Sand Rivers Page 11

  Contentedly, observing hippos in a small river lagoon just beneath us, we cut the dove into three pieces and ate it in the sun, as Kirubai exclaimed over and over at certain subtleties of hippopotamus behavior that heretofore he had not noticed. Rick Bonham thought that Kirubai's experience and ease with the wild animals might have saved his life a few nights before when the truck got mired on its way down here to Mkangira. Kirubai was lying down, digging out the wheel, when he

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  realized that what he had thought was cool night mud was a small snake that had crawled into his shirt. Instead of panicking, he stood up slowly and pulled his shirt out, letting the snake fall before jumping back. "A few minutes later," Rick said, "he was right back there under the truck. Maybe it's because I hate those bloody snakes, but I was amazed."

  Further on, Kirubai pointed out what his people call tuwanda, a small multi-trunked tree with patchy bark that "bow and arrow people" (the Sanye, Liangulu, Kamba, and Taita peoples of the thornbush country of southeastern Kenya) used for making their bows, wrapping a carefully cut piece in fiber before curing it in the heat of a low fire. Like Goa, who is a Taita, Kirubai had once been a hunter with bow and arrow, but now this tradition was almost finished, and his people were very few and scattered, except for Kirubai's own group, near Lake Balissa on the Tana River. Kirubai himself was married to a woman of Goa's tribe, and was actually Sanye: like Goa, he sometimes identified himself as "Liangulu" because that tribe was romantically identified as "the elephant hunters" by the white men who were offering the jobs.

  Kirubai liked the Selous because of all the water here, enough for animals and shambas both, he said; that wa^not true of his own country, where a few years ago the Somali were finishing off the elephants. In fact, they boasted they would finish them, Kirubai said, and furthermore, they were stealing food and clothes and livestock from his people, and killing any who resisted. Now the anti-poaching units were strong again, they were using airplanes, and anyone found in the bush without good reason was thrown in jail, so he thought there was hope now for the elephants of Tsavo. But the only elephants left in Kenya would be those found in the parks, and even in the parks they would not be safe unless they stayed where there were many people. The old days were gone, Kirubai said, and would not come back.

  Like all young hunters (Kirubai does not know his age, but Rick figures he must be about thirty-five) Kirubai was trained early to track goats over hard ground - for goats often got lost - and to distinguish between a nanny and a billy. At the age of about eight, his father taught him to stalk and kill dik-dik, then wart hog, using a small bow and poison arrows; whenever he did not learn a lesson, he was thrashed with his father's kiboko, or knobbed stick.

  When a boy succeeds in killing his first wart hog, he takes the fat home, where his mother shaves his head and rubs in the oil. Natoka katika kundi ya wanawake, Kirubai said - You leave the herd of women. The boy is now an apprentice hunter, and must kill a buffalo. Having done so, he returns to the fire in the hunters' camp singing a song - and spontaneously Kirubai sang this song, which included an uncanny simulation of the buffalo's puff of warning and alarm. The buffalo meat is carried back to the main camp for a feast and further ceremonies, which include a second shaving of the head. The time has come when he must

  (Left) Baboons.

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  kill a rhino, lion, and elephant, in any order that they happen to present themselves, after which he may call himself a hunter.

  When the boy kills his first elephant, the ears are removed and holes cut in each one so that during the ensuing celebration the ears may be worn upon his arms, together with a bracelet made of the animal's tail bones. Otherwise he is naked. On this occasion, he sings another song:

  I have killed an elephant I have cut its ears and tail I am a man.

  In the still woodland Kirubai sang this song, and I had a pang of recognition: it seemed to me that 1 had heard a song much like it on another continent, sung by an American Indian. I wondered if long, long ago when, as Indians say, the peoples were all one, this sad brief chant had not been known to all hunters on earth.

