Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  She decided to go with Yoko’s estimate.

  FIFTEEN

  December 27, 1899

  Otombe led Jeremy to the WaKikuyu village where the lions had recently killed. Standing on the riverbank, Otombe pointed out where the lion had ambushed a woman when she was washing clothes at sunset, dragged her under the nearby tree to eat her, with her five-year-old watching. Now, no one went out at any time close to sunset, did not step outside of their bomas until well into the next morning when the lions would probably be sleeping.

  The tree was a huge baobab, the trunk twenty feet in diameter, the limbs clenched and twisted. Beneath, the shade was cool and the grass rich, a strangely beautiful site for a murder. By the time they arrived, there was nothing more incriminating remaining than some slightly trampled grass, not even a stain. Morning doves called, grasshoppers whined. After the long walk, Jeremy felt the need to lie down here in this cool shade, on the matted grass and nap. Instead he studied the branches above for lions.

  Catching him at this, Otombe said, “Lions are poor climbers, too heavy. People can go higher, faster. If you need to flee, always run up a tree. Climb more than the height of two men. They can jump that high.”

  Run up a tree, Jeremy thought. Run? He remembered his awkwardness in scaling the tree when they were hunting the hippo.

  From the WaKikuyu village, a crowd shuffled toward them. The children were bony and naked like the N’derobbo children. A few of them had strangely distended bellies as though they had just consumed the meal of their lives, but even these ones moved as slowly as the old people, barely lifting their feet. These WaKikuyu, he saw, were not faring as well as the N’derobbo.

  “The more you know about lions,” Otombe said, “the better you will hunt them, the more likely you will survive. I will teach you. Any boma must be very tight to stop them. The lions are used to thorns. They have to push their way through the nyika all day long. They can force themselves through tiny holes.”

  He thought of the small nyika tunnel he had attempted to crawl through a few days ago, in order to trail the lion.

  “If a lion catches you, he will kill in one of three ways. Sometimes he stops your breath with his mouth over your face.” Otombe opened his mouth wide and fit it over his fist, kept it there for a long moment. Jeremy found that his breathing became a little labored at the thought. “Sometimes, instead, he pokes his teeth through your temples. That is the best way. Death is like that then.” He clapped his hands. The children turned their slow eyes to him, not able to comprehend even a word of English. “Sometimes, with his hind claws, he kicks out the belly of you, the entrails. That is not so good. Most times you are not dead before he starts to eat.”

  Jeremy felt no desire to know how Otombe learned these details.

  “First thing,” he continued, “lions like to lick the skin off your body, especially the thighs and haunches. They lap the blood up for their thirst. They eat the muscles after that, some of the innards. Most times, they do not touch a human’s head or face. My people think it is because the lions are spiritual, believe it a sin. The head and the bones they leave to the hyenas. Hyenas are not like lions. They will eat anything.”

  The hunter continued, “Lions do not like to go into enclosed places they cannot see into. They do not know if there might be danger in there. You are safer in a tent than in the open, even though they could easily rip through the canvas.

  “Whatever happens, never run unless you can get up a tree. They are cats and will chase whatever flees, and we are not fast like gazelles. If you cannot escape up a tree, better to stand quite still.”

  Momentarily Jeremy attempted to picture this, staring at a lion from a few feet away, a cat weighing over four hundred pounds, standing four feet tall. He imagined trying to stand still without his legs crumpling underneath him from the fear.

  To distract himself from the image of what would happen next, he took his lunch out of his satchel for the WaKikuyu children. After hearing how the lions ate, he had lost all hunger. He held the sandwich for a moment in his hand, uncertain how to divvy this tidbit up for so many. Before he could arrive at a solution, the children leapt forward, adults slapping them out of the way, everyone grabbing. He was squeezed out of the crowd by the frenzy. Afterward, as he remembered it, the detail that frightened him the most was the utter silence of the fight; not a single child cried out in pain.

  While the village battled over the scraps, Otombe led him away, walking fast, not saying a word in praise or rebuke.

