THE LAST SAVANNA

by Mike Bond

  “I’ve been dreaming of a francolin—roasted on a stick.”

  “Sure.” He hadn’t seen a francolin since North Horr. Even doves would do.

  She leaned against him, her hands under his arms and round his back, speaking into the warm corner of his neck. “If I’d had more courage I never would’ve left you. Then all this never would’ve happened.”

  It gave him pain to think of all the years he could have wakened each day beside her. “It was harder, stopping us like you did.”

  “I was going to live without you; that was that. But it’s like a stream, you cover it over and it just flows underneath, and everything you build on top caves in… And you dry up, you’re nothing.”

  He tried to see over her head, watch the sunset-orange desert. Already, she thought, I’m losing him. “That’s why in a way it didn’t matter, with the Somalis.”

  “You had the kids, Klaus.” It did not irritate him, he noticed, to say this.

  “The kids were my excuse, remember?”

  “I always thought it was ironic—that I’d tried to show you the joy of life, the purpose, when all along you’d had a deep purpose of your own, one you never shared with anybody.”

  “Rubbish.”

  “I who had nothing, bringing you my gift of nothing because you weren’t content with what you had…”

  “You’re over-dramatizing.”

  “No, I’ve thought a lot about it, in the desert. Since M’kele died. Funny how you never know how close you are till someone dies. Same way I felt when I was tracking you.”

  A hyena called, out on the desert, making the tethered camel hiss with fear, and in the firelight he saw her shoulders rise in repugnance. Why couldn’t she see killing and love were one, that each demands the other? The camel lipping the new grass, the combretum root flaring on the coals, the dry wind’s scents of dust and lava and its memory of rain, the voices of hyenas, night birds, and the stars—death and life are two halves of the same truth—couldn’t she see that?

  “M’kele says we should get out of here. Watch for the Somalis and Borani, find water and get up to the Faille road and back to Kenya.”

  “And when we get back to Kenya I’ll keep doing research at the Museum and live with Klaus and you’ll ranch on the Lerochi and we’ll be shy with each other, every five years, when we meet.”

  The sand felt loose beneath him, as if he might fall through. “Your kids aren’t a reason. Not that they ever were.”

  “Klaus won’t let them go.”

  “He doesn’t care.”

  “He does when he might lose them. When he can use them.”

  “No one’s like that.”

  “Klaus is. Nothing stands in his way.”

  “Except danger.”

  She shook her head, making him feel a child. “That’s not fair.”

  “But true.”

  Her palms felt small and cold on his face. “You and I went through this so many times, and never reached an answer.”

  “We never went through it far enough. All the way.”

  “It never ends. I cried and cried and ached for you so hard I thought I’d break. I won’t again.” She undid the buttons of his shirt, careful not to tug the fabric. “As soon as we have water I’ll clean this—it’s so infected.”

  “It’ll wait.” He caressed her hair back down into her collar, took his rifle to scout the perimeter of camp in a silent radius of a hundred yards, then back to check on her and out again, further now, crouching and watching, bent low and slipping soundless between the rocks, sheltered in the shadow of a basalt boulder where a sagey herb grew in a little dark crevice. Dig deep here and there’s water, he thought, memorizing the place. A slimmer moon was trying to climb Gamud’s southern slope, pricking out its detailed silhouette as of a ruined castle. Andromeda rode the peak, interrogating him. “I’ll watch her,” he promised. “She’ll get back.” Something darker than the night passed below the peak. He thought of shooting to scare it off but held his fire.

  “What did you see?” she said when he returned.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing kept you a long time.”

  “I’d have rather been with you.” Hasn’t that been true for years? He felt cross with himself for saying it. But you bring it out in me, Rebecca, love and the refusal to lie about it. As the firelight brushed her hair, her cheekbone shadowed, he saw written on her face a harsh docility that would turn from any man she loved. In her hunger to be free she’d always be alone.

