THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  Across the savanna MacAdam watched the trail of dust announcing Dottie’s return from town. “You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  Nehemiah ignored him. “The President’s created a special unit. Anti-poaching, anti-guerrilla—it’s become the same thing. A hundred men, full support, partial use of a plane, G-3’s, the President’s backing—”

  MacAdam laughed. “You can’t stop the bloody Somalis with a hundred men.”

  “We pick the men we want. The matériel. Very few strings.”

  “He’ll tie you all up in strings! Too afraid of a coup.”

  “He fears that from the Kikuyu, not the Maasai. The Kalenjin have never had to worry about us.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m Deputy. Under M’Bole.”

  “Great!”

  “He’s not that bad, Mac.”

  “Not if you want to buy a few tusks…”

  “He’s straight, now. And I’ll be on the first ops. We’ve picked up reports of a new band of Somalis coming down from the Kaisut Desert, headed for the Ewaso N’giro—”

  “Going after the last herds—”

  “If we can catch them in a firefight—”

  “Who’ve you got?”

  “Luos, Kikuyus, some very tough Maasai—”

  MacAdam laughed. “You guys’re all tough, Nehemiah. But tough ain’t enough.”

  “That’s where you come in.”

  “I’m the whitewash? To please all the European wildlife organizations worried about the elephants?”

  Nehemiah chuckled. “The President wants you. You’re in the middle, you’re the balance…”

  “He doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  “You’re a ‘good Kenyan’. Never taken advantage, never cut and ran. You give more than you get.” Nehemiah paused, glanced at Dottie’s approaching Range Rover as if timing his request. “So he needs you to give some more.”

  Chickens squawked and scattered as the maroon Range Rover crossed the yard and parked under the galvanized shed roof. “I’m through giving,” MacAdam said. “From now on, I’m going to learn how to take.”

  Hair flashing red, squinting as she pushed up her sunglasses, Dottie came towards them, bundles in her arms. “Well hello, Nehemiah!” she said as if he were an everyday visitor, leaning round her packages to kiss his cheek. “We’ve missed you lately.”

  “Life on the Lerochi’s too tranquil to miss anything.”

  She carried her packages towards the kitchen. “Come on! It’s quiet as a tomb up here!”

  Nehemiah winked at MacAdam. “Will you?”

  MacAdam felt uncomfortable, the chagrin of refusing a kindly offer, of not wanting to be used. “You’ve got plenty of young bucks with fire in their bellies who can follow a track through the bush day or night, sleep with the snakes…”

  “Anybody can do that. What I want is someone with experience. These aren’t just poachers, Mac, they’re well-armed guerrillas with infiltration routes from Somalia, and a network of safe houses among the Somalis in Kenya. You remember the Somali president’s letter to his generals—to spread economic chaos in Kenya, prepare for war…” Nehemiah stood to pull out a chair for Dorothy. “You don’t throw recruits at that.”

  Dorothy set her gin and tonic carefully on the table. “You’re not trying to take back my husband?”

  “Says he’s too old, Dottie.”

  “He still wants to die with his boots on.” She laughed her deep, high, drinker’s laugh, as if every joke were, finally, about herself.

  MacAdam felt shame for her, for himself before Nehemiah, and for Nehemiah, being exposed to it. But my shame’s why she drinks, he realized. He saw her, years back, kissing the kids into bed, their little round pink faces above the sill of covers, her rough, loving voice. Her drinking was the wall between her and herself, he’d thought then. Her way of limiting yet accentuating the beauty of life, a governor. But now she was governed by it.

  “You can’t go off like that,” she halted the glass before her lips, “just leave the ranch.”

  He looked at her. “There’s nothing I do that Isau can’t.” Then he looked at Nehemiah. “And there’s nothing I could do, out there, that some young officer can’t do better.”

  “No young officer I know has fought in Dhofar, faced that kind of Moslem insurgency. Like the Somalis.”

  “Dhofar was wrong, Nehemiah! You know that. I shouldn’t have been in Oman—none of us should.”

  Nehemiah watched him. “OK. I agree. But Kenya’s not wrong now. And we need you.”

  “I don’t give a damn about being needed. That’s the oldest con in the book. Nobody’s needed, nobody’s irreplaceable.”

