Walking with Abel (39 page)

The hump of sorrow. “We eat the hump and it tastes so good and we cry: ‘Oh, my beautiful cow died!’” said Saadou. “Really, we should feel lucky the boys are safe. Allaye and Hassan were right in the middle of the herd, swimming very well. Sometimes the cows crush the boys who swim with them. So we are lucky,
al ham du lillah
.”

—

At sunset egrets streamed in from all cardinal points to skim the gilded river that took Oumarou’s cow and landed on sundown-lit islands where they nested in night bushes like giant fruit. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, all the egrets in the world, beating their wings against the last hour of light, landing and landing forever. Around the islands the river moved northward. Oumarou sat on a sheet of black plastic with his back to the water and his turban tight over his mouth and watched the cow’s head bleed out onto a goatskin next to him. Men stopped by to greet him and he raised his hands to return their salaams and gave away chunks of his share of meat one by one. In a daze he gave away, to a distant relative, the hump.

“It’s not my luck today, it’s his,” he said after he had realized his mistake. “Anna Bâ? Being a cowherd is very hard.”

The hump of regret.

When it grew dark Ousman doled out chunks of grilled cow liver and Fanta and Bobo served rice with fish sauce. “Dive in, dive in,” said Oumarou.

“A lot of cows die during the crossing for nothing, they aren’t even killed. This cow, at least we’re eating it. Besides,” he said a few minutes later, after giving it a thought, “the cow was a little sick.”

After dinner Ousman, Gano, and Saadou’s son Allaye whipped out their cellphones and vanished into the ghostly blue light of LED screens. On the western bank of the river Hassan and Allaye staked a calf rope to the south of Ballé’s clay walls and talked the cows calm and submissive and milked them. Against the depthless night they built a fire by which to nurse their battered bodies. A cow had kicked Hassan in the jaw; for a day he could barely move it. Allaye spent the hours before dawn coughing up blood. Later elders would say it was because he’d had a full breakfast before driving the cows across the Bani. Everyone knew that if you ate before swimming you would bleed from your mouth.

T
he pirogue listed in the strong evening chop, taking the sunset waves broadside, the river white in the slant light. Seventeen terrified people gripped the gunwales. Seventeen sets of knuckles ashgray on the redwood porous from water rot. No one spoke. Oumarou’s goatskin blew off in the water. Salimata hesitated, let go her grip, clawed out the goatskin, reclaimed her hold on the boat. A blue tarp luffed like a sail, dragged on the water, unleashed in its wake a hoop of drops like sparks.
“Ya Allah!”
someone whispered. Waterfolk’s tricks, or maybe the river’s own. The river’s voracity extended beyond cows: three weeks earlier a pirogue had capsized on the Niger between Mopti and Timbuktu and seventy-two passengers drowned. I tucked the tarp back into the boat. It took in water overboard but the two Bozo polemen said nothing, faces set, stern. To the east, a small fishing craft sailed upstream under a homemade square rig, a solitary Paleolithic silhouette upon it keeping perfect balance against the river’s blinding surface, one with his boat like some pelagic centaur.

When the pirogue scraped the mud of the western shore everyone mouthed a prayer. The nomads unloaded into ankle-deep mud. Exhausted by the crossing, the sun, the numbing fear of water, the women huddled on their sacks, scooped out some cold rice for the younger children. Sensing their tension one of the fishermen pretended to steal baby Mayrama. A big man, big face, big hands, big smile. The girl shrieked. He turned to Kajita, lifted her in the air, cooed something in a language she could not understand. Kajita frowned, wiggled free of his grip, slid down into riverside reeds. He made to steal Hashem and Amadou’s rice. At last the women began to chuckle, uncrack their tense shoulders, their clenched hearts. Then they were laughing fully, relieved to be laughing. The boys laughed, too. Everyone was laughing to tears.

That night they camped on the bank. After a dinner of rice and tea Oumarou knelt to pray on dry mottles of sedge grass. He faced the river’s east bank, where more cows still streamed in from Hayré and the white smoke of cowboy fires seeped down to the water through the brush. Upon the river silhouetted fishers glided soundlessly, cast their diaphanous seines. Handmade sinkers kissed the surface, puckered it lightly, pulled the nets under. Tossed oars dripped water into water. From inland sounded the surprised lowing of cattle. Hmmm? Hmmm? To the west, where the sky faded from orange to blue, Venus rose, and right above, the waxing halfmoon shone like a brimming calabash of milk. In the clearing to the north darkened the compact mud walls of Ballé, where Allaye, his lungs now recovered, was spending his days and nights, flirting with plump rimaibe girls in the smoky crepuscule of empty mudbrick rooms. He was gregarious, handsome, and the girls liked him a lot. They told jokes and took photographs with cellphones they charged with motorcycle batteries, and stripped off their tops, allowed his mind to stray on faraway journeys to the Atlantic shores, allowed his hands to wander.

“It all starts when boys go to the village and drink tea all day,” said Oumarou. “That’s where corruption begins. We used to just herd cattle, that’s it. If we went to town, we’d just go to buy or sell animals. Now they want cellphones, motorbikes. Radios.”

