Calley woke at dawn, released from a dream in which he had been lost in a desolate place and bitterly weeping. He whimpered on waking and lay for some time without moving, not knowing where he was, still involved in the grief of his dream. Then he knew the feel of the sand on which he was lying and saw the branches overhead of the rough shelter he had made for himself.
He crawled out, away from his sorrow, into the misty light of morning. He shook himself and urinated and shivered, looking up at the sky above the sea, where trailing clouds were touched with faint pink. Crouched again in his shelter, he ate the koonti bread and scraps of dried fish left from the day before. Then he started back through the jungle of the hummock to make a scratch-hole for water on the landward side. It was several hours’ walk to the settlement, but Calley had been combing the beaches and ranging through the pine ridges for years now and he knew there was water here, just below ground, as he knew there were acorn trees and pig nuts and the tunnels of the big red land crabs.
Now he did things exactly in the way Nadri had taught him years before – Nadri had always been kind to him and protected him and to some extent had taken Deakin’s place in his life. With the long-bladed knife that was his only weapon and practically his only possession, he dug down into the soft, sandy mould until he came upon the water. It was muddy at first, but Calley knew that it would clear if he waited some minutes, because the water below the ground was always flowing, very slowly, towards the ocean. Nadri, who knew a great many things, had told him this and he had always remembered it. When the water was clear he lowered his head towards his moonface reflection: alone among the crew people, Calley grew no hair on his face, only a soft, whitish down. He drank, careful not to disturb the bed of the pool.
This done, he put on his harness, which he had carried with him from the shelter. It consisted of a broad back-pad, rather like a saddle, made of matted palm fibres, worn high on the shoulders and secured with rope straps. Calley quite often found logs of pitchwood in the forest and he had learned that this black, heavy wood was in great demand as fuel and could secure him food and shelter and sexual favours sometimes – he had no hut of his own and no settled way of life. He was extremely strong and he would arrive at the settlement with his squat and heavily muscled figure bowed under a great pyramid of logs.
He began to walk, following a faint track in the direction of the sea. The air was bright and he knew the sun had risen clear, though it was too low in the sky to be seen. Sharp folds of limestone rose here and there above the ground, but Calley’s soles were thickly calloused and he felt little through the deer-hide bags he wore tied to his feet.
The vegetation thinned as he drew nearer the sea until there was only the saw palmettos and torchwood trees and the smooth writhing forms of the sea-grape. Finally there was nothing but the fringe of tall, dishevelled palms growing above the shore. He emerged into the open to see the sun riding clear of the water and a sky that seemed surprised by the brilliance that had come to it, just as he was himself surprised. Calley found echoes for all his feelings in the look of things around him.
He began to walk southwards, in the direction of the settlement. A breeze from the sea stirred the palms, and the pliant, yellow-green spines of the fronds were touched to gold by this early sunshine. Calley felt the beauty of the swaying leaves and the radiant sky and the surprised clouds. His soft mouth hung a little open as he settled into the rhythm of his walking and lowered his eyes to the scattering of pebble and shell fragment that marked the tide-line. Things could be found here, things of value. Calley had learned and memorized them: sea beans, polished and smooth after their long washing in the sea, odds and ends from wrecked ships, tiny white cone shells to make necklaces and the bigger, cunt-shaped ones that some of the women valued for good luck in childbirth.