  He watched her pulling at a strand of tangled hair, caught in herself. Right at the start, Rebecca, I learned you make me free because I desire you so, to be with you, so much I can’t ignore it, have to be the way I am. And the more I become who I am, with my harsh incessant striving, the more you, fearful of your freedom, recoil. He felt a surge of anger and frustration.

  “It’s like I’m lost,” she said. “And they’re calling me.”

  “Who?”

  “The hyenas.” She spoke as if he should have known, drawing the goatskin around him so it covered both their shoulders. “They know some day they’ll have us. But they don’t know when. So they keep calling, hoping it comes soon.”

  “They’ve talked about us, decided to wait till tomorrow to see if one of us dies.”

  “They always know, the Maasai say.”

  “They’re great optimists.”

  “All scavengers are.”

  The wind shifted; like water, he thought, flowing round us.

  “On my way to the geb tree the hyenas kept following. They never attacked but I couldn’t stop imagining what it’d be like, eaten alive.”

  “They start with your legs.” He snatched her thigh, fingers like teeth.

  “Don’t!” His hand inside her thigh made her mouth go dry. He doesn’t know what I’m thinking. I don’t care if this happens. Oh yes I do. Her fingers touched his leg. “What about Dottie?”

  “She’d rather have England than me. I love my kids, too, but that doesn’t make me want to be with them.”

  “But you’d take mine?”

  “I’d take your kids to be with you. That’s a fair trade.”

  “A she-camel and two calves.”

  “But I’d have to see how you ride. See if you kick, and check your teeth.”

  “I’m thirty-four. You don’t need to check my teeth to know that.” How wonderful to kiss him, the soft rasp of his beard making electricity inside her. Like it would feel coming in. It’s been so long; she could not stop her hand from rising up his thigh. “You aren’t afraid someone’ll see?”

  The feel of him beneath the khaki was too big for her hand, made her wrist, her body ache. Swollen in her hand, it belonged to her. That had been lost. She kept holding and squeezing it and his lips roughed hers, his tongue in her throat hot like it would be, and now it was free of his clothes and she could hold it in her hand all the way around warm and hard but everything was in the way. She was pulling down quickly the clean underwear he’d brought and the earth was sharp under her but she kept holding it lifting her body to him so it could fit inside, it was there now, splitting her, slow, go slowly God go slowly and yet come quickly, lacking for so long, and already it was happening, the coming, making her so hot and wet inside that he slid in faster, pushing her apart, filling and completing, and again she came, sharp as a sword the pleasure driving up inside her and he kept forcing her open so far inside there was no end to it, all the way filled up making her think only bullfighters live their lives all the way up Hemingway said, hard like a rock inside her, it was hers now and this time she’d never give it up, never give him up, how could she, his scratchy hair butting hers and the thick round warmth of his balls ramming her and she came again, this time washing everywhere in waves and never is dispersed and yes, she prayed, make it always be like this.

  This is all, he realized, all that counts, inside her, driving to completion, her whimpering an admission of so vast a truth it linked him to her forever, he
r teeth against his neck, her breast in his hand and her belly wet to his, the pumping agonizing joy that becomes the only and all truth, knowing he could hold it let it go, feeling it soar out into her, lift her, lift them till they were together and alone, where no one had ever been. Like God he looked down on the universe and saw that it was good, but less than this, and he felt sorry for poor God.

  When they returned to where they’d been he was still hard inside her; she was so wet he could not feel her, only feel within her. How insane, to do anything but this, he thought, moving down to lick how wet and smelly hot she was, her come mixed with his, making his lips sticky and slippery that he rubbed against her lips and into the corner of her neck, making all of it smell good. He held her buttocks in his palms and then licked and licked gently and slow, rising, shoving, carving her with his tongue as her body arched and writhed and subsided and he came into her again, exploding at once, the way the stars die, and how can this be so much and suddenly be over? I’m free, he thought, alone, seeing the scar-faced Somali and M’kele, the lives he had to live for them.