  Late that afternoon, they trailed the day-old prints of the lion that had walked out of the railroad camp carrying the dead man’s bag. They followed the pugmarks for half a mile before they found the strap of the satchel. It lay at the bottom of the river detour that Jeremy’s men had been digging for days. The strap lay torn and chewed, marks in the dirt where the lions had rolled on their backs and played with it like kittens. Crumpled up on the dirt nearby, the leather satchel itself was wet with their saliva. They must have come back here recently.

  Otombe crouched down to examine the prints up close, but Jeremy noticed he touched nothing.

  He does not want the lions to get a clear whiff of him, Jeremy thought with sudden certainty. He does not wish for them to know who in particular hunts them. Jeremy became aware, after walking all day in the heat, he was rather fragrant himself. He eased away from the nearby bushes that might brush against him in the breeze.

  “They’ve been at this spot more than once,” said Otombe, hunching down to look at a pugmark so clean Jeremy could see the imprint of hair between the toes. “They like this place, this man’s things. Do you have any sheep in camp?”

  Jeremy blinked at the change in subject. “Some goats I believe.”

  The man nodded. “Have three tied up here to an object so heavy the lions cannot drag it away. Use chains, not rope, nothing the lions can bite through. Tonight, we will wait with your gun in a nearby tree, at the very top. See if the lions return. Now, we must bathe. Scrub with herbs at the armpits and groin. Tonight we must have no scent.”

  For their bath in the river, Jeremy summoned two askaris with rifles to stand on vantage points upon the riverbank above, watching for crocodiles and hippos. He had been around Otombe all day long, with him wearing only his goat-skin toga and choker, yet when the man dropped his robe to the ground to step into the water, Jeremy turned away, trying to erase from his mind the image of his slender body.

  Involuntarily he remembered Bert at the watering hole, his drooping bathing suit, the look of triumph he gave Jeremy just before punching him.

  His own clothes were much more difficult to remove, unbuttoning and tugging, him hopping about on one foot trying to pull off his drawers. He did not look at Otombe, did not want to see any amusement at the complexity of his layers. Finally naked, he hurried into the river.

  In the water it was different. After the heat of the day, the water felt delicious against his body, cooling him off, easing the tightness of a headache. He wondered what the askaris saw looking at the two of them in the water. Without guns or clothing to differentiate who had the power of the railroad behind him, they simply became two men, one short and sure in his body, the other not.

  He kept his back turned to the men as he scrubbed himself awkwardly with the plants Otombe had given him. They smelled of mint and something medicinal. Even though the water felt cool, he stayed in it not one extra second, sloshing quickly out to hide in his towel.

  Otombe stayed longer, floating on his back, breathing gently out his nose, his chest bobbing at the surface, his face quiet. Whatever he felt about the upcoming night’s hunt was not obvious.

  When they returned to the site of the satchel, the goats were securely chained to a railroad sleeper, a trunk of creosoted wood weighing almost three hundred pounds. The goats’ vibrating maah-ahhs of confusion traveled far through the forest. Otombe requested that a ladder be propped up against the side of the nearest tall tree and, once it was there, the t
wo of them climbed it, neither them nor the ladder touching the trunk of the tree anywhere below fifteen feet. Twenty feet up in the tree, they nailed boards into the branches, one for a seat, the other for a seatback, and then settled down to wait. Carrying the ladder, the Indians who had helped them hurried back toward the safety of the boma.

  “Down there, will the lions not smell us? On the goats and the sleeper, on the ground?” Jeremy found he was beginning to talk like Otombe, his sentences shorter and rhythmic.

  “They can smell humans, yes, but the smell will be hours old. With luck, they will not scent us now in this tree. Not on the trunk or on the breeze.” Otombe looked at him. “No more talking. If you have to, make hand signals. Move as little as possible. They will start hunting soon.”

  The sun set within minutes, the night calls of the riverbank began, the groans and splashes of the hippos, the yips of the jackals, the woo-oop of the hyenas. The mosquitoes rose as a low cloud. Otombe sat motionless, his arms tucked into his cloak, not slapping at the insects. Jeremy draped some mosquito netting over his hat, tucking its ends deep into his collar to keep the bugs off his face and neck. He hid his hands in his armpits and attempted to sit still.

