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

by Pamela Jekel

  “Sure,” Chase said, “it’s no big deal. We’ll do it together.” He smiled at Desta. “We’ll all learn how to do it, and that way, when I go back to America, you guys will be running it by yourselves.”

  Asha glanced at Jomo. Desta’s mouth fell.

  “Yeah,” Baako said. “A new Maathai business. Can I drive?”

  Jomo nodded, and as Peter pulled up and relinquished the driver’s seat, Baako slid in. “Come on!”

  Desta and Chase climbed in behind him, Baako shoved it in gear, and they drove down to the algae troughs in the shadows.

  * * *

  It was October again, and Jomo announced that he was going to take Baako and Chase on a trek up into the Aberdares. “This will be a rough-and-ready adventure,” he told them, “no Jata to cook for us, no Peter to manage the camp. You’re both old enough now for a trek into the wilderness, and outside the Aberdare National Park is the wildest place in Kenya I know. We’ll shoot what we need to eat, we’ll travel by foot, and we’ll sleep wherever we find ourselves. It will be splendid!”

  “How long will we be gone?” Chase asked, glancing at Baako, who still had not responded to his father’s invitation.

  “One day to drive there, five days on the mountain, one day to drive back.”

  “What about classes?”

  “Have to make up your work.” Jomo’s grin was jaunty.

  “What about the team?” Baako finally spoke.

  “I feel sure they can manage without you for a week.” Jomo peered at his son. “You want to stay home then?”

  “Just saying.”

  “Just heard you,” Jomo said. “We might even see a bongo,” he added.

  “I thought they were extinct,” Chase said.

  “Everyplace but the Aberdares,” Jomo said. “Is it a go, then?”

  “Sure,” Baako said, his voice taking on new enthusiasm.

  A week later, they set out for the Aberdare Mountains, driving from Nyeri southwest to Tusha on the eastern slope of the park. It was a rough, snaking, high-altitude track up to the little village about six miles outside the National Park’s Kiandongoro Gate. They parked at the village center, and Jomo led them to a round stone hut with a thatched roof. There, they received permission from a village elder to leave their vehicle and were promised that it would be safely guarded from shifta. Bandits. They buckled their packs on their backs, their rifles on their shoulders, and set off up a trail that led away from the route to the gate and up into the mountains.

  It was late afternoon, but the trail was so overhung with foliage that the shadows were deep and quickly getting darker. Jomo said to Chase, “Welcome to wilderness, lad. Got anything like this in the States?”

  Chase was concentrating on his footing, not wanting to slip back down the damp trail into Baako who was bringing up the rear. His pack already was digging deep groves into his shoulders. “Guess not,” he said. “Dad and I camped a few times up at Tallulah Falls, north of Atlanta. But it’s not really wilderness, if there’s a McDonalds within a mile.”

  “I should think not. America used to be full of wilderness, yes? It was a real way of life, the call of the wild and all that. Not much left of it, I dare say. No place for a man to go where men are not. Soon, there’ll be no place to go that’s wild in America, just like there’s already no place to go in Europe. Then the world will go altogether mad.”

  “But Africa still has wilderness,” Chase said.

  “Ah, yes. Africa still has wilderness. At least for now. If we keep killing ourselves off so efficiently, I suspect the wilderness will hang on a bit longer.”

  “What’s the difference between wilderness and woods?” Chase wondered aloud.

  Jomo thought about that for a moment while he bent to pull himself up a rock and over a tangled root in the trail. “Well, of course, no airplanes, no power lines, no roads, no lights. But it’s more than that. Do you remember that lion who stole your first kill?”

  “Yeah,” Chase said. “Big-time.”

  “What did you see in his eyes?”

  “He didn’t give a crap. It wasn’t so much hostile. It was that we didn’t matter at all.” He grimaced with the memory. “Your basic ‘sod-off.’”

  “Exactly. That’s wilderness, lad. That complete indifference to man. The Bible says all creation is for man, but it’s just not so.”

  Chase was startled to hear him debunk the Bible.

  “In wilderness, true wilderness, we don’t matter a jot. Some men can’t take that. Most have to make their mark, which is why there’s so little of it left. But I think it does a man’s soul good to face that indifference. Keeps him respectful.”

