Three Weeks in December (9781609459024) (8 page)

“Who?” Alan asked, spreading the quince jam.

“Them, the Indians. Do they catch the disease as quickly?”

“Oh.” Alan paused, the crumpet held in front of his mouth, surveying the men. The only other white for twenty miles, Alan was not the kind of person Jeremy would naturally take to. “Rather interesting question.” He took a slow bite and began to chew reflectively. “My first guess would be—without having the numbers to back it up—yes, they seem to contract it bloody easily.”

Each night they spent by the river, the mosquitoes rose from the banks to cover the tents. The Indians' tents were not in very good repair, had divots and tears, many of the men had no mosquito netting round their beds. None could afford the quinine Jeremy took.

Three days from now, forty men would be shivering and delirious, the hospital tent beginning to reach capacity.

 

The day of the hunt with Otombe, Patsy began to wheeze even when standing motionless, her head lowered and ribs working. At sundown, Jeremy left her with the groom rubbing her down, a hot bran mash in her feedbag. He did not look back. She will be fine, he thought, fine. The symptoms of rinderpest were diarrhea and discharge from the eyes, not panting. It was not rinderpest, it was not.

Waiting at the edge of camp were the seven Indians he had arranged to help with the hunt. They stood restlessly in the dark, waving their arms at the mosquitoes and stamping their legs.

When Otombe stepped out of the jungle, he paused at the sight of all the men, then shook his head. “No, a night hunt must be quiet. Just us two.”

Jeremy looked at him in surprise. In the moonlight, the man's dusky features were hard to read. He thought about walking through the jungle at night alone with this one African holding a spear, a man he barely knew. Violent, his mother had said, sooner or later you will see these savages bloody and violent.

Otombe took a step back, looking toward the path, ready to disappear. With every day Jeremy woke here in Africa, his desire to see more of it increased. At this moment, in the dark of the night, on the edge of this hunt, all its mystery seemed close enough he could almost wrap his arms around it. Here, it stood in front of him, backing up another step.

Jeremy said, “Alright.”

Because Jeremy was not riding this time, Otombe walked rather than ran. To Jeremy, it felt very different this way, striding under the darkness of the trees. Trying not to slow Otombe up or look unfit, he hurried along, legs stretching out. At this speed, he was incapable of being quiet, his feet not so clever. Even with a full moon, under the trees it was close to pitch black, lumpy shapes leaning in on all sides. He had no idea how Otombe managed to decipher it all into bush or tree, rock or animal. Perhaps he did not. Occasionally some creature crashed away through the underbrush.

On his feet like this, without a horse's height for protection, Jeremy felt exposed. After a while, rather than have his rifle slung over his shoulder, he shifted it forward and kept both hands on it. Held this way, the strap occasionally snagged on passing branches, jerking him to a halt.

This hunt was also different because he was not wearing his flannel spine protector. He figured the sun was not out at night, the danger of radiation must be gone, so he had left the device lying on a chair in his tent like the discarded brace of a cripple, its elastic shoulder holders twisted and empty. Without it, he felt so much cooler. If it were not for the mosquitoes around at the moment he would be tempted to undo his shirt further than the top two buttons. He could comprehend how the Africans ended up nearly naked on this continent. Give him a few years here and he would find even Otombe's goat-skin cloak too confining.

After at least a mile, the path they were on joined another much larger one. From the width of the trail, he guessed elephants might come this way. He had heard that because of the elephants' thick skulls, they could not be killed if they charged you face on unless your bullet hit exactly the dollar-bill-sized weak spot above their eyes. Perhaps this was why the colonists brought many men on hunts, as a crowd to bolster their courage, as simple numbers to decrease their risk of being the one the elephant chose to crush.

The last time he had hunted, he had wished to stumble into some large creature. Now in the dark, he found himself wishing the whole forest magically emptied of anything larger than a mouse.