He made little whistling sounds to himself as he walked along, happy to be out here in the open where there was no danger. As the sun rose the sky took on a deeper blue but the marbling of cloud remained and there were bursts of light and falls of shadow across the surface of the water. The low waves broke and milled briefly in splinters of light and the suds frilled out and fizzed and shrank back, leaving gleaming levels of sand that confused Calley’s eyes when he looked along the shore. A company of pelicans, disturbed by his approach, flapped up awkwardly and headed out to sea, one behind the other, gliding on stiff wings. He walked steadily at first, keeping his gaze on the tide-line. But before long the jellyfish began to distract him. Dead and dying jellyfish lay here and there along the shore, stranded by the tide, their iridescent, bladder-like forms sometimes alone on the wet sand, sometimes entangled in seaweed. These lilac-tinted bubbles could deliver a lash-like sting, as Calley knew from painful experience: he had once tried to pick one up and ever since had harboured vindictive feelings towards them. Whenever he came to one now he stopped and pricked it with the point of his knife. As the gas was released the puffed-out sac collapsed with a comical squeak like a fart of farewell. Each time it happened Calley chuckled to himself and mocked the deflated jellyfish with squeaking sounds of his own.
He looked up gleefully from this sport to see a fretting and worrying of waves round a dark shape at the water-line some distance ahead of him. He thought at first it might be a section of the trimmed hardwood timber sometimes washed up from cargo ships; but it was too short for that and too light – the water was lifting and moving it this way and that. Then he saw that it was the body of a negro, not fully grown. The sex he could not determine yet. As he drew nearer the movements of the body seemed like a sort of languid play. He saw now that it was a boy. Calley stopped and stood looking. It came to his mind that the sea was bringing this body to life. Calley knew there were spirits, he saw and heard them everywhere about him, they informed his dreams. In a shaft of awe below any power of words it seemed to him that this negro boy would presently crawl up out of the sea. Then he saw the staring eyes and the slight, helpless gestures of the hands and he knew the boy was dead.
He went forward and drew the body out of the water and laid it higher up on the beach. The boy was perhaps ten or eleven years old and his body was whole – he had escaped sharks in the deep water and crabs in the shallows and the vultures that would have found him soon. He was emaciated; his cage of ribs was clearly visible beneath the skin, the collarbone like a halter on him. There was a brandmark on his chest, on the right side, above the nipple. The scar was red, still new.
Calley fell now into a painful state of anxiety and indecision. He stood looking from the dead boy to the empty shore and sea and sky. He was absolutely alone with the responsibility of this discovery, nothing to guide or help him. He could leave the body where it was and walk on as if nothing had happened. He would never speak about it, no one would know. Would Deakin have done that? Deakin would not just walk away from the dead child. Deakin would take the body and show people …
He stopped and picked up the boy in his arms. The body was ice-cold and Calley shivered slightly at the contact of this cold flesh against his own. He hoisted the slight form across his shoulders and resumed his way. Soon he became accustomed to his burden. He walked on steadily, his mind vacant, aware only of the washing sound of the waves, the growing warmth of the sun.
Also abroad early was a young man called Sefadu, whom love had made restless. He had risen with the first light and paddled for two hours through the channels on the edge of the flooded saw-grass plain towards the dark line of a jungle island on the horizon. The water levels had begun to sink but he often hunted here for duck and quail and he knew the floodlands well. He had been born in the Bolilands of Sierra Leone, a region not much different, flooded in the rainy season and dry in winter. In the narrow, flat-bottomed canoe, which he had hollowed out himself from a single trunk, he could pass at a level of a few inches.
The tall grass grew close and the minute teeth on the blades cut his arms and shoulders sometimes. But his purpose was fixed and the fire in his mind steady, so that he hardly noticed these wounds, or the indignant herons and spoonbill birds that flapped up with heavy wingbeats at his approach.
He tied up the canoe at the edge of the hummock among pads of water-shield plants still cupping their catch of dew, and stepped into the green twilight of the trees. He had been here before and knew there was a wide sink-hole on this side, not far into the trees, a deep hollow in the rockbed which was the hummock’s foundation. Thrusting through the close-growing vegetation, beating before him with a stick to warn snakes, he came upon it. It was deep still, brimming with clear, dark water. A lacework of duckweed floated at the edges, but the centre held nothing save the glinting reflections of the foliage above it.
