“Helen—Helen, I don’t know what you want.”
Helen retreated from me, leapt down into the stream bed, and began following it northward, back the way we had come.
“Helen, what are you doing?” I cried. “Where are you going?”
The other Minids seemed unperturbed. I jumped down into the gully and trotted after her, but she waved me back without ceasing to retreat from us. When she clambered up the eastern bank, plunged into a thicket some thirty or forty yards farther on, and completely disappeared from my vision, my heart sank. I was astonished and hurt. Later, with more facts at my disposal, her departure made sense, but at the moment it struck me as arbitrary, erratic, and maybe even suicidal. The last glimpse I had of her was a flash of vivid red from the bandanna about her neck, and that red seemed frighteningly portentous.
Reluctantly I followed the others.
Afternoon sloped into evening. What was going on? How had I offended Helen? By failing to understand her? By refusing to make bellicose gestures at the band of A. africanus shadowing us? Had Helen’s disillusionment with me sent her off across the savannah in search of another husband?
Pathetically egocentric, these questions pinched at my forebrain and hung on like angry crayfish. Reason would not shake them loose. I began to wonder if I could survive without Helen.
Toward twilight we approached a water hole on whose opposite bank stood a female black rhino and her hairy calf. They snorted at the water, nuzzling it with vaguely prehensile lips. The evidence of their hides—splotched, mud-caked, rubbery-looking—suggested that they had already enjoyed a good wallow and were now just fooling around, keeping other thirsty animals at bay by refusing to depart.
Swarms of bot flies danced about their impervious bodies, looking for dry places to alight.
Ham led us down to the water hole to drink, and the rhinoceroses’ piggy eyes strained after our outlines while their big purse-shaped ears absent-mindedly tracked our chatter. Much to my relief, they did not attempt to chase us off.
When the Minids and I had finished drinking, Malcolm took up watch in a tree.
The darkness had a tincture-of-iodine quality about it, and my anxiety over Helen’s desertion had begun to take on a hysterical edge. Unable to sit still, I paced the western shore of the water hole. Alfie and the others divided their attention between me and the rhinos, which finally lumbered up the opposite bank and out onto the evening grasslands.
Suddenly Malcolm hooted a warning from his tree, an urgent warning, and I hurried to join him aloft. All the other Minids took cover, too. Soon I was installed in a pale, polished tree fork higher than Malcolm’s lookout, and I saw that a pack of giant hyenas was approaching the two departing rhinos. Above Mount Tharaka the full moon—a huge, luminous brood ball—heaved into view, spotlighting the confrontation on the veldt.
The hyenas’ joint purpose was to induce Junior to charge, thereby separating him from Mamma and making it possible to gang-tackle him. To this end, two of the hunger-crazed hyenas danced in, swatted the calf on his fuzzy fanny, and darted away. Mamma blustered from place to place, trying to disperse the hyenas, but because they saw far better than she or Junior did, they could easily skitter out of her path. In fact, her huffy offensive maneuvers seemed to be wearing Mamma down. Junior jostled along in her lee whenever he could, but his mother’s increasing frustration and bad temper kept deflecting her into stupid games of tag with their tormentors.
Most of the hyenas, I noticed, were sitting some distance away, watching. Their eyes were yellow agates in the moonlight. The dog work of harassment they left to a pair of agile bullies who stood nearly four feet high at their shoulders. The noise from this scrimmage—the lunges, snorts, and foot feints—seemed somehow remote. Abstractedly I wondered if a kill on either side would take my mind off Helen, and if the Minids could get in on the spoils. So far the contest had engendered only sound and surliness, most of it from Mamma.
This changed. When the female thundered to her left to rout one lean hyena, Junior rashly attacked the renegade nipping at his flank on the right. His charge took him forty or fifty feet toward the hyenas lounging in the low grass east of the water hole. Several of these creatures sprang up to capitalize on his folly. Almost before I could blink, the calf was down, thrashing and squealing as a pair of his assailants dragged him along by his skinny tail and one hind leg. The remaining hyenas rushed in to rip open Junior’s belly.
The calf’s high-pitched protests turned Mamma around. Stampeding to his rescue, she bayonetted one monstrous hyena with a dip of her snout. With a resounding crack that probably signaled a broken spine, the wounded animal flipped brains over butt to its back. As the other hyenas scurried for safety, Junior was able to regain his feet. He trotted to Mamma for consolation. The set-to was over, for the hyenas had lost the will to test the huge female again. Secure in their triumph, Mamma and Junior angled off into the bush. Their departure was dignified, even lordly.
Once they had gone, the hyenas moved in to tear the guts out of their fallen mate. Jockeying for position, they nudged the carcass, quarreled viciously with one another, and fed.
Alfie, in the tree next to mine, periodically hurled a piece of debris at the hyenas—a fruit husk, a scab of bark—but with more symbolic than real effect. The hyenas went on gorging themselves. As they were finishing up, several of them broke away and crept down to the water hole to drink. Stranded aloft, we intensified our efforts to drive them off, hurling whatever came to hand: rotten limbs, nuts, berries, old birds’ nests, the works. We also assaulted the hyenas vocally, carrying on like banshee divas at an operatic wake.
This aggressive strategy boomeranged. The hyenas—the entire pack, at least a dozen—withdrew from the roiling water hole without really surrendering it to us. They either prowled the edges of the thicket or lay in the grass out of missile range. Our dissonant abuse did not greatly upset them. They were prepared to wait us out.
Vultures settled out of the air, as if from the mother-of-pearl uterus of the moon, and the night kindled with insect song and lethargic wing beats.
We were under siege, the Minids and I, and it occurred to me that in times of trial a resourceful people nearly always finds a means of allaying its fears and bolstering its courage. Usually either an acknowledged leader (F.D.R., say) or a person with a special attention-focusing talent (Betty Grable, for instance) steps in to nerve, comfort, and cheer the demoralized multitudes, by oration or tap dance.
None of us was in a position to tap dance. But because the Minids required this kind of psychological boost, I decided that I must speak to them in the forceful and reassuring tones of a storytelling patriot. Or maybe I simply needed to reassure myself. In any case, I told them a tale, a spur-of-the-moment tale, that probably ought to be called “How the Reem Got Her Horns.”
“Once upon a time,” I declaimed, furiously free associating, “the rhinoceros had no horns at all. Further, in those distant days she was known by her Creator, Ngai, as the reem rather than as the rhinoceros.
This later word, O habilines, implies the possession of a horn that the reem did not yet have.
“I want to tell you how she got it.
“Yes, in those days the reem was a miserable, defenseless creature whose great size was her only seeming asset. In truth, she could seldom use her size to good advantage because she was slow, hard of hearing, and near-sighted to boot. All the other animals, including even the hares and the hyraxes, taunted her with impunity. It had not taken them long to discover that her armor plating was something of a sham, for her skin was thick only at the underlayer. Provided one knew just where to strike, the reem could be made to bleed like a hemophiliac.