West with the Night (16 page)

My father bought it, bringing it from wherever it could be found, and where he spent a rupee, he lost two. The mill wheels turned, the flour spouted into yawning bags and each was sewn shut with a part of the farm sealed within it.

There were men who thought my father a little mad. Contracts had been evaded before, hadn’t they? Wasn’t God responsible for drought?

Yes, and for a number of other things, my father thought, including lack of drought. But he held that God was reasonably innocent in the matter of a signed contract.

One day, a string of freight cars left the mill siding behind a triumphant little engine. The last of the flour had been milled; all the contracts had been honoured from the first word to the last solemn scratch of ink. The engine made the farthest turn. It hooted once, cast a smudge on the immaculate horizon, and disappeared. It carried with it most of my youth — my father’s title to the farm, the buildings, the stables, and all the horses, except just one — the one with wings.

‘Now,’ said my father, ‘we have to think.’ And so we thought.

We sat for an hour in his little study and he spoke to me more seriously than he ever had done before. His arm lay across the big black book that was closed now and he told me many things I had never known — and some that I had known. He was going to Peru — an untrammelled country like this one, yet a country that loved horses and needed men who understood them. He wanted me to come, but the choice was mine; at seventeen years and several months, I was not a child. I could think; I could act with reason.

Did he consider me expert enough to train Thoroughbreds professionally?

He did, but there was much to learn.

Could I ever hope for a trainer’s licence under English Jockey Club rules?

I could — but nothing succeeded like success.

I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much. Peru was a name — a smudge of purple on a schoolbook map. I could put my finger on Peru, but my feet were on the earth of Africa. There were trains in Africa, there were some roads, there were towns like Nairobi, there were schools and bright lights and telegraph. There were men who said they had explored Africa; they had written books about it. But I knew the truth. I knew that, for myself, the country had not yet been found; it was unknown. It had just barely been dreamed.

‘Go to Molo,’ said my father. ‘There are stables at Molo that you could use. Remember that you are still just a girl and do not expect too much — there are a few owners here and there who will give you horses to train. After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work.’

A Spartan thread held through my father’s counsel, then as now.

The trail ran north to Molo; at night it ran straight to the stars. It ran up the side of the Mau Escarpment until at ten thousand feet it found the plateau and rested there, and some of the stars burned beneath its edge. In the morning the plateau was higher than the sun. Even the day climbed the trail to Molo. I climbed it with all that I owned.

I had two saddlebags, and Pegasus. The saddlebags held the pony’s rug, his brush, a blacksmith’s knife, six pounds of crushed oats, and a thermometer as a precaution against Horse Sickness. For me the bags held pajamas, slacks, a shirt, toothbrush, and comb. I never owned less, nor can I be sure that I ever needed more.

We left before dawn, so that when the hills again took shape Njoro was gone, disappeared with the last impotent scowl of night. The farm was gone — its whirling mills, its fields and paddocks, its wagons and its roaring Dutchmen. Otieno and Toombo were gone, my new mirror, my new hut with the cedar shingles — all these were behind me, not like part of a life, but like a whole life lived and ended.

How completely ended! — for Buller too, bearing the scars of all his battles, holding still in his great dead heart the sealed memory of his own joys and mine, the smells he knew, the paths, the little games, those vanquished warthogs, the soundless stalking of a leopard’s paws — he too had lived a life and it was ended. He lay behind me, buried deep by the path to the valley where we hunted. There were rocks over him that I had lifted and carried there and piled in a clumsy pyramid and left without a name or epitaph.

For what can be said of a dog? What can be said of Buller — a dog like any other, except only to me? Can one repeat again those self-soothing and pompous phrases: this noble beast? — this paragon of comrades? — this friend of man?

How would the shade of Buller, eager, arrogant, swaggering still under the cool light of some propitious moon, regard such sighing sentiments except to tilt once more his forever insatiable nose, open a bit wider the eye that always drooped a little, and say: ‘In the name of my father, and my father’s father, and of every good dog that ever killed a cat, or stole a haunch, or bit a farm boy! — could
this
be me?’

