by Meja Mwangi
The expression on Hari’s face warned me to get out of there fast. I stepped back, tripped over the piece of wood the mzungu boy was chopping and went crashing into the dust. Hari kicked me hard and went away very angry.
Nigel was totally amazed by the encounter.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Hari,” I said. “My brother Hari.”
“What did he want?”
“Nothing.”
“He whacks you like that just for fun?”
“It doesn’t hurt much,” I said and smiled.
“Can’t you report him to your father?” he asked.
The last time I told my father that someone had beaten me up in school, my father had called me a coward and gave me a rapping too. So I went back to school and walloped the bully right back. The bully’s mother complained to my mother. She reported it to my father, and I got another beating for that.
I had long given up trying to understand the world of adults.
Nigel could not understand the brutality that dogged the everyday life of a village boy.
“Doesn’t your father ever beat you?” I asked him.
“No,” he told me. “Never.”
“And your mother?” I asked.
She never beat him either.
“What about your big brothers?” I asked him.
He had no brothers.
And the teachers? I asked him. Didn’t the teachers whack him all the time?
“Never,” he told me.
I could not help envying him. I told him how the life of a village boy was difficult. Everyone beat the fun out of you. There was no hope of peace until you were grown, circumcised and became a man. Then no one would touch you, not even your mother.
The wood-chopping business was getting nowhere. Nigel suggested we give it up and do something less tiring. We could go down and explore the forest along the river.
I called Hari’s dog, Jimi. He was lying on the dust under the grain store playing dead. He opened one eye, regarded me for a moment.
With no one else in the compound to talk to, I talked to Jimi a lot. I asked him if he would like to go for a walk.
He turned the other way as if to say, “Leave me alone.”
“I have a good idea,” I said to him.
He did not want to hear it. He was fed up with my bright ideas. Some of them had nearly got him killed.
I grabbed him by the neck and hauled him out from under the grain store. He was my dog, or at least Hari let me call him my dog, and he had to do as I commanded.
Everything in our village ran according to a hierarchy. Above everyone were Bwana Ruin, Mamsab Ruin and any white person who happened to come along. Then came the village men. Then came the women and girls. And then came the rest of us. The boys and village dogs were at the bottom of the ladder, below the goats, the sheep and the chickens. We boys had no rights whatsoever. Not at home, not in the village and not at school.
But the dogs were in a worse situation. We, at least, had names we could call our own. The dogs had none. No one wasted time worrying about what to name his dog. Every other dog in the village was simply called Dog. The rest were named Jimi. It was not strange at all for a person to have three dogs named Jimi. This confused the dogs more than it confused the boys, the village dog handlers.
However, in the presence of other dogs, only Hari’s jimi answered to the name Jimi. He was a true mongrel like the rest of them, a strange crossbreed of all the dogs that had ever lived. He was bigger and meaner than the rest and was the leader of all the village dogs. He was also one of the oldest dogs in the village and was father and grandfather to most of the other mongrels.
I nudged Jimi with my foot.
“Let’s go chase rabbits,” I said to him. “You are growing fat and lazy and ugly.”
He rose, walked a few paces farther under the grain store and lay down again to sleep. Once, when he was weak and dying from hunger and fleas, Jimi had been my dog and best friend. But as he grew bigger and stronger, Hari had reclaimed him and promised to find me another starved, flea-bitten puppy to love. Jimi owed me his life, and I never missed an opportunity to remind him of it.
“Leave him be,” I said to Nigel. “We’ll take the other jimis.”
I whistled for Hari’s other dogs. I never took them anywhere if I could help it, so they eagerly rose to go with me. When Jimi saw that we really intended to leave him out of the adventure, he got up, shook the dust from his fur and took his place by my side.
We made our way through the village paths. I led us away from any route where we might come upon my father or mother. We were joined by numerous other jimis along the way, dogs that had nothing better to do than tag along with us. We joined the fishermen’s path and went up the river, away from the village and the farmhouse.
Nigel had never been in a forest this big and wild before. Everything was new and wonderful to him. He was amazed by the things he saw. The trees, the birds and the insects were all new to him. It was soon clear to me that he knew as little about my world as I knew about his.
Nigel ran about with the dogs, swung from the liana and leaped over the rocks. He roared like a fearsome giant and flexed his thin muscles. He leaped into the river, clothes and all, and wrestled with giant crocodiles. That was the first day he told me about Tarzan. He wanted to grow up to be Tarzan, a fearless giant who lived in the forest and was not afraid of anything.
I knew I was going to like Nigel, this white boy who knew so little about everything. I had a great deal to teach him. But first he had to teach me to swim.
“We have no swimming trunks,” he said.
“Swimming trunks?”
“Swimming shorts,” he said.
He was surprised to hear that I knew of no such shorts. I owned two pairs of shorts — the ones I wore at home and the ones I wore to school. I swam in the nude, like all the boys I knew.
