The Story of Bones Read online

“You first,” Baba said, stepping aside.

  I ran around the thicket and into the open, where a splotch of blood darkened the leaves. I saw more blood a few meters away and followed the trail up a gentle rise into a stand of trees. Looking around, I feared the worst: that I had destroyed a beautiful animal that had vanished and would die for nothing. Baba stood beside me, scanning the ground but not taking the lead. After a moment, he cleared his throat and dipped his head in the direction of a medallion of blood I had overlooked. Not far beyond the blood, I spotted the impala lying dead in a clutter of yellow leaves.

  I was familiar with the emotions that whipsawed through me then, feelings unrelated to the size or stature of the animal I had killed: elation and remorse, pride and humility, respect for the game I had brought to ground, and relief that my family would soon eat well. The act of killing a blameless creature, big or small, never felt quite right or truly wrong either.

  I knelt down and stroked the impala’s still-warm, golden flank. One dark hole indicated the path of the slug. It was as neat and humane a kill as I could ever hope to make. “Your body will feed my family,” I whispered.

  “That was a fine shot,” Baba said.

  His opinion mattered to me, but killing was not an experience we celebrated or even shared. I felt a little quiet inside as we repositioned the animal with his head uphill. Baba made quick work of gutting and dressing out the carcass, letting gravity send the fluids and offal downhill, out of our way. He showed me how to turn the stomach inside out and sew it into a tidy sack for holding the still-warm heart, liver, and kidneys—delicacies Zola would cook with special care. We did our work respectfully, without saying much. Baba sliced the meat and handed pieces to me to stow in a canvas bag. He had large hands and knuckles like walnut shells, yet he wielded the blade with delicacy, making neat cuts close to the bone to minimize waste. When we had finished, he tested the weight of the bag and said we would leave the head and bones for the hyenas.

  I cut a pole and hung the tripe sack on the end for carrying over my shoulder. The sun had almost reached its zenith.

  “Let’s go clean up. Then lunch,” Baba said, knowing food was never far from my mind. He hoisted the bag of meat onto his back and set out for the river.

  For a moment I stood beside the scant remains laid out on their golden cape. The wide brown eyes stared at me, glossy and lifeless. “Thank you,” I murmured and turned away.

  * * *

  Baba and I walked faster then, unworried about scaring away game but still alert to our surroundings. The habit of vigilance in the bush had become second nature to me, both for safety reasons and because there was so much to capture my attention. A clutter of spiders clinging to a web held as much fascination as a herd of elephants. I was learning to identify birds by the sound of their calls and to notice small details, like a tuft of lion mane caught on a thorn. I was always on the lookout for lucky bean seeds, the glossy red kernels with a single black dot that Zola strung into necklaces and bracelets. The seeds were supposed to bring luck in love and work. They possessed the added glamour of being deadly poisonous. Exactly what love and work were going to look like for my older sister, I couldn’t have said. At the time, I didn’t see beyond her affection for our family and all she did to care for us. I was still a boy who relied on the order and certainty she provided at home. I never considered that she might have a different future in mind or what that future might be.

  Baba strode ahead of me at a determined clip, causing the sack of impala meat to bounce against his back. I kept an eye on him because from time to time he would uncurl a finger or tilt his head toward an attraction I might overlook: a lizard on a branch or a frog the size of my fingernail. We were always watching for lions and leopards, of course. Although the cats were nocturnal and usually hunted in the cool, dark hours, they were not immune to the scent of fresh meat or the allure of an easy strike in daylight.

  The day before, Baba had pointed out a cloud of vultures circling not far from where we were walking now. The cloud had funneled down to a single location, a sure sign lions had killed and eaten well. That night, I noticed my father drank only water. I guessed he wanted to stay sharp so we could hunt early in the morning when the pride was sated and lazy. At present, the big cats were probably resting their swollen guts nearby, nearly senseless with the effort of digestion. We had come upon lions in this condition before—adults and their offspring sprawled in the grass, panting, with blood-reddened faces and huge, distended bellies. They had barely raised their heads to look at us.

