Three Weeks in December (9781609459024)

by Schulman, Audrey

  “It is the lions’ time now,” said Otombe. “No more talking.” From near the river a leopard’s two-toned rasp came, like a saw being drawn forward through wood, then back.

  Jeremy fell into a kind of trance, not asleep, but not entirely awake, his eyes open, his breath coming slowly and deeply. Otombe beside him made not a single sound. The lions roared closer and closer. The sky clouded over. Without the moon, he had no way to tell how much time passed.

  In the night, he found it surprisingly hard to judge how far away a sound was. Everything seemed so close. He persuaded himself the last roar came from a hundred yards away, then decided it was more like half a mile. He felt certain only that the lions were moving in this direction.

  When the creatures finally fell silent, he felt relief. His knuckles ached from the tightness of his grip on the rifle. Relaxing his fingers consciously, he leaned back a little in the wood seat.

  Otombe sat tall, every muscle solid with concentration.

  Otombe touched one cautious finger to the rifle barrel, ticking his head side to side in the smallest no. Only then did Jeremy understand the danger.

  The moon was gone behind clouds, soon it would rain. Below, the three goats were barely visible in the darkness, mostly a sense of occasional movement, the sound of cropping grass and shifting feet, the occasional clank of a chain. He stared down, scanning the underbrush. Somewhere below were two killers, each half the size of a horse, creeping closer step-by-step through the nyika.

  He waited so long, holding the gun. He began to feel certain the cats had moved away or Otombe was wrong to think they had ever been nearby.

  Something below thrashed hard. A goat’s scream was cut off abruptly, a wood bell clacked hard twice.

  All was silent except some sort of rhythmic rasping. Perhaps a goat’s labored breath, perhaps a lion panting. Then the breathing stopped.

  Jeremy stared, his fingers sweaty, looking, looking. He could see nothing. None of the goats made a noise. Could they all be dead so quickly? Where they had been tied, something large shifted, something rustled through the underbrush. Jerking his rifle to his shoulder, he aimed at the sound, ready to fire, before he realized the noise was the railroad sleeper being stealthily dragged away. After it, at the end of their clanking chains, rustled the corpses of the goats. Jeremy aimed ahead of the railroad sleeper, watched and watched, but he could make out no movement more than a bush shifting here, a branch there. Not even a shadow underneath. Logically he realized, in the dark, in the underbrush, the difference between tawny fur and reddish soil would be nearly impossible to distinguish. As though the man-eaters were not there, did not exist at all, as though instead it were the wilderness itself dragging away its sacrifice.

  As when he was in the river with his ears underwater, his own breath echoed noisily. The whole time Otombe sat motionless beside him.

  Still Jeremy kept the rifle at his shoulder, waiting for a shot, waiting until long after the rustling had faded and he knew the lions were gone.

  EIGHTEEN

  December 23, 2000

  Rafiki continued to leave little piles of food for Max, the food prepped for eating, stripped of twigs or rolled into balls. Max accepted the gifts, putting them away in sample bags, while she continued to search for the vine. Every once in a while she would grunt lightly to reassure the family with noise. A few of the others would grunt back absentmindedly.

  She’d always been conscious of how much space there was around her, worried other people might bump into her, that jittery electric shock skating up her nerves. So her mind habitually mapped out the locations of herself and others, a bird’s-eye view, calculating distances. Being with the gorillas, that worry gradually went away. They stayed a few feet back, circling politely around her and each other in a wandering waltz. She found this distance deeply relaxing. That part of her mind, so used to monitoring proximity, loosened bit by bit like a muscle that had been tight way too long.

  Occasionally, when out of sheer habit her mind considered the space around her, she noticed the distance between herself and the gorillas was the same as the distance between each of the gorillas. One morning Rafiki stood up next to Max, to lever a Vernonia branch down to pluck bunches of its buds. After she’d picked several bunches, she continued to stand there, holding the branch down with her stump, looking away, waiting. Max watched her, uncertain of what she was waiting for. Yoko had said that standing upright was uncomfortable for the gorillas, the same as knucklewalking was uncomfortable for humans. Also, the branch was a good size. It must be hard to hold down like that.

