The Tree Where Man Was Born (40 page)

At home, hot, tired, and oppressed, we tramp down to the Udahaya. Careless of bilharzia, we lie in the cool flow, six inches deep, that streams over fine copper-colored sand. We wash, dry off on the green bank in a cool north wind, and climb back up to Gidabembe, feeling better. There Gondoshabe and Angate are singing on their knees, breasts swinging across big flat-topped tilted stones on which maize meal is refined by being scraped by a flat rock. The meal pours onto clean impala hide below the stone.

The boy Saidi, preparing his small arrows, sits alone at a fire above the river. All Hadza boys, developing their bow strength from an early age, have weapons suitable to their size that are in constant play and practice, and the glint of a bird arrow risen through the trees of a still landscape is a sign of Hadza presence. Though some men never hunt at all, content to accept charity in return for the loss of prestige, Saidi’s intensity and bearing say that he will be a hunter. Squatting on his heels, he trims his vulture plumes and binds them to a shaft with neck ligament of the impala. Four vanes are trimmed and bound on tight in as many minutes, and the binding sealed over with the glue from a chewed tuber. He sights down his new arrow shafts, then gnaws at one to soften it for straightening before fitting his arrow tips into shaft sockets dug out with a bent nail. Then he rises and goes off after dik-dik and rock hyrax, which both abound here. The hyrax looks like a sharp-nosed marmot, but on the basis of certain anatomical similarities, notably the feet, it has been determined that its nearest living kin are elephants. Perhaps as a defense against the attack of eagles, the hyrax has the astonishing ability to stare straight upward into the equatorial sun.

Watching Saidi go, Enderlein says, “Do you know what will become of him?” He scowls. “First, when all the game is gone, and the trees, too, he will be forced to go to Yaida Chini. Untrained, he can do nothing, and because he is Hadza he will be treated as inferior everywhere he goes. If he is very lucky, he might become a thief in Dar es Salaam; otherwise he will be just another one of all those faces in the streets, hopeless and lost, with all the dignity that this life gives him gone.” He got to his feet, disgusted, and we walked in silence toward the cave, through the beautiful rock monuments and wild still twilight orchards of commiphora like old apple trees and terminalia with red pods like fruit, and figs, and fruiting grewia bushes, and a small sweet-scented acacia with recurved spines that catch hold of the unwary—the wait-a-bit thorn, from the Swahili
ngoja kidogo
, which means wait-a-little.

At the cave is the game scout Nangai, come on foot from Yaida Chini to fetch back his young wife Kabaka, daughter of Giga. “Who knows why she ran away?” Nangai shrugs, smiling shyly at his sullen wife. Giga, holding his ornamented grandchild to his cheek, rolls his eyes and croons, a love all the more affecting for the great ugliness that, as one comes to perceive this man, turns to great beauty.

Tea is served by sad-faced discreet Gimbe, who says, “Karibu chai,” welcome to tea, with the same sweet simplicity with which another African once said to me, “You are nicely welcomed to Samburu.” With his wood ladle he stirs maize meal into boiling water to make the thick white paste called ugali that is subsistence in East Africa; ugali, eaten with the fingers, is rolled into a kind of concave ball used to mop up whatever is at hand in the way of meat, vegetables, and gravy. Soon he presents a bowl of water in which the right hand is to be dipped and rinsed prior to eating, because here in the cave our posho, or ration, is eaten from a common bowl. The Moslem washing of one hand comes up from the coast by way of the part-Arab Swahili, once the agents of the trade in slaves and ivory; so does the mbira or “marimba,” called irimbako by the Hadza, who have no musical instrument of their own. The mbira, or flat-bar zither, came to East Africa centuries ago from Indonesia. It is a hollow box faced with tuned strips of stiff metal that produces soft swift wistful rhythms of time passing, and the old one here at Gidabembe is passed from hand to hand. It is Giga who plays it by the fire as we dine on ugali and delicate doves shot in the hills.

At Gidabembe Hill, among the monoliths, baboons are raving, and there comes a sudden brief strange sound that brings Giga from his cave. “Chui,” he whispers. Leopard. But the others shrug—how can one know? The Hadza never like to give opinions. A few days later, in this place, we find the vulture-gutted body of a young leopard on an open slope where no sick leopard would ever lie, and the grass all about has been bent
and stamped by a convocation of baboons, as if the creature had been caught in the open by the huge baboon troupe, which had killed it. Yet there was no baboon fur in its mouth, nor any blood or sign of struggle in the grass.

The dark falls quiet once again. From Sipunga comes the night song of unknown birds, and the shrill ringing yip of a distant jackal, and inevitably the ululations of hyenas. The Hadza are comparatively unsuperstitious, and unfrightened of the dark: “We are ready for him,” they say of Fisi, reaching out to touch their bows. “Hyena can be a bloody nuisance,” Enderlein says, recalling an account, no doubt apocryphal, of a sleeping man who had his foot bitten clean off by a night hyena. He places a dim kerosene lantern near our bed rolls, for we are sleeping outside the cave. At my head is a white hyrax stain on the dark rock, and beside the stain are stacked the rifles. Mosquitoes are few and we sleep without a net, staring up through the black leaves at cruel bright stars. Gimbe is sleeping in the Land Rover, and the others sleep on hides inside the cave. Magandula curls up with his bunduki, and Giga is hooked close to the embers. They murmur in their soft deep voices, which drop away one by one. Soon Giga is asleep, and all night he breathes rapidly, like a wild creature stunned and felled while running.

