engine. “Will we hunt buffalo soon?”

  “In your dreams,” Desta said. “That’s only the most dangerous game there is.”

  “Mbogo is far more aggressive than even the rhino,” Jomo said. “The rhino will charge quickly enough, but it might go right on past you, its eyesight is so pitiful, and once past, it may well forget what it was doing altogether a
nd amble off to pluck grass. But not the buffalo. It can turn on a shilling, it’s keen of eye and ear and nose, and it won’t give up, even when it trees you. It will stalk the man who hunts it, waiting in the grass without a sound until he’s tracked past, and then mow him down relentlessly. We’ll leave the buffalo to the lions.”

  Chase nodded and sighed. “Hate to go.”

  Asha smiled. “The Maasai say, ‘epwo mbaa pokin in-gitingot.’ Everything has an end.”

  * * *

  As the rising sun heated the thermals, the large vulture roused himself, stretched his wings, yawned with wide-open hooked beak, and raised his neck up from his hunched shoulders. He was perched with others of his kind on a limb of an acacia tree that clung to a rock outcropping, and the branches and boulders were white with their excreta. The lions were beginning to roar in the first seepings of dawn, and the rising noise of the waking birds and animals became a chorus of greetings to the sun, an enormous orange-yellow flattened ball that rounded as it rose from the black line of the horizon.

  The vulture began to preen himself, searching with the sharp hook of his beak for any debris or filth left in his feathers from his last meal. He was a Ruppell’s Griffon Vulture, mottled brown in color with a lighter brown underbelly, a white collar at his neck, and a dark brown crop patch. Gyps, like all of his kind, was finicky about grooming, and his head and neck was covered with a thin gray fluff rather than feathers, the better to keep himself clean. In fact cleanliness was essential to his survival, and the vulture bathed more frequently than most birds, submerging himself in the Mara River up to his head. He would then perch in a nearby tree with his wings held out to dry, letting the sun do its work.

  He felt the heat begin to rise from the ground, and he lifted off his perch into the air. At eighteen pounds, three feet in length, with a wingspan of more than eight feet, it took the vulture no more than three wing flaps to rise over the river, over the trees, and into the thermals, which he rode in a sweeping glide up into the sky. He conserved energy by using the sun-warmed air, spiraling upwards until he was thousands of feet above the plains, often gliding for hours with no wing flaps at all. At eight-thousand feet, he found another air current and rode it higher, until he was only a small dark dot in the blue sky, and in all directions, he could see other griffons, white-backed vultures, and lappet-faced vultures circling in a kettle of raptors, all of them looking for the same thing: a pack of dogs, a cluster of hyena, jackals, a pride of lions, or descending vultures, any of which could mean the first meal of the day.

  Solitary in his flight, he did not prefer it that way. One of the most social of vulture species, Gyps had a mate who had been killed by a hyena, leaving him alone to care for their lone chick. Because he mated for life, he was still alone, a rare thing at his age of thirty years. Now that his chick was independent and the next breeding cycle was beginning, he hoped to be mated again. In his colony of nearly one thousand breeding pairs, it was inevitable that a female would be left alone this season. He would court her as his own.

  Although he could not know it, the Griffon was a vital part of the African environment he watched so carefully below. Called a death-profiteer, a scavenger, and generally reviled by humans, he and his kind were the clean-up crew of the wilderness. He could eat rotting flesh which contained anthrax, botulism, and even cholera bacteria with no harm, for most food-borne diseases were destroyed in his stomach and passed to his fecal matter as harmless fertilizer for those trees on which he roosted. He was the highest-flying bird on the planet, soaring past thirty-seven thousand feet where his only peril was the occasional jet engine that could suck him into its roaring mouth. He had a specialized variant of the hemoglobin alpha D subunit, a protein which allowed him to take up oxygen efficiently despite the low pressure at that height. Usually silent as death, Gyps was only vocal at the nest or at a carcass. Unique among most of the creatures below, he wasted little energy on noise.

  Gyps soared over the plains, using his amazing eyesight to find animal activity which might lead to a carcass. The skies over the plains were never empty. The winds carried the tawny eagle and the black-chested harrier, the bateleur, and the martial eagle. Buzzards and kites hovered on the thermals, and always the vultures. Unlike New World vultures, he had no sense of smell and relied on his vision to find food. He was confident that he would feed soon, for the Mara was filled with game and predators, and he could fill his belly with even the hide or the bones of a carcass, if that was all he could get. The backward-facing splines on his tongue could remove every rasp of meat faster than a lion’s rough tongue, when given the chance by the larger predator. He could gobble down chunks of meat and fill his crop with over three pounds in four minutes, a meal which would last him several days before he would have to search again. If need be, he would stay in the air for six or seven hours each day. But one-hundred thousand wildebeest died on the Mara plains each year, from old age, disease, or predators. He and his kind rarely went hungry.