Here among the trees there was no sound. Sefadu stood at the edge of the pool, looking across to the sharp outcrop that thrust like wrinkled knuckles through the peat mould on the other side. These creases of rock were what had brought him. He had remembered the dark interior of this hummock, the cracked limestone and the complicated roots of the trees edging the pool. It was a perfect place for ground pearls, the most coveted of all ornaments among the women. He wanted to make a necklace for Dinka, so she would know his love.
He was three years younger than she, the youngest adult of the settlement, having been not yet ten years old when brought here – he had been a well-grown child and Thurso had thought him older. He was Temne-speaking like Tongman, but that was all they had in common, since Sefadu was not interested in dealing but in making things, and especially decorative things, though he made cutting tools and arrowheads also. He was tall and long-legged, rather narrow in build, with heavy-lidded eyes that gave his face a totally misleading expression of indolence.
The pause had been for something in the nature of a strong wish addressed to the spirit of his maternal grandmother, who had been a great gleaner and finder. Now he moved carefully round to the far side of the pool and began his search. After he had been there some time a brief but heavy shower descended. He stood patiently where he was, waiting to resume, watching the bark of the trees darken with wet. The rain stopped abruptly and he immediately began searching again, with the drenched leaves dripping down on him and the slow ack-ack of the grateful tree frogs resounding through the hummock.
It was an hour or so before he found the first pearls, caught among the exposed roots of a pond apple, four small opaque lumps, roseate and waxy, glistening softly among the dark root-hairs. There were two more in the soil below.
He put them in the skin bag he wore round his neck and searched on without pausing. He felt neither hunger nor fatigue. By mid-afternoon his bag contained thirty-eight pearls, all roughly the same size. Enough to make a necklace.
He set off back immediately, wanting to make the most of the light. Once again in the compound, he started work without pausing to eat or rest. His hut was also his workship and he had everything here that he needed: sailmaker’s needles, steel pins, chisels, all begged at various times from the people of the crew, some when he was still a child – he had always been clever at making things. Now he worked with application to pierce the pearls, the movements of his hands assured and delicate, his face set in a slight frown of concentration, joy and anxiety contending within him.
Somewhere not far away he could hear the voices of children. They were acting out the story of Wilson – he recognized the dialogue of the quarrel. Sefadu knew this story well; he had witnessed the execution of Wilson as a child and he had never forgotten it, the big man and his white, unbelieving face, the ragged volley of the muskets, fired by black men and white men together, all the men of the settlement. The voices of the unseen children carried to him, rapid, high-pitched, the actors scarcely distinguishable one from another, using words they knew by heart:
‘We here is two man one woman. You ken do matta mattick, yes or no? We got to share dis woman.’
‘I no share wit you, I wan’ fuck dis woman for wife.’
‘We go ask woman den. Woman, you take us share two husban’?’
‘Yes, sartin, I take you …’
No excuse had been found for Wilson’s crime. He had waited in hiding and stabbed a man to death, a negro, over a quarrel about sharing a woman.
Sefadu had not understood matters fully at the time. Those early days were clouded and confused with the terrors of the voyage and the hardships they had suffered on first landing. As a child, aboard the slaveship, he had seen death come in fearsome ways; he had heard people shrieking around him in the stinking darkness and he had joined in, screaming, not knowing whether it was fear of death or desire for release. But this public death that Wilson had suffered was not like any other he had seen. The white man had been brought out and tied up and slaughtered like an animal. He had not struggled, he had not believed it, he had walked among the people as if in a dream. Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in.
At ten, Sefadu had not been able to understand this because his idea of justice was more personal. It puzzled him still, twelve years later. Killing Wilson had been good for the settlement, it had shown the black people that their lives were valuable to the white people, but he could not see how that could be called justice. Delblanc, dead now himself, had been the great talker for Wilson’s death, just as he was talking for it again now, in piping tones, outside the hut:
‘Turn you arse about, I talkin’ to you. What you name?’
‘My name Wilsoon.’