  Within half an hour the first of the lions roared, perhaps a mile to the west. The noise rough and full, echoing through the night. The sound and the distance it traveled clearly signaled the power of the animal.

  Nervous, Jeremy started to pack a pipe with tobacco. Otombe closed his hand round Jeremy’s fingers on the pipe and shook his head. Jeremy looked down at their hands together. Otombe did not make the gesture brief, did not withdraw from the contact as a European would. Jeremy waited long enough to feel the warmth, the firmness of the man’s grip, then he broke the contact, putting his pipe away.

  He assumed at no point during the long night ahead would he be allowed to sip from his flask of fragrant coffee either. Even his water, he realized, must be rationed, because urine would smell.

  The second lion answered from the southeast, some trailing grumbles at the end of his call. He could imagine the brute standing there, his paws spread, head back, the roar rumbling through his chest. His golden eyes half-closed as he sampled the breeze all around.

  Below the tree, the goats bleated uneasily and their wood bells thunked. The chains tying them to the sleeper clanked. After a minute, one of the goats tore at the grass and began to chew.

  The moon rose above them, an orange orb low on the horizon, lighting the ground below them surprisingly well. Otombe mimed sleeping, then he pointed to Jeremy and a spot in the sky the moon would reach in about three hours. Nodding, Jeremy wrapped the rifle’s strap several times around his forearm, leaned back, and was asleep almost instantly.

  He awoke when a bird flapped by his face close enough he could hear the waxy whisper of its pinions. He startled up, even in his alarm remembering to be silent. Otombe sat motionless beside him, his eyes fixed on a spot off to the right, somewhere past the nearest trees.

  Below them, the bell of a goat thunked. One of the goats shifted its footing. Looking down, Jeremy realized the night was strangely quiet. Not a hippo chuffed, not a leopard rasped. He could just make out the goats below, standing at attention, all looking in the same direction as Otombe. Jeremy ran his eyes over the trees where they looked, a few low bushes, tiny pinpricks of fireflies signaling intermittently. He wondered if the goats’ strange yellow eyes had good night vision, if Otombe’s dark irises worked better in the darkness than did his green ones. Perhaps, while he had slept, there had been some noise. At the moment, the silence was so crisp he could hear it ringing in his head.

  Then the screaming started, the gunshots and the clanking of pans. Camp.

  At this distance, all the fear and frenzy was stripped from the noise, just faint clanks and pops and squeals, the pathos of bugs. Above the other noises, one man’s voice cut through, a single word called again and again, crying out the name of his lost friend.

  SIXTEEN

  December 18, 2000

  Yoko and Max lay on the mountainside, staring up at the trees, waiting out the gorillas’ afternoon nap. Mutara sat a little back from them. He had a radio he was listening to with earplugs. He stayed very still, his head cocked to one side, moving only when he needed to wind up the radio. Perhaps he was listening to news about the Kutu. His intensity made Max nervous.

  “Why doesn’t Dubois want me to find the vine?” she asked.

  Yoko was lying on her back, facing the jungle canopy. Up there, the sun shivered through storey after storey of leaves, a twinkling of green. The dry leaves below her rustled as she rolled her head to face Max. “There are two reasons. If you find the vine, then you’re going to leave and, at that point, your company will have gotten what they need from us. Roswell can stop paying for the park guards if he wants to. Without guards, the hunters will come and the gorillas start dying.”

  Max pictured the family as they lay at the moment, napping in their giant bird’s nests, hairy and snoring.

  “Why would anyone want to kill them?” It couldn’t be very challenging to track them. A child could follow their bulldozed paths. Once a hunter reached them, of course the silverback would charge the intruder, hoping to buy his family a few seconds to escape, offering his chest for target practice. “Trophies?”

  “They eat them.”

