THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  The glow of Rashid’s burnoose neared, moving side to side as he ascended beneath her. Her rock was too heavy for one hand but when she let go her other hand’s hold on the cliff the stone’s weight pulled her outwards. Rashid’s breathing loudened, the scrape of his fingernails on rock. She squeezed further right and down the descending ledge, held her breath and batted her eyes to shake away sweat, gritted her teeth against the weight of the stone and the pain in her ankle. His dim outline passed directly below her and she pushed the stone outwards and away; it fell straight but struck the cliff above him, smacked the breech of his rifle and bounced past him down the chasm. He yelled; shaking with terror she crept down to the end of the ledge above a clear, sharp drop of cliff, and waited.

  THE SKY above the eastern slopes crimsoned as the moon slipped down the west. It’s just a forced march, MacAdam told himself, sleep on your feet walking. Not going into battle nor retreating, just seeking water. And to make sure the Somalis are dead. Dead and very dead. For what they did to Rebecca, for killing elephants. For being the same ones on the Ewaso N’giro. If we had caught them there, split up and tracked them down, they never would’ve had Rebecca. We couldn’t catch camels, Nehemiah said. But we are.

  Water impossible to find. Darius and Gideon never reach us now. Halted at the border like respectable churchwomen outside a whorehouse. Ignorant of the sanctity within. He laughed, heard a jackal’s bark and stared round shocked, but there was nothing.

  Raise one foot in front of the other as the slope rises. Around each pockmarked ragged rock. Tense each descending ankle, step steadily with the weight, lean forward under the pack, balance the rifle, breathe deep and steady.

  M’kele always before me. M’kele with his dangling earlobes tied up over his ears. His curly hair graying in the back. Who doesn’t give a damn about Rebecca. It’s not his fight, not his woman—he does it out of kindness. She wasn’t my woman either. Time to say that. Elephants weren’t my fight either but I pretended they were. I don’t have any fights left. Must get back in time to Nairobi. So the prisoners don’t get killed. But if they’re the same as these, the ones who took Rebecca, why save their lives?

  M’kele’s seventeen children, “twelve still alive”. His steady stride sucking up the miles. M’kele thirsting in the desert to help me with my vengeance. He who’d be the first to remind me the blood of enemies never assuages grief.

  The dawn grew wider, engulfed the east, stretching euphorbia shadows across the gravelly sand. Birds were singing, doves cooed; far away a gazelle gave a warning double bark. Bees thrummed among the tiny purple flowers of the thorn bush.

  Suddenly M’kele dived to the ground, waved his hand down. MacAdam ducked among the rocks and ran left, away from M’kele to the far side of this gully ahead that had somehow bothered M’kele.

  Now he could smell it too. Camel dung. That’s what bothers M’kele. Whose camels? He crept forward along the left side of the gully as M’kele advanced through thicker brush on the right, keeping parallel with each other so that if one of them needed to fire he knew he could shoot ahead or behind but never straight across.

  M’kele stood, waved: they’ve gone. Who? MacAdam ran to the gully, picked up a piece of dung and rubbed it between his fingers: a day old. M’kele jumped down beside him. “It’s them!”

  “They camped here. Yesterday.”

  There were four holes in the ground where someone had driven sticks. Around them were the tracks of all three Somalis and prints of Rebecca’s sneakers. MacAdam knelt beside them, not breathing so it wouldn’t go away, wouldn’t be a dream. “They got her back. She’s still alive.”

  M’kele tossed a desultory glance at the sand peppered with tracks. “This time we won’t lose them. Now we will kill them.”

  “They got her back, from the Borani.” If he repeated it enough times it would have to be true.

  M’kele glanced up, smiled. “Tomorrow, Captain, you’ll have her back.”

  WARWAR PICKED HIS WAY hurriedly along the far side of Selach ridge, his bare feet scraped and bleeding, his left arm nearly severed at the humerus where Ibrahim’s bullet had shattered it, his legs quivering with pain. The curving shoulder of the mountain hid Ibrahim’s approach, but Warwar’s own tracks were easily visible as hasty dark blotches over the rocks. With no clothes he could not wrap his feet to hide his tracks. Without a gun he could not stop Ibrahim.