  Max wondered if this might be a different type of food offering.

  She cautiously raised herself up, moving slowly, watching for a single flash-glance reprimand from Rafiki or the others. No one looked over except Yoko and Mutara, but up here on this mountain, the censure of humans did not count.

  So she got to her feet beside Rafiki. Being so used to crouching down, in the shadow of Rafiki’s large body, it seemed strange to discover that when they were both standing upright, she was the taller one. For a moment the two of them paused there—one slender and hairless, the other muscular and short. The feeling was not like being next to a dog or horse. It was more like standing beside a weighty and hunched aunt. Max plucked a few clumps of buds, while Rafiki waited, face averted, her own harvest held to her chest.

  As Max sank slowly back into her normal crouched position, she looked down. Their feet were side by side. The length of Rafiki’s feet was close to that of her own. The width, however, was utterly different, because—while Rafiki’s heel and instep were like a human’s—the front of her feet spread out into four short fingers and an opposable thumb. A child’s hand sewn onto the front of a foot.

  In high school, she’d had a biology teacher, Mr. Denni, who’d emphasized the importance of thumbs. He tended to speak in a booming voice suited for a much bigger audience than a few bored eleventh-graders, as though he’d never gotten used to the idea he wasn’t lecturing in a large college auditorium. At least once a semester he let drop the fact that he was a member of MENSA and that his wife’s uncle had invented the flame-thrower. Discussing evolution, he called out his belief that opposable thumbs equaled manipulation of the environment and, thus, must be followed by brain development. Thumbs—he said—were the reason humans were the dominant species on Earth. He held up his own thumbs and wiggled them around.

  Gorillas had four of them.

  Rafiki released the branch and sank back down to eat her buds, chomping through them as methodically as a person eating popcorn.

  A few months ago, Max had read a study that disproved the idea that Neanderthals died out because they were dumb. Instead, the study demonstrated they had a significantly bigger braincase than even modern humans. It was possible that, half a million years ago, the Neanderthals had been capable of higher order thoughts than anyone living today.

  Still the archeological record showed that soon after Homo sapiens arrived in any area where Neanderthals lived—even large groups of them—all traces of the Neanderthals disappeared.

  She wondered if, like the gorillas, they’d been a gentle people.

  Someone touched her on the shoulder and she swiveled fast.

  “Lunchtime,” whispered Yoko. “Let’s go.”

  After a morning with the gorillas, her hairless skin and confrontational stare seemed shocking, such a foreign species.

  Late that afternoon, the temperature began to drop suddenly, wind moving through the jungle, the branches creaking and groaning. Titus rose majestically on his hind legs, peering at the sky, sniffing. With an authoritative grunt, he led his family up the mountain.

  Mutara led the humans in the opposite direction. They’d barely descended a hundred yards before the rain started. Within a minute it was lashing down so hard the spray rebounded several feet into the air, the lightning almost continuous. Waterfalls of red earth gushed down the slope, the trail turning into a rushing river. For the first ti
me Max began to glimpse the scope of the word, “monsoon.”

  They half-walked, half-slid down the mountain, over the plants and mud. All of them so fighting for their balance, they didn’t say a word until they came in sight of the dark research cabins. The rain beginning to slow, night was falling. By this point, the generator had gotten so low on fuel that they didn’t turn it on any more, saving its power in case they needed to phone out for an emergency. They now lived and cooked and worked with candles and fires, as though they’d gone back in time.

  They headed straight to Pip’s cabin for dinner. After eating, they would return to their cabins to do what work was possible without computers or other electrical equipment.

  Just before they got to the cabin, a scream rang off the roof above them. Max took a fast step forward, running straight into Mutara’s back.

  “What?” He turned around. “Ahh, the sound. It is a hyrax. Little animal.” He cupped his hands to show how big it was. “Makes much noise, yes?”