He squinted into the night toward the village walls. The walls of settled lifestyle: so impenetrable to him, so open to Allaye. Generation barriers. The walls of disconnect.

“Sons! They are very hard. And we love them best of all.”

Ousman walked to Hassan’s new camp and returned to make tea and report the latest. His brothers had staked the calf rope next to the spiny twisted hump of an atil bush. The long swale near the camp was full of dry grass on which the cows grazed to fullness, and the cows’ udders hung heavy and low. The piebald dogie whose mother had died during the crossing was doing well and Hassan was feeding it rice-flour pap from a teapot spout four times a day. Two Sankaris and a Diakayaté set their cows loose in Ballé rice fields and the farmers were demanding a cow’s worth from each owner even though the harvest in this year of late and meager rain would have been not worth three goats. Two officials from the Department of Forestry confiscated the broadsword of a fourteen-year-old goatherd, accused him of cutting down trees, and ordered his father to report the following market day to court in Djenné.

The Diakayatés would move to their new camp in the morning. Half a mile to the north of that campground rose the hummock of Ballé, with its cool pump well and its sultry girls. A mile or so to the east, inaudible, ran the Bani. To the south and west, reaching almost all the way to Djenné, stretched the red Sahelian expanse. Sunbaked to brick under limpid skies. Breathtaking, austere, unwelcoming with barely any shade and so many thorns. Sparse acacias, some shrubs. Creepers blooming fuchsia trumpets. From here the women would resume their long walks to barter buttermilk in Djenné, where mango trees already flowered once more. There was no permission yet from the
dioro
of Senossa for the Fulani to enter the bougou, and the women would return carrying grain and salt and tea and tales of fens full of hippo grass that waved taller than the horns of the tallest bull and tales of other Fulani families waiting for the clearance to pasture their herds in that grass. Here Oumarou would spend days and weeks perched on his goatskin. He would look west. Toward the invisible green swales, the next camp, the next reunion. Fixing himself once more in the savannah, in the world, in the Stone Age ritual of wandering cowboys who always reached the next campsite but never quite arrived.

How long would they have to wait? Days, weeks, a month? No one could tell. There existed no calendar for the nomads, no dates. There was barely time at all: only cycles. The sunrise like a huge white celebration in the east, the molten fisher’s float of sunset. The children dying in the night, the women circling back to sit with one another in mourning. The droughts and the deluges. The slow spasmodic migration to and from seasonal grazing lands, and the shorter rhythmic patterns of ferry rides back and forth across the river and its anabranches and seasonal affluents, the roundtrip slogs to pasture, water, market. And the waiting, always the waiting: for rain, for thicker grass, for the next move.

For now, they prepared to spend the night by the river. Boucary’s wife, Abba, stretched a mosquito net between six lopsided poles in silver moonlight, like a lunatic fisherwoman cast ashore. Salimata and Fanta quietly gossiped. Hairatou, who was afraid to sleep by herself, spooned her body against Bobo, who lay listless, fatigued. Hashem cuddled against my right leg and covered himself with the frayed hem of my skirt and Kajita fell asleep against my left, holding my hand. Oumarou tucked us in. Much later it became very cold and someone’s newborn goat joined us on the mat. I dreamed that a little colorful bird, like a sunbird, red and blue and yellow, lived on my breast.

E
vening outside Ballé. The animals sang the sun down, sang the Sahel to sleep. Women talked quietly over their cooking, clattered their pots. Hairatou hummed a song of syncopes and halfsteps, and young Amadou, naked as usual, danced in the dust. When the blood moon rose in the east the men and women prayed toward it like sectaries of some eldritch nocturnal cult. Then they went to bed. Several hours later Hassan drove the cows to nightherd.

The night swale was all the breath of cows against the stubby soil, the rhythmic cropping of hay, the moist chewing, the large nostrils exhaling into the earth. Pale clouds smeared the hemispheric sky. On the grass lay blue and green cocoons, bundles of resting cowboys. They napped, rose, checked to see that their cows were still nearby, lay down to nap again. After a time the cows, too, lay in the grass. The sun had sponged up all the rainy season’s water, and the night wind, harmattan’s precursor, blew cold and dry from the north. There was no longer any dew. The moon paled as it rose and in its blue light shadows fell hard and angled and it was easy to imagine that the world comprised nothing else—just the open palms of the cyanotype valley and the cattle in it, the sleepy herders speaking and not speaking, the few bright stars competing against electric moonlight.

By dawn the bush was fully awake, rock pigeons and dogs and chickens, and the many herds that had slept in the valley had risen and shuddered and mooed together and deeply, and slowly gathered into one enormous milling herd. Egrets lifted off their island shelters and winged across the pinking east in dark lacy outlines, finding room among the cattle. The savannah lowed in the cold wind. When the sun was a palm above the horizon it was time to head back to camp for milking. Hassan stood up from the bare impress his body had made in the grass and wove through the animals, separating out his father’s cows one by one. He worked quickly, surely, almost without looking.

“How can you tell which cows are your father’s?”

“I can tell.”

“But how?”

“These cows were born into my hands. I know.”