Jane (30 page)

The dream had rattled me. What could I be thinking! What was I feeling? I forced myself fully awake. I needed to keep my wits about me. I really did.

*   *   *

I felt a sudden urgency to continue reading the Claytons’ journal, and now my listener sat rapt at his place on the floor beside the bed.

2 December 1888

An unsettling occurrence has got me on edge. Worse still, dear Alice is quite unconcerned. I think she has been lulled by our strangely idyllic existence and her perception of me (a quite incorrect one) as a hero. I feel anything but heroic after this morning’s sighting of a most frightening creature.

I have for all of these nearly four years been able to keep at bay any wild animals that happen onto the beach and threaten us in the least. On several occasions, a large crocodile has wandered from the brackish outlet of the mangrove swamp and onto the sand. The first time a blast from my rifle gave the animal a fright and it turned tail, returning whence it had come. The second time it emerged in the night, and in the morning it was Alice who received the fright when she opened our door and found the armored reptile, twelve feet long, sunning itself just below the porch. I dispatched the thing with a single shot. It proved my first experience with skinning and butchering an animal. We tried to cook and eat its meat, but we all found it distasteful. Its pieces (quickly putrefying in the sun) had to be hauled down to the shore and set out to sea.

The spotted leopard that came padding up the beach from the south was scared away by warning shots from the Winchester and never returned. These incidents, I presumed, imbued Alice with a false sense of security of which I (quite wrongly) failed to disabuse her. For it was from these incidents I came to believe that I, with my weaponry, could repel any and all threats to our well-being.

But this morning there emerged from the mangroves perhaps 300 long paces from the hut, a “thing” that struck such unreasoning fear into my heart that these many hours later I am still unnerved and trembling. How shall I describe it? It was an ape … but not an ape.

*   *   *

The whole of my body tingled with gooseflesh. I looked down and the hair on my forearms stood erect. All at once Tarzan swept past me, a blur, and out the hut door. By the time I had laid down the journal and followed him, I found that he had attained the highest branch of the baobab above the tree house. He squatted there on a limb staring out to sea.

“Tarzan, come down!”

He disregarded my call as though he had not heard me. The problem, I knew, was that he
had
heard me. Heard the words I had read from the journal. The frightening “ape-man” that had emerged from the swamp was Mangani. I was dangerously close to opening the door behind which lay the darkest and most terrible secrets of young John Clayton’s past. It must be true, I thought, gazing up at perhaps the strongest human being on earth, he crouched in a pathetic posture avoiding my call, refusing to hear more of the story that had, until now, so delighted him.

I considered climbing the baobab. It would be unwise, I decided. I was yet unskilled for such a feat without Tarzan’s close assistance. And besides, he had fled from the story in the journal for a reason. Though it pained and frightened me to see Tarzan in so weakened a state, I must give him all the time he needed. He would come down when he was ready to go on.

Just after the sun set in a blaze of outrageous crimson and serpentine green, he descended and came to sit with me on the porch outside the hut door, the place from which John Clayton had first spied the ape that was not an ape.

“I must tell you,” he said, his voice choked with misery.

“What? Tell me what?”

He raked his fingers across his forehead.

“Is it a story?”

“A story, yes.”

“What is it about?”

“About
Boi-ee
 … Bowie,” he corrected himself. “And Kerchak. And Kala.” His voice quavered at this last.

“I was a … boy.” Tarzan raised his hand five and a half feet above the floor. Perhaps he’d been thirteen or fourteen. “I stand in the mangroves, there.” He pointed inland. “I have come from Zu-dak-lul. The blade”—he balled up his fist as if gripping the hilt—“it is in my hand.”

As he began to weave the tale in words he had recently learned, I saw it clearly in my mind’s eye—like a moving picture. Heard the words as if in a play. Felt the depth of feeling he so simply and perfectly conveyed …

Blade

The cool, salted air of Zu-dak-lul had disappeared quickly as the boy plunged inland through the mangrove swamp. He thought about the blade hanging at his waist from a hide thong and sheath, the way the knife felt as if it belonged there. It was his. It had always been his.

As he pulled the blade from its sheath, he wondered at the perfection with which the handle of the blade fit the palm of his hand. But then he had never once left Zu-dak-lul without the sensation of wonder, confusion, or elation. Sometimes an unnameable fear. This was, however, the first in all of his solitary visits to the bower by the great water that he had taken something away with him.

It was not as though before this he had found the blade of little interest. He had handled it on innumerable occasions since its discovery. The first time he’d slid his fingers across the sharpened edge he’d sliced the flesh. Surprised, he’d cried out, but as he sucked the blood away, his surprise was mild, perhaps tempered with the same wonder he now felt at the grip of the knife’s hilt. Somewhere within him was the sure knowledge that the artifact could cause harm. It was meant to cut and stab, and that with it held in his hand he could become a brave hunter, like
ko-sabor,
the mighty lioness.

As he moved from mangrove swamp to jungle, he felt a gnawing in his belly. He knew his hunger would be sated by a handful of nuts or pawpaw, or the white worms he could pick from the wood of a rotting log. The watering holes with snails and crabs were still far ahead of him. But he longed to employ the blade. So he stopped, ceased all forward movement. He lifted his eyes and attuned his ears to the canopy above. He drew breath equally between his mouth and nose, tasting the air in a long slow pull.

Oh, the
kambo
was rich with life! The sweetly rotting stew of the jungle floor, the animals in all their abundance. The perfumed flowers in profusion.