  “Eat?” In her mouth, the word felt foreign. It made her see again the gulf between her and most other humans. She, who ate primarily tofu, oatmeal, and bananas, tried to imagine sinking her teeth into a gorilla’s dark arm.

  She remembered her recurrent nightmare of Aunt Tilda chasing her, wanting to take over her flesh. She could imagine how a gorilla might feel, understanding it was to be eaten, its body transformed into jumpy human flesh.

  “Look, for the last fifty years, the developed world has given this country vaccinations without following up with enough condoms. There are over eight hundred people now per square mile. Surviving off the land. They desperately need some source of protein. If they come upon a gorilla and they have five children at home screaming with hunger . . . ” Yoko shrugged.

  “And the second reason?”

  “Reason?”

  “The second reason Dubois doesn’t want me finding the vine.”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry,” she said. “If you find the vine, it’ll take a while before your company is able to molecularly manufacture the active compound. Until that can be managed, Roswell will need lots of the plant to experiment with and to make into medicine for the clinical trials, lots of it. If he offered enough perks to Rwanda, the government would allow people up here, hunting through the jungle for the vine, harassing the gorillas and driving them further up the mountains.”

  Max looked at the distant peaks above. “Well, there’s still more land up there for them, isn’t there?”

  Yoko scrubbed her eyes so hard there was an audible squishy noise. “The gorillas aren’t meant to live this far up the mountains. At this altitude, there are fewer of the plants they eat and the temps are colder. They’re at their limit. Still, the people down there need firewood and arable land. Every year they push the gorillas a little higher. Edge them out of existence foot-by-foot. Most research predicts the gorillas will be gone within twenty years.”

  Max picked up a stick and turned it over in her hands. Even without leaves or much bark, she could identify it as Hagenia.

  “That baby up there,” said Yoko, “Asante, she’s part of the last generation. The least we can do is let her live out some of her life in relative peace. Keep the hunters away. Stop crowds of people from tramping all over the mountains.”

  Max, thinking this through, noticed her body was rocking slightly back and forth. She forced herself still. “Can’t some of the gorillas be kept alive in zoos?”

  “You’ll find lowland gorillas in zoos, but not mountain gorillas. Back in the 60s and 70s, a few zoos tried kidnapping a baby or two, but a whole family will die fighting to stop that. Not just the moth
er and the silverback, but every adult and juvenile will run screaming straight into gunfire in an attempt to protect a baby. The baby, having seen its whole family slaughtered in front of it, won’t eat, won’t drink, and shortly thereafter dies from grief.”

  Max’s hands were clenched into balls now.

  Yoko inhaled. “You know, when they’re really sad, they sing. I heard it once. After a baby died. It was the most . . . ”

  There was a distant crack. It could have been a branch breaking or gunfire far down the mountains. They both turned to look in that direction.

  “No,” Yoko said. “They will live on these mountains. Or they will die.”

  “Fuckity fuck,” Max said. “Isn’t it time to go up?”

  She climbed upward as quickly as she could, leading the others. Even with her fractured rib, she was climbing a little faster each day. She’d always been able to manage pain well. Among all her fairly extreme sensations, pain had never seemed all that interesting. By now her lungs were more accustomed to the altitude, her balance was better, and she was learning strategies to keep her traction on the muddy slope. Today she managed to stay in the lead, rushing upward until she heard the gorillas again, the distant crunching and cracking of their foraging. They’d finished their siesta.

  She paused, breathing hard. The pain of her rib was a hot yellow shimmer in the back of her head. She consciously turned her attention to the smell of the gorillas drifting by. That living scent of moose-like flatulence and crushed vegetation, of furry heat and adolescent sweat.

  Gradually she wandered closer, knucklewalking in roundabout until she sat down on the outskirts of the group. Close to them again, she felt her muscles ease, her shoulders relax. The gorillas ambled about in their sideways navigation around one another, eyes politely on the plants, their dance of distant affection. The color of the earth and the bark, the tangled intensity of the jungle. She observed their movements with glances, using all her considerable attention, memorizing every detail. A headache was blooming up the back of her skull.