After perhaps two miles, they reached a wide swampy bay in the river. Otombe slowed down, held a finger to his lips. Twenty feet from the water, he located a tree that hung out over the path and, with practiced ease, swung himself up into the branches. Jeremy waited below, surveying the limbs with dismay. When Otombe paused in his climb to look down at him, he handed his rifle up and then reached for a branch. Attempting a pull-up, he scrambled at the trunk with his toes. With a wheeze he managed to hook his knee over a branch. From here it was easier to ascend, climbing up the branches. Fifteen feet up, with a good view of the path and the river, they rested their backs against the trunk and waited. He tried to keep a certain amount of space between himself and Otombe. His mother, when considering his responsibilities in Africa, had never imagined him sitting in a tree at night next to a nearly naked native. This close to the river the mosquitoes immediately descended. Even in this heat, he rapidly buttoned his shirt all the way up, tucked his pants into his socks. The insects landed on his face and hands, wiggled their way up his sleeves and down his collar. In all the accounts he had read of the dangers of hunting in Africa—of rhinos charging, leopards clawing and elephants stomping—no trophy hunters had waxed eloquent on the dangers of mosquitoes biting. Otombe, beside him, pulled his cloak a little tighter and settled into stillness under the buzzing onslaught, watching the river. Jeremy tried to do the same. He thought the Africans must be more immune to malaria than other races or they would be long extinct from the number of mosquitoes and the length of their own exposed limbs.

Otombe leaned his mouth close to Jeremy's ear. “A hippo will walk up the path,” he mouthed more than whispered, “probably within the hour.” Jeremy could feel his breath against his cheek and backed away to create a more appropriate distance.

Struggling to ignore the mosquitoes wriggling into his hair, to stay motionless, he concentrated on listening to the jungle. Hundreds of frogs made pinging noises like rubber bands being plucked. An animal nearby chewed determinedly on wood; Jeremy hoped it was not at the base of this tree. Some creature to the left of him hooted.

“Is that noise an owl?” He tried to make his voice as quiet as Otombe's had been.

“What?” asked Otombe.

“Is that noise an owl?” he whispered, leaning closer but still maintaining what he felt was a proper six inches between him and the hunter.

“Civet,” Otombe whispered back, his mouth nearly touching Jeremy's ear.

Jeremy backed away again. Africans seemed more comfortable with physical proximity than white men were. Several times, he had been surprised to see tribesmen casually holding hands as they watched the railroad crew work. “What is a civet?” he inquired.

Otombe thought for a moment. “Cat,” he added, this time without leaning quite as close.

Jeremy imagined a cat, sitting high in a tree, pursing its hairy lips to let go a bird's sweet hoot.

A creature flapped by, the beating of wet sheets, wings wide enough to be prehistoric, a single sobbing laugh and the animal was gone.

Jeremy looked to him. “Bird,” Otombe mouthed, less than helpfully.

Forty minutes later, something in the river moved. The water swirled, mud sucked at its feet as it clambered out. The night amplified every sound. Wet stones ground against one another. After a moment Jeremy understood this sound was the guts of the animal grumbling. The rising stench of mud and algae. The cracking of the brush. A dark hill appeared on the path, lumbering closer. Otombe held up his hand to wait. Perhaps he had doubts about Jeremy's ability as a marksman. Perhaps he worried a bullet-stung hippo could push down their tree, mangle them both. He waited until the shadow was fifteen feet away, wider than the single bed Jeremy slept in at home. Otombe let his hand fall. Jeremy's rifle cracked. Bright sparks from the barrel.

The hill fell down.

For a moment, he almost believed he had killed a hill, shot part of this landscape, pierced a hole in it for all this humid African air to whistle out of. Perhaps this was what the British were doing from the trains, not killing animals but slaying hill after ditch of Africa until the vibrant rolling landscape was deflated enough, dead enough, that England's neat hedges and tidy roads could be built over whatever remained.

He shook his head. The late hour and the heat were taking their toll on his thoughts.

“Shoot once more to make sure,” Otombe said in a normal tone of voice, no need to whisper after the bark of the rifle. Jeremy acceded with a careful shot.

And as soon as the second shot stopped reverberating and the dying animal had grunted that one last time, he realized there was no way to carry the body back. It must weigh at least a thousand pounds: two miles, two men, no horses.

He whispered his worry to Otombe.