  When the young hunter takes a wife, he must kill an elephant with tusks more than three mkono in length, a mkono being an arm's length from elbow to bunched fist. The right tusk goes to the bride's father in first payment, the left tusk is kept by the hunter; sometimes a bride price of five tusks is demanded, as in the case of Kirubai's own mother. But those days are passing, Kirubai said; his mother was probably the last person in his village who still knew how to make the arrow poison. The hunting that the white men now call "poaching" is all but finished, too, although there had been a small recurrence since 1977, when so many trackers and gunbearers lost their jobs that a few felt compelled to revert to their old profession. Kirubai himself had been an elephant hunter toward the end of the old days, when the anti-poaching campaigns at Tsavo put so many of his people into jail, and he was content that he had had that great experience; indeed, he still considered himself a hunter. Among the bow-and-arrow tribes, boys are no longer taught the hunting ways and are forced to attend school instead; no doubt they can tell people their age, as Kirubai cannot. "They are not men," said Kirubai, turning his back on us as well as them and going on into the forest.

  In stalking elephants with bow and poison arrow, the hunter had to sneak up very close so that the arrow would penetrate the heavy hide; he shot and ran. When Kirubai was about ten, his father was attacked by a buffalo and his back was injured, and within the year, because he could not run fast any more, he was destroyed by a wounded elephant near the Galana River. In relating this story, Kirubai, upset, acted out the entire episode, pointing his knife at trees and bushes in hushed tones, jumping backward, spinning around as if to hear, and staring fearfully past Rick and me as if we were not there.

  With a deep fierce frown, Kirubai told also how his uncle had been killed by a hippopotamus that had torn loose from some wire snares.

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  His uncle had tracked the hippo to a small pool near the Galana, where people coming in search of him next day pieced the tale together. Apparently he had shot at the hippo, but the arrow had been deflected by a twig; the hippo had charged out and run him down, biting him through the right shoulder and right hip, after which it had returned into its pool. It also attacked the searchers, who fled unhurt; they returned next day and killed it. Coming upon the hunter's bow, they located the tracks of his crawling and followed them to the bush where his body lay.

  VIII

  On his first day in the Mbarangandu region, Hugo got photographs of a herd of sable antelope; he was red in the face with sun and a bout of malaria but shyly pleased. "That takes care of the sable, I should think," he told me, referring to our book, "but I may have trouble getting kudu." Including the fleeting glimpse he had had back at Madaba, he had now seen greater kudu on six different occasions, but this wonderful creature was as well-camouflaged as it was wary. The animals were not uncommon here, to judge from all these sightings and from tracks, yet Hugo had just one exposure that might work, if it wasn't ruined, as he thought, by too much heat haze. Because he was patient, he was bound to catch up with them as they grew used to his car; at the same time he knew that a month is not much time to get good pictures of shy animals in such thick cover.

  In search of kudu and more sable, we returned to the dry miombo ridges from where we had had our first glimpse of the broad white sands of the Mbarangandu. The day was heavy, overcast and humid. (Brian Nicholson thought that this morning shroud was the consequence of summe
r bush fires; it burned off in the late morning every day, with hot blue skies all afternoon and stars at evening.) Perhaps the animals also felt oppressed, for few were moving in the early hours, though big colorful birds were very common - green pigeons and brown-headed parrots, hoopoes and wood hoopoes, racquet-tailed rollers, a violet-crested turaco, a pair of African harrier eagles on a high nest. Just after midday, along the edge of the wood, we encountered a fine sable antelope, grazing the new

