The Sky And The Forest (17 page)

In the end chance -- or Loa’s instincts -- brought them back to the stream again. For some time their course had lain along a minor watercourse, a mere thread of water winding through boggy undergrowth. And then the boggy area grew more extensive, the character of the forest changed perceptibly in a morning's march, and they found themselves beside what they had come to look upon as their own stream -- if indeed it was the original one; it may well have been some other. That did not matter, and the thought did not occur to them. Here was a tree round whose base had fallen ripened pods of forest beans; that was what mattered most, while they could hear bullfrogs croaking in the distance. They camped at once, and lit a fire, and Lanu and Loa left Musini beside it to pound and roast beans into digestibility, while they went off to catch frogs. While there were beans and frogs no one need despair.

For four or five days more they followed the course of the stream. The water surface of it was wider than before; here and there it even widened into marshy pools a hundred feet across, so wide that the trees did not meet over them and they could see the sky overhead, and with reeds and weeds growing thickly in them, wherein lived a myriad birds and a myriad mosquitoes. On one occasion Loa found Lanu crouching intent and anxiously on a bit of firm ground beside one of these pools. Lanu gesticulated for silence and Loa crouched beside him obediently. A big grey parrot came flapping across the lake, and settled on a branch within range, and Lanu trained his arrow round upon it inch by inch, the motion almost imperceptible. At last he released the arrow, and with a sharp hum of the cord it sped true and straight at the parrot, which dropped stunned into the still water of the pool. Lanu gave a cry of triumph, and started towards the bird; his feet were actually in the muddy water at the edge when there was a surge upon the surface. A huge evil head emerged with gaping jaws, the jaws armed with large conical teeth -- the most frightening, the most horrible sight they had ever seen. The jaws engulfed the floating parrot, and the head disappeared, to be replaced momentarily by a long tail that swept the water and then vanished in a flurry; the ripples broke against Lanu's legs as he stood petrified in the shallows. He fled back terrified to cling to Loa, and Loa embraced him to comfort him, although he was terrified as well. No transmitted memory of hairy devils could equal that sight, and the unexpectedness of it added to the horror.

“What was it? What was it, Father?” asked Lanu, his frightened hands clutching at Loa's bare skin.

“Some snake or other, without a doubt,” said Loa, with all the calm he could muster; he was preventing himself from shuddering at the memory only by the strongest exertion of will. It was his love for Lanu that made him exert this self-control when he had never tried to control himself in his life.

“Let us go away from here, Father,” said Lanu. “Let us go quickly.”

“We shall go,” said Loa, as soothingly as he could; he still made himself retain his calm in the face of the infection of panic. “First pick up your bow and your arrows and your axe. We need not leave those for the snake.”

The matter-of-fact words went far towards calming Lanu. He obediently picked up his weapons with one hand while he wiped his beslobbered face with the other. He was in no panic as he led the way from that fatal pool, so that Loa walking in his footsteps felt that they were not walking fast enough, although he refrained from saying so. That water-dwelling devil had turned a cold, horrible eye upon them as he swallowed the parrot; Loa, shuddering, wondered if that glance would cause them to waste away, would cast them into the sleeping sickness, perhaps, or bring them ill fortune in the matter of food or in their next encounter with the little people. It had brought them ill fortune at the moment, for the matter of that, because all they had for supper that night were the beans Musini had bruised and toasted for them.

Musini listened to Lanu's voluble account of the horrible apparition in the pool.

“Big, mother. Big -- big -- big!”

Words failed Lanu when he tried to tell of the ugliness of the creature, or the frightening effect it had upon him.

“Indeed a big snake,” said Musini, looking at Lanu's outspread arms.

She glanced at Loa, who was chewing beans, and the glance told her a good deal about Loa's feelings; she knew him too well to be deceived by that stolidity of manner.

“Such things live in the water,” said Musini, indifferently, “as elephants do in the forest.”