The Hadza see no sense in hunting hard with bow and arrow when there is a rifle in the camp. In hope of meat, people are coming in out of the hills, and there are seven hearths where there were four. The Hadza here are now no less than thirty and a buffalo would feed everyone for days.

Many buffalo, as well as rhino and elephant, live in the forest below Gidabembe. When Peter asks me if I wish to hunt, I tell him I will think about it. Enderlein is a good shot who is shooting badly, who is sleeping badly, whose every action has a trace of rage in it; he is not the companion I would choose for the pursuit of dangerous animals, and especially buffalo, toward which he seems more disrespectful than any hunter I have ever met. “He’s too damned careless about buffalo; he’s going
to catch it one of these days,” says Douglas-Hamilton, who is not known for prudence. On the other hand, though I had no wish to shoot a big animal myself, hunting dangerous game is a part of the African mystique that I did not know. And this morning is a soft green morning when death, which never seems remote in Africa, but hangs about like something half-remembered, might come almost companionably . . . be that as it may, I leave my doubts behind.

We descend to the river at daybreak, accompanied by the game scouts Magandula and Nangai, and Mugunga, who is Nangai’s young porter, and two wild Hadza, Yaida and Salibogo. Magandula carries Peter’s .375, which few hunters consider powerful enough to stop a buffalo, and Nangai brings a .22 for small game. Yaida and Salibogo carry bow and arrows. We ford the river where it winds around the base of Gidabembe, and enter the dense forest single file. Salibogo is in the lead, then Enderlein, Nangai, Mugunga, who carries Peter’s pouch of bullets, then Magandula, then myself, and finally Yaida, who looks like a young Bushman. For the first time Magandula is shirtless, and he has a porcupine quill stuck in his hair, but he clings to his red socks and pointed shoes.

Trees in this virgin place are huge—umbrella thorn and soaring fever trees, and here and there a mighty winterthorn (
A. albida
), the noblest of all acacias, these interspersed with fat sycamore figs and sausage trees. But along the animal trails and walling the small glades is head-high thicket, hollowed out, where rhino and buffalo may stand entirely hidden. Their spoor is everywhere, and Salibogo drops behind; there is no need for a tracker. We move carefully and quietly, bending each moment to peer into the grottoes. The trick is to sight any hidden beast before it feels crowded and decides to charge, but the cover is dense, and Enderlein offers a tense grin. “Bloody dangerous bush,” he murmurs. “They can see you but you can’t see them.” In Peter’s opinion, rhino are more dangerous than buffalo, being stupid and unpredictable, a “warm-blooded dinosaur,” as he says, that has outlived its time; rhinos are apt to rush out blindly where a buffalo would slip away. But I share the more
common dread of the low-browed buffalo, shifting its jaws sideways as it chews its cud, light glancing from its horn.

Oblivious birdsong in the early morning wind; warm butterflies spin sunlight through the glades. The Hadza pause every little while to wring dry berries from the grewia bushes, but my own mouth is too dry, I am not hungry. There is exhilaration in the hunt, and also the quick heart of the hunted. I feel strong and light and quick, and more than a match for the nearest tree that can be climbed in haste. These are damnably few: the big trees lack low branches and the small are shrouded with thorn vine and liana. Yaida and Salibogo, like myself, keep a close watch on the trees, and we grin nervously at one another.

In a circular glade, Enderlein crouches, stiffens, and steps back, holding out his hand. Magandula gives him his rifle. In the shadows ten yards to the left, the cave of leaves is filled with a massive shape, as still as stone. A little way back there was fresh rhino track, and Peter thinks this is the rhino. He circles out a little ways, just to make sure. A slight movement may bring on a rhino charge—its poor vision cannot make out what’s moving, and its nerves cannot tolerate suspense—whereas a sudden movement may put it to flight. I am considering a sudden movement, such as flight of my own, when I see a tail in a thin shaft of light, and the tail tuft in fleeting silhouette, and grunt at Peter, “Buffalo.”

A sun glint on the moisture at the nostril; the animal is facing us. The tail does not move again. We stand there for long seconds, at a loss. Enderlein cannot get a fair shot in the poor light, and at such close quarters, he does not want a wounded buffalo. He starts a wide circling stalk of the entire copse, signaling his game scouts to follow. But it is the boy Mugunga who jumps forward, and the game scouts shrug, content to let him go. We follow carefully, but soon the hunters vanish in the bushes. Heat and silence. Soon the silence is intensified by a shy birdsong, incomplete, like a child’s question gone unanswered.

The bird sings again, waits, sings again. Bees come and go. Soon Mugunga reappears. The beast will not be chivvied out of hiding, and there is no hope of a clear shot with the rifle. But
a poisoned arrow need not be precise. The hunter had only to wait a few hours before tracking, so as not to drive the dying animal too far away, and in this time he would return to camp to find help in cutting up the meat, or if the animal was big, to move the whole camp to the carcass.