  “My father would like you,” Chase said.

  “Indeed?” Jomo looked down at him with a grin. “I’m delighted to hear that.”

  Chase turned and extended his hand to Baako who was struggling with the heavier pack, climbing over a boulder. Baako took his hand, pulled himself up, and then fell onto Chase.

  Chase waited for him to move and then sensed that Baako was enjoying the sensation of pinning him down. “Get off me,” he said.

  “I’m trying.” His voice was light and unconcerned.

  “Try harder.”

  Jomo looked back and chuckled. “We’ll go about an hour farther before we stop and make camp,” he said. “Is that pack too heavy, son?”

  Baako shook his head. “I’ve got it.”

  “Good lad. What sort of man is your father, Chase?”

  Chase got up and brushed himself off. “Kind of different. Mom said he was an old soul. His favorite author is Thoreau. Not the typical engineer, I guess. He always said that someday, man would realize that his machines were killing him. That we’re slaves to machines. That we should get back to living in tribes, off the land, fishing, hunting, small farms, and only visit the cities once a year to swap stuff and marry off our children.”

  Jomo laughed aloud. “A visionary!”

  “So that’s why he sent you to Africa?” Baako asked.

  Chase shook his head wearily. “I don’t know why they sent me to Africa.”

  “So that their first-born son would survive, of course,” Jomo said. “Let’s stop here, catch our breath.” He sat on a fallen tree and took out his water bottle. “Pass us one of those biscuits, lad.”

  “I wonder what other American kids are doing right now,” Chase said. “The ones who got sent someplace else, I mean. Like to Iceland or New Zealand or Nova Scotia.”

  “You mean, besides freezing their asses off?” Baako smirked, around a mouthful of crackers.

  “Being bored to sobs!” Jomo crowed. “Because of course, they don’t have the benefit of my wit and wisdom. Now then, let’s be off and find our spot for the night.”

  They trekked up the back of the Aberdares, heading for a place right outside the parklands, where the mountains came to a large valley, the forest opened, and a clear stream ran between rocks down into the park. A rocky gorge walled one side of the valley, where hyrax, leopards, and cobras made their homes. They set snares for francolin and quail in the grasses and set up their tent back from the stream in the shade of a small fig tree forest, clearing a spot for their campfire in a ring of small boulders.

  By the time twilight came to the valley, they had laid out their bedrolls, dug a latrine, boiled their drinking water, caught, plucked, and spitted a francolin, and Jomo was preparing some concoction with powdered milk, maize, and hot water in a pot over the edge of the fire. “Are there lions up here?” Chase asked, watching the shadows darken around them.

  “Could be,” Jomo said. “More likely leopards, though. There’s a small pride in Tsvao, and sometimes they follow the buffalo up this high, but usually, they’re down where the herds are grazing. If you hear them roar in a bit, you’ll know they’re here.”

  “And elephants?”

  “Forest elephants, to be sure. Smaller than those on the Mara, and very elusive. Lots of okapi and perhaps even a bongo, if we’re quite f
ortunate.”

  “Tell another packy story, Baba,” Baako asked.

  “Well,” Jomo said, “there was the time I saw one carried away after battle. We were tracking a bull, Peter and I, at the request of the elders from the village. The packy had been wounded by a poacher. We were to find the elephant and dispatch him before he attacked someone in his pain and anger. This was many years ago, well after 1989 when the ivory trade was banned worldwide, but some poaching still continued nevertheless. At any rate, we knew the bull had been ripping up the crops, and that his askaris, the younger bulls who accompanied him, would charge us to defend him. We tracked him away from the village into a forested area where he laid up during the day. Now elephants, when they’re wounded, will generally try to put as much distance between themselves and their enemy as they can. But sometimes, they decide to take revenge. This bull had had enough of man, and we guessed that he was determined to take at least one of us with him into death.”

  Chase grinned in the darkness, noticing how Jomo took his time, drawing out the suspense. “Tell it, Baba,” he urged.