It was Loa whom she was trying to cheer up; she herself was frightened by Lanu's description, and in other circumstances she might have allowed herself to indulge in her fear, but as it was she cunningly set herself to minimize the occurrence. Her allusion to elephants was apt and effective, for the elephant, huge and terrible though he was, was not the object of utter fright such as this new creature inspired. Elephants were the lords of the forest, roaming where they would; if they chose to enter the town's banana grove and strip it of its crop nothing could deter them, and yet elephants were not supernatural. Once in a great while one would fall into the pits dug for them, and would die upon the poisoned stakes and under the poisoned arrows shot into them by brave men. Loa had eaten roast elephant, and a man could hardly cherish superstitious fears of something he had eaten and whose tusks had for so long adorned his house.

“That is so,” agreed Loa, parentally pontifical, and Musini could see that this time it was not all a pose. Being married to a god for a dozen years had given her a curious insight into the supernatural.

They went on down the stream, skirting the marshes that bordered it. The marshes grew wider and wider, compelling them to keep farther and farther from the water, until at last, without almost no warning, they came to the great river. Walking in the twilight of the forest, they could see a growing whiteness beyond, shafts of light penetrating between the tree trunks; they smelled the raw smell of the decaying river vegetation, so unlike the faintly musty smell of the forest, but they were not ready for the full revelation when they reached the river, when they stepped out from the last tree into the immensity of the daylight. The river was huge at this point, gleaming metallically in the sunshine. The farther bank was a mere dark strip on the horizon, and Loa, looking across at it, felt the familiar inward shrinking and vertigo at the brightness and the immense distances. He wanted to cower back, but Lanu was beside him troubled by no misgivings. Overhead Loa's brother the sky, the vastest thing in all their experience, glared down at them; but at their backs was his friendly brother, the forest, ready to afford them shelter and protection. With the moral support of the forest, and with Lanu and Musini beside him, Loa was willing to meet the sky's unyielding stare -- the sky that had flung lightning at them, the sky which made them miserable with rain, the sky under which that awful creature had emerged from the lake to swallow the parrot. But Lanu and Musini were paying only scant attention to the sky; it was upon him that they were conferring their blinking respect, for he had led them through the trackless forest through all these endless days and had brought them out here to the river, which they knew and recognized. Neither of them knew how much chance had had to do with it; neither of them had followed the obscure reasoning in Loa's mind -- more instinct and superstition, if the truth must be told, than reasoning -- regarding the flowing downhill of water, which, combined with his memory of the trend of the country, had determined him on their course.

Neither Loa nor his family knew about the possibility of rivers flowing in great arcs; they had no means of knowing about it. They turned and set their faces downstream along the great river. They had a definite route to follow, and were much the happier in consequence. They knew that it was possible for someone lost in the forest to wander for a lifetime in an area ten miles square, and they could be certain this at least would not be their fate. It was not easy to travel at the water's edge -- in fact marshes and the obstructions of the forest made it almost impossible -- but it was easy enough to find their way along a short distance from the river, certain that it was on their right hand. Often they were within sight of the water and its marvels. They gazed breathlessly one day at a herd of vast creatures disporting themselves in the shallows, snorting and grunting, swimming with deceptive ease and lumbering through the reeds like elephants in a manioc patch. More than once they saw canoes upon the water, the paddles flashing in the sunshine. That meant men were there, and not the little people of the forest, either. Loa knew much about canoes as a result of his experience in the slavers’ camp, so that he could give answers to Lanu’s eager questions about them -- conveying information that was satisfactory, if not correct. At the water's edge there was more chance of a fair shot at one of the birds which flew in clouds among the trees, and once Loa himself managed to hit a monkey with an arrow. The little brute fled straight up a tree before the poison began to work in him, and he clung for a long time to a branch, crying pitifully -- Loa and Lanu would have laughed at the amusing sight if they had not been so desperately interested in the chance of getting fresh meat -- as the paralysis crept over him, and even when he showed no signs of life he still clung on, far out of reach, while Loa and Lanu waited below, almost in despair before the muscles relaxed and the dead monkey came tumbling down through the branches to fall with a satisfactory thump to earth. That night they ate fresh meat and rejoiced; it was fortunate, from the point of view of all forest hunters, that the minute amount of poison introduced into an animal's circulation paralyzed its brain but had no effect on the human stomach, at least after cooking.

