The soldiers the Colonel had lent them were definitely not his most valuable men. They looked no older than fourteen. The oversized rifles and ammunition seemed unfair burdens on their gangly frames. The officer who had brought them over talked to them first in a loud voice, pointing up at the mountains and then at their chests, jabbing his fingertip into their sternums. Although Max couldn’t understand what he was saying, she did see Mutara’s head turn fast toward the boys, startled. In spite of their youth, their breath in the breeze had a rotting scent to it—the breakdown of protein—like someone with a wasting disease or bad dental hygiene. When the older boy responded, his voice sounded like he might cry. The younger one kept his head down, but his voice, when he talked, held no shame in it.
“It is one-thirty,” Dubois said over her shoulder to Max. “If we climb to the station in three hours, we can descend before dark.” In French, she repeated her statement to the soldiers, then had to say it again slower and with some illustrative pantomiming before they nodded. Their French seemed far from fluent.
Dubois started to climb, leaving Max at the base of the path, frozen with indecision. Then Mutara spoke from behind them. “Dubois.”
Turning, they saw him still standing down on the asphalt, his arms at his sides. Dubois came to a halt.
He talked to her, not Max. “You understand. I cannot go with you.”
“What?” said Max.
“Oh,” said Dubois. “Your family. You must care for them. Get them away from here?”
He nodded.
“Family?” asked Max.
Dubois ignored whatever fear she might have held for herself. “I thank you for helping us. For taking the time.”
“I am sorry I am not able to do more.” His neck turned so his head faced in the direction of the two soldiers then turned back to Dubois. The shadows of the afternoon had already started. His voice when he spoke was not happy. “Climb down tonight. Get off the mountains fast.”
Dubois said, “Next time we meet, we have a big meal and tell stories of this day. Good luck to you and your family. For now, let us hurry.” She turned and started climbing.
Max forced herself to look into Mutara’s face, into his eyes. “Thank you,” she said. She noticed for the first time he had a small sty on the bottom of his right eyelid. His jaw was tight with worry.
Holding his gaze, she nodded once as she had with Titus, a short and serious nod.
Then she turned her eyes to Dubois, who was moving upward, low and purposeful, planting each foot firmly and grabbing onto what branches she could. She had her hair pinned up, out of the way for the hike. This hairstyle revealed the back of her neck, the tendons so narrow and exposed. For a moment, Max could picture exactly what the end of a rifle barrel would look like, nestled there between those tendons, aimed at the spinal cord.
The world creaking on its fulcrum.
This tiny woman climbing up, all alone except for two boys.
So Max followed. Not so much a decision as an unavoidable response given the circumstances. Perhaps her lifetime of forcing herself to do things she didn’t want to somehow made this choice easier.
She concentrated on simply moving, finding handholds, and not slipping. She imagined herself running back down this slope at sunset to be driven away from here in a military car—Yoko, Dubois and Pip sitting giggly and exhausted beside her.
When she reached the first turn in the path, she glanced down one last time to the parking lot and the safety of the army. Beyond them, she glimpsed Mutara running along the road toward town, head down and serious.
For a moment, standing there, she could smell again that dank room full of datura and tobacco hung up to dry, could hear the féticheuse’s voice rumble in her ancient language, “You have strength. Use it.” Jerking away from the sight of the road, she continued to climb. At least up here among the trees, she felt less exposed.
Hiking up, they were all a little nervous, but the soldiers seemed the most twitchy. They held their rifles in front of them at the ready, even though that made climbing more difficult, and they jerked toward every loud birdcall, pointing their guns. This slowed their climbing down. Within a few minutes, she caught up with the younger soldier on the trail. Climbing past him, she noticed out of the edge of her eyes a wad of food or tobacco bulging in his cheek. His jaws worked on the wad nervously, his hands tight on his rifle. It was possible these boys had never been in a jungle like this before.
