Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (28 page)

The jacket and Dubois faded away into the mist.

“Good luck,” Max whispered.

Climbing the mountain, she and Yoko moved through the undergrowth. Every few minutes they stopped to check if the guns sounded any closer. The two of them felt like such a small group, no Mutara, no Dubois, not even Pip. Just two women walking on alone. Probably it would be this way for many days. At this hour, the mist was thick. It completely erased them from the waist down and little vortexes of it curled and twisted in their trail, especially where Max's right hand flapped through it like she was paddling. Her other hand flapped in its sling, patting her chest as though to comfort her. In the jungle, in this situation, there was no reason to pretend she was other than she was. She'd forgotten how calming this habit was, how much it could help.

Into her mind came images of her aunt in a tattered wedding dress trailing them up the path.

The two of them began to push their way through a thicket of bamboo, the shafts bony, the whole of the leafy sky wobbling on its stalks with a rustling clatter.

Yoko jerked to a halt, her head cocked to listen. Max stopped behind her, unsure of what had alarmed her. They grabbed as many of the bamboo stalks as they could, hugging them to silence their clatter. The stalks quieted enough for them to hear the cheery ruckus of a jungle at dawn. Still they waited. Max concentrated on standing still, not making any motion that could attract attention, not rocking or flapping. She mouthed swears instead. Yoko's head was to one side, her eyes closed in concentration, listening.

This was a new situation for Max, to feel terror like this. Certainly she'd at times experienced adrenalin—what felt to her like short moments of extreme physical alertness—but extended terror like this, true terror, deep in her gut, was different. She observed her reaction with interest. Her joints felt airy and her limbs were trembling. Her heart had been pumping audibly in her ears for an hour. This situation might last for weeks.

It was, she decided, distinctly unpleasant. The pressure inside of her was building. The silent swearing was not enough. She clenched her left hand to keep it from flapping, stuffed her right hand in her pocket. Her fingers bumped into the
féticheuse's
pouch. On their own, they grabbed it. It fit snugly into her palm, its fur silky as a cat's. Her thumb rubbed over the pouch fast and repetitively. She hooted silently.

Yoko still made no motion forward, intent and waiting. No sound of humans except for the distant
kuhkuh kuh
of guns.

Inside the pouch, seeds shifted, stems rolled, leaves crinkled. The feel of plants between Max's fingers. She rubbed harder, trying to concentrate on plants, how accomplished they were at survival.

Yoko took a step forward to peer out from behind the bamboo. She scanned all around, then waved Max on, and they began to climb again, moving now into a clearing of ferns. The fronds, as high as their waists, rustled and cracked around them.

Max continued to rub the pouch, like she was a child and this was her favorite stuffed animal. Stroking the pouch, she could feel a few roots in there too, ropy and fibrous. There was something that might be a cushion of moss. Moss had a true talent for survival. When samples of it—dried out for a hundred years—were misted with water, they started to grow again.

Rubbing the pouch, she glanced behind them.

The broken ferns. Their path as clear as the trail of a gorilla. A child could track them.

“Problem,” she said.

“What?” Yoko said, turning. Stood there staring, motionless, looking for a moment as helpless as Pip.

This path must lead all the way back to the station. As soon as the Kutu got there, they would see the path and know some of the scientists had fled upwards into the mountains. They would trail them. Find them.

Max closed her eyes. Plants, she thought, our position is being betrayed by plants. She concentrated on the rhythm of her thumb over the seeds inside the pouch, hard and round as beads. Before today, she'd always considered prayer a classic byproduct of the neurotypical tendency toward wishfulness, clinging to the belief that the geometric causality of the universe could be shifted by sheer hope.

In this moment though, standing here in this jungle, her eyes shut for fear of what she might see, she found herself strangely willing to put faith in this pouch. For the first time she understood old women stroking their rosaries and mumbling.

She could fix this, she told herself. She knew enough about this habitat. She could think her way out.

She rocked back and forth, like a davening Rabbi. Prayer came in all forms.

She rubbed the pouch, thinking. Then opened her eyes.

“A stream. We need a stream,” she said.

“Why?”

“Walk up the center of it for a while. Hide our trail.”

“OK, Tombay. Alright,” Yoko inhaled. “I like it.” She looked at the mountain peaks above them to get her bearings. “Follow me. There's one this way.”

They located the stream within a quarter of a mile and tied their boots together to sling them over their necks. The water was icy cold, fed from the snow melting above. They picked their way up the river, looking back many times to make sure they were leaving no clues of their passage. The clouds of underwater gunk swirling with the movement of their feet were quickly washed away, as well as any indents in the mud.