  The hyenas had stopped calling. He slid his body from her, pulled up his trousers over his throbbing, aching penis that stuck damply to them, took up his rifle and scanned the night. “I love you. More than the entire universe has ever loved.”

  She lay with knees bent up, the cool air like another orgasm. She could open to the night, the world, take it all inside, be mistress and mother of it all. “There is nothing but this.”

  He knelt, caressed her, bringing her fingers to his lips. “And there’s lions and hyenas and other enemies, and we’re going to be very careful of them so we can live, and do this again and again and again and never stop. And almost never stop.”

  He took the rifle up to sit beside the overhang, seeing and unseen, the tent of the stars unrolled down to the peaks around him, her scent stronger than the desert’s on his body and his face. If the hyenas had stopped calling there was danger. If the danger were the other two Somalis there was no way they could approach across the star-bright rock without his seeing them. If it were Darius and Gideon he’d hear their camels and his camel would whinny at theirs, but they hadn’t come north of the border nor could they find them if they had.

  There was a flicker of dark distant movement against a starlit rock; he caught it with the corner of his eye but by the time he turned his eyes it was gone. He watched the starlit rock for a long time but nothing moved near it.

  After a while he stood and stretched, back muscles sore and tightening. His broken ribs were too painful, made it hard to breathe. He thought of the Cape buffalo in the Matthews Range crashing faster than a huge truck at him through the bamboo, its horn smashing his chest. Why, he wondered, didn’t the poacher shoot me? Because I wanted. Now that I have what I wanted, what do I want?

  WARWAR TOO was attempting not to think of his pain as he lugged Ibrahim’s heavy rifle along a flinty unvegetated reef of stone shouldering down from the mountain, its roughness blistering his feet through Ibrahim’s worn sandals that flipped loosely because they were too large and because one-handed he could not lace them properly. I’ll have Rashid tie these before I kill him. If he doesn’t know. But if he doesn’t know, why kill him? But to rescue the whitewoman how can I help but kill him?

  Thinking like this he tried to divert his pain, trying also to focus his thoughts on Soraya, but he could form no clear impression of her black eyes above the black veil, nor the outlines of her face he had seen openly in the years before the veil, nor her slender strong arm raising the bucket from the well. That will all come back after we’re married, he decided. But then, why do I have to marry her? Did she not stand idly by while others stoned me? Did she not also throw sharp stones? There’s Halia, Usuf’s first daughter: who’s to say I can’t have her?

  No matter how he tried, Soraya’s features became Halia’s, longer, more slender, the cartilage of her nose concave as bone. But Halia’s skin was far too pale; she had the whitewoman’s nose, Soraya too, and the whitewoman’s frank abusive gesture of throwing back the look in your eyes although she doesn’t love you. But after I rescue her from Rashid she’ll have no choice but love me. I’ll be her maker and she must love me forever.

  RIFLE on his knee beneath the wheeling stars, MacAdam tried to stay awake; the camel huffed and snorted in her dreams; jackals were exchanging news along the distant ridges; thirst climbed steadily up his throat. He tasted his fingers heavy with Rebecca’s scent, loving the taste but not wanting to lose the smell of her by licking it. Thank you God for her. I will protect her, God, he promised, no matter what. I can live with both of them, her and Dottie. I have enough love in me for both. When you feel like this nothing can stand in your way.

  At first light he would wake her to stand guard an hour while he slept. Just an hour would be paradise. Tomorrow night we could reach the water hole on Selach mountain—where she was before with them, but now she’ll be with me. Then three more days to Faille.

  No use to think about what will happen after Faille, not now with the stars losing their edge, the jackals quiet and dawn’s first breeze rising with the odor of honey up the crevices and gullies. To be is all, not in sorrow or in joy but much more deeply, simply to breathe in and out the wonder of the coming day, so complete all sense of self is lost.