Twenty minutes up the trail, a nearby hyrax screamed, and the younger boy panicked, shot a short round in that direction. The noise was explosively loud in the jungle, the violent chatter of a jackhammer. Where the bullets hit a Vernonia tree, wood chips flew out, a canyon created big enough for Max’s foot to fit inside. The white center of the trunk was revealed, seeping slow sap.
At the gunfire, the older boy threw himself to the ground, while Dubois and Max, inexperienced with flying bullets, stood there tall as patient targets, gaping shocked at all the damage visible in a being as large and solid as a tree. Max knew she could have chopped at the Vernonia with a hatchet for ten minutes before she could create that much damage. Luckily, a tree could survive a wound as deep as this, for its large body was based on the concept of multiple redundancies: many leaves, many roots, many veins filled with sap. Nowhere was there the soft lump of a fragile and irreplaceable organ.
Standing there, her ears echoing with the noise, she knew that her body, on the other hand, was a pulpy bag.
Her eyes turned to the rifle the boy carried. Her wariness of it had intensified exponentially. The other soldier lay on the ground, cradling his hands over his head. She had never imagined she would live—even for a few hours—in this sort of world. She glanced at Dubois, who was gaping at the tree, mouth ajar. Max would have to learn on her own how to navigate this.
Lesson number one, she thought. Next time bullets flew, she’d be the first to throw herself to the ground, hug it for safety. Around guns, she could not afford many lessons.
After Dubois had explained to the boys in French that the sound that had scared them had come from a tiny animal, the group began to climb again. The soldiers tired quickly at this altitude, huffing like Max had her first day up here. Within half an hour, they were stumbling along the trail, heaving for breath and pleading, “Arrêt, arrêt.” It was clear at this speed the group wasn’t going to reach the research station soon enough to get back down the mountains during daylight.
Half a mile from the station, the women hurried ahead of the soldiers, to warn Pip and Yoko. They got seventy-five feet ahead, then maybe a hundred. The yells from the soldiers got more emphatic. “Arrêt,” yelled one of them, “arrêt.” Dubois ignored this, but the shrillness caught Max’s attention. She was used to judging emotions through the voice. She glanced back. The younger boy was pointing the rifle loosely in their direction. She didn’t feel entirely sure he wouldn’t use it. She called to Dubois and they waited for the soldiers to catch up. When the boys walked by, their heads were higher. They cradled their rifles in front of them. The power shifted to those who held the guns.
It was almost six-thirty before they reached the research station.
Hiding in the bushes, Dubois and Max looked out across the clearing. All appeared quiet.
“The dark does not matter. We get Pip and Yoko and climb down now,” said Dubois. “Allez on y va.”
Max nodded in agreement and they sprinted across the clearing, scanning the jungle around them. When they burst into the cabin, Yoko and Pip—soup bowls in front of them—stared at them and then at the two boys with the rifles arriving behind them. Max told them quickly the Kutu were possibly climbing over the mountains at this moment, these were Rwandan soldiers to protect them, and they had to leave the station now. Gesturing toward the door to emphasize the urgency, her hand got a little carried away with the gesture and flapped up and down a few times, a childhood habit. She let it. This was not the time to get fussy about details. The two researchers hurrie
d into their boots and jackets, while Dubois grabbed the few handfuls of papers she considered crucial. It was only when they turned to leave that the younger boy stepped deliberately into their way.
During the climb to the station, neither woman had truly considered the boys as individuals, as decision-makers who could impact their future. They had assumed the boys were soldiers under orders, predictable, here to protect them.
Flash-glancing at this scrawny adolescent with his jittery bloodshot eyes, Max realized they’d made a bad mistake.
Standing between them and the door, he shook his head.
“What’s his problem?” asked Pip.
Dubois addressed the boy in French and gestured toward the door. The boy looked out the window at the growing dark and shook his head again. “Animaux dehors,” he said.
“Mais les Kutus,” responded Dubois and the boys’ reactions were strong. It was as though they’d somehow forgotten about the possible appearance of thousands of Kutu soldiers. They swiveled toward the door, holding their rifles at the ready. One moved the wad in his mouth from one side to the other. Unfortunately neither of them seemed any more motivated to venture outside.
