by Mike Bond
An uneven clump, clump-clump of hooves approached; shouldering his rifle the Somali turned to another leading a camel. “Ho, brother! Did I not shoot well?”
The other smiled. “Yes, Warwar, it was well done. Now let’s load your pelt quickly. The shot was loud.”
“It’s a shame to share this with the others.”
“You would live alone?” The other dragged the lion pelt from the bushes where it had tumbled. “Check there’s no money on him.”
“Him?” the young Somali scoffed. “It’s a barbarian in rags—an old simi and a worn spear.”
They lashed the pelt atop the camel and continued leading it south as the last rays of sun receded across the lilac sands. Just before dark they crossed a furrowed trail coming from the northwest. Warwar knelt, fingering a round, deep print. “It can’t be!”
His brother walked alongside the tracks, noting the different sizes and strides. “Three females, one old. Plus a calf.” He scanned the back trail, the rough scar in the earth’s reddish eroded crust shadowed by the fading horizontal light. “The last of the northern herds. Driven by thirst down out of the mountains, headed for the Ewaso N’giro.”
“How many days?”
“Weeks. We won’t catch them till the river.”
“Perhaps they’ll find us a bull.”
“Hush, you dreamer! Don’t bring bad luck.”
“Since when would it be bad luck,” Warwar laughed, “to come home loaded down with ivory?”
4
BY READING, MacAdam realized, he had enlarged his awareness but impaired his vision. Now to see the world clearly he was forced to look at it through a wall of glass.
He unbuttoned his shirt and wiped dust from his spectacles, watched the camels milling in the paddock where the Rendille woman had driven them. Not even eight o’clock and already the sun hot on the back of your neck. The grass underfoot not too brittle for December: so far the short rains had been good.
Under a thorn tree by the paddock the dismounted cab of a Land Rover served as a shed from which he took two bottles of hydrogen peroxide and a large antibiotic tube. This probably would not work but was better than that mixture the Rendille woman used that killed four camels last year.
A string of Samburu kids lined the stockade, their fuzzy hair paled with dust kicked up by the camels shuffling nervously and swinging their heads to snap at flies along their haunches.
The Rendille woman climbed the stockade and jumped in, her head barely to the camels’ bellies. With a switch she drove one into the chute; Isau, the Samburu foreman, dropped the gate behind it. MacAdam slipped a noose of sisal round the camel’s knee and as it lurched forward against the front gate of the chute he yanked the noose tight, jerking up its knee. It brayed and tried to pull back, tautening the noose that he then tied off against the stockade. He threw a halter rope around its head, tossed the end to Isau who looped it once around a beam and held it tight.
With the camel neighing and jerking at the halter MacAdam washed a large boil on its neck with hydrogen peroxide, took a knife from his pocket and sliced the boil open. The camel screamed, craning its neck, green grass spittle frothing its yellow teeth and pale gums. MacAdam squeezed the boil, blood and pus running down the camel’s rough, dusty fur. Wiping pus from his fingers on to its neck, he screwed a syringe top on to the antibiotic tube and squeezed some into the wound. He slipped the noose from its knee; Isau tossed free the halter; MacAdam opened the front chute gate and the camel trotted, swinging its head angrily, into the pasture. The Rendille woman drove another camel into the chute.
It was nearly noon when he finished. Dust and sweat caked his face; blood and pus streaked his shorts and knees. He thanked Isau and the Rendille woman, who nodded, her eyes on the savanna, as if he had not meant his thanks and therefore to accept them would further demean her, or that neither his thanks nor he were significant. For an instant he saw himself as they must see him, an easy-smiling, hearty man with a booming voice and nothing to say, with a fine home and wife and possessions that inoculated him against others’ joys and sufferings and his own. A gregarious fake. Oi meninisho k’kiri nememe: flesh that is not painful does not feel.
He put the last half-bottle of hydrogen peroxide back in the Land Rover shed, rubbed his hands clean with dust and walked past the thatch-roofed sheds where several ancient Land Rovers rusted calmly on blocks in the tall grass, past the long stone barn with its galvanized roof, towards the slate-roofed house under flame trees, frangipani, bougainvillea and jacarandas, a candlestick euphorbia towering cactus-like on either side.
