Something darted out in front of the car.
She hit the brakes and swerved to the right, not nearly fast enough. Something went thunk against the front bumper, a dull wet noise that echoed through the Wagoneer. The brakes squealed as she slid to a halt just inches from the edge of the offramp. Below the high beams struggling with the rain was a fifteen-foot hole that hadn't been there when she'd left for work the evening before.
She sat there in the car, gulping air, and leaned forward to study the drop-off. The damn highway department had been at work. She could see where the guardrail had been removed. Putting in culverts or something, she thought. Thank God she'd had the brakes relined two weeks ago. Otherwise the road crew would have arrived in the morning to excavate her. She could see herself going over the sharp drop, a split second of realization, her face slamming into the steering column, the unyielding plastic smashing her nose flat, driving through her face into her skull …
She gagged, felt the gorge rise in her throat but didn't vomit. All to avoid hitting somebody's dog. And she hadn't even managed to spare it. Swallowing, she put the car in reverse and slowly backed away from the pit she'd nearly plunged into. She dreaded what her headlights would illuminate on the pavement, but though she backed up several yards there was nothing to be seen but rain-swept asphalt. No large furry lump like a hunk of discarded carpet lay in the road in front of her wheels. The discovery made her feel worse, not better. She hadn't killed the animal, had merely shattered its hip or something.
Ignoring the rain, she lowered the window on the passenger side and stared at the pit which separated the roadbed from the forest beyond. It was almost nine o'clock and starting to get light out despite the dense cloud cover. There was no sign of whatever she'd struck.
It was hard to believe it had survived the collision. She'd been going at least forty down the offramp and struck it solidly. She couldn't get the sound of the impact out of her head. It hadn't been flung out in front of her and she hadn't run over it, but not even a big dog could live through a collision like that.
It came through the open window straight for her eyes, claws and black blood accompanied by a guttural growl that froze the breath in her throat and caused her insides to constrict convulsively. She let out a single primordial scream and flung herself back on the seat. The paw dug furiously, frustratedly at the air inside the car. The power window controls were set in the center console, near the gear shift, and she flailed wildly at all of them. By extreme good fortune and pure coincidence she struck the control the right way and the window purred as it closed. If she'd slapped down on the switch it would have lowered the window instead, allowing the thing outside in the rain enough room to get inside the car.
With a furious howl it pulled its arm free, leaving her lying on the seat, hyperventilating, her face full of rain. She forced herself to sit up, to stare out the window.
There it was, racing back toward the tree line. She stared after it until it had vanished back into the woods. After a while she realized another car might come along, hit her from behind, and knock her into the pit she'd barely avoided. Her arms wouldn't work. She willed them forward, willed her hands to grasp the steering wheel. The engine refused to turn over.
Please, she whispered silently to it, please start. Don't leave me stuck out here. It might—come back. Start, damn you!
The engine growled, came smoothly to life. She put it in gear and rolled down the rest of the offramp until she reached the stop sign at the bottom. There she hesitated. She had to make a right turn and she didn't want to make a right turn. Cedar Falls, home, lay to the right. But that was also the direction the visitor from hell had taken, and she didn't want to go that way because she might come upon it again.
"Don't be an idiot!" she said aloud, and that frightened her because she wasn't in the habit of talking to herself.
You're just tired. Tired, and it's raining. It was just a dog. You broke its back, you couldn't help it, you didn't see it in time. It's gone off to die somewhere deep in the woods. Probably a stray, maybe it didn't belong to some kid. The rain made you see the other things.
As she cruised down the familiar country road she found herself eyeing the blacktop ahead with unusual intensity. Her gaze kept darting unwillingly from the road to left and right as she tried to penetrate the damp darkness that still cloaked the drainage ditches and primeval woods. The storm turned the forest into a solemn, threatening wall that might hide anything.
