Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (4 page)

 

O
n the morning of his first hunt, when Jeremy pushed through the flap of his tent, a N'derobbo man stood outside ready to be his guide. Ungan Singh, Jeremy's head jemadar, had said he would arrange to hire all the men necessary for the sport. Here, Jeremy was led to understand, he would not hunt in the manner he was accustomed to, just whistling up a dog and slinging a gun over his shoulder to wander off into the forest. In Africa, whole parties accompanied each hunter: guides, trackers, gun boys, and bearers.

Jeremy did not know how long the N'derobbo had been waiting, but the tribesman stood there, balanced like a stork on one leg, leaning on his spear, the other foot pressed into the side of his knee, the stance of an African hunter. He might have been there for hours, standing with as much grace as though his goat-fur toga and shell necklace were the couture of a king. If Jeremy had to dress that way, his less wiry body would appear not nearly as decorous and he would never be able to arrange the robe's folds as elegantly nor be able to stand so still on one leg.

Instead of being a N'derobbo, Jeremy was referred to by the Indians as “Pukka Sahib.” Straightening up outside of the tent flap, he felt—in comparison to this man's primitive clothing—uncomfortably cognizant of his crisply laundered safari suit and fine riding boots, his wide hat and gleaming gun belt. He didn't wish to appear conceited. Having mastered a few phrases of Swahili, he nodded, “Jambo, rafiki.”

“Morning,” the N'derobbo answered in a clear British accent, looking him straight in the eye, his gaze not wandering down to Jeremy's accessories of power. This was the manner in which the Africans tended to look at him. Unlike the Indians, they did not survey his clothes or guns, but searched his face instead for its strengths and weaknesses.

“I'm Otombe,” the man said. “Pleased to meet you.”

 

The hunting party broke out of the underbrush onto the savannah. After all the claustrophobic nyika, the vast stretch of the plain took a moment to adjust to, a shifting inside the mind as much as in the eye. The immense vista reminded Jeremy of the sea, the grass rolling in waves out to the horizon. Hunting here could not be the same as it was in Maine, a matter of stealth and cunning. Here, there were no forest paths to crouch beside in ambush, no trees to hide behind. In this thick grass, there could be no prints visible to trail. No, out on this plain, locating any prey must be a simple matter of wandering along until you spotted one, probably at a range of at least half a mile, and then shooting the creature down like target practice. Really, he was rather disappointed, surprised so many experts had made such a fuss over this pursuit in Africa. Assuming there was no further need to pay attention, that the trotting N'derobbo would guide the search, he loosened the reins, giving Patsy her head as he fell to daydreaming.

Preston, in one of his final letters, had warned him not to bring any animals with him from America. There was the rather exorbitant expense of the transport on a ship, especially a creature as large as a horse. Few animals adjusted gracefully to the difference in climate and, those that did, had to survive all the diseases of the tropics. However, if Jeremy had of one symbol of his adulthood, it was Patsy. Hers were the saddlebags he had packed to attend Rensselaer. She was the horse he had ridden to graduation, the one he had taken to his first job, as well as to pick up the mail on the day the job offer from Preston came. Although he'd said good-bye to everything else from his previous life in Maine, including his family, he was unable to imagine his future without her.

He'd had to pay dearly for a horse stall on the ship to be built and enough provisions for her to be stored, had to endure the captain grumbling. Still he judged it worth it. Patsy was only eight and had always exhibited a healthy constitution. Jeremy felt confident she would last many years here.

Among her many strengths, she was a good hunting horse, never spooking at a shot and when he jumped off to retrieve a kill, she drop-reined like a statue. Back in Maine, they had made a competent team, potted a fair number of animals: deer, fox, hare, and once a wolverine. These were the largest creatures one could find in the area because every farmer had a gun and the fervent desire to civilize the wilderness for both crops and people. Long before he had been born, the wolves had been exterminated, as well as almost all the bears. He had not heard tell of a moose in years.