  In Pip’s cabin, the only illumination was a single candle in the center of the table. In the light from it, Pip and Dubois were sitting by the radio, not saying a word. They made no move at the entrance of the others.

  “The radio . . . the radio just now.” Pip’s voice wavered. “They announced . . . ”

  Dubois continued, “This morning a UN plane is flying near Rutshuru, forty-two soldiers on board.” She wrapped her arms tightly round her ribs. “Nigerians and Belgians. Soldiers to keep the peace in the Congo. The people on the ground, they say they are seeing the plane in the air, then something flies up to hit it. Then it catches fire. And falls into the jungle.”

  In the meadow outside, a forest buff moaned, hoarse and surprisingly cow-like.

  “A missile?” Max said. “What a minute. The Kutu have missiles?”

  “Hey, we don’t know the Kutu did this,” said Yoko.

  All of them, even Max, turned to stare at her. After a day in the jungle, Yoko’s hair was standing straight up, a little like a cockatiel’s feathers.

  “What?” Yoko said, “It could be someone else.”

  There was a pause, then Dubois continued. “They do not know yet if the soldiers live. If any are captured.”

  “Rutshuru, how far away is it?” Max asked.

  “Thirty miles,” said Yoko. “Two days of travel on the jungle paths they call roads around here.”

  Max could imagine the UN soldiers who survived the crash limping out of the plane, dragging those who were wounded to safety. Crouched over the bodies, trying to stem the flow of blood, these men would look up when the children stepped out of the jungle, what appeared to be toy rifles looped over their shoulders.

  “Little wankers.” Pip’s voice was almost without emotion. “Are the planes going to be flying on Tuesday? I want to go home.”

  Yoko stepped forward to get them soup. They sat down, listening to the clacking of the ladle. On the table, she placed the bowls and, since they’d run out of sweets, a small bag of Doritos for dessert. The four of them took slow bites of the soup. Max ate her tofu, no one saying anything while they listened to the rest of the BBC news hour. She was getting much better at eating with just her right hand, her other hand in the sling. She’d learned to wedge the box of tofu between several bowls so it didn’t fall over when her spoon scraped at the corners.

  Whenever the radio’s volume got too low, one of the others would pick the radio up to crank it back to full power. There was a story about the brokering of a cease-fire in the Chechen Republic and another about five fans trampled at an Italian soccer match. Nothing more about the UN soldiers.

  After the end of the show Dubois leaned forward and clicked the radio off.

  In the silence, with just one lit candle, with no phone or light bulb working in camp and the Kutu getting closer, the precariousness of their situation seemed clear.

  Yoko was the one to break the silence. Her voice was quiet. “Maybe it’s time we abandoned the station.”

  There was a rustle of surprise at her words. In the light from the candle, the parts of her most visible were her hands lying pale and thin on the table. Having stared at chapped gorilla hands all day, Max noted the smoothness of these narrow fingers. This was not someone who’d lived outside, struggling with the elements. These were the hands of a researcher, a bookish academic. Examining the hands of the others, she understood none of them had much practice in recognizing physical danger, in delineating the exact point when their previous methods of coping should be abandoned and new rules adopted. For each of them (except Pip), one of their biggest fears seemed to be overreacting and looking like a fool.

  Yoko addressed Dubois. “Without electricity, we can’t get much work done.”

  “We go to town soon and get fuel,” answered Dubois. She picked her hands up, seemed to be rubbing her temples. Her voice was tense. Possibly another migraine was starting. She’d been getting more of them recently.

  “We won’t be able to afford that for long. The black market’s too expensive.”

  “We can pay for a while.”

  “Soon we’ll run out of paper and even potato soup. Soon we’ll have to leave.”

  “If we go,” said Dubois, “our stipends stop, no? Then no more patrols. Without us and the patrols, the hunters come.”

  Into the pause afterward—that pause while they all considered what their response might be—Pip spoke. “Please, you have to leave. I don’t want you to die. You’ve no guns. You can’t stop anyone, Kutu or poachers.” Her voice was loud and pleading.