“Dubois,” said Yoko quietly. “They’re chewing qat.”
Dubois looked at the boys afresh. “Non,” she said. “That is qat?”
“I don’t know where you rustled up these soldiers, but they’re fucking high.” Yoko kept her voice calm and smooth, could have been describing what she had for breakfast. “And carrying Kalashnikovs. Let’s not scare them anymore than they already are, OK?”
Just as some people had an aptitude for instinctively grasping algebra or how to handle animals, others had an aptitude for dangerous situations. Yoko had comprehended in a minute what Max and Dubois had missed all afternoon.
Whatever happens, Max thought, I’m sticking with Yoko.
“What is it I should do?” asked Dubois.
“Don’t make sudden movements or startle them,” said Yoko. “Don’t talk loud or use an angry voice. Try to persuade them calmly that walking down to town right now would be safe and easy.”
“Don’t mention the forest buffs,” said Pip.
The older boy flinched and Max wondered how close the word, “buff,” was to the French and if they’d just scuttled their chance of walking down tonight.
For ten solid minutes, Dubois talked in French, her voice patient and low, her sentences simple and repeated. The other women sat down in the chairs, hands folded in front of them, trying not to move at all. Meanwhile the boys bolted the front door, helped themselves to large bowls of soup and ate hungrily. Finally, tiring of Dubois’ voice, the younger boy lazily rested the barrel of his rifle along her sternum. The rifle lay there like a metal finger, pointing upward toward the soft underside of her chin.
In mid-syllable, she stopped talking.
He took his rifle back and returned to his meal, muttering something in French under his breath.
Shakily Dubois lowered herself into the seat next to Yoko. She whispered, “He says we climb down at first light. Their officer tells them if they return without us, they get a beating. The boy says do not worry; they make sure we are OK.”
Probably thirteen years old, Max thought. He should be in middle school, playing with video-game guns, not real ones.
“Stay here all night?” said Pip. “No way.” And she took two steps toward the door.
The boy machine-gunned the door just in front of her. No one knew if he wanted to scare her by getting that close or if he’d missed by mistake. Either way she stopped, staring at the bullet holes through the wood in front of her belly. In the small cabin, the sound of the gunfire echoed in their ears long after it had stopped.
In this moment, Max understood the Kutu so much better, their preference for children. Until now she’d always assumed a large man holding a gun was one of the scariest things a person could face. Now she realized that a child with his finger on the trigger was much much scarier.
Pip lowered herself into a seat, placed her hands on the table. Her breathing was fast and audible.
Within half an hour, the researchers had settled down for the night, lying on the bed or the floor, wearing all their clothes, ready to leave the moment they were given permission. The two soldiers took shifts during the night, sitting in a chair by the door with a rifle—whether to keep the women in or the Kutu out, Max didn’t know.
Max woke, her heart pounding. It was dark enough that the only way she realized it was predawn was by the birds calling. At first she wasn’t sure what had woken her. Then she heard it again. From this distance, it sounded like one rock ricocheting against another, a slight echo following.
A gunshot. At least two miles down the mountains. She could hear the change now in the other women’s breathing. It had woken them, but they were too scared of the boys to move. Cautiously they peered through the dark to the chair by the door. It took them a moment to be sure neither of the soldiers was in the cabin.
“Bonjour?” whispered Dubois. “Il y a quelqu’un?”
“They’ve deserted us,” said Pip. “Thank God.”
“Must have realized their chances were better without us,” said Yoko. “Didn’t care as much this morning about their sergeant whipping them.”
Now the pada-pah pada-pah of assault rifles drifted up the mountain, many firing at the same time. The women crept to the window, peeking over the sill, but could see nothing moving in the swirling mist of the clearing. Yoko eased the door open half an inch. The distant boom and crunch of larger guns reverberated, coming from somewhere down near town.
“Jesus,” said Yoko.
“Les Kutus,” said Dubois. “We must run.”
