by Meja Mwangi
Old Moses quickened his pace.
“Jimi?”
“He’s scared,” said Nigel.
“Jimi is not scared of anything,” I informed him.
Old Moses was moving faster now, his bouncing motion building momentum. Soon he would be in full charge. Then only a tree could stop him.
“Jimi!” Nigel’s voice rose in panic.
Jimi stood his ground.
Any second now, Old Moses would knock us across the plain, unless Jimi did something about it, fast.
Jimi started his own charge too late. We could see that, but not him. They met twenty feet from us, the warthog going full steam. There was a mighty crash, and our Jimi went flying into the air and disappeared in the grass behind us.
I grabbed Nigel’s hand, ready to run for it. Then the warthog braked suddenly, stopping in a cloud of dust ten feet from us. He whirled around, searching for his adversary. We could hear Jimi groaning behind the bushes.
“Wow!” said Nigel. “Did you see that!”
I had seen it all right, and I knew what it meant. Our defence was gone. We had just been defeated, while the rest of our army of dogs wandered the plains in search of adventure. The hunt was over before it had begun.
There was only one course of action left now. Leave Old Moses alone, collect Hari’s Jimi — whatever was left of him — and go home to plan another day.
I was considering this line of action when two of Jimi’s best friends happened along and, without waiting to find out what was going on, went straight for Old Moses.
The old warthog was just as startled as we were. He too had considered the skirmish over and won. But he was a mean old fighter. He went back into battle with determination.
More jimis turned up, drawn by the noise, and they joined in. Old Moses was outnumbered, but none of the dogs could match his speed or strength. He snorted, grunted and whirled at top speed, tossing the tenacious little mongrels this way and that. Then he turned around and, with his little tail pointed at the sky, crashed through the bushes in full flight.
The dogs went after him. Jimi emerged from the bushes, still a little dizzy from the fall, and charged after the mob. We came last, running as fast as we could to keep up.
We went through the tall grass to a patch of open ground where the dogs started gaining on the warthog. By then a band of at least twenty strong jimis had converged on the quarry, going like the wind and raising such a din that we must have been heard all the way across the plain.
Old Moses charged on, his short legs pumping, the massive head swinging from side to side to keep the pursuers in sight. Whenever the dogs got too close for comfort he would whirl around without breaking stride and scatter them on the dust. Then he would take off again, fast as lightning. But we could see he was getting tired. His pace was slackening and his snorts and grunts came less forcefully.
We pressed on, yelling at the dogs to get him. With Jimi now back in the lead, it seemed a certainty.
Then, all of a sudden, as the dogs were gathering their last energies for the kill, Old Moses stopped and turned around to face us. The jimis were so surprised by this that instead of pouncing on him immediately and bringing him to his knees, they paused too, wondering what was on his mind.
Then Old Moses moved. Not forwards, as the dogs expected, but backwards, moving at such an incredible speed that he left us breathless. By the time the dogs figured out what was happening, the warthog was safely in his hole laughing his head off.
Then the jimis charged forward and crashed at the mouth of the hole, fighting to be the first to go in after him. They piled up at the entrance and would have suffocated had I not taken a stick and beaten sense into the pack. They stood back and waited. I asked for volunteers. They all volunteered. All except Jimi. He was older and wiser.
We picked the leanest volunteer, an eager little jimi with no brains at all. We pushed him head first into the old warthog’s castle. He went in easily, wriggling his way in with amazing enthusiasm. Then we stood back and waited to see what would happen.
He was gone for a few seconds. Then we heard a muffled rumbling underground followed by a terrified yelp. Then the dog shot backwards out of the hole. He went spinning into the air and landed in a cloud of dust several yards away. He lay there as if dead.
There were no more volunteers after that.
We had quite quickly reached what could be called a stalemate. The warthog stayed inside and we stayed outside.
I asked for smart ideas. Jimi thought we should go back home. The other jimis thought we should go after the gazelles and the plains animals they could see grazing miles away on the horizon.
“No use,” I told them. They were looking at the survivors of many more serious hunts by predators that were much smarter and more determined than any jimi. Lions, wild dogs and hyenas had all, at one time or another, gone after the gazelles. But the jimis were welcome to try.
“But don’t say I did not warn you.”
They grumbled, but they stayed with us.
“Let’s smoke him out,” Nigel suggested.
It sounded like a good idea, and it was our only idea, so we gathered twigs and dry grass, piled them over the hole and lit them. But the wind was blowing the wrong way, and it blew the smoke in our faces instead. After a few attempts we gave it up.
Soon the dogs got bored and wandered into the bushes to look for something more interesting.
“Any bright ideas?” I asked Nigel.
“We wait for him to get hungry.”
“Could take days.”
We didn’t have days. We didn’t even have hours. Night was coming. Now that I knew Nigel did not see in the dark, I worried about darkness.
“We’ll get Salt and Pepper,” he said. “They are not afraid of anything.”
“It will be dark before we get home,” I told him.