Rest you, Buller. No hyena that ever howled the hills nor any jackal cringing in the night will paw the rocks that mark you. There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered.

My trail is north. It is thin and it curls against the slopes of the Mau like the thong of a whip. The new sun falls across it in a jumble of golden bars that lie on the earth or lean against the trees that edge the forest. The trees are tall juniper and strong cedars straining to the sky on straight shafts, thick, and rough with greying bark. Grey lichen clings in clotted mops from their high crests, defeating the day, and olive trees and wayward vines and lesser things that grow huddle safe from the hard hot light under the barrier of their stalwart brothers.

I ride my father’s gift, my horse with wings, my Pegasus with the dark bold eyes, the brown coat that shines, the long mane that flows like a black silk banner on the lance of a knight.

But I am no knight. I am no knight that would earn the greeting of any other save perhaps of that fabulous and pathetic one who quested the by-paths of a distant and more ancient Spain. I am clothed in work slacks, a coloured shirt, leather moccasins, and an old felt hat, broad-brimmed and weather-weary. I ride long-stirruped, my idle hand deep in a pocket.

Giant bush-pigs bolt across my way, disturbed at their morning forage; monkeys shriek and gibber in the twisting branches; butterflies, bright, fantastic, homeless as chips on a wave, dart and soar from every leaf. A bongo, rarest of all antelope, flees through the forest, leaping high, plunging his red and white-striped coat deep in a thicket — away from my curious eyes.

The path is steep and never straight, but the clean, firm legs of Pegasus measure it with easy contempt. If his wings are fantasy, his worth is not. He never trudges, he never jolts; he is as smooth as silence.

This is silence. This ride through the boisterous birth of a forest day is silent for me. The birds sing, but they have no song that I can hear; the scamper of a bush-buck at my elbow is the whisking of a ghost through a phantom wood.

I think, I ponder, I recall a hundred things — little things, foolish things that come to me without reason and fade again —

Kima the baboon, the big baboon that loved my father but hated me; Kima’s grimaces, his threats, his chain in the courtyard; the morning he escaped to trap me against the wall of a hut, digging his teeth into my arm, clawing at my eyes, screaming his jealous hatred until, with childish courage born of terror, I killed him dead, using a knobkerrie and frantic hands and sobbing fury — and ever afterward denied the guilt.

Leopard nights — lion nights. The day the elephant trekked from the Mau to Laikipia, hundreds of them in a great irresistible phalanx, crushing the young grain, the fences, crumbling huts and barns while our horses trembled in their stables; the aftermath — the path of the elephants, broad and levelled like a route of conquest through the heart of the farm.

Lion in the paddocks — the bawling of a steer, a cow, a heifer; the rush for hurricane lamps, rifles, the whispering of one man to another; the stillness; the tawny shape, burdened with its kill, flowing through the tall grass; bullets whining away against the wind; the lion leaping, bullock and all, over the cedar fence; the lowered rifles.

And leopard nights — moonlit nights; my father and I crouched by the bulk of a Dutchman’s wagon on the edge of the water tank; the smooth snick of cartridges in long guns; the wait, the tightened muscles; the gliding prowler sleek as a shadow on still water; eyes along the black barrels, the pressure of a finger.

All things to remember; some dark, some light. I nudge Pegasus into a gentle canter where the trail flattens through an open glade. The reins are threaded between the fingers of my right hand, the whip rests between my palm and the reins in the same hand. I have slipped into a thin, buckskin jacket, for, as the sun climbs, the forest deepens, the upward path finds thinner, colder air, and the green aisles are fresh with the smell of it.

I smile to myself, remembering Bombafu. What brings him to mind, I do not know, but suddenly there he is. Bombafu means fool in Swahili; at Njoro it meant my father’s parrot.

Poor Bombafu! — one day he whistled for destruction, and it came. How sad, how naked, how disillusioned he was after the moment of his greatest triumph had shone upon him like a gleam of light, then abandoned him to the darkness of despair!

They were proud feathers Bombafu gave to the Cause of his Learning, pretty feathers, long and rich and stained with jungle colour. How proudly he wore them!

