Daygo's Fury (9 page)

“Come on,” he said, pressing his hands underneath Niisa’s armpits and lifting him up to his feet. Niisa staggered and almost fell, his legs feeling weak and numb, but his father held on to him and steadied him. He wished they would not disturb his calm as they did. The thought was a fleeting disturbance at the edge of his consciousness that did not quite break into the tranquillity he had achieved within his mind. It was a thought laced with some anger and disquiet. But it was a thought too silly to find purchase, so it floated away again with all the others. How could he blame nature for moving and living, for being as it was? He felt in tune with it all. He felt a deep peace with all of its forms. He knew that Daygo inhabited all, that all stemmed from the same source, that all were a part of the Daygo stream.

What found purchase within him was the consideration that it was him and not them that needed to learn and improve. He needed to learn to achieve and sustain such awareness in every moment of his life, no matter what his environment required of him, so that he need not ever lose the connected state of being that he was able to achieve through stillness, focus and quiet.

He allowed his parents to lead him back into their village and their hut, where he lay down beside his sister. His trance slowly dropped into sleep and dreams.

******

They woke while the forest was still quiet, with the first grey light of dawn crawling through their open doorway. The cabin started to fill with soft groans and the sound of leather and fur creaking beneath shifting, rolling bodies. Niisa found his eyes open to the boar-skin hide beneath him. He looked into it softly for some moments as he found his breathing and felt the small aches in his body that sleep always induced. He waited quietly until his mind came awake with the yearning to stretch and open up into the day. He lifted himself onto knees and elbows. He could see Chiko’s open eyes beside him, watching him, waiting until he rose and stepped from the cabin. When he did, he heard her moving to follow.

Outside the hut, he looked into the greyness of the morning and savoured its quiet. The birds still slept up in their trees. The silence was only disturbed by the smallest of breezes, the quiet movement of leaves and branches and some distant rustlings of the creatures of the night still finding their beds. Sometimes in the morning you could hear catcalls or the hooting of a round-owl, or the small screeching and cries of rodents and turret-ferrets. But this morning there was none. He stretched his arms wide and arched his back and felt the soft touch of Chiko’s hand trail across his own as she stepped past him.

She gave a small stretch and, with her eyes still half-closed, they clasped hands and began their morning routine. She groaned as they swung and arched their backs, pressing their feet together as levers. Even her groans were high-pitched and musical, as pleasant as the song birds in the forest. She tossed her head lazily, letting it hang loosely behind her as she clasped Niisa’s hands. It took little thought or effort. They had built a routine that they performed almost in their sleep.

Since they were children they had stretched together, as early as either could remember, loosening every muscle in their body. They rehearsed and refined their movements without ever having to speak with one another; their bodies themselves were their own form of communication, and every year their morning dance was added to.

When they were finished, his sister hugged him. “Thank you, Brother,” she said, her words clipped and individual and with a residual sigh of satisfaction within them.

Their mother placed a hand on them both as she stepped from the hut. She gathered her bowls and baskets of food and filled each with their breakfast; picking nuts, seeds, berries, plants and bark from the small baskets she had filled gathering in the forest the day before, her breasts dangling below her as she worked.

The village stirred to life around them as they ate, and their neighbours called the morning to each other as they rose and left to relieve themselves in the woods. His father soon joined them. Others stood and stretched beside their huts, groaning and speaking quietly.

The forest woke slowly too, quiet rustlings of leaves, branches and feathers, an occasional catcall, early tweeting of birds. But, as with the village, the ruckus steadily grew. The monkeys and every other beast came alive and started to chatter, calling and welcoming the new day in much the same way as the people did. By the time they had finished nibbling on their breakfast, the forest was full of noise and the air was already thick with moisture.

They took their time to tidy up and prepare themselves for the day to come, men and women, children and adolescents skipping through their little village to talk and greet each other in another day. Niisa found a tree to sit beside and watched it all quietly, as he normally did. The chief finally made a shout for the hunt, and the men began to gather. Niisa stood to join them for only the second time, his ear still sore from the new stone inside it.

They met beside the chief’s hut, the village’s third oldest man using his station to save his legs. Niisa stayed quiet as the usual banter commenced all around him. Bold predictions were met with jokes and reminders, they poked one another and laughed together, they made outlandish bets that would never be claimed, only laughed about the following day again. The chief laughed along from a distance, an arm resting against his hut, an easy smile on his face as he was called in as mediator, as the chronicler of the histories, to settle their exaggerated claims of previous achievements. With a tilt of the head or a leaning of the shoulders he indicated enough to create cries of mirth or indignation, without ever spoiling the fun by reciting the actual, and far less adventurous, truths. Finally, they quietened and got down to business, which was easily done, so practiced was everyone in the village to their daily routine. It was only a matter of picking the place, the route and the plan, with some consideration for the time of year and the observations of the previous days. When all was done, his uncle came over and wrapped an arm around Niisa’s shoulders in added friendliness to perhaps disguise the uneasiness that Niisa knew they all still felt for what he had done the previous year.

“Just stay on your toes,” he said reassuringly. “There’s no need to go off and do anything on your own. You’re just here for the journey. Just watch how me and the rest do it. You don’t need to take part in anything yourself. It’s your first run out, just give it a few weeks.” He looked down at him. “Arm’s distance, okay?”

Niisa nodded. Nuru clapped him on the shoulder, and together the tribe moved out into the woods.

They took little care for their noise as they set off from the village, but as they neared their end destination, with only a few short hand gestures, their steps became near silent as they spread out to a long line and fell into the bush. In short time Niisa might have been alone in the forest with his uncle, cautiously treading through the underbrush. The occasional rustle of branches to either side was no more than a large bird might make and sounded no different. And only when he stared at where he thought a man must be was he able to spot glimpses of their trek through the forest.