  Jomo took his time chewing the francolin breast, poking at the fire with his stick. “Well, when one is following a wounded elephant, one must use one’s wits. This is not child’s play, especially in dense forest. One must look everyplace where an elephant can hide, and they are quite adept at that, to be sure. We were crouching down and peering underneath the lower bush, trying to see his feet or those of his comrades. Elephants are quite intelligent, as you know, certainly smart enough to lay a good ambush. Silent as stones, they watch you coming for them. And then when they think you’ve dropped your guard, they charge you like a cast-iron jeep, and little will stop them.”

  “Did you have your .375?” Baako wiped his greasy fingers on his pants and reached for more grilled quail.

  “Indeed, with hard-nosed solids. And I had something even more valuable. Our man, Peter. You know, he has that sixth sense about danger that all of us have, but his seems more developed. That feeling that one gets that something is lurking, that something is watching, following, too close for comfort. Peter’s sixth sense saved us that day.”

  Chase thought instantly of Peter’s sudden appearance in the barn, his panga raised and ready, and he knew what Jomo meant.

  “Before I could see where the bull was hiding, Peter felt his eyes, and we turned, and there he was, almost as close as I am to you right now. We would have stumbled right into him, had Peter not turned when he did. We should have smelled him if the wind hadn’t shifted; his leg was that covered with pus. The poacher’s snare had almost cut it to the bone. Swollen to twice its size, and obviously giving him a lot of pain. But amazingly, the bull did not charge. He was losing the battle with his wound, and as much as he wanted to gore us and trample us into the dust, he was slumping slowly to the ground. As we stood there and watched, he slid down to his knees, and then onto his side. His breathing was labored, and his ears barely fluttered. Probably close to death from the infection. The askaris ignored us completely, paid no heed to my gun which was by now pointed right at them, and they surrounded that old bull, determined to guard him to the end. As though they had discussed it beforehand, they got on either side of him, slid their tusks under him, and raised him upright again. They got him between their shoulders and their rumps and half-walked, half-carried him off, until they disappeared into the forest. He never came back.”

  “No way,” Chase murmured.

  “I’ve heard they’ll do that,” Baako said, nodding in agreement. “And they sometimes take the bones or tusks of elephants that have died and hide them off in the forest. Bury them, or something.”

  Suddenly, from the darkness almost directly above them, a frog-like croaking began, followed by a series of shrill quavering cries, and then a crescendo of screams. It sounded as though small children were being murdered over their heads. Chase whirled around and stood up, the hair on his arms raised. “What the hell?”

  Jomo grinned. “Tree hyrax. Probably a half-dozen or so, by the sound. Dassies, we call them. You usually only hear them at the higher elevations.”

  “Man, I’ll never sleep through that.”

  “They quit in about an hour,” Baako said, yawning. “I’m stuffed. Great grub, Baba.”

  Chase settled back on his log. It was cooler at this elevation and very dark.

  “Do you know how to make a poison arrow?” Baako asked his father.

  “More or less. Having never done it, I’d not wish to risk my life on it, but I know how the poison is brewed. Why?”

  Baako shrugged. “Just wondered.”

  “It’s the bark of the scrub-olive. They boil it down to a black gum, and sometimes they throw in a scorpion’s tale or some puff adder venom, if they can get it. But it’ll work without the venom. They smear the stuff on their arrows, and then one must sheath the arrowhead in leather, because it loses its strength in the air. The elders say they could kill a bull packy in fifteen minutes. But I’d rather my .375, myself. Just my luck, I’d go to all the trouble to brew the stuff, and it’d go bad, and I’d be out there with my hat in hand, courteously begging some hyena not to maul me.”

  They sat at the fire, quietly talking of this and that, and Chase watched the flames leap high. The stars were brilliant and low in the night sky, and the moon was an ivory curve, like an elephant’s tusk against the black. His ears pricked up when he heard Jomo say, “The Somali say that a man experiences supreme fear three times in his life. Once when he sees a lion’s track, once when he hears the lion roar, and once when he comes face to face with the beast.” He chuckled. “Chase, my lad, you’ve had your three supreme fears already! Nothing more to worry about in this life.”

  “Yeah,” Chase said. “I want for nothing.”

  “I guess the Somali never had wives?” Baako asked.

