The Flame Trees of Thika (25 page)

M
OST
of the cannibals went home when the Palmers’ house was finished, but two or three settled down with wives and families, a little group of aliens stuck like a splinter into the flesh of the Kikuyu. The women wore nothing but a triangle of leather, no larger than my hand, dangling from a string round their waists, but made up for it with a great deal of thick, heavy wire coiled round their arms and legs so tightly that the flesh bulged out like inner tubes on each side of the coil. They walked with a free, upright gait, carried things on their heads instead of on their backs and smoked clay pipes with long stems. The Kikuyu, whose own women wore leather aprons to their knees, thought them indecent, bold hussies and had as little to do with them as possible.

They soon acquired goats which, like all livestock, spent the night in thorn-fenced
bomas
intended to keep out marauding beasts. In this objective, the Kavirondo s
boma
failed. They lost several goats, and accused the Kikuyu of stealing them. The Kikuyu denied this hotly, and blamed a leopard, whose spoor they pointed out nearby. The Kavirondo retorted that the spoor belonged to a harmless hyena and stuck to their charge, and so a
shauri
developed which came to Hereward for settlement.

This word
shauri
was one we used a great deal. It could mean a quarrel, a lawsuit, an arrangement, an agreement, a discussion, a concern – almost anything. Here it meant a contest in rhetoric between Kikuyu and Kavirondo spokesmen. After several hours of this, Hereward gave a judgement of which he was proud. If the Kikuyu are so sure there
is
a leopard, he said, let them catch it, and their case will be proved. If they fail, and if no better evidence can be furnished, they must restore to the Kavirondo a number of goats equal to those which disappeared.

‘Unsporting, in a way,’ Hereward commented. ‘Traps, I mean. Much rather walk him up and bag him in the open, but there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that.’

Tilly warned Hereward to take special care of the dogs. They
were a favourite food of leopards, who would risk almost anything to catch one. But Hereward had taken the side of the Kavirondo, and was not unduly disturbed.

He paid for this – or, rather, poor Chang did. The Palmers were at dinner, the double doors giving on to their veranda were open and Chang was curled up in a wicker chair outside. Chang and Zena went everywhere with Lettice and it was unusual for Chang not to be at her feet, but he was less than six or seven paces away, and no one imagined any danger. Even just after it had happened, they did not realize anything was wrong. Lettice heard a sort of thump, and something like a tear or gasp, and a faint noise that might have been the chair scraping on the tiles. Hereward got up to look, and saw nothing.

It was dark outside, no moon. Lettice called Chang and when he did not respond Hereward felt in the chair, which he noticed had been slewed round to one side.

Of course there was a great hue and cry. Everyone called and walked about with lamps held high, but saw nothing. At last one of the Kikuyu shouted: he had found the spoor. It was not very clear to Hereward, but everyone else agreed that it was a leopard, unmistakably. No sign of Chang was ever found. I wondered if his hair, poor Chang, would give the leopard indigestion, but Juma said their stomachs were like mincing machines. Once I was shown some leopard droppings that had in them bits of undigested fur from the pelts of mice, of which leopards are fond, though you would think mice too small. By such standards, Chang was quite a large meal.

Lettice drove herself almost into a frenzy with remorse and self-blame. ‘If I had only called him…. If I had only for one single second imagined…If only…’ It was too late. Zena was seldom out of her arms, and she refused to be comforted.

‘You’ve still got Zena,’ Tilly said.

‘They were inseparable. It’s like Pyramus losing Thisbe, or Juliet, Romeo; how can Zena live without him? How can I? I expect it’s a punishment, only why should it be wreaked on Chang?’

‘The best thing is to get another quickly, even when you feel (one always does) that you can never, never bear to have another in his place. Like a tooth.’

‘No, I shall never get another; I ought to live in a solitary fortress somewhere, fed through a hole in the wall; I bring disaster on everyone I love.’

‘I don’t think you should blame yourself
quite
so much,’ Tilly suggested cautiously. ‘Leopards are one of the country’s natural hazards, I suppose.’

‘Hugh has had appendicitis, did I tell you?’ Lettice seldom spoke about her son. ‘He very nearly died, poor little boy, and what good am I to him as a mother?’

