THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  One minute the night was thick with stars, then the sun burst over the slag and battlements of Dukana ridge, blasting her with heat. Water appeared in hollows in the sand but sank from sight when she knelt to it; water trickled on the wind but she couldn’t find it; water fell from heaven, touching her cheek, yet in the viridian sky there were no clouds, only growing fire. Pools of water glimmered on the sand; as she ran to them they retreated, and when they had tricked her far into the desert they disappeared.

  She followed the laga south but could not remember why. There was some reason she must cling to, against this hunger to release herself to the softest, most sensual of sleeps. To the west the tall cliffs glistened in the risen sun, their scarps streaked with water; there was a stream—she heard it; a voice was calling her by a name she recognized but could not place.

  The sun climbed quickly; step after step she forced herself across the blazing sand; minute after minute outspanned into infinite hours of unlivable heat and thirst, while the Dukana’s brittle umber peninsula wavered round her, sometimes to the east, then straight behind her, then strangely to the west, marooned in the middle of the desert, once even before her, dazzlingly divorced from earth, a weightless dark phenomenon hovering over infinitudes white as titanium fire.

  She realized she must get out of the sun, go back down into Kore laga, back to where the leopard waited, or die from the sun. She crawled and slid down to the Kore’s narrow, vertical, shaded canyon. She remembered there had been a geb tree standing in a bend of the laga, hunched over a pool of clear water like an old man inspecting his reflection. A strangler fig had grown down over it, weighting its limbs and choking off its air, sucking moisture from the same tiny source. Before it would be a blade of outcrop on the right sinking into the bed of the canyon, and a sharp turn to the right upstream behind it, where ancient floods had split the basalt like an ancient axe.

  As it neared midday the sun’s head poured down the canyon walls. Each time she fell she rose resolutely as soon as possible; only once did she get confused and turn back up the canyon. Why had she left the expedition? Why had Klaus deserted her?

  Each step she was coming closer to it, the understanding. It vanished round every curve in the canyon ahead of her but she was catching up. She glimpsed a trace of movement around the cliff and ran to catch it, fell and ran again; the canyon floor widened where once a stream had barreled round an edge of harder gneiss and now in its deeper deposits stood a gnarled geb tree guarding a scabrous pool. A dwarf raven flapped away scrawking from its topmost bough.

  She fell to her knees, parted the green scum and drank its tepid bilious nectar, lay in a trance and drank again, till her vision cleared and she washed her face and rested her feet in the hot alkali mud. She still could not understand how she had been separated from the expedition. Soon the predators would come. She climbed into the geb tree’s low, stout crotch and began to eat its scaly sweet yellow fruit.

  How had she remembered this tree, when there was no way she could have ever seen it, if she had never been in this part of the canyon? How had she pictured it in her mind, exactly as it was now? She had a sense that someone had helped her. Who? Climbing higher, she ate till her stomach heaved, then gathered more fruit in her shirt. She was thirsty again, but feared to descend. She saw the bones scattered on the sand, tried to decipher the tracks around them, to find where the leopard waited.

  When the leopard comes he’ll climb this tree, she thought. The cliff above was smooth and vertical. She’d have to continue south along this canyon till she found a way back up into the sun. South because if she could go for three more days, four days maybe, she might make it to Dabandabli, the police post at North Horr. No, not “maybe”. She would reach North Horr.

  She knelt again and drank till it seemed the pool would go dry. She gathered a few more geb fruits in her bulging shirt, holding them with one forearm beneath her breasts, took up an axe-rock in her other hand, and walked quickly, glancing often behind, southwards down the canyon.

  Turning back like this she failed to see the leopard ahead as she stepped round a curve in the canyon. But she heard it snarl and jumped round to face it, raising her axe-rock. It huffed angrily at the bad human smell, glanced past her up the canyon, saw there was no one else and slid its emerald eyes back to her.

  She tried to back up but the cliff wall bumped her spine. The geb fruits fluttered down her front and hit her feet. The ground was rocky and she tried not to fall as she stumbled backwards along the cliff and the leopard came at her. It was a big old leopard—how hungry is it, she thought, how much can it find to eat up here?