How proudly he clasped the perch in the square room outside my father’s study, day after day, looking with truculent, or bemused, or falsely philosophic eyes, on all who entered — on all the dogs of the motley pack my father fancied then!

And these were the undoing of Bombafu. Dogs were simple things, he saw, controlled by a single sound. A man would stand in the doorway of the house and make that sound with his lips — and the pack would come.

But who could make sounds if not Bombafu? Was he to remain a bird on a stick the whole of his long, long life? Was there to be nothing but seeds and water and water and seeds for a being as elegant as he? Who had such feathers? Who had such a beak? Who could not call a dog? Bombafu could. He did.

He practised week upon week, but so cleverly that we seldom heard him; he practised the abracadabra of calling dogs until he knew, as well as he knew the shape of the bar he clung to, that no dog that ever sought a flea could resist his summons. And he was not wrong. They came.

One morning when the house was empty, Bombafu slipped his perch and called the dogs. I heard it too. I heard the quick, urgent whistle that was my father’s whistle, though my father was a mile away. I looked across the courtyard and saw Bombafu, resplendent, confident, almost masterful as he trod the doorsill on hooked, impatient toes, his brilliant breast puffed and swelling, his green, and all too empty head cocked with insolence. ‘Come one, come all,’ his whistle said — ‘it is I, Bombafu, calling!’

And so they came — long dogs, short dogs, swift dogs, hungry dogs, running from the stables, from the huts, from the shade of the trees where they had dozed, while Bombafu danced under the portal of his doom and whistled louder.

I could run too in those days, but not so fast as that. Not fast enough to prevent the frustration of an anticipant dog from curdling to fury at the sight of this vain mop of gaudy feathers committing forgery of the master’s voice — insulting all of dogdom with the cheek of it, holding to ridicule the canine clan, promising even (what could be worse?) a scrap, or a bone, yet giving nothing! That was the rub; that was the injury heaped on insult.

Bombafu went down; he went under; he disappeared only to rise again, feather by feather. His blaze of glory was no abstract one. It floated on the air in crimson and chrome yellow, in green and blue and subtler shades — a burst, a galaxy, a comet’s tail of scraps and pieces.

Sad bird! Unhappy bird! He lived, he sat again upon his perch, his eyes half-closed and dull, a single tattered wing to hide his nakedness, a single moment to remember.

And the immortal line so rightly his, the only word he might have uttered, was stolen too. Surely this was tragedy — this was irony — that not Bombafu, but a dour and morbid raven, a creature of the printed page, a nightly nobody, had discovered first the dramatic power of those haunting tones, those significant syllables, that ultimate utterance — Never — Nevermore!

So suffered Bombafu — and suffers still for all I know. Parrots are ageless — though blessed, I suspect, with memories too short to be fatal.

While I think of him, the trail I ride finds the verge of the plateau, curls over it, and Pegasus and I move in a place no longer Africa.

A country laved with icy streams, its valleys choked with bracken, its hills clothed in the green heather that wandered Scotsmen sing about, seems hardly Africa. Not a stone has a familiar cast; the sky and the earth meet like strangers, and the touch of the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

Such is Molo. Its first glance presages the character I later learn — a stern country, high and cold, demanding from those who live upon it a tithe of toil, a recompense of labour fuller than full measure and a vigour of heart against the stubborn virginity of its earth.

Sheep run here, but they are native sheep with the weather in their blood. Cattle graze, mulling the sweet grass to rhythmic cuds, staring into the full-grown day with calm eyes. There is game — scattered reed-buck, impala, smaller things that rustle the bracken but never part it; a buffalo now and then emerges from a copse to scan the fresh hills with dubious approval, then turns, shouldering a path to less austere and more familiar levels.

There are farms — and farmers scattered like the builders of a new land, each hugging to himself all that spreads from the door of his hut to the horizon he marks with a sweep of his arm.

Yes, this too is Africa.

I dismount, slip the bit out of Pegasus’ mouth and let him drink from a stream that rolls from nowhere, washing rocks immaculate for ages — rounded rocks, sleek with the wear of water. He paws at them, snorts bubbles into the clear eddy that stings with cold, then sucks his fill.