Reincarnations Page 6

  Even if he thought he’d be quickly caught, Tshingana did not intend to make things easy for Sigwebana-or for the rest of the clan. He crawled out of his mother’s hut just past midnight, a good deal earlier than it was customary for herdboys-turned-men to head off to hide the kraal’s cattle.

  The cattle were convinced it was too early. They lowed in sleepy protest as Tshingana moved aside the heavy poles that barred their pen. "Shut up!" he hissed. He knew Sigwebana would be up soon no matter what he did; he did not want the beasts rousing his half-brother all the earlier. That kept him from whacking them into motion with the shaft of the assegai, as he would have done otherwise. Instead, he gently coaxed them out of the pen and away.

  Luckily the moon was only a couple of days past full. By its light Tshingana managed a fair pace, not what he could have done in daylight but much better than the crawl he would have had to use in real darkness.

  As best he could and for as long as he could, he kept the herd to the same path it used going out to its usual grazing grounds. If fortune smiled, the tracks the cattle were making tonight would be hard to pick out from the thousands of other hoofprints, some fresh as yesterday, that pocked the grass.

  The kraal was invisible by the time the eastern horizon lightened toward day. Tshingana danced a few steps-he’d come farther than he’d dared hope. In a while, he could start thinking about where to abandon the usual track and strike out for a proper hiding place.

  Motion behind him, highlighted by the morning sun, made him whirl-was that, could that be, his pursuers already? Would he be laughed at for the rest of his life? But Tshingana’s clansmen were not coming up; instead he saw a large herd of elephants ambling along, each immense’ beast now and then pausing to pull up a bush or clump of grass with its trunk and stuff the food into its mouth.

  Where Tshingana had danced before, he sang now. If he could keep his herd headed in the direction the elephants were going, their huge feet would erase the tracks of the cattle. The men and boys from the kraal might never catch up to him! What sort of triumph would be foretold by his triumphant return home after they all gave up?

  He shouted to the cattle, smacked a couple with his assegai. They had to move quickly now, to stay ahead of the elephants, and move in a tighter body than usual, too, so no stragglers’ hoofprints would let his pursuers pick up the trail.

  The cattle complained, but they were used to obeying herdboys. They would do what Tshingana wanted, at least for a while. The elephants were faster than they were, so eventually he would have to get out of the way. But not yet, he thought. Not yet.

  Tshingana sang louder. Things were going better than he had ever dared hope. Even the elephants were cooperating, walking a fairly straight path that was easy to anticipate. They would hide the herd as a witch-doctor’s mask hid his face while he was smelling out an umThakathi.

  Just as Tshingana was starting to feel like a great chief (or as he imagined a great chief might feel), everything came apart at once. The elephants were about a quarter of a mile behind the cattle when Tshingana heard a low, rumbling roar that jabbed twin spears of ice into the small of his back.

  The elephants’ trunks went straight up into the air; their great fanlike ears stood away from their bodies. First one, then another, trumpeted the high shrill cry that meant danger.

  The moso roared again. Tshingana partly heard that roar, partly felt it with some ancient part of his body that seemed specially made for knowing terror. He remembered what Uhamu and Ndogeni had said about the moso’s roar. He had thought they were exaggerating. He thought so no longer. The moso’s roar made him afraid, in the most bowel-loosening literal sense of the word.

  The elephants were terrified too. They scattered in panic, running every which way. The ground shook under Tshingana’s feet. The moso bounded after a cow elephant who fled with her ridiculous fly-whisk tail straight out behind her. With its bulk, the moso was not as fast as a lion, but it was faster than any elephant. Tshingana watched the great muscles ripple under its striped hide as it slammed into the cow.

  Like a lion that had seized a gnu, the moso tried to drag the elephant off its feet. Its claw scored the cow’s thick hide, leaving behind dripping lines of red. The elephant’s screams grew even more frantic. The moso roared and bit, roared and bit.,

  Finally the moso pulled the elephant down. Tshingana heard the thud of that huge body slamming to the ground. Forgetting his own safety, he ran closer. He wanted to watch this greatest of all kills. Through the dust the other elephants had kicked up, through the cloud that surrounded the fallen female, it wasn’t easy.