“I will come back with men for the meat tonight.” Otombe said, continuing to speak in a normal voice. “No matter how quickly the crocodiles eat, there will be some left. It is too large even for them. I will drop the meat off for you at your camp.”

“But I shot it for the head, the trophy.” The head alone would weigh several hundred pounds; they had no way to cut it off. The skin would be mauled. He felt irritation at his own lack of foresight. “Fine. It is useless to me. Keep the meat for yourself and your village.”

Otombe went still for a moment at this, seemingly surprised, then nodded and swung down from the tree, walking away. Reluctantly, Jeremy followed. Before they were sixty feet down the path, he heard the wet clap of teeth into meat. They walked on. Behind them came a scuffle and a roar as two crocodiles jousted over the remains.

It started to rain again. He was not sure what he thought of this role of white hunter that had developed for him, seemingly of its own power. He wanted to ask Otombe simply to take him for walks out here, to explain to him the ways of this wilderness, the people here and the animals. These talks did not have to be contingent on death. However, it seemed somehow unmanly to extend such a request.

On the way back, Otombe headed along what Jeremy believed was a different path, one not as close to the river. In the rain, he found it difficult to walk quickly, his wet clothes rubbing at his heat rashes, the mud sucking at his feet. The rain hissed harder all around, obscuring other sounds, limiting visibility. He followed with his head down, water running off his nose and brow. He did not bother to hold his rifle in front anymore; instead he entrusted himself to Otombe. After several turns and forks, the path gradually widened, the undergrowth receding. Through sheets of rain, Jeremy noticed the vegetation seemed different, more uniform, and he wondered if they could be proceeding through crops of some kind. Soon he could discern a large lump ahead, twelve or thirteen feet high, at least thirty feet long. He smelled wood smoke. A wall, he realized, a village inside. Lightning flashed and the many thorns on the wall glittered. He had heard these protective fences were called bomas, that the tribes wove them from the thorny nyika branches, built them around any place they camped, even if only for a night, a cheap version of barbed wire.

Otombe followed the path around the village. As they rounded the curve, an object appeared a few feet out from the wall. Too short for a tree, too tall for most animals, too wide for a human. Jeremy peered at it with some uncertainty, wiping rain from his eyes, noting Otombe was edging subtly aside without changing pace. When they were twenty feet away, lightning jagged the sky. A frozen diorama of wiry hair, solemn eyes, and sagging breasts. Only in the blinded aftermath did he comprehend this was not one creature, but three older women, shoulders touching. The glittering eyes of all three staring at him as though they had been waiting. In approaching the village, Otombe and he had not been making much noise, certainly not enough to rouse these women from their beds, to give them time to take their places outside, settling into a stillness as deep as if they had been waiting their whole lives for this moment.

From the little Jeremy had seen, the natives were generally deeply social, greeting each other elaborately. However neither the women nor Otombe spoke a word. In fact, if anything, Otombe sped up, head down. Acted as though he could not, or would not, see them. In response, Jeremy edged out even further. As he got parallel with the women, ten feet away, they swiveled their wet heads to watch him, smooth as ball bearings. Him, not Otombe. The center one parted her mouth to make a clicking noise with her tongue.

Repetitive, almost insectlike in its speed and precision. A twig caught in the spokes of a bike. The noise rising quickly in volume and speed. The whites of her eyes gleaming.

And strangely, the person he thought of was his mother in her immaculate Victorian crepe (wearing the black of mourning two decades after his father had run away, not died). He saw her sitting with her three closest friends, all the curtains pulled, holding each other's hands, calling the names of dead neighbors in quavering voices. The fashion of communicating with the Great Beyond had reached Maine: ectoplasm, spirit mediums, and tapping walls. Jeremy's mother and her friends held a séance every Tuesday afternoon, a time during which Jeremy quickly learned to stay away from home for the way the science of engineering seemed so utterly denied. While his Grandpapi made fun of the women's occupation, imitating their shivery high-pitched voices each night as he called in the dogs for dinner, Jeremy was affected differently. Simply glimpsing his mother at the table, eyes closed, chin tilted up in concentration, and hearing that earnestness in her voice, was enough to ensure he'd be jumpy that night when he hurried with the swaying lantern to the outhouse.