‘Perhaps you should bring him out.’

‘That is the one thing I’ve been hoping for; but Hereward…I daresay he’s right, in a year’s time Hugh will have to go to school, and here there’s nothing; but even a year, that seems an eternity; a year would mean everything to me. Now I feel that if he came, I should let him get bitten by a snake, or eaten by a lion, or he would get dysentery or typhoid or malaria….’

When Tilly got home she told Robin that she was going to get another Peke for Lettice, to take her mind off Chang.

‘They are very expensive,’ Robin pointed out.

‘Surely the price of a single Peke won’t make or break us.’

‘No, but the bank…’

‘Well, then, we must blue a bit of capital.’ That was Tilly’s sovereign remedy, but Robin said regretfully:

‘I’m afraid it is too late for that.’

‘I daresay there’s something we can sell,’ Tilly concluded hopefully. She had some turkeys, reared with much care for the Christmas market, and every morning she emerged from what she called her muddle-room, next to the store, with streaming eyes and a red face, having been chopping up the onions they so much appreciated. Now she decided that a pair sold for breeding ought to fetch the price of a small Pekinese.

Meanwhile, a leopard hunt was under way. Hereward went out at dawn with an enormous rifle and an array of amateur trackers, gun-bearers, and beaters, but the spoor was soon lost in the bush and long grass. There was no knowing which way the beast had gone. It could follow our little stream to its junction with the Thika and proceed right down to the Athi Plains without encountering much in the way of human habitation. Most of this country had been a no-man’s-land between the Kikuyu of
the forested uplands and the Masai and Kamba of the plains, so it was neither one thing nor the other, forest nor veld, mountain nor plain. Upstream, the leopard would come to the reserve, which was much more populated, but on the other hand it could also reach forest, and eventually the whole wild mountain-range of the Aberdares. Even Hereward had to admit that the choice was too wide to permit of his putting his mind, as a hunter should, into that of the quarry, and locating it by a sort of telepathy, so he reluctantly agreed to fall back on low cunning, rather than to rely on the manlier virtues of skill, endurance, and courage.

When it came to low cunning, the Kikuyu were in their element, and it soon appeared that everyone was an expert leopard-trapper, but that many different kinds of trap could be made. You could arrange a contraption by which a poisoned spear fell on top of the quarry, you could dig a pit with poisoned stakes into which it would tumble, you could set a noose for its neck, you could conceal an iron gin that seized it by the foot, you could build a small stockade whose gate closed behind it to capture it alive – there seemed no end to the different techniques. The only thing in common to nearly all methods was the use of goats as bait. Poor goats, they were destined to suffer every kind of torture for the convenience, pleasure, or superstition of man.

I forget which kind of trap was first constructed, but I do remember that instead of the leopard it caught a hyena, which none of the Kikuyu would drag away. Hyenas were unclean because they ate corpses, but more than that they were a favourite haunt of dead men’s spirits; the creature whose baleful eyes you saw glinting in the darkness just beyond the halo of firelight might, for all you knew, be your grandfather or your uncle, come perhaps to embody retribution for some insult or injury inflicted on him while he was alive.

The fur of this dead hyena was a dingy sort of grey with dirty white spots. Its powerful shoulders tailed away towards long, sloping hind-quarters, a structure that gave it a curious loping motion. Njombo looked at the beast with distaste and said that all hyenas were lame. When I asked why, he pointed at some piebald crows hopping about at a safe distance beyond the vultures, and told me one of his children’s tales. Long ago, it appeared,
the father of all the piebald crows possessed a gourd with white stuff inside which the hyenas saw, and thought was fat.

‘Where did you get that fat?’ asked the hyenas. The crow answered: ‘In the sky, beyond the moon.’ ‘Take us there,’ said the hyenas, ‘and we will get some of the fat.’ ‘Very well,’ replied the crow. ‘Catch hold of my feet, and my neck, and my wings.’ The hyenas did so, and the crow took them up, up, up among the stars. ‘Can you see anything below?’ asked the crow. ‘No, we can see nothing.’ ‘Very well.’ The crow gave a big kick and flapped his wings and all the hyenas fell off, and dropped to the ground and were killed. All except one. This was a female, and her legs were broken. She gave birth, and the
totos
were born with broken legs, and hyenas have limped ever since that day.