Max found she was breathing quickly through her mouth, half crouched over as though in some cheap cop movie. This felt unreal. Why exactly was she here in this cabin? A few weeks ago, she’d never even heard of these mountains. Consciously, she made herself step back from the door, lean against a wall and breath deeply. Into her mind floated the smell of her mother’s winter coat, the feel of its corduroy trim. Pressed against the wall, she found she was still hyper-aware of the room around her, the sound of artillery. In case of gunfire, she repeated to herself, fall to the ground. Fall to the ground. She wanted to hold her mom’s coat in her arms for a few minutes, bury her face in it. Then she’d be able to deal with this so much better.
“The question is where do we run to?” asked Yoko. “It’s suicide now to try for town.”
Dubois talked fast, her accent worse in the rush. “We make a circle around the guns. Go through the jungle to the road to Karago. We pay money to someone there to drive us to safety.”
“You’re crazy,” said Yoko. Her voice, while still whispering, was harsh. “You’ve no idea how wide the Kutu are spread out down there or where you might bump into them. Twenty-thousand killers can take up a whole fuckload of space. Even if we got to the road safely, we’d be blinking neon signs saying, ‘Foreigners, Eat Me.’ Most of the Rwandans around here speak just Kinyarwanda. We wouldn’t be able to find out where the danger is or how to stay safe. We’d be helpless.”
“What else can we do?”
Yoko stayed still, facing the window. From the length of the pause, it was clear she had no idea.
Dubois continued. “We can’t stay here. Everyone knows the station exists and that it has whites in it. They will come.”
Max spoke. “The gorillas.”
“What?” said Dubois. “No, we must save ourselves before we can help them.”
“No, the gorillas can help us. We can hide with them.”
There was a pause while they absorbed her idea, then Yoko grabbed her by the ears and planted a kiss hard on top of her head. “Fucking brilliant.” She remembered whom she was dealing with and let go. “Sorry about that, Tombay.”
“Brilliant?” asked Dubois.
Yoko was swiveling already, grabbing a knapsack and stuffing the radio in it. “Look, we carry as much f
ood as possible, enough to last a few weeks, until things quiet down or the UN arrives.” She yanked the blankets off Pip’s bed and began ramming them into the bag. “With all that firepower, the Kutu aren’t hiking over the top of these mountains. They’re driving around, along the roads. Sure, a few might climb up to the station to search for us, but there’s a hundred and fifty square miles of jungle around. They’re not going to check every square foot of it. With the gorillas, we’ll be safe from predators. We bring the radio so we’ll know when it’s OK to climb down.” She stepped fast over to the food cupboard.
“Perhaps it is months,” said Dubois. “Perhaps years.”
Yoko spun, her arms full of sweet potatoes. “Better than strolling down through a jungle full of underfed cannibals.” She began funneling the potatoes into her bag.
Dubois said, “Before you say you do not think they eat people.”
“I was lying,” said Yoko. “Made us all feel better.”
The distant pops and explosions drifting up from town were coming faster now, the battle truly engaged. Max stood against the wall. She was rocking back and forth. At the moment, she needed to rock—that was OK—but she worked not to forget herself in the motion, not to lose focus on what was happening.
From Pip’s direction came a small but continuous clicking—like a tiny, very fast typewriter—and she turned toward it. Pip’s arms were wrapped tight around her ribs. Glancing upward, she saw Pip’s teeth chattering, her eyes staring out the window, searching the jungle.
Dubois was only a little better off. She was moving from window to window, watching for soldiers, but not preparing to flee.
Yoko, on the other hand, was filling a canteen and clipping it to her knapsack. She grabbed another blanket off a shelf and threw it to Max. “Tombay, snap out of it,” she said. “We don’t have time for any aspie shit. Pack fast.”
Max continued rocking, but at the same time awkwardly shoved the blanket into her knapsack with her one working arm. The knapsack still contained all the canned food she’d bought yesterday in town. “Can you take these too?” she asked and gestured to the bags of mangoes. Yoko tied them onto the straps of her backpack. “Don’t forget raincoats. We’ll need them.”
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