Not many days later, one afternoon, Lanu put back his head and tried the air with his sensitive nostrils.

“There is something that I smell,” he said.

Loa and Musini tried the air likewise.

“I smell nothing, my son,” said Loa, and Musini agreed with him.

“Yet there is something,” persisted Lanu.

He said so again that night when they camped, hungry after an unprofitable day, and after an hour's march the next morning Musini, too, turned to Loa with the remark that there was a scent in the air. Loa blew his nostrils clear and tried the air again. Perhaps there was something, the faintest smell of wood smoke, perhaps -- a camp of the little people a great way off, presumably. Lanu and Musini disagreed with him. That was not the smell. And an hour later some variation in the wind bore the smell down upon them in greater volume, and Loa knew they were right. He sniffed carefully. Wood smoke undoubtedly was the main constituent, but there was a series of undertones of odour as well. A whole torrent of memories, of stored-up images, flooded into Loa's mind as he sniffed. It was the smell of a town: the smell of wood smoke, of cooking, of decaying vegetable matter, of refuse, of humanity -- it was the smell of home.

“That is the smell of a town,” said Loa, announcing what Lanu and Musini had long before suspected.

They looked at each other, all three of them, as they wondered what they should do next.

“We shall have to go round it,” said Loa.

With difficulty he was forming mental pictures of the situation. He had never seen a map or a plan in his life, so that he could not slip into the easy method of the civilized man of visualizing a map first and then plotting a route upon it. He had to plod along step by step; at least his experiences with the slavers had shown him other towns than his own, but it was home that he knew best. He thought in terms of home; of a town in the forest, with the river running some miles away from it. Surrounding the town would be the old clearings and the new banana groves and manioc gardens. Beyond the clearings there would be the area frequently or habitually traversed by the men of the town, the hunters wandering through the trees with their bows in the hope of a shot at monkeys or birds, digging pitfalls for antelopes -- or for elephants on occasions when there was an unusual burst of communal energy -- and closer in there would be the fringe where the older children would seek for forest fruits. It would have to be a tremendously wide sweep that would carry Loa and his family right round the town without any possibility of contact with any of the inhabitants. Also, in the neighbourhood of the town there was a far greater likelihood of meeting the little people, who were attracted there by the chance of stealing plantains (Loa remembered the depredations of the little people at home) and goats and the coveted weapons of iron; and by the chance of getting for themselves meat on two legs. Loa, exchanging glances with his family, knew that he and they were in greater danger than usual.

Yet round the town they had to go. Loa strove, without arithmetic or maps to help him, to calculate how long a journey it would be to go safely round the town on the side away from the river. A day's march was such a variable quantity. It depended both on the ease with which food was found and upon the obstructions offered by the forest. The occasions when town dwellers camped in the forest were very rare indeed, so that -- this was a triumph of Loa's calculating power -- half a day's march from the town would mean they were safe from town dwellers, though not from the little people. To circle the town at a distance of half a day's march and to come back to the river again would take -- how long? Loa could form no idea. It was far too difficult a problem for him. It meant a prodigious number of days, he could be sure, and the detour into the forest would be dangerous in another way, too. It might take them so deep among the trees as to make it impossible for them to find their way back to the river at all. After all their efforts they might be lost in the forest. It would certainly be quicker, and might well be safer, to push through between the town and the river. Loa put his limited vocabulary to work to explain this to his wife and son, and the suggestion met with their approval. They continued their way as close to the water as they could, proceeding with the utmost caution. If some lucky chance should bring them in contact with an isolated town dweller, the question of meat for their supper might be solved. They were hungry as usual.