  She saw she would not reach the geb tree. The leopard darted at her, eyes wide, mouth agape, yellow-black fur rippling down its shoulders, the easy swing of muscle moving into its pouncing gait, its white teeth smiling. She hurled her rock, distracting it for an instant, then she hunched down, teeth bared, neck muscles distended, claws wide, in that automatic position of pointless self-defense adopted by all primates about to be killed by a big cat. She was past thinking, past knowing, just flesh in its last desperate hunger to survive as the leopard halted and peered past her, hissed, spun round, and vanished down the canyon.

  She knelt to pick up the geb fruits but her shaking hands could not hold them. It had not happened. Yet here were the leopard’s tracks, the furl of sand where he’d spun round and down the canyon.

  It was a small man, almost a boy, in a tan cloak, rifle in his hand. She felt no fear. “You’ve just wasted time, Mama,” he said in his demotic Swahili, and raised the gun at her. “Now we go back.”

  She remembered. This was what she had fled. Klaus had not deserted her. Everyone was dead. She saw the universe as it is—pitiless, infinite; she had only imagined trust, faith, hope. “You don’t need to point that at me. I’ll come.”

  Warwar kept her ahead of him back up the Kore canyon and across the Chalbi’s baking sands. The camels were tethered among boulders at the edge of the Dukana, where Ibrahim and Rashid rested in the shade of a goatskin stretched between four sticks.

  19

  AUTO EXHAUST rippled over clogged lines of midday traffic on Uhuru Highway as if Nairobi’s air were made of a melting plastic. Every start and stop of Nehemiah’s Land Rover brought new pain to MacAdam’s bandaged ribs; to distract himself he bought a Nation from one of the barefoot vendors walking the lanes of cars. But these plaintive sheets of dead tree stained with English words and the photographs of politicians—people unfortunate enough to have forgotten the ancient warning that the camera steals the soul—seemed like a joke made tragic because no one understands it. The handshakings, earnest conferences, and faces wrapped in probity were simply a mimicry of the white world, angering him at both.

  A Datsun matatu throbbed beside them, a half-ton pickup with a wooden crate into which some twenty people were compressed, others standing on the tilting bumper or squeezing out the cab. On the other side was a new blue air-conditioned Volvo with diplomatic plates, a single mustached driver in gray pinstripe, his air-conditioned windows shut against the air MacAdam was trying not to breathe. He envied the people walking beyond the roadside—women with variegated baskets on their heads, children running to catch up, businessmen in suits, and tribesmen dressed in rags and plastic bags on their way to beg for work at construction sites. The distant light turned green; the traffic edged ahead; the light turned red.

  A stainless steel elevator at Government House took them to M’Bole’s top floor office suite. “There must be no more of this keeping prisoners!” M’Bole waved a broad palm that to Nehemiah seemed like a whiteman’s stained with shoe polish. M’Bole laced his fingers and back-cracked his knuckles like stones snapping in a fire.

  “No civilized soldier’s going to kill his captives.” MacAdam had hunched forward in his chair and Nehemiah saw the antagonism building in him, in the challenge of “civilized”.

  “I don’t want “civilized” soldiers, Mister…MacAdam.” This double slight see
med to please the Minister and he leaned back, the leather chair squeaking cooperatively, emphasizing his bulk. “No one wants to kill, but this poaching’s killing us. We have to make a stand.”

  “You don’t make a stand, Minister, by killing unarmed men—”

  “Unarmed? That’s not so, MacAdam—”

  “—they’re unarmed when you’d have us shoot them!” MacAdam lunged to drive home his point, then sat back, pain on his face. “You do as you want. But I won’t be with you.”

  M’Bole levered himself up and walked along his office wall hung with photographs of himself shaking the hands of many people, himself holding certificates of merit, himself smiling as he cut ribbons and placed paper crowns on young girls’ heads. He stood with his back to the plate glass window, blocking the light, hands clasped behind him. “You know your participation, Mister MacAdam—above the value of your experience as a hunter of men—” he stressed these words as if MacAdam might be foolish enough to think them a compliment, “—is proof that we are a multiracial society using all our talents to protect the nation’s common heritage…”

  “You mean the international conservation groups and European governments are on your back about the elephants, and you want to project a unanimous, concerned effort.”