  Hopelessly he examined the horizon, gray beneath the platinum sky: no trees, no scrub, nothing to cut the wind or impede the eye, nowhere to hide but crags and gullies where his trail of blood would fast betray him. He sneered down at the curved dagger in his right hand, at its puny length and the nick in its blade.

  Allah will not help me now because this is truly clan. I pretended it wasn’t but it is. There is a link between Ibrahim and me: I can’t deny him. Allah will not take sides within the clan except in cases of code; but here we have both done wrong. My pride will kill me. As Ibrahim said, I want more than I am.

  He almost wept at the memory of last night when he had still been happily a member of the clan. Now he was alone and naked. Even if he escaped Ibrahim he could never go home; the clan would stone him to death.

  Pride made me want to take the little metal spearhead from inside Ibrahim’s gun. So I could make him beg, before I killed him. But Ibrahim would never beg: I wanted him to fear. Without pride I could simply have shot both him and Rashid tomorrow, from behind. Then the whitewoman would be mine, and the clan would look up to me, for no one would know about Ibrahim and Rashid except what I said, that they had been killed by soldiers. And I would have given money to their wives and children and been praised as a good man.

  All this flashed through his mind in instants as he surveyed his bloody tracks across the rocks, the barren horizon, the dagger like a useless twig in his hand. I should have shot them plain and simple.

  The sun’s tip glinted on the horizon, swelled up in righteous anger, its first blasts striking his face and chest. It and Ibrahim—together they will kill me. Each will force me to hide where the other can easily find me. He felt Ibrahim’s bullets striking his chest, even more awful than the one that had smashed his arm. Or will they take me back to the village? He saw Soraya watching from the crowd as the stones struck. Will she throw stones also? Perhaps my pride has fooled me even there, and even she has never cared.

  30

  RASHID CLIMBED PAST Rebecca up the cliff, not stopping at the place where she had crawled to the left and down. His footsteps overhead negotiated the last steep section; he scrambled over the top and his sound vanished. He’ll come down again, she reminded herself, as soon as he can’t find my tracks.

  The canyon brightened with sunrise; a fragrant warmth flowed down it from the peaks; between her feet pebbles glistened on the dusty ledge; the cracked canyon wall was chilly against her back. She leaned out and looked up the cliff but could not see Rashid; she crawled quickly back up the ledge and climbed down the canyon wall.

  When she reached the gully at the bottom Rashid still had not reappeared, but where were the other two? Something thumped to the sand behind her and she flinched, expecting Warwar, but it was only a rock loosened by her descent.

  She limped from rock to rock down the gully, trying to make no tracks in the sand and loose stones, avoiding even the rocks that might shift under her weight and leave a changed impression in the sand. Each time she looked back she expected to see the boy killer or Ibrahim on his camel coming to recapture her. Or more likely now to kill her.

  The sun struck her shoulders and neck, turned her hair to thousands of fiery wires. The gully died out in a plunging rocky slope; ahead the Selach’s colossal southern flanks rippled down into the Sidamo Desert, towards the too-distant Kenyan border and the Chalbi. This is the way we came—so I can get back to the geb tree—if the leopard’s gone I’ll drink and then it’s only a hundred more miles across the mountains to Turkana, if I can avoid the Borani. Oh if only I had my goatskin. The water. Wha
t will I do without water? Why did Ibrahim or Warwar shoot? Where are they? Warwar wouldn’t shoot me. Were they shooting at something else? A lion? There can’t be a lion because if there were by now it would have got me.

  If I climb the mountain and go north toward Faille, Rashid will see me. Warwar and Ibrahim are up there too, expecting me to go that way.