Someone suggested that Mr Roos would be sure to know the best kind of trap, and to supervise its construction. Tilly had declared a week’s holiday for me, because the time had come to graft the citrus trees now standing in glossy-leaved ranks near the house. Neither she nor Robin had ever done any grafting, but she had an illustrated book on the subject and was busy most of the day in the plantation with a knife and twine; so I was allowed to take a note over to Mr Roos.

Although his farm was next to ours, to go there was like venturing into a foreign land. We seldom saw Mr Roos – he came and went unpredictably, like an elephant – and his life was full of mystery. He scarcely had what we would call a house, it was a hut like the natives’, only with a sort of veranda on one side and a fireplace made of scraps of corrugated iron on the other. A queer smell hung round his encampment, which perhaps originated from the slices of raw meat tied to a pole in a large cage to keep out flies. When this biltong was quite dry, it became as hard as timber, and did not smell unpleasant, but in its earlier stages it drenched the air with a vicious odour. It was strange to see a European’s dwelling without a garden, not even a few salvias or daisies, or an attempt at a lawn. The tawny grass of Africa straggled all round the hut, and fat-tailed sheep grazed right up to the veranda on which there stood a bare table, a camp-chair, and the white skull of an elephant. There was one touch of colour: a morning glory with its sky-blue flowers climbing up one side of the hut.

My elders considered Mr Roos a dour and uncommunicative man but he was always friendly when I saw him, which was seldom enough. Sometimes he had a black, bristly beard, sometimes a rim of stubble giving him a saturnine look. His hat was even older, dirtier, and more battered than Robin’s, and instead of boots he wore sandals that he made himself from eland or kongoni hide. His face was creased like the bark of an olive tree, and almost as dark, but he had light-blue eyes that looked odd in such a setting, and a wide smile that deepened all his crinkles and exposed a few yellow, ill-assorted teeth. Most of these had been knocked out when he had been trampled by a buffalo, and he had a deep scar up the inside of one arm where it had gored him, and no doubt other and less visible injuries as well. I thought of him as carved out of wood, he was so hard and brown.

Mr Roos was cutting skeys for his yokes with a bush-knife from branches of thorn. He put the note into his pocket without even glancing at it and said:

‘Not often you come riding this way. Neighbours and strangers, eh? How you like it now I show you the nest of –’ he added a word I have long since forgotten, which sounded something like
boomklop
, and of whose meaning I had no idea. I nodded nervously.

‘You come with me.’

Mr Roos led the way round to the back of his hut and I followed, wondering what a
boomklop
was and whether I was really to see one, or whether Mr Roos had some sinister motive in view. At home he was said to be ‘slim’, and to trade with the natives for sheep and cattle in a manner described as sailing close to the wind. Perhaps the
boomklop
was only an excuse and he was going to capture me and sell me to someone, though I could not imagine to whom, and for what purpose. Or perhaps he would turn me into biltong, or dry my skin for sandals, or even feed me to the
boomklop
, which might be a large, angry beast with horns like a rhino and jaws like a crocodile.

I hung back, and suggested to Mr Roos that he should read the note in his pocket.

‘Plenty of time for that,’ he said. ‘You know what’s down there inside, I bet?’

‘It’s about the leopard.’

Mr Roos stopped dead, and asked questions. His face never showed what he was thinking, but I felt that he was pleased. Now that I was close to him, I could see little streaks of grime embedded in the crevasses of his leathery neck so deeply that obviously no one could remove them by ordinary washing. The air smelt sharply of hides and alum. Skins as hard and stiff as boards, their livid, sinewy undersides exposed to the sun, were pegged out on a flat space behind his hut, and skulls with horns attached, and flesh in various stages of decomposition, lay about in the grass attracting flies. It was all rather sinister. Pointing to a pegged-out skin, Mr Roos remarked:

‘You see that, man? Ten feet from nose to tail, a beauty. And what a trek, for three days he led me and he was the one was first tired. He got four legs, you see, and I got two, but that don’t help him none.’

‘You must be good at walking,’ I said politely.

‘Man, I walked from Bulawayo, and with an ox-whip in my hand.’