  35

  THE SUN LIKE a vast low-lying thermonuclear explosion seethed up over the east, melting the air, the stones, the shriveling seared brush, the simmering sand. Of the earth there was nothing but blackened ruins, broken teeth of buttes and peaks and collapsed charred canyons, shadows to mark the former existence of things, like the human silhouettes printed on the ground after Hiroshima.

  Dust rose from the camel’s hooves as if there’d never been rain. Walking beside the camel, MacAdam tried to keep his mind separate from the pain in his chest by thinking that Rebecca must get home, he must not let her down, that any movement in this land might be Somalis. No matter how carefully he watched the rock and scrub, the dry sky with its distant tinged cirrus and lazy innocent spiral of two short-tailed bateleurs above the crags, even if he saw every scurried trace of elephant shrew’s tiny splayed feet and string tail over the sand, or the klipspringer’s rear hoof prints shoved deep by a fast frightened leap, a burst of cut-throats chittering with fear from the bush ahead—no matter how much he saw he wouldn’t see enough, for every moment can be death: the change of shadow on a stone, a trace of dust, a smell, a hint way back in the brain, the camel turning her head or raising her ears or slowing for one step… He carried the rifle only in his left hand now because of the broken ribs, watching ahead and behind and on all sides, near and far, reminding himself of the klipspringer who is never for a moment safe—a lion behind the thorn bush, a leopard on a branch, cheetahs or hyenas to run you down in shifts, a human’s poisoned arrow or loud stick, a mamba, viper, cobra, or adder to kill you for coming near. Kill you any instant, night or day, while you eat or sleep or drink or mate or care for your children, as soon as you’re tired or sick or unwise or for a moment unlucky or not totally attentive.

  The camel undulated on, jerking Rebecca forward to the left, then backward to the right, on to the left, back to the right, like the trance dance of the Samburu, how they accentuate the prison of the flesh till they can break through it to a plane of pure perception, the loss of thought, the loss of want. Till they revive, she remembered, when this numinous state cannot be recovered.

  She wondered what the camel thought of death, what it wanted: to get this human off its back, to have water, grass and brush to eat, the company of other camels, shade beside a stream beneath the tamarinds and date palms.

  High above, a silver glimmer against the blue—the morning Air France from Nairobi. Paris in five hours. People up there having coffee and croissants and reading Le Monde. How far we’ve come from those first stories round the fire, about antelope herds, tubers, berries, of where the lion feeds and where he hunts us, the first words far back in our
heads, this sharpening of brain and tool—for what?

  WARWAR BECAME AWARE of El God God and the cracks of morning sun through the straw and brambles of his hut, the bleating of kids for their dams as night’s coolness arises from the ground. But across the enormous shriveled earth as far as he could see, to Mega’s radiant peaks and the shimmering hardpan of the north, there was no hut nor calling kids, only the fire in his chopped arm, the awful thirst and dizzying heat inside him, the diffident company of hyenas sitting on their haunches a hundred yards away, waiting for him to die.

  Thirst was like a hook in his throat. It yanked him up, dragged him across the hot gravel, blocking his mouth, pulled him along the steep side of Gamud peak back the same way someone had once chased him with a gun, before he’d purged his evil, but he could not remember who or when that was.

  Thirst made him keep looking back to check his way by the far angle of Mega’s peaks, and as he did he saw how close the hyenas had come, the nearest one’s drool sparkling in the long corner of her jaw. He tried to shiver the rifle off his good shoulder but it wasn’t there: he’d left it somewhere, gone on without it—and now the hyenas knew. He stared disconsolately down the slope to where he’d left his rifle, but could not see it, could not remember where it was or was it back in El God God?

  The hyenas were too nervous as they circled—too near now—he turned back down the slope, holding his good arm up against its shoulder like a rifle, clasping his fingers like a barrel pointing to the sky.

  Each rock looked the same; there were no tracks; he’d gone too low and climbed higher—no, this was too high; he descended then realized he’d always been too low; at each step the hyenas came another closer; they’ve already had my arm, now they want the rest. His body seemed promised to them; he tried to think what they’d given him in exchange.