  Nehemiah wiped his mouth with a large black hand, thumb and forefinger sliding down the opposite sides of his lower lip and meeting in the center. He seemed to be concentrating on a point far out on the savanna. Then what are you here for?”

  “Here, the ranch?”

  “Here!” Nehemiah brought his hand down and slapped his thigh. “Here, anywhere!”

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

  “And what’s the answer?”

  “Ian’s better at asking questions,” Dottie interposed, “than finding answers.”

  “That’s true.” MacAdam felt himself judged by them both, that she saw him, forgave him, in a way he could not himself, but that this weakened him. “I’ve had a sense, lately, that my life’s been going nowhere, that somewhere long ago I made a wrong turn.” He faced her. “Maybe leaving England, but I can’t think that’s true.”

  She exhaled roughly, denying it. “You—without Africa?”

  “So give it a chance, Mac.” Nehemiah turned away, anxious not to push.

  MacAdam looked down, a jacaranda petal lying loosely in his lap, his upper lip indrawn within the lower, an affectation of Nehemiah’s. “There’s too much to sort out here…I’ve no time for rules of engagement, channels, all that shit.”

  “There are no rules of engagement anymore,” Nehemiah said, pushing his cup away as if suddenly it contained a piece of dung. He got up, formal in his uniform, boot heels bowing him forward. “You find them, you shoot them. Simple as that.”

  “You’re not leaving already?” Dottie’s voice was harsh, anxious and relieved.

  “I’ve done all I came to do,” he answered.

  MacAdam walked beside him to the blue Land Rover. “Remember M’kele?” Nehemiah said.

  “Your uncle, or something, a hunter. That the one?”

  “The best tracker in the tribe. Can follow the trail of the butterfly, simply by the shadow it has cast on the ground.”

  “Would you stop that tribal crap!”

  Nehemiah laughed. “He was an elephant poacher once. When there were elephants by the hundreds of thousands. He’ll be with us on the Ewaso N’giro.”

  “Us?”

  “If you come.”

  MacAdam paused. “Give me a day or so, to think. I’ll go into Rumuruti and call you.”

  Nehemiah took his arm, drawing closer. “I didn’t think she’d like it.”

  “She’s bored. Lonely. I’m trying to get her to go back for Christmas, see the kids.”

  “You too?”

  Nehemiah’s arm in his resuscitated the old closeness; he felt connected. “It breaks your heart to have no country,” he said.

  “You’re the latest of our wandering tribes, Mac. Don’t fall into thinking black and white.”

  A troop of ostriches—three tan females, a black-and-white male and a string of chicks—were crossing rump-high through the field beyond the fence. “We almost lost them,” Nehemiah said, “till we banned the trade in feathers. Think of a world—Kenya—without ostriches!”

  MacAdam watched the solemn, self-possessed birds hop a low link in his fence, the young ones scuttling under. “Reminds me of the one in Nyahururu who hated cars. When tourists stopped to take his picture he’d kick their tires flat, then wouldn’t let them get out to fix them. I
can see him now, trotting furiously, round and round the car, waiting for someone to hop out.”

  “Remember the Tana River, below Kiboko Camp—where the valley’s two miles wide or more—remember how we used to see elephants, solid elephants, all the way across? Or when the trail of elephants from Marsabit down to Losai was a mile wide and fifty miles long…” Nehemiah unlocked the rear hatch of the Land Rover and opened a long pine box. Inside it lay five silver-black automatic rifles separated by canvas sheets. He lifted one out and handed it to MacAdam. “HK G-3—you know it?”

  “By reputation.” It felt very solid yet not heavy, as if with a will and soul of its own, self-balanced. He politely checked it over, hating it somehow, yet when he tossed it up to his shoulder it fitted perfectly between his arm and cheekbone. “Nice.” He handed it back.