He should hunt before the rain began again, he knew, for the scent of his prey would weaken in the downpour. There! He inhaled the faintest whiff of
manu
just above his head, but he hesitated. Monkey meat was hearty and delicious, he knew from the bits of it left on the bone after a kill and before it had been picked clean by vultures or ants, but the furred creature with long agile limbs had a form and a face close in shape and features to the
Mangani
—his clan—and eating its flesh always left him uneasy. He found a fat
dan-sopo
tree, its trunk encircled with roots, and began to climb, the footing so easy he ascended quickly. There were myriad meals along the way. The nuts that grew on the tree. A fat lizard. Curled green fern fronds tempted him, for they were tender and luscious and required only that he pluck them and put them in his mouth. But Tarzan longed for something more. Something upon which he might use the blade to subdue.

The barest movement and swish along a burly limb below him was loud to his ear, and before he saw
histah
the skin beneath his forearms shuddered, the hair rose, and his loathing for the creature was felt as a fleeting jab in the pit of his belly. He saw the snake then, almost as long as the boy was tall, just now finishing a curl into itself, yellowish with its black bars hidden within the coil, and its head drawn down to settle at its apex. It was a night hunter, he knew, but even as it had found shelter from the heat of the day under a broad leaf,
histah
would not hesitate to strike if provoked.

Tarzan nearly ceased his breathing and drew the blade from its sheath with slow and infinite care, for even if
histah
could not hear well, its incessantly flicking tongue could taste the most delicate scents—the faint wafting of musk from the pit of his arm. His breath. His fear.

He remembered the Mangani
balu
who had fallen victim to the yellow snake. She lay on the ground spasming violently. When blood began to seep from her eyes and out from under the fur of her arms and chest, all life left the child’s body, and a great wailing went up from the clan.

The boy’s mother, Kala, had pulled him and his sister, Jai Kala, close, clutching them to her with such ferocity that her long fingers dug into his flesh.
“Histah uglu utor,”
she whispered. Hate and fear the snake. From that moment, all and every
histah,
small or harmless though it might be, was avoided by the boy. Now as he watched the creature sleeping below him, he saw that he could kill it with the blade. If he ate its flesh, he would not simply quell his gnawing hunger but also gain the strength of
histah,
if only for a while.

I must be quick and clever,
he thought,
or I will die like the Mangani balu.
Then he saw, not a hand’s breadth from his face, his salvation—a bright blue
rok
staring placidly down from the white-petaled flower in which it was cradled. The boy well knew this frog, its habits, the distance of its leap. He also knew the creature’s language, its sounding. Never taking his eye from
histah,
the boy croaked hoarsely.
Rok
echoed the sound precisely. It was a greeting, given and returned.
I am a friend,
it said,
sharing the same branch.

Histah
remained immobile, unmoved by the conversation above it. With another call, Tarzan moved carefully and took up the
rok
in his hand. His fingers curled like a small prison around the frog. Then before
rok
could begin to struggle, the boy threw it down to the branch upon which
histah
rested. But not for long. The movement, the scent, and the sight of perfect prey caused an uncoiling, jaw-expanding assault that, in its speed, rivaled a lightning strike.

Once the snake was stretched to its full length, devouring Tarzan’s sacrifice, he dropped with perhaps less grace than purpose and began his assault. The long, muscular body twisted around the boy’s body, causing great terror in him. The dangerous head whipped from side to side, poisonous fangs snapping at him, keeping all of the attacker’s limbs employed in a frenzied defense. But something burned in the boy, even it the midst of his struggle.

With a burst of strength that he never knew he possessed, he grasped the snake’s neck with one hand and with the other slashed the head from it. While the long body still writhed, curling around the boy’s leg, there was, he realized with some shock, nothing left to fear. He had killed
histah
with this blade! He shouted with joy.

The body of the beast had finally stilled and now Tarzan slit the skin of the belly from end to end, taking great and slow pleasure in the precision of his task. He stopped then. Snakes were strange creatures. Did they have entrails like monkeys and birds, that might be removed and eaten separately from the flesh? With the knife’s tip he made a deeper cut and pulled it the length of the flaccid body. Yes. There were entrails, but Tarzan had no stomach for them. Pulling them out, he threw them to the ground—a good meal for the jungle pigs.

He wrapped his fingers tightly around the top of
histah
’s headless, gutless body and pulled the skin from the flesh, cleaning from it the remaining blood and membrane. Then filled with satisfaction, Tarzan sank his teeth into the flesh of his once-feared and hated enemy.

It was surprisingly sweet.

The triumph over
histah
brought added strength to the boy’s body and a new clarity to his senses. Wrapping the snakeskin around his forehead and tying it in the back, he continued his journey.

When the first of the monstrous tall and thick-trunked trees came into sight, his heart grew calm. Soon he would be among his tribe and the warm embrace of his mother, receive the playful jabs and jostles of his sister.

Tarzan began to climb the first of the trees that divided the jungle from the forest. He stood in the crook of the tree and leaped into what, for anyone but him, would have seemed an endless void. Tarzan lived for this feeling of flight, of soaring. Through these branches he swung his lithe body hand over hand above the forest floor. To home he flew. To Kala, his mother, her warmth and indulgence. He knew that in Mangani eyes other than hers he was dwarfish: “The Scrawny One.” “The Weakling.” “The strange white-skin …
tar-zan.
”