As they came across the burrows of small creatures—birds, squirrels, snakes, capybaras—his uncle’s movements grew slow and catlike, his eyes searching as he held his short spear high and poised, ready to fall with lightning accuracy at any sign of escape. As he paused and crawled with spear high, his left hand trailed low along the ground, sometimes gently tapping the earth, or vibrating a leaf, imitating prey, enticing the creature to move from its place of safety. Sometimes as he crouched low and level across the ground, he reversed the roles of his hands, using the handle of the spear to reach out and alter the small environment while his left hand hovered ready to snatch what poked out from the soil.

Every now and again a round of bird whistles came from right and left as the advance paused to wait for each man to regain position within the line. A ready whistle was called and they fell back to their steady pace. Monkeys dangled overhead as they travelled, watching with black, beady eyes, their limbs always seeming loose and lazy. They yawned and scratched and picked at one another, occasionally breaking out into chatter and play. It did not matter so long as they acted as they normally would. No creature had cause to fear a monkey.

Niisa found the whole experience fascinating, and considered regretting his impulsive action the previous year. But he found it hard to do so. The killing of the monkey allowed him to watch it die, and that was a wonderful thing to have beholden. That had been intensely fascinating. A creature that showed similar intelligence and awareness to a human, an animal that perhaps felt a similar isolation from the Daygo stream, which, it seemed to Niisa, smaller creatures did not.

To see an animal die and return to the stream was always something that caught Niisa’s attention. And similarly he spent much time pondering the moment of separation, the moment of creation. He had asked on occasion if he could be allowed to watch the women of his tribe giving birth, but he had only been laughed at. They thought him silly and told him it was not something he would want to see in any case. He had often peeked through the doorways of huts but what he had seen was too far removed and abstract for him to gain any great insight into the process.

A sharp whistle from the right brought Niisa’s mind back into focus. His uncle, walking before him, had a snake curled up and hung at one side of his walothsa and a large, rat-like capybara hanging from the other. He stopped and listened, checking his bearings, as more whistles echoed away into the distance. As whistles travelled faintly in the opposite direction, they came closer along the line, growing in length but holding to the same sharp pitch. They started to move forward again, slowly. Then came the whistle from the man closest to their right, just longer still than the one before. His uncle copied it, tongue to teeth, adding its own length, and broke into a dead run.

“Boar!” he shouted over his shoulder. “Keep up!”

Before Niisa knew it, he was racing after his uncle through the woods. There was no silence anymore as they ran in a wide arc around where the sound of the whistle had come from. They had a boar on the chase. Along both sides of the line they ran in ever wider loops from where the first whistle was heard, using the length of their whistles to give direction, in an attempt to trap the boar within their closing circle. It was dangerous and the boar could come bursting through the bushes at any moment. Niisa’s uncle held his spear high and at the ready as he ran. The forest was still treacherous with many things that could poison and kill. But the thrill of chasing a boar seemed worth taking risks. And with the gathering in two days, Niisa knew that a boar skin would be held with high esteem for the tribe, and for the tribesman who eventually brought it down.

He pictured the scenario of the boar appearing through the vegetation and driving into his uncle with its tusks, or through him. The risk sent his heart pounding. There was speed, everything was accelerated. The unpredictable movement of Daygo seemed more pronounced, more full of life. He ran, aware of its wonder as life happened and bubbled and changed all around him. He gloried in the privilege to be there, to witness it, to be aware of it all unfolding before his eyes, within his body, pounding in his ears, whishing through his nose and mouth; he could smell the forest sharply, the scene changing, moving, assaulting his nostrils.

He imagined himself high up above, looking down at all the frantic activity happening below in the forest and trees, up and down the mountain. He wondered if such fantastic movement continued into the soil and deeper, only invisible to his eye, happening right now. Could it be even more wonderful? He laughed and waved his arms, giddy with the thrill and the joy of
life.

The boar burst through the trees. The spear flew from Nuru’s hand in an instant, and missed. Its head dipped. Its horns pointed shortly out to either side. Niisa ran at full sprint, midstride, laughing, arms wide, eyes wide. He saw the collision course as it happened. He watched, witnessed, amazed, as the boar drove through him. He was flying through the air before his brain registered the hit, his legs flew high, his head cracked off the creature’s back, his nose pressed deep into the fur. His body bounced, lost, somewhere, out of control, his mind blank, alive, as he lived it, complete, a witness, aware, lost in its full glory, his neck locked, his mouth hung open, spittle flying onto his face.

He landed hard on his lower back. It thudded into the soil, his feet and legs snapped into the earth, seeming to suck his upper body in before it ricocheted back and into the soil hard, knocking the wind from him a moment before his head smacked the ground in imitation of its lower part. His vision disappeared in a stupefied whiteness, his chest choked so that he couldn’t move or breathe. He was trapped in that space for a moment as his body filled with a blind panic. He felt a dull second thud on his head, and a moment later his vision returned. But he continued to choke, his mouth dangled open to no avail. He saw his uncle appear over him, placing hands on him to hold him steady, and speaking. He looked up and gave a shout.

His body was full of feelings he had never experienced before, pain and confusion, he was struggling but he didn’t know to what end or against what, only that his chest wouldn’t work.

And then, like a river bursting, he could breathe again.

“Easy, easy,” his uncle was saying softly above him, still with a hand pressed gently against his chest as he crouched above him. “Stay there a moment. Stay there a moment. Stay still.”