Occasionally their toes slipped on unseen rocks and they twisted around, struggling for balance. After maybe half a mile, Max spotted a large mat of scrubby vegetation on the riverbank. The grey-green foliage was four inches high and as thick as though it had been poured over the ground.

She stopped and pointed. “We can climb out here. That's
Thymus serpyllum
. It stands back up even when crushed. It'll hide our prints.”

They stepped out on the spongy mat, avoiding any spots of bare mud that might leave an imprint. The thyme ran out after twenty feet, but by then they were up and over the side of the riverbank, so their tracks would be out of sight of anyone who might follow them up the river. Sitting on a log, she started to pull on one of her boots.

“Bad idea,” said Yoko.

“Why?”

“Your prints, think about your prints. Barefoot, they can pass as a juvenile gorilla's. The moment you put on your boots, even a partial print will betray us. Anyone who spots an inch of tread knows exactly what he's trailing.”

Max weighed her boots in her hand. “You know spending the next few weeks on these mountains in bare feet is going to suck.”

“Got a better idea?”

She slung her boots back around her neck.

Climbing, they occasionally swore and hopped about, having stubbed a toe or stepped on something sharp. They began to move slower, eyeing the ground, giving a wide berth to thorny plants or thick shrubs, their path becoming more roundabout, like the gorillas'.

Midmorning something crashed through the bushes hundred yards below, parallel to their path. Both of them froze in mid-step, awkward statues, staring downward. To stop herself from rocking, Max rubbed the pouch. Whatever was below them, it plowed along with enormous power, breaking branches. She saw a flash of movement through the trees. If she let go of the pouch, she would start screaming.

An explosion, faded with distance, echoed its way up the mountains. On this vast continent, she was thousands of miles from everything she'd ever known, in a situation she'd never imagined.

Her lips moved silently, mouthing the words, “Please God please God please.'

She marveled once again at how chameleon was the human mind—capable of shucking off a lifetime of values fast as a dirty shirt—able to angle the facts toward whatever it found convenient. She was quite surprised to find this capability inside her own mind.

Below, the crashing arced away and they heard the lowing of a forest buff. Yoko exhaled in relief and they began to climb again, searching for the gorillas.

 

I
t was close to the hottest part of the day. The cicadas whined, doves called. Watching the men work, Jeremy felt almost hypnotized by the noise of his own breathing.
Otombe
, some small part of himself constantly whispered in his head,
Otombe
. He kept replaying this morning's scene with Otombe stretching after the long night in the tree, but no matter how he imagined the scene, each time it ended in the same way, with him turning away from Otombe. The loss beat in his throat.

This morning, in the mirror, his skin had appeared a trifle yellow, the whites of his eyes a little lemony. It might be lack of sleep, he thought, or his imagination, or his eyes permanently seared by this fevered yellow sun.

It did not necessarily have anything to do with the malaria.

In front of him the men were supposed to be rolling boulders into the river, building up a dam across the old riverbed to force all the water to flow into the new canal. As soon as the old riverbed was emptied of water, they could start building the feet of the railroad bridge.

Mostly, however, the assembled boulders were not moving. The men grunted mightily, leaning into their work, but the rocks seemed stubborn, almost glued to the earth. He watched two of the men heaving at a medium-sized boulder. It did not appear more than a hundred weight, still their strain was obvious, their necks corded with effort, their bodies pressing into the work. Only after a moment did he notice that their legs were not angled back for traction, but stood straight up, relaxed, not bothered in the least by the theater in the rest of their stance.

“Work, you men. Work!” he yelled, getting to his feet. His anger, his frustration, all of his emotion from the last few days coming out.

The men turned to him. Their faces, this time, were not as startled at this tone of voice from him.

Stung by shame, his voice got louder. “Stop this damnable playacting. Why are you determined to cheat the railroad? You want to get away from the lions, do you not? Then work hard and fast. Block this river, build the bridge, and move the railroad away from this cursed place.”

This time Singh translated his words, calling them out over the rushing waters of the river. Before this week, Jeremy had never yelled at others in this way, the way in which he had yelled at Alan and these men. He had always sought to speak with the kind of respect and enthusiasm he found most effective in motivating himself to work. As he bellowed, he weaved on his feet with the rhythm of his voice, as though a trifle drunk. If he wanted to, he was not sure he could stop this sway. In his mind's eye, he saw again Otombe at the base of the tree, stretching after the long night, while the vein in his neck beat on, untouched.

“You are shirking the work you signed up to do. Not earning your pay. You are imperiling yourself and others. You will do it no longer. I'll not stand for it.”

The sea of dark faces was turned to him, their expressions closed and watching. It was the same way in which they had looked at him weeks ago, when during his opening speech a fight broke out among them so he had shot his rifle into the air.

They looked at him as though they had always suspected he would act this way.