Dorothy was not downstairs. He entered the parlor cool and dark after the blast of the sun, poured gin and tonic water into a glass and wandered into the kitchen for ice, then out on the veranda, sipping gin and watching the heat seethe over the wide golden savanna; behind it, blocking the horizon, the blunt, vast bulk of Mount Kenya was cloaked in clouds.
On the equator the days pass one like the next. You come here young, marry, raise a family, die, and leave no tracks. Occasionally you go “home”, to London and the Cotswold mists, the old streets of Cirencester, the city’s bookshops, movies, pubs, museums, the facile English conversations. After a few weeks you wake up one day and decide to go back to Africa—the rest is just a game.
Like malaria, Africa. Once bitten you can never shake it. They used to call acacias “fever trees”, thinking malaria came from them. Now they “know” malaria comes from mosquitoes. Some day they’ll realize malaria comes from the continent itself: Africa is a fever. For Africa there’s no chloroquine. No matter if you leave it, it’s engraved in your blood.
Yet Africa is dying, taking the fever with it. Have no attachments, MacAdam knew the Maasai said: see the world as it passes, not siding with lion or gazelle. A century ago the whites came, ploughed and fenced the savanna, cut the forests, grazed their ignorant cattle where the wildebeest had roamed. They killed the warriors and made the docile ones clerks, told them we nailed God to a tree because He threatened to free us of our sins. “What are sins?” the Maasai answered. “God is the land, the trees, the mountains, the animals, the sky, the rivers and the rain. How do you nail this to a tree?”
Now the land, the trees, the animals are gone; the whites were right—God’s not so hard to kill. And most of the whites had gone, too, leaving behind them a plague to finish off what they began. This plague, MacAdam had reflected so many bitter times, was medicine without birth control. It allowed the weak to live, populations to explode, the limitless savannas and jungles cut into tiny shambas where swollen families burnt and hacked the vegetation, then clung to the malnourished soil till it eroded to bedrock. Without the grass and trees the soil dried, the rains died and you could see a man coming miles away by the dust he raised.
But don’t see a lion’s killing a waterbuck from either side, he reminded himself. He should not try to attribute “good”. Learn not to care, again and again he had told himself, about the death of Africa.
Dorothy’s footsteps upstairs. Africa, that still enslaved the black woman, in MacAdam’s experience wore the white one down, made her either passive or hard. In the first years of their marriage there’d been friends, other ranchers, with a common longing for an England whose mirage grew ever more entrancing as the reality was forgotten. But now the neighbors and her own children were gone, Dorothy couldn’t stop talking about going “home”.
The Samburu distinguished between house and home. A house was what the Europeans had, here in Africa. It was not their home. Home was where the family lived, generations, the familiar soil. A place which had no written history because it was in their bones, as their bones were in the soil. The Mau Mau had come because the Africans got tired of waiting for the white man to go home.
When MacAdam and Dorothy went down to Nairobi she perked up, but said she hated it. As the other white ranchers left the Lerochi plateau, Kikuyu politicians had bought their ranches and resold them in tiny parcels whose buyers could not make
enough from them to live. Their goats tore up the last grass; the rains scoured the broken topsoil into dirtied streams that gnawed gullies through parched valleys. Now MacAdam and Dorothy were the last whites on the plateau. When the rains were good their cattle prospered. When there were no rains he cut the herd to two hundred heifers and a few bulls, and wandered northern Kenya with them like a Samburu nomad.
Dorothy’s tread was listless on the stairs. When they were young there’d been so much passion, joy in each other. Now they were old friends and passion a trick of memory. He felt himself turning into sinew. “Take a second wife,” Aiyam the Samburu elder had counseled. “Look at me—at more than seventy years I have four wives—I keep them happy!”