Crazy. It was already dead or dying somewhere far behind her, back in the trees, not close to the road. There were no angry, burning eyes following the Wagoneer's progress, no vengeful, crippled wraith stalking her parallel to the pavement. Get ahold of yourself.
She talked to herself like that for another ten minutes before she finally started to relax. She had to relax because she was coming into Cedar Falls and the Wagoneer was doing an uneasy, dangerous seventy miles an hour. Not sensible on the narrow road. At that speed she'd finish what the animal had tried to do.
What? That was crazier still. It hadn't been trying to hurt her. It had been trying to get out of her way, and had only gone after her when she'd hit it.
Almost home. Sunlight was finally beginning to add substance to the shadows dogging her progress, chewing at her thoughts. The dark shapes haunting her imagination faded under its influence. She would take a long, hot bath and then climb into bed. First she'd make sure all the doors and windows were locked.
In Cedar Falls? Who needed to lock their doors in Cedar Falls? Yes, she would make sure everything was locked and that the fireplace flue was shut and then maybe, just maybe, she'd be able to fall asleep. When she awoke again it would be mid-morning or afternoon. The sun would be shining and the memory of the incident would have faded. Maybe it had been a mad dog, she told herself. Maybe she'd done it and the rest of the county a favor by hitting it. You couldn't tell in the dark. Certainly the way it had tried to come through the window after her suggested something beyond normal animal behavior.
The trouble was, it had only looked like a dog when she'd looked at it out of her right eye. When she'd turned away at that desperate moment and fallen back on the seat, she'd seen something else out of her left eye. Something black as night and maybe two feet high at the shoulder. Without tail or fur, smooth-skinned as a baby rat, and with bizarre triangular ears that went off in different directions.
And those claws, stuck on the ends of what surely had to be hands and not feet.
It had been looking straight at her, and that had been worse than the claws and the horrible sound it had made. Because the eyes had been a pair of fiery smears against the face. They'd illuminated a skull made of molten rubber. The lower jaw had hung loose, like a toothed tail attached to the wrong end of the body. She thought she must have broken it when she'd struck it with the car. Except it didn't look broken. It looked grotesquely natural, slobbering against the rain-slicked window, trying to rasp its way through the glass. It was not the face of anything that had ever been as wholesome as a dog, not any dog that had ever lived. It was not the face of an animal or a person but of something evil and unnatural that was less than either.
Then she'd started to sit up and had looked at it out of her right eye and had seen a dog again. None of which made any sense, no sense at all.
She shivered and the sensation ran down her back like ice water. It was just a poor damned dog, ugly and misshapen and abandoned, and now it was dying slowly somewhere out in the woods because she'd hit it. Bad judgment, darting out in front of the only car for miles around like that. Almost as if it had done so deliberately. But why? To make her swerve toward the gaping pit by the side of the offramp? Her imagination was running away with her.
On the far side of town she turned left up the dirt road that led to her house. A flickering, steadily weakening memory of those glowing eyes clung to her. Eyes that looked as if they'd been gouged out of their sockets and could tumble to the ground at any moment. They couldn't have bee
n dog eyes. They couldn't have been people eyes. They hadn't really looked like eyes at all. But she'd seen them.
She tried half a dozen times before her shaking fingers finally slipped the key into the lock. The worst thing of all was that the thing had made a noise as it had run off into the woods. Not a sound like a child or a dog would make. She felt a little better. That proved she'd hallucinated what she'd seen out of her left eye. She had to have hallucinated it anyway, but the sound she'd heard confirmed it. Surely anything that had been run over by a car wouldn't have run off into the woods laughing.