  At the moment, I was most concerned about the hunger sinking its jaws into my stomach. A scrim of green marked the river ahead. Baba quickened his pace. I knew we would make our way to a shallow runnel where the water ran clear. There we would wade in to rinse the blood, dust, and sweat from our feet, hands, and faces before eating lunch. Baba was a meticulous hunter for whom every ritual signaled a category of respect—for the game he shot, for the animal’s fragile habitat, even for the person who would have to wash his bloodied shirt and pants. He always cleaned himself before coming home, plunging into the river fully dressed if necessary to spare Zola an unpleasant job of laundering. Today, I was glad we needed only a quick splash that wouldn’t delay our meal.

  As we neared the river, however, I felt a change in the atmosphere, a troubling new sensation without apparent cause. My footsteps slowed. The air seemed heavy, suggestive, freighted with a meaning I couldn’t grasp. It was oddly quiet. The sense of sunny peace had drained away, and the tiny hairs on my arms began to bristle.

  Baba stopped in the shade of a marula tree. “Smell anything?”

  He had cautioned me never to copy his smoking habit if I valued my keen sense of smell. So far, I had taken his warning to heart. I hadn’t tried even a puff with Rooper Nobbs or the other boys who smoked behind the schoolhouse.

  I raised my chin and whiffed the air. Making a face, I put down the pole attached to the tripe and stepped upwind of Baba’s sack of meat. He was watching me, waiting for my report. I took my time, partly to prolong my standing as the authority and partly because what I smelled made me uneasy. I sniffed again. If anything, the stench was stronger from this position. It rode up my nostrils like an assault, overpowering the sweet fragrance of the marula tree and the usual swirl of dirt and vegetable scents that enriched the African air. I knew this smell: the stink of death. But my excellent nose had never encountered a stench so pungent that it seemed to possess weight, a sticky materiality so dense and bottom-heavy it made me want to puke.

  The look on Baba’s face told me he had smelled enough not to wait for my opinion. He lifted the binoculars and glassed the riverine woodland.

  “It’s a kill,” I said, needlessly.

  “We saw the vultures circling. This must be it.”

  “But the stink …” My eyes had begun to water. I was trying not to breathe.

  “It may be more than a day old. The lions are well fed by now.” He paused. “Let’s go upwind and keep our distance.” He sounded calm enough, but I heard tension in his voice. He pointed a finger in the direction we would head, and off we went.

  We walked with the breeze on our faces until the stink subsided. Upwind, the change in air quality refreshed and energized me. My thoughts had already returned to corn bread and biltong when the river came into view.

  The first thing I saw was a herd of elephants, cows and their calves, oddly reclined in the muddy flats as for a nap. The second thing I saw was that all the elephants were dead. Bullet wounds riddled their collapsed carcasses. Several of the great gray bellies yawned open to expose shredded entrails and arcs of dripping bone. Most horribly, all the slaughtered elephants bore deep, bloody gouges where the killers had hacked away their tusks—their entire faces.

  Saliva pooled in my mouth. I closed my eyes, swallowed, and managed not to barf. Baba placed a steadying hand on my back. When he found his voice
, it was low and pinched. “Ivory poachers, Bonesy. This is what they do.”

  “Are they still around here?” I managed to whisper.

  “No. They’re far away by now. They have trucks and helicopters.” He kept his eyes on the atrocity, taking in every detail.

  I swallowed again and made myself look. The condition of the carcasses and the remains strewn across the dirt said everything. The poachers had not been interested in food for the table. Tusks were all they had taken, and to get the tusks they had destroyed and mutilated an entire breeding herd of elephants. I counted fourteen adult females, five juveniles, and three small calves too young to have sprouted more than an inch or two of ivory, yet their fuzzy cheeks had been cut to pieces.

  The earth between the bodies was littered with bullet casings and claw-torn flesh. Feeding by opportunistic carnivores had been underway for at least a day or two and might have started even before the poachers loaded the last of the ivory into their vehicles and fled. I knew the natural order: the king of beasts, first in line, would have arrived to chase away interlopers, rip open the kill, and claim the most tender morsels. After several hours of feasting, the lions, exhausted and hypermetabolic, gave way to the dozen or so hyenas currently on the scene. Two of the hyenas turned reddened muzzles toward Baba and me and then went back to their meal. I noticed movement at one gaping carcass and realized I was looking at the backside of a hyena that had waded all the way in to sample the deepest core of musculature.