  “We say the same thing.”

  “But one of us doesn’t mean it.”

  “Meaning is what you say, MacAdam.” M’Bole looked down through the glass at the green lawns and tiny multicolored figures far below.

  “No, Minister, meaning is what you do. Siad Barre may be the “President” of Somalia but he doesn’t pay his soldiers enough to feed their families—what would you do?”

  “You and I both settled that question long ago.” M’Bole returned and sat. “Mister MacAdam, don’t you realize that sometimes governments are more important than people?”

  “I can’t think of a single case where that might be true—”

  “And I can think of few cases where it isn’t. These men you captured, they’ll be sentenced in a week and shot the day after.”

  MacAdam got to his feet. “Then you’ve got no further need of me.”

  M’Bole waved a hand painfully before his face. “Now let’s not be precipitous—”

  “We don’t agree.”

  “It’s a necessary sacrifice.” M’Bole seemed to ponder. “Like the millions of dollars’ worth of confiscated tusks and rhino horn we burn, that we could be selling to pay for schools and wildlife conservation and all the other things we need so desperately…”

  MacAdam’s gaze wandered the room’s fine carpets, wallpapers, statuary and fittings, swept across the vast ebony desk and back to M’Bole. “If a man dies fighting he dies fighting. If I bring him in I don’t want him shot.”

  “There’s other issues,” Nehemiah said. “The G-3s, hot pursuit.”

  “Into Somalia?” M’Bole’s voice rose. “Impossible.”

  “Then how can we wipe them out? Isn’t hot pursuit within the Department’s power, according to the Constitution?”

  “Not now. Not with civil war in Somalia.”

  Nehemiah held his breath against the Minister’s, harsh with raw onions and greasy with beer. “Melay olambu enoyoto,” he said suddenly, switching from Swahili to Maasai, which he knew the Kikuyu M’Bole would not directly understand, this tall, overweight farmer with his holdings in tourist hotels and mines and shacks for city workers, empowered to protect the elephants, whose sister used to send five thousand pounds of tusks a month, under protection of the Indonesian and Pakistani embassies, from Mombasa to Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. “Melay olambu enoyoto,” he said. ‘He who talks loudly won’t cross the valley.’ We won’t get far without more action.”

  “You speak Maasai to me; I speak Kikuyu back to you: Mwaga gukua mwaruta mbaara— ‘It’s those who’ve not died in wars that start them.’ There are channels best approached diplomatically.”

  Where everything is lies and stolen profit, Nehemiah finished to himself, furious that now MacAdam would desert the struggle, that he cared more for Somali prisoners than the future of Kenya, that the Minister would dismiss them and nothing would be gained. “It’s not enough guns.”

  Leaning forward, the Minister nodded, as if glad this had been brought up. “More will come as soon as we complete the loan agreement with Heckler and Koch.”

  As soon as you have chosen your percentage of the herd, thought Nehemiah, How much will that be, your personal cut of the loan fees and payback? One per cent? Too generous of you. Five per cent? Somewhere in between. In the neighborhood of ten to thirty thousand pounds. As we Maasai say, you milk the cow that feeds in your pasture—such a small amount on the international scale, but enough to pay the fees of a thousand children who otherwise cannot go to school. Are you really sure this thirty thousand pounds will do more for your people, Minister, in your Channel Islands bank? “It would be better, wouldn’t it,” Nehemiah continued, “to buy fewer G-3s with cash and forget the loan, and have the guns right away? The thirty we just received, plus we could get what—another two hundred?”

  The Minister nodded affirmatively. “Believe me, I’d like to, but they prefer a loan. Building credit.”

  Nehemiah decided perhaps this was not a deal the Minister had arranged. Was it forced down his throat by “them”, the Kalenjins around the President? He’d still get a piece of the loan though. “The well-fed belly does not know the unfed one, yes? It does no good to waste money when we have it, just to ensure we can borrow it when we don’t.”