To show him there was really nothing to it, I undressed and rolled my clothes into a ball. I stuffed them into a hollow under the root of a mokoe tree. I had learned this from Hari. If the river guards showed up when I was in the river, I would run off into the forest and come back for my clothes later.
I jumped into the river. The water came up to my knees and was very cold. Nigel took off his clothes too and joined me in the pool.
We splashed about for a while. The dogs got bored and went off into the forest to look for something to eat. Nigel tried to teach me to float, but the pool was too shallow.
“We’ll find another one,” I told him. “This river is full of pools.”
We dressed and went farther up the river. We could not walk quickly, as Nigel had to see everything, touch everything and smell everything. He asked questions about everything he saw. About the trees and about the birds. About the hundreds of insects and things that lived on the moss-covered trees and in the undergrowth. He had nature study in school and had read scores of books and encyclopedias on nature. But he had never seen anything as wonderful as this forest.
I was very proud of my forest.
“Can you read a book?” he asked me.
I told him that I could. I was in class five. He was in class six. I told him about my school. I tried to tell him about our much-feared headmaster, Lesson One, but his mind was on many things.
We came upon a convoy of safari ants crossing our path. Nigel immediately stopped and kneeled by the path to study them. I sat on the bank and told him how the safari ants invaded our village during the long rains, and how we spent sleepless nights fighting them off.
He stuck his finger into their path and withdrew it with a cry as a giant soldier ant sank its teeth into it. He tried a blade of grass and watched the soldier ants attack it furiously. He looked up to ask how one fought off such small creatures.
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bsp; “First you take off your clothes,” I told him. “That way they have nowhere to hide. Then you pick them off your body one at a time and throw them into the fire. After that you hold your clothes over the fire so that the smoke blinds them. Then you burn old bicycle tires to drive them out of the hut.”
If you had no old tires, old shoes — especially gum boots — did just as well.
We did not always win. Sometimes we had to move out and leave the ants in charge of the house until they saw it fit to move on.
Nigel’s green eyes were full of wonder. He had a broad face, a freckled nose, red cheeks and a happy smile. I had no doubt he could see in the dark too, like Bwana Ruin.
He was getting hungry. He suggested we catch a fish and roast it over a fire.
“We have no fire,” I told him.
“Yes, we do,” he said.
He always carried a box of matches with him. He was a boy scout, he told me. He was always prepared.
“We have no line,” I said reasonably.
“We can use our hands.” He had seen Amazon Indians do this in a film.
“I don’t know how to eat fish,” I confessed.
“I’ll show you,” he said, and we hopped off the bank into the river.
The fish found in the Liki and Nanyuki rivers were mountain trout. They had many fine bones that could get stuck in a boy’s throat and kill him. It was said, mainly by Hari and other poachers, that it cost a hundred shillings at the local hospital to remove a fish bone from your throat. More than twice my father’s monthly salary. The fear was deep.
I was later to learn that this rumor was started by Bwana Ruin to discourage the villagers from fishing in his river, and spread by Hari and his kind who had no wish to share their catch with the whole village.
I loved fishing for the sake of fishing. The tingling sensation when a fish nibbled at the bait, the thrill of landing it. I had never fished with my hands and thought it a foolish and impossible task. But Nigel believed in it, and as he was now my friend, I went along with the idea.
We wasted some time that morning trying to catch fish with our bare hands. Finally we had to settle for the purple koe fruit that grew wild all along the river bank. I considered taking Nigel to the duck pool to introduce him to my ducks, but before I could make the suggestion, the dogs came back, making a big noise in the forest. They had been as far as the middle plain, Jimi told me. They had caught and eaten something and some were still licking their lips. They were doing much better than us as far as food was concerned. Nigel suggested we get them to catch something for us.
I explain that jimis did not catch anything for anyone. It was everyone for himself and too bad for the slowest. They ate everything on the spot — first come first served — dividing the catch so fast that only blood and a few hairs remained. The slowest jimis had to be content with licking the blood off the leaves and the grass.
“You have to be fast,” I said to Nigel.
“I’m very fast,” he told me.
So I called the jimis and gave them the plan. They were all mongrels and many of them were slow to catch on. They gazed at me, bored. They had heard it all before.
I turned to Hari’s Jimi and instructed him to keep the others in line. And to make certain that Nigel and I got a share of whatever we caught.
Jimi looked balefully back at me and would have laughed at me if he could. But he understood, all right. He turned his glance across the river and said something encouraging to his followers. Then he rose and splashed across the river and into the trees.
The hunt was on.
Five
WE SPLASHED ACROSS the river after the dogs. Following their loud rustling through the undergrowth, we rushed on into the forest.
The forest grew thicker and darker as we penetrated deeper into the interior. The ground rose steadily as we left the river valley. The forest floor changed from rich, soft soil to hard, rocky ground.
We ran on after the dogs. Nigel’s hair caught on the undergrowth, slowing him down. Several times I had to stop and help untangle it.