He’d take no other wife. Once yes, with a joy that bordered on abandon. But those days were dead. Dead and buried. The other wife had never been his own, and they’d been right to kill it. But when he dared to think honestly about her, he saw that only then had he lived down to the bottom of his soul, with a joy so hot and bright it cut him to the bone. He’d acted like a fool, he would tell himself, a teenager lost in visions of himself. It never would have lasted; he would have ended just as badly off as he was now.
In the kitchen he took three ice cubes from the fridge and plunked them into his glass. How soon they start to melt, he thought. Have I reached the age when nothing is enough? What else is there? When you’re young it’s so easy—you love danger. Look for it. But once you test yourself, face fire, you never have to doubt again. Then you see that courage is so little. In any case I’ve got no danger now. No risk means no joy.
He tucked the gin bottle away and hid his glass in a corner of the sink as Dorothy slippered into the kitchen. “Hullo,” he smiled, hating his smile and the timbre of his voice. “Another lovely day.”
5
THE PLUME OF RED DUST rose diagonally into the bright late afternoon sky, its thickness attesting to the speed of the approaching vehicle. MacAdam glanced at it from time to time as he moved along the fence between his outbuildings and the weaning pasture, loosening the staples on the wooden posts, pulling the barbed wires tight one by one against a bracing post with a cable stretcher, then hammering the staples home, so that this section of the fence now stood tight and true.
You don’t do what you don’t want to, he’d always told himself, unless you have to do preserve yourself. If you avoid what you don’t want to do, you’ve more time to do what you want. But what if there’s nothing you want to do?
Now he could see the vehicle, a dark blue Police Land Rover: probably come to arrest someone in the manyattas behind the ranch—it annoyed him, making the steel grips of the cable stretcher feel slick in his hands.
The Land Rover slowed as it reached the white-fenced lawn; it stopped at the back door. MacAdam tossed the cable stretcher on to his shoulder and walked angrily towards the house. A tall man in a camouflage uniform and blue beret stepped out of the Land Rover, waved, and strode towards him.
He felt a sudden surge of pleasure and dismay. Tipping the cable stretcher against a post he took the other’s hands, grinning. “Jambo, Nehemiah!”
“Mzuri!” the man smiled: All’s well. “Jambo?”
“Mzuri sana,” MacAdam answered automatically—all’s very well—as if what he’d just been thinking was but a fantasy and now he’d awakened to the intercourse of men, where doubt and despair had no place. “Something to drink? Let’s go out of this sun.”
Nehemiah took off his beret, stooping to enter the kitchen. “Coffee?” MacAdam said. “Tea? Beer?”
“Hey, coffee! You don’t remember?”
They sat at a sun-faded white wrought-iron table beneath the jacarandas whose petals littered the mown grass like purple snow. “Seeing you, right now,” MacAdam laughed, “I think I can remember everything we ever did. Where did it go, all that time?”
“And the ranch—you’re happy?” Nehemiah asked.
MacAdam gazed out at the tawny grass brilliant with sun, the pale stone buildings, their rusted roofs and riotous bougainvillea, the white backs of distant cattle reminding him of the Samburu and antelope whose land this, a hundred years ago, had been. “We’ve made it through some bad seasons—raised our kids—”
“Tom’s still at LSE?”
“Graduates in June. Seth’s started at Edinburgh, a degree in journalism.”
“Great. Great.”
A moment’s pause as MacAdam sought not to think of Nehemiah’s wife and three daughters killed seven years ago in a flaming crash of their car with an out-of-control matatu. He faced it head on. “How are you and the world of women?”
“No time. No time.” Nehemiah tucked up the crease of trousers, sliding back one heavy black boot as he leaned forward. “It’s war, Mac.”
MacAdam sloshed the remnants of his coffee round the cup, trying to dredge up the sugar. “So Christ, what’s new? The Rwandans massacring each other again, the northern Sudan Moslems killing the southern Christians, the CIA spreading war between the Ethiopians, the Ugandans back to disemboweling one another—” He shrugged. “Fuck them all.”
Nehemiah sat back, great black hands folded on the worn white metal table. How strange, MacAdam thought, to have black skin. All these years it’s taken me to see what a great gulf it is between us.