Lazy from the heat, swaying in the saddle, he glanced back to see how far they'd come. Ten paces behind the last of his hunting party, two unfamiliar natives trotted along with spears the length of a man. They jogged patiently, utterly silent. The savannah had been deserted in every direction last time he'd looked. Startled by the appearance of the Africans as well as by the span of their spears, he remembered his mother predicting that the savages would be bloodthirsty. She had repeated this belief several times, maintaining that since the natives concentrated on the blood sport of hunting for the daily procurement of their food, instead of farming, the habit of violence must run in their blood. They would not be able to help it. While she spoke, his mother held up one thin finger, which looked even paler than it was from all the black crepe she wore.

Remember, she promised, no matter how they appear at the beginning, you will see that those people are bloodied and violent, their true natures revealed. Do not trust them.

Unnerved, Jeremy asked Otombe, “Where did the two behind us come from?”

Otombe did not glance back at the hunters, his eyes continuing to study the rolling grass in front of them, in the manner with which a fisherman might examine the sea. “Always people around. Masai, Ogiek, WaKikuyu.”

Jeremy searched the horizon, saw no one else for miles. How could a person hide out here? There was not a tree or big rock in sight. “Why do they follow?”

A short man, spare and tendoned as an antelope, Otombe's breath was not ragged even though he had been loping steadily along beside the horse for an hour since they had left camp. His goat-fur toga draped elegantly, leaving both arms bare but covering the torso down to the upper thighs like a furry dress, the bottom swaying back and forth as he ran. Regarding him from the side like this, Jeremy realized that the flapping item he glimpsed occasionally under the edge of the toga was not a loincloth or the end of a purse. Mortified, Jeremy jerked his eyes up. How was one supposed to maintain a proper decorum here if the people did not dress correctly?

“Where a white hunter is, soon there'll be meat,” said Otombe. “They're hungry.”

Jeremy tried to keep his gaze fixed on the horizon or on the hunter's face, but in the heat and boredom of the ride, he sometimes found his eyes drifted back down. Of course, he thought, the man must be cooler that way than if his clothing consisted of leather boots, woolen knee socks, linen underclothes, shorts, belt, spine protector, shirt, and thick hat. But, after all, a native could afford to wear less. Modern science knew that exposure to the tropical sun's radiation could waste a white man away—especially if the exposure was to the critical regions of head or spine. Thus the spine protector had been invented, a thick piece of flannel cloth running the length of the back held in place by rubberized straps over the shoulders. He had been assured by Dr. Thornton, the camp physician, that it would be close to suicide to remove his hat or spine protector for any length of time while outside, unless in complete shade. The corollary of all his protective clothing was that perspiration occasionally ran into his eyes, stinging.

“Otombe,” Jeremy said, “I'm curious. Could you tell me how you came to learn English?”

Otombe looked at him, no change in his posture or the rhythm of his gait.

Where did this man get such self-possession, wondered Jeremy.

“A British missionary couple raised me as their own until I was six.”

“What happened then?”

“They gave birth to their own child. Returned me to my tribe.” He jogged on, his spear held loosely by his side.

Jeremy considered what that experience must have been like, the shift from a wood house to a wattle-and-daub hovel, from reading the Bible to hunting with a spear, from standing patiently in shoes to running in bare feet, from wearing restrictive clothing to near nudity. Aside from the painful shift in parents, he had to admit a touch of jealousy. After only a week, he found himself strangely at home here in Africa. He wondered if some relative of his could have resided here before, if something in him was meant to stand beneath this wide tropical sky. However, how was that possible when until a few years ago the only foreigners around were the Mohammedans, a few explorers and the Portuguese? Still, in the pre-dawn, he relished stepping out of his tent to hear the nervous cackle of the last of the night's hyenas and to smell the Indians' spices beginning to roast over the fires. Gazing out over the twisted thorn trees and the tents dusty with red dirt, he knew not a soul around him had heard a single rumor about his past, and in his chest he felt the rising flutter of love for this colony, this continent.