From the malaria, twenty-seven men had died thus far. On average, three a day since they had arrived at this river. Lions, yellow fever, and complications from jungle ulcers had taken the total of another twelve. Thirty-nine deaths he was responsible for, thirty-nine. He imagined, back in some dusty hamlet far outside Jaipur or Delhi, the mother of one of the dead men grinding out the spices for the evening meal, going about her life as normal while the telegram was carried by foot the ten or fifteen miles from the nearest telegraph office, passed from traveler to traveler, getting crumpled and dust-stained, closer and closer, ready to inform her the structure of her life had been destroyed.

He remembered the warmth of Otombe's hand cradling his ankle as he prepared to cut the worm eggs out of his foot.

His head throbbed. He raised a hand to his forehead. “I want to save your miserable brown hides,” he screamed, “so you can be shipped back to India to starve. You get those boulders in the river this morning or there will be no lunch this afternoon for the lot of you.”

Something in the personality of the group changed, as the coolies pressed their weight against the boulders, beginning to roll them with an effort close to real energy. As the first rocks splashed into the water below, no one cheered or even smiled.

He was tired, deeply bone tired. His greatest fear was that he would fall asleep during a night's hunt, so deeply asleep he would not hear the lions when they charged, not wake when Otombe shook him, leaving the N'derobbo to face the animals alone.

Sheer will and tea was all that kept him awake now, ten to fifteen strong cups a day. The little time he had to sleep, between dawn and when work started, he mostly lay on his cot, pulse jittery, temples ringing from exhaustion, staring up at the tent's canvas roof.

Now, leaning back in his chair, he asked for a pot of tea from Singh. His lips felt thick.

Singh looked at him, his eyebrows raised, unsure what he had just said.

 

It was almost sunset. Already the night monkeys were calling and some jackals yelping. The insects throbbed at the same pace as Jeremy's headache. He stared at the riverbank's thick jungle, hypnotized by the great green heat all around.

Next to him, Otombe got undressed for their pre-hunt bath, dropping his cloak to the ground, neatly placing his spear and knife on top. Jeremy began to fumble with the buttons of his shirt. From two steps away he could smell the other man, his scent of sweat, wood smoke, and red dust, of grass and the fur of his cloak. He inhaled, savoring the smell, trying to memorize it and store it away for the long years ahead. He had retained the scrap of Otombe's robe that the hunter had placed between his chattering teeth two nights ago. He kept it tucked in his cheek, sucking on it secretly. He watched the man's naked body against the shimmer of the sun on the water.

In the river, he copied the extra care Otombe showed, running the soap and then the herbs twice over his body, rinsing three times, working to get off all smells, even the slight scent of the soap's fat and lye. The lions knew they were being hunted now, knew the smell of Jeremy and of Otombe's trick of hunting from in a tree.

Jeremy heard his own voice announce, “Tonight will be the most dangerous hunt of all.”

Otombe glanced at him, surprised by the calm prescience in his voice. “Yes, tonight, we will hunt in a new way.” The man turned and headed toward the shore. “I thought of it this morning.”

Jeremy would always remember this moment, replaying it again and again in his mind. He walked after Otombe, the warm silt of the river squishing beneath his toes. On shore, the askaris—seeing him leaving the river—had already turned and were hurrying away down the path, scared to be out of the bomas this close to sunset.

A leopard coughed raspily somewhere past camp, a fox barked downriver, a passing strand of lakeweed caressed Jeremy's calf. He worked to memorize each detail of this, his Africa. Ahead of him, Otombe was striding out of the river, his body in a watery striptease, gleaming black. His straight back. His buttocks. His thighs. For the first time Jeremy noticed he had long raked scars along the small of his back. He focused on them, wondering if these were tribal scarification marks or clawing wounds from an animal.

He did not notice the slight movement in the bush on the far side of the clearing, the sense of a presence, the dappling of light on haunches tensing into readiness.

And so they stepped onto the riverbank, walking toward their clothes, naked, moving easily, delightfully cool. Jeremy stared at those pale scars on the dark skin, their slight sway, the raised marks reminiscent of the tracks the railroad left upon this land.

The creature bolted forward.

A cannonball of motion, of weight and size, a fanged beast, low and mean and limber, the lack of mane revealing so clearly its driving purpose.

“Rifle,” screamed Jeremy, rolling his legs forward through the slowness of time, running toward the firearm where it lay on his towel and moving thus toward the animal. Those heavy paws swinging up into another stride. Those yellow eyes flicked to him, locking on like the scope of a gun.

“Tree,” yelled Otombe, sprinting away.