  Again the Minister flailed his hands. “It’s more complicated—”

  MacAdam stood stiffly. “You’re busy, Minister—thank you for your time. Thank you also for Kuria’s pension, for the attention you’re giving this. Please reconsider the death sentences; two years of jail to one of these Somalis is an eternity; when it’s over he’ll go home and never dare to cross the border again…”

  To Nehemiah MacAdam seemed to be playing in a hilarious tribal play the role of a man who attempts to overcome evil with goodness.

  MacAdam took the Minister’s suddenly outstretched hand. “Perhaps you don’t need to go into Somalia to find the poachers.” He smiled into the Minister’s tiny, merry eyes. “When one can find most of them here.”

  “Exactly! That’s why we don’t need hot pursuit.” Bowing slightly forward, a hand in the small of each one’s back, the Minister showed them out, like a gunman, Nehemiah reflected, sheltering behind his hostages, a pistol jabbed into each. From what, he wondered, do we protect him?

  “You must reconsider, Mister MacAdam,” M’Bole said. “You do your country a marvelous service by staying with the Rangers.”

  “When the young Somali held his fire, didn’t kill me, he taught me, he taught me…we’re not meant to take others’ lives—he didn’t want to, he was better than that, and I’ve learned, learned from him—” Again MacAdam seemed, naively, to believe in the converting power of good, as if one man’s experience could teach others.

  “But you shot him!”

  “M’kele—Nehemiah’s uncle—did. He didn’t know. I killed another man, in the battle. I don’t like it, but I did. I’m still willing to be your hunter of men, as you call it, but to bring them back alive.”

  M’Bole smiled. “And teach them the error of their ways?” He halted at the door. “I forgot to mention. You knew her, didn’t you, Rebecca Hecht?”

  Nehemiah saw MacAdam jump, try to hide it, turn. “What about her?”

  “Her husband, the archaeologist—he staggered into the police post at North Horr last night. Your dear Somalis shot their drivers and two students and took her hostage—”

  “Where?”

  “East of Turkana.”

  “Where east of Turkana?”

  “You knew her well?”

  “What did he say, her husband?”

  “All I’ve learned so far is that they took her in the Chalbi. Somewhere by a place called Mailoka, Maikona, something like that.
We’re having the husband flown down.” M’Bole raised a huge fist and tucked back his suit sleeve to view his Rolex. “Might be here now.”

  “Who’s on it?”

  “On it? Marsabit police.” M’Bole turned back towards his door.

  “Marsabit police! She’s an internationally known archaeologist! You can’t give it to local police with one vehicle and three camels.”

  “Who would you put on it?”

  “Get planes on it!”

  “We have. The plane’ll fly back up there today, after it drops off Hecht.”

  “One plane’s not enough—”

  “We might send more men—”

  “How many?”

  “You won’t be with us, remember?” M’Bole taunted.

  MacAdam took a breath, steadying himself. “What do you want?”

  “Mister MacAdam, what I want doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s best for Kenya. I’d like to spare your Somalis. I’d like, too, not to burn the ivory we confiscate. But we burn it because that shows we’re serious. Think of it, Mister MacAdam, in the African way.”

  “Fine. But I want to call Wilson Field right now and make sure that plane doesn’t leave and to talk to Hecht and then take the plane back up to Wamba to pick up my men—”

  “No more worry to these Somali prisoners?”

  “I’ll be back before you shoot them. Nehemiah, we’ve got to get the men up to North Horr and on the Somalis’ tracks before they get into Ethiopia.”

  “If they do,” M’Bole said, “or into Somalia, that’s the end. No hot pursuit.”

  “I pray that doesn’t happen,” MacAdam said.

  “If it does, we never heard of you. If they catch you, they kill you. If you come back, we arrest you.”

  Going down in the chrome elevator, Nehemiah watched MacAdam in the mirror, the gray eyes narrowed under the thick curly blond brows, the face set, the stare that sees nothing. “You let him walk all over you,” Nehemiah said.