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  grass on a burn not fifty yards away. Because the wind was in our favor, the big black animal did not scent us, though he reared his harlequin head as if to listen. Soon he was joined by three more bulls that stepped one by one across the track; one was still young, chestnut-colored and slighter in horn and body than the others. The animals grazed peacefully on the bright green tufts under the fire-coppered leaves of a blackened rain tree. Then the air shifted, the armed heads jerked to taut attention, the white-blazed faces turned to stare even as the shining bodies gathered and sprang away across the hillside, whirling up the dust from the black ground. And as they streamed between the trees, it was easy to see why the sable (and the roan) were given the generic name Hippotragus, "horse antelope", not only because of their size and strength but because, unlike such peculiar relatives as the wildebeest and the kongoni, they move with the elegance of horses, lifting their hooves high, heads high too, chins toward their chests, as if to accentuate the grand sweep of the curved horns. There is none of that odd bouncing gait, called "pronking", that is seen in lesser antelopes, even the gazelles. That morning an impala had pronked away into the woods in inappropriate response to the sudden appearance of our blue Land Rover, and kongoni tend to pronk as a matter of course. The long-faced kongoni,'*with its striped ear linings, blond hind quarters, and rumpled horns, seems suited to this foolish gait; at times it appears to lose all forward motion and bounce straight up and down.

  The wildebeest is also a born pronker. On the ridge flats, in low scrub, more than one hundred of these flighty animals now came together, jostling and crowding one another as they pushed forward for a better look at man. The lead bull had imposing horns, which glinted in the sun like horns of buffalo, but such horns are ill-suited to a long sad face with odd ginger eyebrows. The wildebeest has a goat's beard and a lion's mane and a slanty back like a hyena; the head is too big and the tail too long for this rickety thing, and Africans say that the wildebeest is a collection of the parts that were left over after God had finished up all other creatures.

  On two high points of the ridge, where petrified wood and small red stones litter the ground, we found a number of flaked stones left behind by the tool makers of early man. A few such sites have been reported in the northern Selous, but so far as we know these sites near the Mbara-ngandu are the first to be discovered in this southern region. I found one of several chopping tools of dark red stone, with flakes chipped off all around the perimeter; it was nearly round, and of a distinct type that Hugo, who had done field work with the Leakey family, had not seen before. "Actually, that is a beauty," said Hugo, who intended to show some samples of these Selous stones to Mary Leakey. In a letter from the Serengeti six weeks later, Hugo reported that he had visited Mrs. Leakey at Olduvai "to show her the stone tools from the Selous . . . The tools are

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  made of quartzite and chert. The ones we found together are from the Middle Stone Age and consist of disc or tortoise cores, and flakes struck off when making similar cores. Dating is impossible since the Middle Stone Age culture apparently covered a wide span of time which started about 200,000 years ago. I did find three handaxes after you left, and these are older. They are from the Acheulian handaxe culture which came to an end 200,000 years ago. Again, this culture covered a large expanse of time so these handaxes could be considerably older."

  Later that day, we had a strange sense of timelessness when in a stream bed we found more hominid traces: catfish bones lay on a large flat rock in the stream, beside them the three stones of a small cooking fire. Near the stones lay a long tweezer carved from a green stick, the tips of which had been bound with fiber to hold the fish while it was broiled over the fire. Stuck into a bush, as if the wanderer meant to return, was the traditional flat-bladed wood spoon used for stirring porridge, and a place in the stream bed had been cleared where a man might sleep. We couldn't believe that a poacher would be all alone - for we both had the distinct feeling that this camp had been used by just one person - or would make his camp within sight of the track, although these tracks south of the Liwale-Madaba road were rarely traveled. Who was it, then, who walked by himself in the remote southern Selous, a hundred miles or more from the nearest hut? Perhaps a honey poacher? Whoever it was must have carried a pot and something to cook in it, and he must have been confident in the bush, since there was no sign of a bonfire to scare off animals. Excepting the shadow of his bed and the rude implements at the faint hearth, the unknown traveler had left little more behind than the stone tool makers of hundreds of centuries before him.

  Off the track ahead, a kudu cantered back into the scrub before stopping in a screen of thin gray saplings to inspect us; she seemed to know how well these saplings blended with the thin silver stripes on her pretty flanks. Certainly she would never be seen by passers-by in these sere woodlands of the dry season, and I wondered how many of these creatures watched us pass. Then leaf shadows shifted, a huge gray kudu bull was there beside her, big pink ears twitching with apprehension in the soft autumnal light, and through binoculars 1 could make out a second female, then a third, a few steps back in the brown sun. Hugo tried to come up closer, but the animals overcame their curiosity and withdrew into the wood.