The bathroom was just ahead, and inviting thoughts of a hot, steaming bath helped to relax her. A wild thought made her giggle. Why, if she'd slid off into that excavation and killed herself, she wouldn't have been able to take her trip to Washington.
| Go to Table of Contents |
3
Near the Olijoro Wells,
Northern Tanzania—10 June
There was no telling how old the tree was, but with a base thirty feet in diameter it surely was a grandfather among boababs. It was a suitable place for a council of elders to meet. The gray bark had been shredded to three times the height of a man by hungry elephants and still the tree thrived. Like a gray mountain the tree was home to hundreds of creatures who flew and crawled and slithered among its bare branches. The rapidly narrowing leafless limbs caused tourists to call it the Upside-Down Tree.
To the Bantu peoples like the Chagga and Kikuyu who dominated the governments of East Africa, the branches of the baobab resembled the graceful arms and hands of dancers, dozens of dancers frozen in mid-leap.
The Maasai knew better. To them this land was simply Maasailand, a country in fact if not in boundary. They had taken it to themselves centuries ago by force and they retained control of it through their persistence and determination. They knew the truth of the baobab: that it was an old witch woman planted deep in the earth. The branches were the wild strands of her hair. So they walked carefully in the baobab's shadow lest they anger her.
The tree would have provided protection from the north wind save that there was no wind this time of year. The rainy season was not long over and it was hot but not yet brutally so. Around the base of the great tree the grass of the African savanna still clung to its brief flush of green, though the yellow-brown of dormancy was already beginning to spread across the veldt.
Other baobabs dotted the landscape, spaced well apart from one another (the witch women did not like to be crowded, the Maasai knew). Acacia trees spread their leafy, flat-topped umbrellas over selected patches of earth. Close by the wells themselves grew a multitude of trees not commonly found on the open plains. Off to the west, vast herds of zebra and hartebeest, Thompson's gazelle and wildebeest dared the ill-defined boundary of a national park. Infrequently visited by foreigners, barely patrolled, it would have been a haven for poachers save for one thing: the Maasai. No poacher would run the risk of encountering a band of Maasai, for the Maasai might think he was after their cattle. The poachers carried rifles, the Maasai spears and knives and throwing sticks. The poachers stayed away. So it had been and so it would be till the end of time.
Far to the north lay the city of Arusha. A relic of German and then British colonial times, its aged buildings tried desperately to cling to their facades of pink and white plaster and stucco. As the buildings disintegrated, the community grew and throve. West of Tarangire, the park, lay hundreds of miles of nothingness interrupted only by an occasional village. East was the vast emptiness of the Maasai Steppe, a vestige of the old Africa. Hundreds of miles to the south was the great joke, the new "capital" of Dodoma, reachable only by a rutted and poorly maintained gravel road.
Here between Tarangire and the Steppe there was only heat and flies and the distant milling game.
The thick vegetation encircling the water hole offered good cover for hunting lions, but no lion would approach in hopes of making a kill until the Maasai had moved off. No matter that the twelve Maasai who had gathered beneath the huge baobab were well past their prime. A Maasai, though he makes his way from child to junior warrior to senior warrior, from senior warrior to junior elder to senior elder, is a warrior always from the day he is born until he puts his walking stick aside and lies down for the Final Sleep. The lions know this. So they growl to themselves and stay away from the water hole even as the young zebra begins to drink.
The herds of game did not fear the Maasai because they knew the Maasai will eat only the flesh of cattle and occasionally of sheep or goat. Since God had given the Maasai ownership of all the cattle in the world, it was only fair that they should agree not to eat any wild animals or even to kill them, save those of course that were foolish enough to try and prey on their cattle. The wildebeest and gazelle and ostrich knew they could approach the water hole to drink in safety so long as the dozen Maasai elders sat wrapped in their blankets beneath the baobab and talked.
Of the twelve the youngest was sixty-two. No one knew the age of the eldest. They kept their walking sticks close at hand and their brightly hued cloaks close around them. None was bent or broken, for to become a senior elder among the Maasai one had to achieve physical as well as mental and emotional perfection.
All of the five clans and most of the sixteen tribes of the Maasai were represented at the gathering. Moutelli had traveled all the way from the north of Kenya to represent the Samburu, who were not considered true Maasai because they tilled the soil but whose opinion was valued in council anyway.