  Jomo laughed outright. “Ah, my son is growing older and wiser.”

  And then they were off on another track.

  Chase asked, “Weren’t you afraid that time the lion came for my gazelle?”

  Jomo nodded, “Of course I was. For you lads, as well. Worse had it been a lioness, as I said. I’d prefer to be charged in rough country, rather than on the plains. On rocky ground, the lioness will bound at you quick enough, but on the flat ground, she comes like a streak, takes only about four strides to get to full bore, and she’s on you flat. Best to kneel. You improve your odds a bit.” He grinned. “But it takes a bit of brass to kneel when a lioness is rowing at sixty kilometers an hour straight on, her hind legs in front of her face, kicking up dust and snarling.”

  Baako went in first to the tent, Chase followed, and as they bedded down, he could hear the comforting noises of Jomo damping down the fire and putting the camp to rest. Baako murmured, “He snores like a rhino, mate. Stops if you kick him.”

  Baako was right.

  Somewhere in the night, Chase was suddenly awakened by a rasping, coughing noise, a rhythmic sawing that seemed to be within yards of the tent. He sat up on one elbow, alarmed. But before he could nudge Jomo, he heard the man mumur, “Leopard. Not to worry.”

  Chase eased back down to his bedroll, his eyes wide in the dark.

  It was still dark when Jomo awakened them both, poured them each a cup of steaming tea, handed them a biscuit, and said, “You want to see a bongo, yes? It’s not going to stroll into camp at noon, lads. Leave your rifles, bring your field glasses, and we’re off. Best part of the day awaits.”

  Baako coughed and grumbled. “Day? Hate to break it to you, but it’s still night over on my side of the fire.”

  “Why aren’t we taking our rifles?” Chase asked, remembering the leopard he’d heard last night.

  “I’ll take mine, but strictly for defense. Even though we’re outside the park, there’s no hunting allowed here. The bongo’s mostly nocturnal, so he’ll bed up in an hour or two. Come along, then.”

  They shouldered their daypacks and started up the mountain once more, with only mo
onlight to show the way. After they’d hiked for awhile, moving up around boulders and larger trees, following the game trails, Chase asked, “What’s the big deal about bongos, anyway? Aren’t they just another antelope?”

  Baako said, “They’re nearly extinct. In the whole world, only Kenya has them in the wild. And only in these highlands, right, Baba?”

  “Spot on, lad. They’re critically endangered, with more of them in zoos than in the wild. And this is the wild they’re in, if they are anyplace at all. Biggest antelope in the forests. They have a gestation period even longer than man’s, curiously enough, they only have one calf per birth, and they don’t breed until they’re about two years old, so the odds are stacked against them. When you add the fact that their horns are a poacher’s dream, you can see why we’d be lucky to see one. Quiet now, their hearing is acute.”

  They made their way through the dense undergrowth, pushing through tangles of lianas, vines, stepping over rotting trees, and brushing around bamboo thickets for an hour or more. Very gradually, the forest grew lighter, and they came to the top of a forested hill where several trees had been burned. They crouched in dense cover facing the charred trunks, and Jomo gestured to them to keep well back from the game trail. Chase could see hooved tracks on the damp ground, and he began to grow eager to see what had made that spoor.

  They sat in silence, listening to the sounds of the forest. Chase was intensely aware that whatever lived in these hills could see better than he could see, hear better than he could hear, and could run faster, climb higher, and kill more efficiently than he could, without his rifle. He felt safe with Jomo, however, safe in a way he would not have believed two years ago. He was not his father, could never be his father, but he was a friend. Chase knew that Jomo would do his best to protect him, as he would his own children. Perhaps this was the best any refugee could hope for, he thought. Jata was right after all. He was bahati. Lucky.

  There was a slight noise from the other side of the thicket, and Jomo gestured to them to be completely still. Chase slowed his breathing down deliberately, closed his mouth and exhaled through his nose, lest any sound betray his presence. And then, into the open moved a large form which stopped and lifted its dark nose, testing the air for danger. It lowered its head, and Chase could see massive horns which twisted once and sloped over its back. By Jomo’s grin, Chase knew that they had found their bongo.