We wondered what to do.
A pack of jimis got it into their heads to go after the gazelles. I tried to hold them back, told them it would be dark before they got to where the gazelles were, and by then the gazelles would be somewhere else equally far away. But they chose not to believe me and went on their way.
We rounded up the remaining dogs and headed home. Along the way we ate some wild berries, but they did little to relieve our hunger.
The sun went down as we made our way through the forest. I could smell buffalo but, not wanting to frighten Nigel, I did not mention it. Nor did I tell him of the shadows that lurked, watching us go by, following us with their eyes. The dogs saw them too but they knew them for what they were and did not bark.
A subdued cough betrayed their presence to Nigel. He clutched my arm, his hand cold with fear.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” I said loudly for the shadows to hear. I was a good boy who saw nothing and said nothing.
The fear grew, mounting with every step we took until it was too great to bear.
Then we ran, and we did not stop until we got home.
The following day I told Hari I had seen his friends in the forest.
“My friends?” he asked.
“The ones who gave me the letter to bring to you. The men of the forest.”
Hari glanced around, saw that no one was watching and pulled me behind the chicken house.
“What did they say to you?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“Did they give you another letter?”
“No.”
“Did they talk to you at all?
“No.”
“Then why are you telling me about them?”
I had thought he might want to know, I told him. I wanted to be his friend.
He pinched me by the ears and lifted me off my feet. I bit my lip, determined not to cry out
from the pain. When he finally put me down, he gave me a left-right slap and I went deaf.
From that day on I never told Hari anything he didn’t ask to know.
Eight
BOYS ARE OFTEN the first to know when things go wrong. When lions invaded Bwana Ruin’s cattle bomas and ate three of his biggest bulls, it was a boy who first came across the feasting lions and raised the alarm. When fire suddenly gutted the old storage barns where Bwana Ruin stored his diesel and hay, it was a boy who was the first to see the smoke. And when the old watchman disappeared from the dairy, where the machines were also stolen, it was a boy who came upon his body buried in the forest, far away from the farmstead, and alerted everyone about it.
I knew that the white farmers lived a good and rich life in the big farmhouses, while the Africans who labored for them lived a life of slavery in their crumbling village huts. I knew white people did not like black people and treated them little better than donkeys and much worse than their dogs. My father had told me as much. I knew they paid their workers a pittance and worked them like slaves. I knew that white people beat black people and locked them up in police cells. I knew that they sent black people on detention to faraway islands where they died of malaria and other diseases. It was no secret that Bwana Ruin beat up and abused the village women when he found them in the forest cutting trees for firewood.
I knew these things and more, because people talked about them all the time. Once Bwana Ruin had set his dogs loose on us when he found us stealing fruit from his orchard. I had escaped by jumping over an impossibly tall keiapple fence, but one boy died from the mauling he got from the dogs. His father had to run two miles to the hospital carrying his gravely injured son on his back, because Bwana Ruin had refused to allow Hari to take the boy to hospital on the ox cart that transported milk and cream to Nanyuki.
“A thief is a thief,” he had said. “Let it be a lesson.”
But we soon forgot and went back to raiding his orchard. It was the only fruit garden around.
Though I knew these things, and many more things that were wrong and unjust, I never let them worry me for a moment. They had been going on for a long time, and the adults had done nothing but grumble about them. Besides, I had school to go to and fish to catch and Old Moses to hunt. So I left it to the grownups to moan about the injustices.
Even my own father was helpless. He grumbled, he moaned and, in extreme cases, he took out his anger on me or Hari. When things went very wrong in the kitchen, when he burned the roast and got a lashing from Mamsab Ruin, he came home raging. He looked for something we had done, or not done, and gave us a beating for it. He lay awake at night, tossing angrily in his bed and sighing again and again. I heard him swear not to take it any more. I heard him promise himself to stand up for his rights and his dignity. I heard him swear to resign and find another job.
From my hard and cold bed in the cooking place, I heard my father do a lot of thinking out loud. But, come morning, he rose with the roosters and went to light the woodstove in the kitchen and heat the bath water for Bwana Ruin. No matter what sort of a night my father had, Bwana Ruin’s breakfast was always ready by seven o’clock.
I knew there were gangs of men living in the forest and armed with machetes and spears and smelling like old buffalos. I knew them to be the mau-mau. According to Bwana Ruin, they were bad men, thieves and murderers. They had never stolen anything from me or spoken to me, apart from the day they gave me a message for Hari.
I knew I must not talk about them to anyone, not even to Hari who was their friend. But I did not have the vaguest idea what they were about, or why they crept through the shadows in the forest. It was not until the second raid by the white soldiers that I began to get an idea of what was going on.
The soldiers rounded us all up and herded us into the old auction pen as before. They made us sit on the cow dung. They surrounded us, their guns pointed at our heads while they ransacked our village again. They searched every nook and cranny, looking for anything that would link the villagers to the mau-mau. They turned the huts inside out and stole money and valuables as they had done before. But they found no guns and no sign of mau-mau, and they gave up the search in the end.