  One day Hugo, Rick, Karen, Maria, and I walked perhaps ten miles up the Luwegu until we found a place we liked on a black granite outcrop that rose from a rock ledge overlooking an harmonious bend in the river. In a simple fly camp without tents, we spent two quiet days watching the river, fishing and bathing, observing the local hippo herd, and walking out

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  in the cooler hours to see what we might see. Here, flaked implements of early man could be found on almost any outcropping of rock, and petrified wood, in shards and sections and whole mineralized logs, was littered along the elephant paths and through the grass. At dark, after a simple supper and a bottle of wine, we listened to the night sounds and stars and the soft murmur of the river, and at daybreak came a strange ancient chorus made in the simultaneous needs of frogs and scops owls, hippos and ground hornbills, counterpointed by the deep tearing coughs of a restless leopard.

  On this brief safari, we were escorted by Bakiri Mnungu and three young Ngindo. Years ago Bakiri Mnungu had been one of Bwana Niki's porters; he was later made game scout, then a head game scout, a title that had now been changed to "game assistant", perhaps because there was no scouting any more. From his firstr days with the Game Department until Brian departed in 1973, he had worked under Bwana Niki, and he was proud of this: "He taught me everything," Bakiri said. (Bakiri also remembered lonides, who, he told us, invariably wore long pants with many patches and a hat of many colors, also patched, and never went anywhere without a walking stick: because the Old Bwana was known to be wealthy, the Africans cotlld never understand why he dressed like a poor man, Bakiri said.) Bakiri is a small, friendly, humorous man who is almost always cheerful, even under stress; one day when shouted at by Philip Nicholson, he merely laughed at him and said, "You're just a young boy, you don't know how to curse an old bird like me." Like all of the Africans, Bakiri understands that Philip, who is young and excitable, has somehow gone astray between cultures and customs and generations in the new Africa; the very fact that he feels free to dispute with them points up the fact that Philip is socially involved with Africans in a way that previous generations were not, and he spends a lot of time at the kitchen fire.

  Leaving Mkangira, Bakiri had been extremely upset that due to his own miscalculation a
bout personnel, he was asked to carry a load and not a gun. In a fine tantrum, he cried out that the news of a game assistant carrying a porter's load would ruin his name for ever at Kingupira. However, he shortly got over this, and said so - "I am over it" - picked up the load and then took the gunbearer's place at the head of the procession, although Rick and I were carrying the guns. By the end of the day, in giving orders through Bakiri, Rick had patched up the game assistant's authority, which Bakiri himself emphasized that evening by disdaining to speak to these young Africans of his own tribe who had dared to laugh at him; instead he marched up and down the bank, guarding black and white alike from attack by savage beasts. Next day, on a walk further upriver with Maria, I permitted Bakiri to come along to guard us, and as usual he was lively and helpful, despite a tendency - perhaps left over from the nervous days with Bwana Niki - to load up his gun rather too

  PETER MATTHIESSEN

  quickly when elephants appeared. Bakiri said that Bwana Niki was a real fundi (expert) when it came to elephant hunting. "Bwana Niki would go so close, he would brush the ear back before he pulled the trigger," Bakiri said, laughing aloud in the memory of his own nervousness, about which he is not in the least sheepish; on the contrary, he declared that he always did his best to stay as far behind Bwana Niki as possible.

  "It is terrible since Bwana Niki left!" Bakiri suddenly cried, with a yelp of agonized laughter. "Look at my clothes, nothing but holes! He used to issue us new uniforms, we were very smart, and now I have to hold the ammunition in my hand because all my pockets are broken!" Bakiri plucked sadly at the ragged clothes that were so unseemly in a game assistant. "Every day I was happy because we went here, there, everywhere. Now we don't go anywhere, and we get hardly any money, so I can't retire. 1 had a big belly - now look at me! 1 call him Baba - my father - because he was a father to me. It is very bad here since he left."