  “No, no—it’s for you. It’s what the President has ordered for the squad.” Nehemiah slipped a carton of cartridges from the pine box into MacAdam’s hand. “It’s what you and your men’ll be using—”

  When Nemehiah’d gone he walked back feeling lightheaded and sluggish under the sun, as if he’d given away nothing yet too much, into the cool house, and locked the rifle and cartridges away in the dark den, whose books were ranked like instructions to a rite whose meaning he’d forgotten, primal wall paintings of animals who no longer existed—newer paperbacks with haughty titles, as if they offered truths to unveil the mystery, older stuffy hardbacks sitting on their dusty reputations. Why did they scribble? What did they imagine they were giving to the world, themselves? Didn’t they know that a life without action, a life not lived out deeply in the unreasoned essence of itself, is worthless?

  Now Nehemiah would have him take up the gun again to defend the world of scribblers from chaos and destruction. Who’d be such a fool?

  From the kitchen came the voices of Dottie and Felista the cook discussing dinner. Shall it be curry sauce on the lamb, or mint? Broccoli or cauliflower? Afterwards shall we sit in the parlor and read or read in bed? The wooden clock over the dry fireplace loudened, as it always did, the last few strokes before six, then hammered its echoing chimes round the room as though within a tomb. He had a sudden pang for what would come after he was gone, for things he would never know.

  Once life had been the savanna unending, hills of fields and trees curving out of sight to unknown places. Why’d he stopped seeking, seeing? Anodyne—that was the word for it though he’d forgotten what it meant. Or atonement? It was tied, somehow, to sex. When the love between you dims, you blame the woman. When the life within you dies, you blame life.

  You know, you blind bastard, he told himself, what kills life. It’s the death of joy that kills life, the renunciation of the heart. Like ripping out your eyes because you don’t like what you see. Sure, you can give up love, the kind of love that tears you all apart with need, then fills you up with completion. Till you’re so dull and numbed you never even think of her, have forgotten even the feel of her hair against your cheek. Gossamer, that was the fucking word for it. The perfume of her. Bitch. With her you couldn’t lie, not only the major untruths, but the little exaggerated details, the inexact anecdotes that destroyed the truth. “No,” you used to tell her, “that’s not exactly right,” and you’d say it till you said it right. Bitch.

  An hour never used to pass that you didn’t think of her. Now you’re all dried up, and wonder why.

  A lavender, crimson sunset drained from the savanna, staining the long gold grass that rippled in the wind like lions running. Why in the morning is there so much hope? And in the evening only fatigued desperation? To the west the flat-bottomed cumulus trailed south, their bellies the color of a desert rose, as though even in beauty there is poison.

  Seeing the far crests of Ol Doinyo Lossos backlit purple by the vanished sun, MacAdam felt today would be a good day to die. Not in this impervious house but out on the savanna, bones crunched by hyenas, like a warrior’s, melting into the dust.

  If he went with Nehemiah it would be for the thrill. Not for Nehemiah or Kenya or the elephants or any sense of duty. Not to get away from the ranch or Dottie. He would do it for the desert, and to hunt the only animal worth hunting. The only decent prey.

  6

  HE WAS WALKING with Dorothy along the road that parallels the railroad tracks north of Naro Moru. There was a single tree out on the plain where they’d once sheltered in a thunderstorm, fearing the lightning. Now they turned north at the fork past the tree, hurrying home because a rogue lion was supposed to be near, then they saw the lion going along the palisade fence towards the neighbor’s, and MacAdam thought, we’re safe, he’ll eat the neighbor and his daughter, and not us.

  Then in the dream they were sleeping and he woke with a sense of danger and saw from the bed that a door in another room was opened, one he had closed when locking the house against the lion. To be safe he decided to check it, got up and walked round the foot of the bed, in the darkness stepping on something huge, rough-furred and warm—the lion. He backed around the bed to wake Dottie, then thought why do I always ask her advice—shall we try to move or stay in bed, hoping that he’s eaten, won’t be hungry?

  Still in the dream he heard himself snorting, choking, as he tried to force himself from sleep, be awake to face the lion, and waking realized there was no lion, only he and Dottie and the night.

  He lay listening to the house and grounds; the dogs weren’t barking; once from the pens a calf called for its mother; only the moon came slanting through the open window.

  As the dream retreated and the security of house and bed seeped back he remembered the fear he had felt hurrying home from the lion, then stepping on the large warm furry thing at the foot of the bed and knowing it was the lion. He thought of the night outside and of those who lived in fear, of his estrangement from it. His sense of danger persisted. Maybe, he wondered, I’m not supposed to go with Nehemiah?