  Around her the plain, vast and indifferent, accepted her into its infinitude: wide, jagged and empty past the bounds of time, its peaks of broken lava teeth and osseous mahogany buttes quivering with heat, the seared white sky, were the landscape of the childhood dream in which she first had glimpsed the horror, misery and destiny of all life, and where she, like the ancient young woman of the jawbone, would vanish into the geologic whorl of time. This seemed only logical and fitting. Because it was fate. Dizzied by the sun, she stumbled down the slope whose every stone threw out a shock of heat, where no stone was big enough to hide her.

  As he came down the cliff Rashid saw the place the whitewoman had turned left on the little ledge, which he had missed earlier in the poor light. He saw where she had climbed back up this ledge and re-descended the cliff. Where she had hit her head on the overhang a single strand of her long straight hair had caught on the black stone, twisting in the downhill breeze like a spider’s golden thread.

  At the bottom of the cliff she had hesitated then turned south, downhill. Why, he wondered, does she walk this way from stone to stone? Her feet must hurt.

  Soon the sun would strike her down; it was easy to follow the tracks but when he found her she’d be too weak to walk and he’d have to go back and get a camel. But why did Ibrahim shoot? To warn Warwar the woman’d escaped? Then where were they? How was it they were fools enough to go another way?

  As he trotted upslope towards camp to find Ibrahim he reflected how unwise was this entire episode, how he and Ibrahim had become ensnared in the youngster’s hunger for the whitemoney which was to come from writing words about the whitewoman. Warwar had been to the Mission school at El God God and had learned to crave what the whites craved. This was why the whites built those little hard dwellings made of the dirt that when you pour water on it turns to stone, thereby incurring God’s wrath for locking up water inside this stone, and for building human places that remain, cannot be moved, are not annulled by time.

  But it was not good to take whitemoney because slowly it whitened you too. You became like Warwar, desiring things you haven’t made yourself, things made outside the clan: the loud black sound machines the young men trade goats for at Mandera, the bright necklaces and bracelets and the little sticks to start fires or shine light on the darkness. Warwar should be wandering the desert with his goats and sheep as Rashid had done, protecting his herd from lions, building it kid and lamb at a time, so by the time his solitary shepherd’s years had brought him a knowledge of the stars, his herd would be large enough to pay a healthy bride price and feed his family. But the young men who went to the Mission school didn’t cleave to the old ways, sometimes didn’t even marry in the clan. They laughed at the ways their people had learned so repeatedly across the many hundred generations since Allah first raised them from the sea. Yet he himself carried a rifle made by whiteman hands; it poisons us and now we cannot live without it, he thought. And Warwar was his doing too, and Ibrahim’s, for they had not been firm and gentle with him, nor proved to him the value of the clan’s way. Simply because he never drank his mother’s milk, nor walked in the shadow of his father, he’d had no one to show him.

  But Rashid did not like to remember the clan because then he could not keep from thinking of Fatima, how sleepy in the early morning she rose to make him tea, how the smell of cool embers reheated with dry twigs and her odor of sleep and warmth was magnified by the fragrance of the dying night when she folded back the door flap, by the spicy tea warming his hands. He smiled seeing her wide brown eyes which always looked on his so openly and deeply. How true, what the Prophet said—everything shows through the eyes.

  In years past there’d been so many elephants. Now because of Warwar and the whitewoman they had no tusks to sell at Daduma Addi, not even for a small gift to tell Fatima how he’d always thought of her, deep in his every day, no matter how far away. Nothing for the four boys and five girls she’d brought him out of her own slender body as a bough its leaves, the boys who watched his flocks and some day would hunt for tusks and defend the clan, the girls who would be mother to the clan as it is mother to us all.

  Following Warwar’s tracks, Ibrahim also was thinking of his wives, but with shame. He had not acted as a man and therefore dishonored himself and thereby them. Shame because the young fool had led him by the nose, had insulted him without rebuke. Shame because he had made this long journey north with the whitewoman into Ethiopia, instead of turning south of Marsabit where still some elephants might remain, shame because he, Ibrahim, had slept and let the young fool approach and nearly murder him. Why had he come naked, with a knife? Had he been mating with the whitewoman, naked as a fish?