Most of the adult Africans he had encountered possessed willowy bodies and regal cheekbones. They stood with grace in the bright light of day, wearing only a few wavy lines of paint or some metal bangles, a leather loincloth or woven wraparound skirt.

Each day, the construction of the railroad plowed forward without him spotting a single African village in any direction, but still every morning, no matter what the weather, clusters of scrawny potbellied children would appear, to stare at the Indians and him with the same sober curiosity that he wished to turn on them but, out of propriety, could not. In fairly short order, the children learned to cluck their tongues and hold out their hands, begging. The men tossed bits of bread and rice, and the youths scrambled in the dirt for the scraps, an activity Jeremy believed no American would ever lower himself to.

And then there was the animal life. He had been informed that the drought that had ended five days ago had lasted two solid years and was the worst in living memory, yet to him the wildlife appeared to be flourishing. At night, the hoots and grunts, calls and shrieks were loud enough that on occasion one had to raise one's voice to be heard, as though this semi-desert were Eden. During the day Jeremy studied with amazement every creature he came upon, never having imagined such crazed coloring, varied sizes, or methods of movement. Red lizards bolted off in a blur of speed, giraffes lazily see-sawed away over the trees, a blue monkey small as a chipmunk plucked food off his table and leapt high into a tree. Before the rains he had seen vultures, awkward as crippled children, hopping toward the bodies of those animals that had died.

In the last few days since the drought had finally broken—with a torrential deluge of eight inches—the season of the monsoon had hit with a vengeance, making up for the years of dryness.

Yesterday, a rhino had clambered across a newly built railroad embankment and, afterward, the downpour had gradually eroded the plate-sized prints into one zigzagging fast-moving river, the erosion spreading until ten feet of railroad tracks had actually decoupled, sliding down with the washed-out mud into the swamped ditch. Surveying the mess, marveling at the destruction possible from something as simple as footprints and rain—something that Jeremy had always considered gentle and innocuous—he thought it was no wonder that modern civilization had developed in Europe instead.

Every day, before he rose, he reminded himself that here he was a complete neophyte, without the comprehension of half of what he needed to know to safely govern all these men he had been assigned. In this new geography he always tried to question his old assumptions, checking here that they sustained their accuracy. He felt he had been born anew in Africa, with the delight of an infant in each unfamiliar sight and with the same inability to recognize danger.

The second day here, he had learned this lesson well when he'd addressed his men for the first time, the Indians whose hands would assemble the geometric perfection of the railroad tracks—his Indians, all seven hundred thirty two of them. He watched the men convene, attired in puffy turbans and oversized white shirts hanging down to their knees. Still carrying the shovels and hoes they had been working with, they jostled closer to hear how he would address them, to see with their own eyes what kind of sahib he might make. So new here, he did not yet comprehend there were over forty different languages in camp, the only shared ones being English and Hindi. He did not understand the difference between the broad groupings of Buddhists, Hindus, and Mohammedans, much less those between Sikhs, Jainists, and Shiites. He had not learned that Mohammedans asked repeatedly not to work Friday afternoons while the Hindus would not touch beef if it were served. He did not know that the Mohammedans would stop work five times a day to bow down toward the North while the Hindus requested that, if they perished here, their remains be cremated. Instead, he mentally lumped all those dark attentive faces together into one homogenous group and labeled it
foreign
.

Before he could commence his address to the crowd—the Hindi translator waiting at his side—two of the men near the front began to push one other, other, no need for any greater complaint than physical proximity and religious distance. A few of the bystanders were hit by the scuffle and the fisticuffs began to spread. Jeremy froze, no idea of what to do. Five of the jemadars waded in, shoving and yelling, trying to separate the men even as more and more workers pressed forward into the knot of thrashing arms and yelling faces. Then he heard the first real scream and spotted the bloody edge of a hoe raised overhead.

Desperate, Jeremy discharged his firearm into the sky. The crowd froze, all their furious motion abruptly stopped, those brown faces staring up at him and his rifle.