  Even down, the female kept fighting, striking out with her big round feet at the moso, which clawed her belly like a wild cat ripping the guts out of a squirrel. Blood was everywhere now, on the elephant, on the ground, ‘all over the moso. The moso was biting as well as clawing, trying to get a grip under the elephant’s chin and throttle it.

  Then, unexpectedly, the moso’s roar rose to a shriek that made Tshingana stuff fingers in his ears. The cow elephant, still screaming itself, scrambled up onto its feet and lurched away. The moso slapped at it with a barbed foot as it escaped, took two or three shambling steps after it, and stopped. After a moment, Tshingana saw why: in the struggle, the elephant’s bulk had crushed one of its hind legs.

  The moso shrieked again, fury and torment mingled. Tshingana’s flesh prickled. He was not used to feeling empathy for animals, but he did now, for the moso. A three-legged cat was as useless as a one-legged man-and no one would provide for the moso, as clansfolk might for a cripple.

  However beasts know things, the moso must have known it was doomed. It sank back on its haunches, methodically licked the blood from its flanks and belly. It licked its ruined leg too, then let out a snort that said as clearly as words that it knew it would do no good.

  But while the moso lived, it would try to keep on living. It snorted again, this time, Tshingana judged, in pain, as it got up. Only three legs touched the ground. Its enormous head swung back and forth, finally stopping, to his horror, on him. The moso growled, and that growl brought on the same freezing fear as its roar. It limped toward him-if it could not hunt elephants any more, smaller prey would have to do.

  Tshingana fled. The moso came after him. For the first time, he wished his clansfolk had caught him hours ago. But he had done too good a job of hiding. He was on his own-he was a man. He wished-oh, how he wished!-he were a herdboy again.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the moso, tripped over a root, and fell on his face. Thorns scratched his chest and arms. The shock and pain of the fall helped clear the panic from his head. His wits were working once more as he jumped up.

  The moso still limped after him, remorseless as death. But Tshingana was faster now, and could change directions far more nimbly. If he kept his head, he was safe.

  Safe, suddenly, was not enough. Instead of running, Tshingana danced toward to the moso. Its baleful yellow eyes followed him as it tried to turn to keep itself facing him. Had it roared, its fear would have made him run again. But it was silent, panting, watching to see what he would do.

  He slipped round till it presented its left flank to him. There, he thought-just behind that stripe. That was where the assegai would have to go in. From ten or fifteen yards, he threw the spear. Then, weaponless, he fled in good earnest.

  The moso screamed, a cry so loud and terrible he thought for a dreadful instant it was coming hard after him. But when he looked around, he saw it writhing on the ground, batting at the assegai with a forepaw. Each time it touched the shaft, it drove the point deeper into its side and screamed again.

  Tshingana saw his cast, his first with a man’s spear, had not been perfect. The assegai was sunk into a brown stripe, not the lighter fur in front of it for which he had aimed. The moso was making up for it, though; its frantic efforts to dislodge the spear simply stirred it through the beasts’ vitals. At last it must have pierced the heart. The moso gave a convulsive
shudder and lay still.

  Tshingana looked around and gasped in dismay. The moso had made him commit the herder’s ultimate sin-however briefly, he’d forgotten about his cattle. As cattle will, they had taken advantage of his inattention and were happily scattering themselves over the savannah.

  He dashed after them, shouting and waving his arms. Rather grumpily, they acquiesced in being regathered into a tight knot-all but one, an old white cow with a crumpled horn that delighted in making herdboys’ lives miserable.

  After spearing a moso, Tshingana was not about to let a cow intimidate him. He screamed in its ears and threw clods of dirt at it. It lowed mournfully, baffled that its usual tactics were failing. Tshingana slapped it on the nose. Utterly defeated, it went back to the herd.

  Tshingana cautiously went back to where the moso lay. Its eyes were glazed now; its flanks did not move. Blood ran from its mouth. Tshingana was sure it was dead… but not sure enough to risk getting in range of those dreadful claws. He picked up a long stick, prodded the end of the spearshaft with it.

  Only when the great cat still did not move did Tshingana dare to reach for the assegai. Just as his fingers closed round it, he heard a shout, thin in the distance: "I see you, half-brother of mine, you worthless clump of cow dung!"