  Gyps spotted vultures descending, went lower still, and saw humans walking across the plains. He swooped to investigate. They looked like predators to him, and he sensed that a kill might be nearby or imminent. He then spotted the carcass they had left, and he quickly descended to claim it. As he hit the ground, hopping to the gazelle, he heard the thump of several other vultures landing with him, and he hissed and spread his wings over the gazelle, as though to protect it. The other vultures hissed back, shoved their way onto the kill, and he ate as fast as he could, climbing onto the back of another bird to keep his claim. In the near distance, they heard the hyenas coming on, and Gyps ate even faster, tearing into the soft belly with his hooked bill, digging deeply into the softer parts, and shouldering aside a younger vulture who squealed in frustration, trying to find a place at the carcass.

  The hyenas came to one side of the gazelle, and one beast lunged at Gyps, trying to drive him off. Gyps whirled on the lead hyena furiously, snapping and hissing and flapping his wings. He hated hyenas. It had been a hyena which had snatched his mate off a kill and ripped her wing, which lead to her death. This one would not intimidate him; this one would not break another wing while he still could use his bill. The hyena flinched, hesitated, and Gyps pushed his advantage, shoving the larger predator away with the sheer force of his rage. He returned to the kill, and of course, he had lost his space at the carcass, but he forced his way back to the head, hissing savagely, daring any creature to keep him from his rightful place.

  As Gyps stuck his bill inside the gazelle’s mouth, searching for the soft parts, he eyed the hyenas warily. They were moving off, taking their offensive noises and caterwaulings with them. He settled down to feed, feeling the pride of his strength and his experience. Next season he would teach his mate and offspring that hyenas need not always take first place at the carcass.

  Chapter Six

  Chase Cummings

  Nyeri, Kenya

  2026

  “There is in many of us, obviously, a deep-seated desire to assent to extraterrestrial forces—to be embraced by them, overwhelmed by them, and if possible deprived by them of our own weary responsibility for ourselves.”

  “Hiccups from Outer Space”, Russell Davies, reviewing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in The Observer, March 19, 1978

  As quoted in Dimensions, A Casebook of Alien Contact, Jacques Vallee, Ballantine Books, NY, New York, 1988, pg. 197.

  It was January, and the heat worsened as the summer months came on. Chase had just celebrated his fourteenth birthday. Jata made him a lemon cake, his favorite, and Asha did her best to celebrate in a way that she thought was American, with small gifts and a hand-painted banner that stretched across the front porch announcing, “Happy Birthday Chase!” Considering he had planned to be back in Georgia by now, he was relatively content.

  Baako gave him a Rolling Stones T-shirt, Desta gave him a small portable radio, and Asha and Jomo, with great flourish and obvious pride, presented him with a set of Bosch tools. One o
f his chores had been to take over the care of the horse stalls and barns from Peter, but without proper tools, it was difficult to make the repairs and improvements he wanted to accomplish. Now, with a power drill, a framing hammer, and skill saw, he would be Barn King, as Baako put it. Chase ran his hand over the skill saw, understanding that this hundred-dollar tool in America likely cost twice that in Nairobi and represented a substantial investment in his abilities to use them well. That Jomo had such confidence in him meant more than the gift itself.

  He was working in the barn alone one afternoon, getting one of the stalls repaired. The humidity was high; the air was thick and damp. The three horses were dozing under the shade of the flame tree in the far pasture. He had his shirt off, he was on his knees measuring a board, and he was listening to the classic rock station from Nairobi. Peter had made a leather tool belt for him, and he reached into the back pocket for his stub of pencil. It had managed to wedge itself among some framing nails, and he turned to dig deeper. He froze, his hand half-inside the pocket.

  Five feet away, a long gray-brown snake was coiled, watching him carefully. It had a slender body, a small angular head, its black tongue darted in and out of its mouth, and it was well within striking distance.

  Chase quickly ran through the photos he’d seen of venomous African snakes in school, not a cobra, not a puff adder—and then the snake rose slightly up from its coils, hissed softly, and opened its mouth in a threat display. A black mamba. Chase let out his breath in a gasp, knowing in an instant that he was feet from death. The snake rose higher from its coils more than four feet in the air, answering his gasp with a louder hiss. He was twisted around in such a way that he was slightly off balance, and he knew if he fell over, the snake was likely to strike, might strike anyway no matter what he did. He held very still for a moment, trying to think, his heart jolting in his chest. The snake’s eyes never left him, glimmering black with golden edges and cat’s eye pupils.