The motion caught the lion's eye. There was a pause, a small bubble in the fabric of time. Then, in midair, the animal's muscles rippled, his weight shifted in his shoulders as, like any cat, he chased what ran away. He galloped by so close that Jeremy heard the raspy
huff
of his exhale, noted the scars that years of nyika thorns had gouged into his skinny flanks. The animal pared down to muscle and bone and desperate hunger. Not a ghost at all, but terribly physically real.

Jeremy reached his rifle in two slow-motion strides. He turned holding it—already loaded with the round he had chambered out of sheer habit early this evening—thumbing the safety back, rolling the barrel up. The scope floated over to reveal the lion knocking Otombe over, his arms flailing for balance as his whole body fell, disappearing behind the lion, the animal's head rolling down, his haunches bunching as his claws began to cut in.

Jeremy had no other option, no other target available. He shot the creature's haunches.

Bowled forward into a somersault by the impact, the lion screamed. Not roared, not whined. He screamed thin and high as a person. Jeremy's shaking fingers were levering the next bullet in even as the creature spun toward him. He pumped the cartridge into place as the lion galloped at him, his speed great even with one of his hind legs flapping loosely, broken at the hip by the shot, those thick front arms clawing him forward.

He shot the animal in the head. Such a modern power, the gun.

The lion was slapped flat onto the ground. Then surged right back up onto his elbows, the corner of his skull clipped off, his ear dangling by a thread to one side. The blood so red. His front legs spasmed, struggling to pull him up. In this quiet moment, they both listened to the rasp of his claws in the dirt and to the snick and clink of Jeremy chambering that final round.

Turning his broken head to face the gun, the animal snarled defiant.

Jeremy took one step closer. He aimed and shot out a gleaming yellow eye.

The lion's head flopped loosely onto the red earth.

He heard someone shrieking loudly in what sounded like his own voice, “I've done it. I've done it.” The voice kept yelling, but it seemed as though there were no need, so quickly did the whole camp stampede up the path, galloping forward at the rifle fire and the animal's scream, all the coolies so triumphant at the death of one lion that they momentarily lost their fear of the other. Many hands scooped Jeremy up into the air to dance around victorious; other men swarmed forward to kick the bloodied carcass. He shouted for Alan, twisting in the determined grasp of the mob, trying to reach Otombe, trying to get him medical help.

When the crowd lifted Otombe, raising him high in the air, Jeremy noted his head was up and his arms flailed strongly. Jeremy fought and called upon the coolies to fetch the physician, but his cheering throng danced about as it wished, separate from Otombe's mob, never close enough for his arms to reach in spite of how he leaned and stretched. Later, when he thought of himself and the hunter, the image that always came to mind was of these separate screaming crowds propelling them in different directions.

By the time the mob finally put Jeremy down, Otombe had been carried away to the physician. As Jeremy's feet first touched the ground, he nearly collapsed, hard rivers of shivering running down his legs from the malaria or the excitement or some mixture of the two. Head down like this, concentrating on remaining upright, he glimpsed his own nudity and began to cast about for his clothing. However men's feet crowded the ground everywhere and, after a bit of searching he could locate only his trampled shirt. He knotted it as a semi skirt around his loins.

At least partially clothed now, he straightened up and caught sight of the dead body of the lion through the crowd surrounding it.

It was huge, somehow looking even larger sprawled there, so unmoving. Curious, he took one step closer, then another. Even in death, power shimmered off the corpse, muscled and tawny. He found he could not force his feet any closer than three yards. At that distance, his lungs constricted and his vision began to narrow. It lay on its side, face turned away.

And for a single moment, glimpsed this way in flashes between the shoulders of the jostling crowd, it seemed almost human, only built on a bigger scale: bent knees and arching ribs, bony hips and arms akimbo.

In the darkness, the fur was smoothed into amber skin.

Emaciated and prone, it looked like a slender woman.

Horrified, Jeremy held up his hand, to make what gesture, he knew not. Perhaps to wave away the crowd or signal for help or magically tug out the bullets he had shot. The other men did not seem to perceive any such resemblance. The crowd stepped forward to stomp on the head, kick at the ribs, yank on the ears and tail. Against the size of the lion's limbs, they looked like a mob of maddened children. Their ferocity surprised him. A man bent over the face with a spoon, struggling to pop out the remaining eye. Another punched a knife repeatedly into the belly, the hilt thumping against the flesh.

Then Jeremy blinked, and saw again it was just a lion's body.

Still, he continued to stare at this unfettered violence he had never suspected the coolies contained within them. And the crowd was not made of only Indians. He spotted a WaKikuyu man trying to saw off the lion's testicles with a spear. Looking now through the crowd, he found a few other Africans, men and women, even children. Had they heard the lion's scream from some nearby village and dared to run through the nyika in what was now complete night? Or were these the Africans who lived as companions of the Indians in camp?