Bwana Ruin came to address his people and plead with them to be cooperative. He stood on the auctioneer’s platform way above our heads so that the sun burned our eyes when we looked up at him. He surveyed us like a herd of cattle and addressed our upturned faces.
“Watu,” he said, “I hear there are some watu going about at night telling you a lot of maneno, a lot of nonsense.”
He was dressed in his khakis and riding boots. As usual he rapped on his right boot with his riding crop as he spoke.
He was not angry this time. The soldiers had allowed his cook and other essential personnel to go to work as usual before leading the rest into the auction pen. He had not kept us waiting as long as he had the last time. But the mothers had learned from the earlier experience, when children had cried themselves sick, so they had brought enough to eat and to drink. It felt more like a forced picnic than a military operation.
Bwana Ruin arrived after his usual inspection of the farm.
“This is my land,” he said forcefully. “Bought from the Crown and paid for with my own money. If the mau-mau tell you that they will take it from me and give it to you or to anyone else, they are telling you a load of manure. That will never happen. Not in two thousand years. Not over my dead body.”
Mamsab Ruin and the little white man watched the proceedings from a distance. Nigel caught my eye and waved. I dared not wave back.
“Freedom?” Bwana Ruin was saying. “What freedom, aye? I ask you again, what freedom are they telling you about? Freedom to do what? Freedom to go where? You watu know you have nowhere else to go. Your tribal reserves are overflowing with poor and unemployed people. You have no land to go back to. Kweli rongo? True or not?”
“Kweli,” the workers answered. “Too true.”
“You know that I have been very good to you,” he went on. “I have given you a job and a generous salary. More than other bwanas pay their labor. You ask their watu. They will tell you I am the best bwana in Nanyuki. I have given you a place to live. Very soon I shall demolish your old hovels and build you new ones. I give you a pound of posho and all the skimmed milk you can drink. Kweli rongo?”
“Kweli,” some people said. Others nodded in agreement.
The sun was very hot now and we prayed he would soon let us go back to our business. Then the jimis showed up. The village dogs, we were to discover, had taken the opportunity to ransack the wide-open huts after the soldiers had left. They had eaten all the food they could find, all the milk and several sitting hens and numerous eggs. Now Jimi came by to see what had happened to the owners of the vandalized huts. He was accompanied by two of his loyal lieutenants, two lazy old jimis who hung around with him because he seemed to know where to eat.
On seeing the armed soldiers guarding us, the dogs ran into the bush and returned to the village.
I could see Nigel was impatient. He walked nervously around his grandmother. He squatted. He got up and walked around her again.
We had set this day aside for the adventure of our lives. Today we were to forget the worthless village dogs and take Salt and Pepper hunting instead. They were our last card against Old Moses, the indomitable old man of the plain. But this mau-mau business was taking too long.
“Freedom, aye?” Bwana Ruin raved. “You watu know you are free to come and go as you wish. You are not my prisoners here. You are not my slaves here, aye? You can leave any time you wish. You may leave today, if you wish. Who wants to leave, right now? Hands up those who want to leave.”
A few hands went up, but they were all from bored children who had no idea what he was talking about. They wanted to go back home to play.
Their mothers whacked t
heir hands down.
“So you all want to stay and work for me, aye?” Bwana Ruin asked.
“Ndiyo, Bwana,” the people said as one. “Yes, Bwana.”
“Very well,” he told them. “But remember that no matter what they tell you, this land will never be yours. Not in two thousand years.”
He said he intended to farm the land until he died. Then his children would farm it and his grandchildren too. But, as long as they worked well, the watu and their wives and totos would be free to live and work for him. They would be treated well and they would always get their wages. That was a guarantee from Bwana Ruin.
“You go tell them that,” he said in conclusion. “You go tell your mau-mau brothers what I have told you today. They don’t know what they are playing with.”
He turned abruptly and hopped down from the platform. He talked with the officers for a moment. Then he left for his house.
Without a word to the villagers, the soldiers climbed back on their trucks and drove away. They did not arrest anyone this time and it took the villagers a while to realize that they had been dismissed and could go back home. Then there was a general scramble back to the village to see what had survived the invasion of the white soldiers.
It took the villagers the rest of the afternoon to sort out the mess. The dogs had turned the place upside down. In some instances they had carried household articles from one end of the village to the other and left them there.
The villagers had learned from the last time around, and they had hidden their money well. In their desperation to find the money they knew was hidden somewhere, the soldiers had stopped just short of dismantling the huts.
Some villagers had done such a thorough job of hiding their money that they never found it again. For months after this second invasion, money kept turning up in the strangest places long after the owners had forgotten about it.
I left my mother searching desperately for the money she had hidden in the thatched roof of the latrine and sneaked through the village. I avoided Jimi so he would not know what I was up to and made a wide detour to our agreed meeting point by the fish pond.