  Yoko grimaced in irritation and the moment was lost.

  Max noticed Mutara. He’d finished his soup, wiped his mouth, and pushed back from the table. He did not add anything to either side of the debate. He kept his head down. His hands, she saw now, were much rougher than the researchers’. She remembered the way he’d grunted with pain each time he’d tried to jam her shoulder back into the socket, a private sound. That final time, he’d jammed it in hard, filled with sudden fury.

  Sitting here, he didn’t offer his opinion on what they should do.

  NINETEEN

  December 29, 1899

  Back from the night in the hunting perch, Jeremy napped in his tent before commencing the day’s work on the railroad. He slept now whenever he had a moment, fast as a rock falling, instantly unconscious.

  He dreamed he had somehow become Taylor, the railroad survey coordinator. He lay on Taylor’s bed in his tent near Voi. The unlikely perfection of the moment overwhelmed him: to be here if only for a little while, listening to the breathing of sleeping children, feeling the warm weight of a wife beside him. His gratitude was intense. He relaxed enough to feel the extent of his exhaustion, all those years of pretending. He had hopes if he made no noise, drew no attention to himself, he could sleep here a little while, just until he was less tired.

  Then the lion cupped his mouth over Jeremy’s face.

  Warm darkness, saliva dripped onto his cheeks, the rough tongue rested on his nose, the jowls forming a tight seal. There was the stench of decomposing meat bits wedged between the animal’s teeth. Jeremy gasped at the lack of air, suffocating.

  Even in this moment he did not thrash or kick once. He would endure so much in order to lie beside someone for a while.

  It was only as the lion began to tug him from the bed that he woke.

  Opening his eyes, he stared at the woman’s face above him. It took him a moment to recognize his WaKikiyu cook pulling on his shoulder, sent to rouse him for work.

  He and Otombe walked three miles to a Masai village. The village had been attacked twice in the last few weeks, and Otombe wished to learn what the Masai knew.

  Jeremy was limping from three insect bites on the soles of his feet. The circumference of each bite was swollen red. In the center was a visible puncture with flesh missing. Palpating each, he could feel something hard and lumpy beneath. The infection, he wondered, or some type of burrowing beetle? Each time he took a step, pa
in shot upward. He marveled that he had not noticed the bites when they occurred.

  Hoping to distract himself, he asked, “Last night, how did you know the lions were nearby?” At least without his spine protector, these long walks were easier. His back perspired less, his movements were less restricted. He could only hope his spinal column was protected enough from the sun’s radiation by his hat and shirt alone.

  Otombe said, “Lions roar in the beginning of a hunt while they are figuring out their plan. Come this way, one says. No, this way, the other answers. Once they go silent, they have agreed on a target. Last night, they went silent around the time they could hear and smell the goats.”

  Outside the boma of the Masai village, twelve men waited in a line for them. They stood almost at attention, their robes, hair and skin smeared with red dye.

  “Feel honored,” said Otombe. “They have put on their finery for you.”

  No, Jeremy thought, they did so for my rifle.

  As he got closer to the men, he was taken aback to see they wore necklaces, headbands and, even many earrings—tawdry and layered as a little girl’s attempt at dress up. Still they were clearly men. Their height rivaled his own, a few were distinctly taller. None suffered from his poor posture. Instead, they stood with their heads high, backs straight, male hips squared inside their skirts.

  “Are these hunters?” Jeremy tried to concentrate on the way each held his spear as confidently as though it were another limb.

  “No,” said Otombe, smiling. “These are shepherds. They don’t even kill their cows, just bleed them a little, drink that and the milk.”

  Otombe and the men greeted each other in Swahili. An old Masai began to talk, his chest sunken and voice quavering. Jeremy surveyed the men for signs of the famine. They wore robes that looped across their chests, covering their torsos and upper thighs. Their limbs were bony but he had gotten so accustomed to slender Africans that he could no longer tell what was normal.