As befitted their station, the heads of the elders were clean shaven. Many wore bright decorative earrings in their stretched, extended earlobes. They sat in an informal circle with Moutelli of the Samburu slightly off to one side. As no true hierarchy existed among the Maasai, anyone was welcome to offer an opinion during an okiama, or council, be he Samburu, city man, passing youth, or even an ilmeet—a foreigner. The Maasai believe firmly in the equality of men. All Maasai were equal (though just a little bit better, perhaps, than everyone else).
The Samburu might have disputed that, and so would the Bantu peoples who had control of the governments. But it was not something you disputed with a Maasai to his face, not even to an elder.
It was an extraordinary okiama, a gathering of knowledge such as had not been seen in living memory. Ordinarily two elders were more than enough to settle any problem or resolve any disagreement between them. To find three arguing a problem together was exceptional. A dozen was beyond comprehension.
For each of these elders was not merely a senior among his tribe or clan, but a laibon. Where other tribes had chiefs, the Maasai had the laibon. Instead of obtaining their reputations and positions through inheritance, the Maasai laibon gained recognition from his people because of his talents at healing and adjudicating, not to mention prophecy and divination. Laibon was a title earned, not inherited.
The eleven most famous laibon of the Maasai (and one of the Samburu) had gathered at the Olijoro Wells because each had read the same discomfiting signs. They were here to talk and to do an enkitoongiwong, a searching out of danger, an exploration of possibilities.
While there was no ranking among them and each man considered himself the equal of his brother, there was one among them all deferred to when a final decision was required. This laibon was a little more equal than the rest of them. He was not particularly tall for a Maasai, who are tall but not as tall as the Watutsi. Only a couple of inches over six feet. Certainly he was the eldest of the group, though he did not look as old as some.
Now he rose, slowly and with dignity. Though there were no cattle to be watched he still assumed the age-old position of the Maasai herder, holding on to his walking staff with one hand and balancing himself on his right foot, his left foot crossed over and behind his right calf to add stability to the stance. He was staring north past the baobabs and the acacias, past the rolling savanna toward the distant village of Loibor Serrit, where the dirt road leading to Arusha began. Then he lifted his eyes to th
e sky where the moon hung, sun and moon riding the air together. A propitious time for an enkitoongiwong. He began.
"Friends and brothers, we all know why we are here." A soft and paternal voice. "We know what we as laibon must do. We must cast the stones today because none of us yet knows how to deal with this thing. I also do not know."
Loqari, who among the assembled was second in age only to the speaker, brushed the flies away from his face with his zebra-tail whisk and squinted upward. He was blind in both eyes, but that did not mean he could not see.
"Can we not show the chiefs of the two great tribes the danger they face?"
"We could talk; they would not listen. They would not believe." The man standing easily on one leg continued his survey of the northern horizon. "They are not laibon; only chiefs. Talking sense to such people is impossible."
"It is only to be expected," said another of the old men. "They cannot see."
"Not so," said a fourth sadly. "They can see but do not believe what they see. They suffer but do not feel. They will learn too late and we cannot wait for them. We must act quickly."
"We twelve must decide what to do," declared the man on one leg. "We must decide because as laibon it is our duty to decide. It falls upon us to save the world."
"A burden." Avari was one of the younger elders. He scratched himself through his brilliant yellow, red, and blue blanket of office. "It means we must save the ilmeet as well. My concern is only for the cattle and the people. The ilmeet prefer to take care of themselves. That is always their inclination." There were smiles around the circle but no laughter, which would have been impolite.
The tall speaker smiled also. "Do not be so hard on the ilmeet. There are good people among them. It is not their fault they are not Maasai. We should not dismiss them all out of hand. We have determined that in order to save the cattle we must save the ilmeet as well. What we must decide here today is how." Again he regarded the heavens.