“Are you tired?” I asked.
“No,” he said, hopping with excitement.
“Are you afraid?”
“No.”
He had never been in such a place before.
“This is nothing,” I told him. “Wait until we get to the Liki.”
We pushed on after the dogs. We heard them forcing their way through the bush just ahead of us, searching the forest for rabbits and hares.
Hours later, we emerged from the dense forest onto the middle plateau, a vast grassland between the two rivers. Apart from a few rain clouds over the mountain miles away to the east, the sky was a clear blue dome above us. The rainy season was not due for another three months, and it was a beautiful day to be out hunting, cool and clear, and the air was crisp and fresh.
Across the plain was the Liki valley. It was as thickly forested as the Nanyuki river valley we had just left. But the best hunting ground in all the world was the Loldaiga plain. Old Moses, the largest warthog I had ever seen, lived there.
The ground around us was open to the horizon. We saw the dogs sniffing their way through the grass, searching each and every clump of bush that grew around the scattered cedar trees.
On the bushes grew many kinds of berries. Some of them were poisonous but most of them were good to eat. I showed Nigel which ones were edible.
“Never eat strange berries,” I told him. “They can kill you very quickly. You must watch the birds. Don’t eat anything they don’t eat.”
Nigel had read a great deal about jungles, and he knew some of these rules. But everything he had seen so far was bigger, more awesome than anything he had ever read. He told me again about Tarzan. He lived with the animals and was king of the jungle.
I knew the forest around Bwana Ruin’s farm well. I also knew all the caves and all the hiding places. But I had never before heard of the white giant. The only king of the jungle I knew was a giant one-eyed ogre with two mouths — one on his face, the other at the back of his head — who lived in caves up on the mountain. He carried a small bag on his shoulder into which he put the children he caught for his dinner.
I was telling Nigel about the giant of the small bag, and about his encounter with Old Moses the warthog, when a big snake cut across our path at a terrific speed.
Nigel grabbed for the snake’s tail. I tackled him and threw him to the ground, away from the snake. The snake sped away, pursued by a few foolish jimis who had never seen a giant cobra before and thought it a good snack.
My heart was beating wildly as I helped Nigel back to his feet.
“What did you do that for?” he protested. “I’m not afraid of snakes.”
His ignorant daring seemed to have no end.
The dogs mobbed the cobra, yelping and leaping and trying to bite him. The snake suddenly stopped, coiled himself into a spring and, raising his head, dared them to come any nearer. The dogs paused to think about it. They surrounded the snake and waited for the bravest of them to take the first bite at this angry lunch. Jimi, who had survived several snake attacks on this same plain, kept well away.
Finding himself outnumbered by the yelping, slobbering jimis, the cobra slithered into a rabbit hole and stayed put. Some young and foolish jimis started to dig him out.
Some snakes were harmless, I told Nigel. But most were not, and you could not always tell which was which. So if he saw any snake bigger than his little finger, he was to run like a hare.
“But I’m not afraid of snakes,” he told me.
Ahead of us, Hari’s Jimi gave a surprised yelp as a startled hare, escaping from the cobra, shot out of the emergency exit of his burrow and took off at high speed. The jimis abandoned whatever they were doing and joined in the chase. We ran after them.<
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The hare ran so fast that he seemed no more than a bouncing ball of fur. Jimi raced after him, leaping and bounding and crashing through everything that stood between him and his prey. The hare seemed to realize he stood no chance in a straight race against Jimi. He started weaving and dodging and zigzagging in and out of clumps of bush. He raced through the tall grass at such a high speed that the pursuing dogs became dizzy from the chase. They tripped and somersaulted, crashed into each other and rolled all over the plain.
The hare led us across the plateau toward the Liki valley. After half a mile the yelping died down and we lost track of the jimis altogether. We ran on, desperate to get to the hare before the jimis had eaten it all up.
When we finally caught up with them, the dogs were sniffing the ground in confusion, unaware that the hare had gone underground. Then Jimi showed them the hole where the hare had vanished. They went mad thinking how to get the hare out. The hole was too narrow for any of them to squeeze into.
Jimi decided the surest way was to burrow into the hole and started digging.
“This could take hours,” I said to Jimi as he set to work, tossing the soil in all directions.
Jimi did not mind. He went right on digging, throwing soil and grass back into our eyes. We stepped aside and let him dig.
“What now?” I wondered.
“Fire,” Nigel shouted with excitement. “Let’s smoke him out.”
We gathered twigs and dry grass. We heaped them over the hole. We were getting ready to light the fire when I looked up and saw our hare. He had popped out of an emergency exit about fifty yards away and was watching us and no doubt wondering what in the world we were up to.
“Jimi,” I said, the excitement rising inside me. “Look, Jimi. There he is.”
Jimi went on digging. The others watched him. Some were bored enough to lie down and doze off.
Then the hare, having apparently decided that this had nothing at all to do with him, turned and went on his way.