  After the hyenas would come the wild dogs, then the leopards and cheetahs, then the jackals. The vultures currently perched thick in the treetops. And finally, the beetles, ants, and worms. It would take months for even the mightiest appetites in the African bush to erase this wholesale slaughter.

  Just when I thought the sight before me couldn’t get any worse, it did. A feeble toot sounded among the bodies. I spotted a calf so small that its tusks looked like aspirin tablets glued to its face. The tiny creature stood next to the mauled remains of a large female. With its miniature trunk, the newborn traced random, awkward loops through the air, touching down here and there on the cow’s putrefying flesh. The calf tooted again, and one of the hyenas lifted its head to cast a predatory eye.

  “Baba, look.”

  He didn’t answer, but he put his arm around me and pulled me closer. We both knew the orphan wouldn’t last another day.

  “Can’t we do something?”

  “I’m sorry, Bonesy. This is beyond us.”

  I had known the words “ivory poaching.” But knowing the words had been nothing compared to the experience of standing there, taking in the true dimensions of the cruelty committed in the lust for ivory. Now I saw, heard, smelled, and felt what ivory poaching really meant. I registered a pressure in my chest, a painful contraction. I took several shallow breaths and leaned into Baba.

  I had grown up with the sound of elephants’ trumpets, in a world where sightings of closely bonded breeding herds were routine. I knew the herds so well that I could identify individual animals by the tears in their hide, the color and curvature of their tusks, the scars on their wrinkled bodies. I knew the matriarch with a pear-shaped hole in her ear, her sister with one tusk striped yellow, the juvenile with a checkmark scratched into its side. The corpses before me now were so mutilated that I doubted anyone could tell for sure which elephants they were.

  I couldn’t imagine the terror these animals had felt as their mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, and offspring fell one by one in the barrage of bullets. The colossal waste and the utter savagery of the humans who killed in this way were almost unbelievable to me.

  Even as I swiped at the tears pooling in my eyes, something inside me hardened. I felt bitter, older, like a distant relative of the boy I had been only a few minutes earlier.

  “Let’s go,” Baba said, turning away.

  We had not walked far when the frantic, high-pitched cry of the newborn calf tore through the air. We kept going and did not look back.

  3

  DISPLAYS OF JOY BY ZOLA were rare in those days, but when something lifted her from the tedium of domestic life, her smile could outshine the sun. Baba and I returned from our hunt to find her sitting on the top step of the porch peeling potatoes. Hannie sat in the grass below, banging on a pie plate with a spoon. The transformation in Zola’s face when she saw us carrying fresh game was sweet to behold, and her smile raised the corners of my lips too.

  That sacks of meat could trigger such a welcome told me something new about my sister’s state of mind. Since Mama died, Zola had become increasingly difficult to read, as though a protective layer had filmed over her. Fortunately for the rest of us, she complied willingly enough with the expected routines of the household. Seeing her go about her work with wordless efficiency had come as a relief to my boyish self because it meant my life would continue almost as before. Although I wasn’t insensitive to her new duties or her early acquaintance with the cares of adulthood, I hadn’t guessed the worry she must have felt about putting enough food on the table, day after day. Her elation at the sight of meat to feed our family scared me a little. Was real, gut-wrenching hunger so close to our door?

  “I shot it.” I tried to sound offhand, as though killing a prime antelope was nothing out of the ordinary. I watched her face, alert to hidden inner workings. “One slug.”

  “Good for you.” Her lips formed a kiss aimed at my forehead, but she didn’t actually touch me. Her gaze was fixed on the bag of innards hanging from the stick. In one quick motion she freed it and turned to go inside. “I’ll soak these and fix some tonight. Will you watch Hannie?” Without waiting for an answer, she hurried through the door.