  He stopped to inspect the jumbled landscape ahead, resettled the AK47 comfortably on its sling. The young fool’s feet all cut and bloody but he hasn’t slowed. Other splotches of blood on adjacent rocks, larger and less dirty—he was hit by my second bullet, in the left arm, or in the shoulder and the blood’s flowing down the arm. Like a leopard or lion he’ll be doubly dangerous wounded, expecting to die and therefore less afraid. Like a wounded leopard he can make a forward trail, then circle to pounce from behind, or like a wounded lion charge suddenly from the front.

  Ibrahim wondered where Rashid and the whitewoman were. The sun’s heat weighed down through his djellabah; he picked up speed. Allah, let the boy not die before I reach him.

  As at a thing profane his mind shifted away from the whitewoman, then kept creeping back. Like a boy, he warned himself, at the circumcision ceremony of an older brother. Like an inexperienced husband around the hut where his new wife is giving birth. The whitewoman’s caused all this—the young fool’s envy for whitemoney, our flight into Ethiopia, the young fool’s lust that he would mate with her, then sneak, knife in his teeth, to kill his clansmen.

  Ibrahim scouted an outcrop from which a little wadi unraveled, but the young fool was not there. He tried to lick his lips but his tongue stuck to the insides of his front teeth. The splotch of blood on the first stones beyond the wadi was still sticky; he glanced back up the wadi but Warwar was not circling behind. The slope ahead shimmered and danced with heat, like the body of the whitewoman in Warwar’s arms, her hot vagina clamping him. Satan. She has brought us all to this. As soon as I kill the young fool I’ll kill her too. Only then can things be as they were.

  31

  “YOU WALK LIKE n’African.” M’kele took off his pack and lay down with it over his face.

  “Spring’ll be dry.” MacAdam dropped to his knees and fell down beside his rifle. Only stop a moment. She’s just ahead. With them.

  M’kele reached for the map in his pack but let his hand flap on the ground. “The last ridge. This.”

  Tuesday 12:34:41.12 Dec. MacAdam tried to follow the seconds on his watch, but each time he fixed the number in his mind the next had already replaced it. 12:35:26. If it’s after midnight—no, the sun’s still out. Must be noon. If this is the Selach hills then we’ve walked two hundred kilometers since yesterday morning. Or the day before. No, we landed at North Horr in the afternoon. Spent that night tracking. She’d got away and M’kele found where they caught her. Next day we found where the Borani took her—last water. That night I scouted the Borani camp—second night. Then we walked all day thirsty to Dibandiba, and that night found the Somalis’ trail again at the place where four sticks had been shoved into the ground. That was last night we found she’s still alive. Or was there another day in between? It was Friday morning from Nairobi—where did the other day go? What other day?

  He saw himself lying sick in another room while the family readied for a trip. Uncle Clyde in a stri
ped wool suit carrying suitcases to the boot while mother hurried the girls through the parlor, each turning back for some forgotten trinket. The squat stone house in Ewen, its grim façade and frowzy shingles, trimmed holly trees to either side of the front door, the granite steps—the one at the bottom’s cracked, catches your shoe—always feared someday you’d trip, but see, you never did…The copse of oaks, the hedgerows, the passage between the barn and fence muddied by trooping cattle—

  do you ever really leave the soil of your ancestors? Do you take it with you?

  12:41:43. How many minutes since I started watching it—was it 12:39? No, it was 12:36. That’s it, and the little numbers kept going. 12:42:16. Again he watched the little numbers but still could not recognize them in time. If it’s not the middle of the night maybe it’s broken. And that’s the reason why I can’t remember what day we left Nairobi.

  12:47:09. “M’kele!”

  “Mnuh?”

  “Get up!”

  “Sleeping.”

  If M’kele’s sleeping it must be OK. M’kele jabbed him hard in the side and MacAdam lurched up angry. M’kele was a five-foot-tall black bird on knobby orange stilted legs, with a red neck from which a few pale feathers protruded like half-buried arrows, his yellow beak blackened with dried blood, that peered quizzically down on him, surprised he had moved. “Scrawk!” croaked this M’kele bird.