“So what you plan to do?” Nehemiah prompted.
MacAdam felt irritation rise in him. “The Somalis have been moving southwest into Kenya for two hundred years. I can remember when there were none in Wajir—now they own the place and are taking over Isiolo…”
Nehemiah raised his eyebrows. “Here’s next.”
“I’ll be dead and gone. I was just the previous tribe; my kind have already moved on. Just like your people did three centuries ago, coming down from Ethiopia and Sudan—now you’re on the Mara, and from Athi back to Serengeti—so what?”
“Your people crossed the land bridge from France to England thousands of years ago—your history’s this endless wandering, peace and war, to and fro across the Channel—we’re all nomads. But the stronger keep their territory. The weak give theirs up.”
“A lot of good that did you and me.” He saw the understanding strike Nehemia like a slap, the gap-toothed smile that could not hide it. He drove it home. “We turned our backs on our dead, our friends, didn’t we?”
He knew what Nehemia was thinking: the loss of Aden was British. Britain deserved to lose, propping up its dirty oil sheiks, then not having the resolve to carry through—leaving her SAS men to die under the blistering Omani sun.
“It’s the elephants this time, Mac. In three more years they’ll all be gone. Just like the rhino is now.”
Lost in his previous thought, MacAdam had a sense of supreme regret for what could have been—a true empire, the world united under common rule of law and civilization, focused on the benefit of humankind, each person, now and for the future. But they’d spoiled it with their arrogance, with the weakness and shame that came from strength. “Screw the elephants,” he said. Again Nehemiah’s gap-toothed smile, his eyes laughing. “They break down my fences and tear up the savanna—they’ve uprooted every goddamn umbrella acacia on this whole end of the Lerochi—my cattle have nowhere for shade—the land gets drier…”
“Ten years ago Kenya had three hundred thousand elephants. Now we have five thousand. We had five thousand rhino. Now we have a few left, in chain-link enclosures protected by guards. Last year we had eight hundred thousand tourists. They won’t come when there’s no elephant; they won’t come to see rhino behind chain-link fence—they can do that in zoos at home. And when they hear about the poaching they get scared and stay away—this year’s figures’re way down—only the wars in west Africa are diverting tourists here; otherwise half our places’d be folding their tents.”
“Screw them! Why turn Kenya into Disneyland for fat pale people to wander round in four-wheel drives?”
Nehemiah shrugged. “No tourists means no foreign exchange, no hard currency to buy p
etrol and medicines and computers and telephones and educational materials and everything else that separates us from the Stone Age.”
Back to the same question again, thought MacAdam—do we move forward, towards a united world, or does Kenya slide with so much of post-colonial Africa back into the chaos, tyranny and superstition of the past, as if this last century were only an aberration? The Kenyans didn’t want that—not Nehemiah nor anyone who’d seen both sides. Yet it was sinking back, even Kenya; even Nehemiah knew they were fighting a rearguard action.
“Then there’s the issue of the animals themselves,” Nehemiah continued. “Do we allow them to be wiped out—”
But wasn’t that progress too, that the elephants were killed off like the mastodon and giant rhino before them, like all other wildlife and wild places? “We can’t stop time,” MacAdam said.
“But you can change the way it goes,” Nehemiah insisted.
“Nuts!” MacAdam rose, knees and ankles stiff, went into the kitchen, stony-cool after the hot shade of the jacarandas, and came back with the coffee thermos. Nehemiah was standing, beret in hand, looking southwest towards the Aberdares, his boots set wide apart as at parade rest. A natural stance it becomes, MacAdam thought. A natural way of becoming protector, defender. But of what? The trouble with war’s that what you defend soon doesn’t matter, you always end up killing what you wanted to protect. “More coffee?” he offered.
Nehemiah shook his head, slapped his beret against his fist. “You and me are dinosaurs too,” he said, echoing MacAdam’s mind in that particular way he’d always had. “Of a time when you respected what you wanted for the world and were willing to fight for it. Are you losing that?”