  Two days after Nehemiah’s visit MacAdam had gone into Rumuruti and called him. “Didn’t think you’d want to miss it,” Nehemiah’d said. There’d been no bad omens. Then a week to organize the ranch for Isau to take over, but that too had gone smoothly, with no sense of angered spirits, of actions out of step with fate.

  He rolled from the covers, took a simi from the floor beside the bed, unsheathed it. The hall floor, then the stairs creaked beneath his feet. The kitchen flagstones chilled his toes; the den smelled of old coals and moldering books, the dining-room floor was slick, scented with beeswax. Something scuttled up the wall; he smiled, lowering the simi—gecko.

  Bone-white, the moon had drained the night of light. The wind tasted of dry grass, cattle, distant smoldering fires, bougainvillea. Brutus, one of his Maasai dogs, came and licked his hand, sniffing him to ascertain the reason for this unusual appearance in the middle of the night. MacAdam knelt beside him, rubbing the dog’s soft short coat along his rangy, thin shoulders and narrow, sharp ribs. Brutus sniffed, licked his eyebrow, the dog’s loud, wet tongue for a moment in MacAdam’s eye making him laugh, and he hugged him, and felt at once the dog’s urgency to be free, to guard, not be constrained. “You’re a fine boy,” he said, scratching behind Brutus’s ears, and the dog trotted back to protect the calving pens. A star fell westwards across the sky; how bitter and cold. MacAdam thought, out there dying in fire. Naked and barefoot on the savanna, knife in hand, the dog near, he felt safe and free.

  He returned to the veranda, not understanding a continuing unease centered beneath his lungs as if he’d been punched there. Waiting to go into battle. He climbed the stairs, sheathed the simi and lay back with hands beneath his head, watching the reflection of moonlight on the ceiling. Dorothy’s breathing was nearly soundless; he turned on one elbow to watch her face half-revealed by the sheet and the nodding shadows of rose boughs beyond the window. Her finely arched brows and forehead beneath the tousled, slightly curled hair, the eyes shielded by darkness, the faint line down each cheek to the corners of her mouth, the slender lips with the fur
row under her short nose—all seemed so familiar, older and more familiar than this room, the moonlight, himself.

  “Can’t sleep?” Her eyes watched him.

  “Thought I heard something outside. Sorry—did I wake you?”

  She smacked her lips, rising. “Got to pee,” she said, shuffling her nightgown round her, and padded to the bathroom, the sound of her urination loud through the open door. The toilet rushed, hissed, subsided; she slipped back into bed. He reached to pull her into his arms; she kissed him quickly on the cheek, “G’night.” He brought his hand down her back, slowing at the curve of her waist, down her hip and thigh and beneath her nightgown, sliding it up past her pants. “Go to sleep,” she murmured, taking his hand, but he moved it down inside her pants. “Ian!” He lay back, one hand loose on her shoulder. “Now you’re angry,” she said.

  “No.”

  She caressed his brow quickly. “It’s time for sleep. You have to leave early.”

  He restrained a desire to sit up, leave right now. “It’s good I’m going.”

  “Lie down, darling.” She nestled into her pillows, squeezed his arm. “Get some sleep.”

  He lay facing upwards till gray began to fill the room, then took his clothes downstairs and dressed, the kitchen light harsh in his eyes. He made a cup of instant coffee, and went to the den. From the desk he took a key and unlocked the closet, inside it was a tall steel cupboard with a combination lock which he opened and removed the G-3 from a rack of somberly glistening rifles.

  He slipped the web sling over his shoulder, the rifle feeling good there, as if healing some ancient want, its weight balancing him, its odor as intoxicatingly familiar as the breath of a woman one has never stopped loving. A can of oil, solvent, and a cleaning rod in his hands, he elbowed shut the closet and returned to the kitchen, sipping his coffee as he wiped pine sawdust from the barrel, breech and stock with an old undershirt. He removed the bolt and placed his thumb inside the breech, held it to the light and looked up the barrel, its rifling sharply outlined against the whiteness of his thumbnail.