  Tshingana’s eyes flicked to the sun. It was into the western half of the sky. "I did better than you, Sigwebana," he yelled back.

  His half-brother ran toward him. "You were just lucky, Tshingana," he said, still at the top of his lungs. "You didn’t even really hide the cattle; I saw them from a long way away. All you did was a lot of running, so it took a while to catch up with you."

  Tshingana glanced around. Sigwebana was right-the herd could have been much better hidden. Others had spotted it besides his half-brother, too; behind Sigwebana, Tshingana saw Inyangesa and his father Uhamu, and more clansfolk behind them.

  Still… "How I did it doesn’t matter, just that I did it," Tshingana said truthfully. "Besides, I’ve been busy with other things than hiding them prettily."

  "Other things? Like what?" Sigwebana was getting close now, but not yet close enough to see through the thick, thigh-high grass in which Tshingana stood. "Like what?" he challenged again. "UkuHlobonga?"

  "Go do ukuHlobonga between a hyena’s thighs," Tshingana retorted. He jerked his assegai free, waved it to show Sigwebana the blood down half the length of the shaft. "I was busy with things like this."

  "What did you spear, a rabbit?" Sigwebana pushed his way through the grass so he could find out what lay at Tshingana’s feet. He looked at the dead moso, at his half-brother, at the moso again. "No," he whispered. "You didn’t. You couldn’t."

  "Yes, I did," Tshingana said proudly. "Yes, I could."

  "Did what, new man? Could what?" Uhamu came up, sweat making his lanky body gleam like polished ebony. As Sigwebana had, he stopped short when he saw the moso. "It wasn’t dead when you found it?" he demanded sternly of Tshingana. Just behind Uhamu, Inyangesa stared at his friend.

  "I speared it still alive," Tshingana declared.

  Uhamu was studying the ground where the moso lay. "I believe you," he said at last. "I see how it twisted and fought when the assegai went home." He raised an eyebrow. "I suppose you also smashed its hind leg there."

  Tshingana felt his face grow hot. "No, of course not." More and more men and boys from the kraal came up and listened while he told the story of how he had killed the moso.

  "So that’s why the elephants stampeded," Shamagwava said. He shook his head in wonder and put an arm round his son’s shoulders. Tshingana felt nine feet tall. Shamagwava went on, "We were still a good ways behind you when that happened. I didn’t think of the moso; I thought it had followed that other herd north."

  "It must have doubled back," Tshingana agreed.

  "So it must." Shamagwava shook his head again. "The first moso near our kraal in years, and not only is it slain, but slain by my son, my son who has just become a man. How could a father be more proud?"

  "You are lucky indeed, Shamagwava," Uhamu said. Mafunzi’s father Ndogeni nodded. Mafunzi beamed at Tshingana, who smiled back at his friend. Inyangesa was smiling too, a little less certainly; he seemed to have trouble getting used to the idea that Tshingana was suddenly a person of consequence. Tshingana did not mind. He had trouble with that idea himself.

  Sigwebana had not stayed around to listen to his half-brother praised. He was heading back toward the kraal, a small, lonely figure thinking in the distance. Tshingana had wanted to outdo him, yes, but he was not sure he’d wanted to outdo him like this. He might have made an enemy for life.

  Tshingana supposed he would have to do something about that one day. Not today, though. Today his father was saying, "Now that you’ve killed the moso, my son, my man, have you thought about what you want to do next?"

  "Two things, father." In the aftermath of the fight with the greatest cat, Tshingana found his mind clear as a stream in a pebbled bed. "For one, I want to make my warrior’s shield from the moso’s skin instead of cowhide, so everyone will know what I was able to do-and so I will never forget."

  The clansmen murmured approvingly. Shamagwava said, "That is very fine, son. You will have a shield to make even an inDuna, a subchief, jealous. And what is the other thing?"

  Tshigana grinned. "Now that I’m a man, I’m going to find out about ukuHlobonga for myself!"

  BLUETHROATS

  Have I ever gone birding around Nome with my daughter? Yes. Are the people in the story anything like her and me? No. And the lady I’m married to is just fine, for which I thank heaven every day. But Laura did see a golden-crowned sparrow in the back yard. She really did.