  I let my shoulders slump a little. Her praise for the man of the hour hadn’t been the gusher I had hoped for. I thought about the fine young buck that had met his match in me, Bonesy. Then I thought about my clean lung shot and the prospect of eating well, at least for a while, and my disappointment shifted to something more heartening. At the time I couldn’t have formed the words, but I was coming to understand that my self-worth did not depend on praise from Zola or anyone else—a consoling thought for a boy with a small, distractible circle of supporters.

  Baba and I had washed in the river after leaving the elephants, but the stink of the killing field still clung to my nostrils. I wondered if Hannie would notice as I lifted her high in the air. She laughed and waved her spoon in my face, so apparently not.

  “Bobo, Bobo,” she said, spitting a little. “Bobo.”

  To Hannie, Baba and I were one vowel apart. I put my nose close to her cheek and breathed in her sweet baby scent. “A BB, like you, baby. Bbbbbbb.” When I fluttered my lips against her skin, she shrieked with delight.

  I carried her around to the back of the house and sat her down near the workbench. Baba stood over the contents of the sack, which he had emptied onto the wooden surface. He was sharpening a knife—quick, hard strokes on a stone. We needed to move fast while the meat was very fresh. Biltong, correctly made, would supply our family with a prized delicacy for many weeks.

  Baba got to work cutting the meat into strips. My job was to rub the strips with salt, lay the salted pieces in a flat container, and sprinkle vinegar on each layer. To me, the pungent odor of vinegar had come to signal this very curing process and something more: good food ahead. As the smell wafted up my nose, I felt cleansed and optimistic. Flies delirious with indecision zoomed toward the meat and back again, repelled by the salt and vinegar. I ignored them, knowing they would lose interest altogether once we had brined the meat and scoured the table.

  “Dinner tonight will be good,” Baba said, casting a glance at me. On the way home he had made a quick detour to Captain Biggie’s. A bottle of beer from the six-pack he had bought sat empty on the ground.

  I nodded. Already my stomach pulsed and growled in anticipation of the meal ahead. It was important for me to eat well because
for one thing, I was famished, and for another, I faced a ration of work. The raw cuts of meat could sit in the brine only a few hours. If we let them soak until morning, they would be oversalted and ruined. I eyed my father, who was relaxing toward stupor. I knew I couldn’t count on his help later that night.

  All the stages Baba went through when he drank were familiar to me. Currently, he was in the genial, conversant zone he occupied after his first beer or two, a precious and fleeting time that fostered intimacy between us. During this particular phase, I always paid close attention and usually learned something new and remarkable—who had left our village for jail or junior college, for example, or how to make a bottle-cap whistle. In one startling, long-ago revelation before I had connected animal and human behaviors, he had told me how a man uses his penis to start a baby.

  Instead of resenting Baba’s slow, steady slide into the fog of alcohol, I noted his decline like a nurse tracking the onset of fever, hoping to make the lucid period last as long as possible. Only years later would I fully realize how much my sisters and I had sacrificed to Baba’s drinking. Even then, my love for him would eclipse my anger.

  “I wish you hadn’t seen what we saw at the river,” he said now, eyeing me. “Are you holding up?” He studied my face as though he was the one searching for signs of illness.

  I nodded. Silence hung between us while I tried to gauge whether or not this was true. The question itself alerted me to the possibility that I was not holding up. I rotated my shoulders elaborately, testing for aches, and wagged my head right and left as I had seen the older boys do before games of soccer. Baba looked away because of course he wasn’t asking about physical pain.

  I took a breath. My voice came out shaky. “Will the poachers kill all the elephants?”

  He sliced a few strips before answering. “Ivory’s called ‘white gold,’ Bonesy. Actually, it’s worth more than gold.” He wiped the blade with a cloth and ran the steel over the sharpening stone a few more times. “Poaching was once a crime of opportunity carried out by locals looking to support their families. Now it’s orchestrated—militarized and transnational. Heavily armed networks use poaching to fund drug selling and big-league crimes of all sorts. Every year the poachers are more ruthless and better-armed. The elephant population is heading toward zero.”