  To get to where the bluethroats nest, you drive north out of Nome, up Bering Street. There’s not much traffic, but you drive slowly and cautiously anyway. The pavement ends a few miles out of town, near the Dexter cutoff, The cutoff is dirt and gravel. So is the Kougarok road, the one that takes you to where the bluethroats may be.

  "Pothole." Your daughter rides shotgun in the rental’s passenger seat.

  "I see it." And you drive around it. One jolt saved. "When the roads are good, they’re fine," your daughter says. But when they’re not…"

  "They’re not," you agree. They have signs on them: NO MAINTENANCE OCTOBER 1-MAY 1. It’s June now. The sun shines twenty-two hours a day. It gets up into the fifties, the top few feet of the tundra thaw. Ponds and puddles and streams everywhere. Flowers blaze across the vastness. Millions if birds, which is why you’re here. Billions of bugs, which is why he birds are.

  Your daughter points to a scattering of houses ahead. "Must be Dexter."

  "Uh-huh." Before you got here, you wouldn’t have thought Nome, with not even 5,000 people, boasted suburbs. But you’re driving through one. Houses. A lodge. A little sell-everything hop. Gone.

  Nome is half small-town America, half really weird. Satellite TV. Kids with backwards baseball caps and baggy jeans slouching around looking for something to do. An Italian-Japanese place run by Koreans- -pretty good, actually.

  But… A reindeer in a red collar in the back of an Eskimo’s F-150. Musk oxen ambling around the slopes outside of town. More bars per capita than maybe anywhere. Loud, drunken arguments on the street outside your room at the Nugget Inn when the bars close at half past two.

  It’s about sunset then. Night, such as it is, barely gets dark enough for you to need headlights. Then, a little past four, the sun comes up again and you start over-if you ever stopped. Midnight Softball-no lights-is a popular sport here. In the wintertime, so is ice golf on the frozen Bering Sea. And the Iditarod ends in Nome, across the street from the Nugget.

  In the hotel lobby is a bigger-than-life photo of a bluethroat singing its head off. It’s an Asian bird, but in summer it spills over and nests in western Alaska. It’s sparrow-sized, but no other bird has that fancy blue-and-orange throat marking. If you want to see it in the States, you have to start from Nome.

  A diffe
rent photo of a bluethroat sits on the counter at the rental-car place, which operates out of the Aurora Inn, Nome’s other hotel. A lot of the summer visitors here are birders, and the locals know it. Next to the photograph is a journal of what’s been seen where. Nome is far, far away from the main highway system. But it sits at the center of its own network of 250 miles of these teeth-jarring roads. There’s a hand-drawn map in the journal. A little past milepost 71 on the Kougarok road…

  Plenty of birding to do on the way. A few miles up the road from Dexter, your daughter points to a roadside pool. "Shall we stop?"

  "Sure." You pull over to the side. You’re still half on the road, but so what? It’s straight as a Republican senator. Anyone coming can see the car from a long way off. Not that anyone is. After Los Angeles, having a road to yourself seems stranger than anything else here.

  You and your daughter get out. You spray each other with insect repellent and rub it on your cheeks and forehead. A few mosquitoes buzz lazily. Only a few: it’s early yet, and cool, and you’re not very far out onto the tundra. But Alaska mosquitoes are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Even a few are too many. A postcard on a rack at the Nugget Inn shows the business end of one silhouetted against a sunset, with the legend ALASKA’S STATE BIRD. Kidding, but kidding on the square.

  Strapped binoculars thumping against your chests, the two of you walk over to the pool. Except for your footfalls and the wind in the dwarf willows, everything is quiet. Your ears don’t know what to do with silence. Always something in L.A. An airplane overhead. Distant traffic. A neighbor’s TV. Not loud, but always there.

  Two brown shapes swimming in the pool. "Ducks?" your daughter says doubtfully.

  You raise your binoculars. "Beavers!"

  They don’t give a damn about you. One swims to the edge of the pool, not twenty feet away. It’s a female; it has teats. It strips off some willows branches and drags them into the water, not very far, to eat. It crunches as it chews. Who would have thought beavers were noisy eaters? Who would have thought you’d find out?