‘Wilsoon, you kill one man. How ken people live tagedder if dey do dat? How ken dey learn share woman if dey do dat? The worl’ fall in pieces if dey do dat. So now we all go kill you, Wilsoon …’
They had tied Wilson to a tree and discharged their muskets at close range into his body. Sefadu remembered how at that sudden explosion of sound great flocks of birds had risen from the marshes. For some moments their wings had filled the sky. Wilson had hung in his ropes all that day and the next for everyone to see …
Sefadu paused to blow dust from the mouth of the tiny hole he was making. The little pile of pearls on his low bench was diminishing slowly. He sat cross-legged on the floor to work, in the light of the entrance. The image of Dinka came into his mind as he had seen her last, the shapely arms, the proud carriage of the head, the long, narrow eyes both languorous and mocking. On her lower lip, close to the join, there was a tender flush of blood, dark pink, as if at some previous time this lip had been turned a little more inward, into the protective softness of the mouth …
Sullivan too was busy that afternoon. He was replacing a broken string in his fiddle. He would win Dinka by the power of music, and he desired the instrument of persuasion to be in best possible condition. Sullivan’s life from earliest childhood had been too hard for him to maintain much consistency of principle or opinion – that is for more sheltered folk – but he had retained a belief in music as an aid to love.
He had been alerted to the need for swift action by his talk with Billy and Inchebe and his realization that both of them had a fancy for Dinka, in spite of being settled men with a good wife. He was by no means convinced that his praise for Sallian had done much to make them see the error of their ways. Indeed, he was rather afraid that his words had misfired and roused their suspicions, Inchebe’s particularly. Inchebe was a subtle and a guileful fellow; there was a good deal to fear from this quarter, Sullivan felt.
Fortune had favoured him in the shape of a fresh-killed deer brought in by Hughes the day before. He had selected a length of gut from the carcass and had squeezed and nipped the blood and excrement out of it with utmost care, pulling it repeatedly between finger and thumb until it was as clean and sweet as he could make it. All night it had been soaking in a strong lye of wood ash. Now he had begun to peel away the softened film of skin lining the outside, a task requiring patience and devotion and lightness of touch, all of which qualities Sullivan brought to it and desired also to bring to Dinka. Meanwhile, as he worked his hopes rose, he whistled between his teeth a tune of his boyhood, ‘Katy Brannigan’.
His plan was formed and he felt that it was a good one. He would tune his fiddle to the maximum tenderness it was capable of. He would wait for nightfall. After the evening meal, when things had settled down, he would make his way to Dinka’s hut, which fortunately was one of those on the edge of the settlement. Once there, he would sit outside her door and give her a tune or two. He would serenade her. He had chosen the tunes already: ‘Oh Hear Me’ and ‘Rose of Ireland’. She would be moved by the beauty of it, she would take him in, he would be home and dry. Perhaps she would offer him, in the way of preliminary courtesy, a drop of grain beer. Dinka made an excellent grain beer …
Of course, there would be something public in it, people round would be certain to hear him, they would come crowding out to see this prodigy of song. But Sullivan had never been averse to an audience. And Dinka would not mind her neighbours knowing she was desired by one of the main music-makers of the place. She would be pleased. It was, he sought for the word in his mind, homage. Sullivan knew women. Women liked homage the world over.
He made a narrow loop at one end of the gut and passed a short toggle through it. The other end he tied to a corner post of his hut. He began to twist the gut, pausing often to run the twists higher with his fingers, increasing the tension. She was a beauty, taut and supple as any man could wish.
As soon as he left the shore and began to strike inland, Calley stopped from time to time to gather pieces of pitchwood. These he laid on top of the dead child and then roped the body and the logs together so that the stack rose high above his shoulders. He was almost doubled under this weight when he reached the first huts of the settlement.
The logs were deposited for safe-keeping outside Tabakali’s hut. He knew she would not cheat him and he knew she was charitable with food. On her advice he carried the body to Paris’s sickroom; he was mightily relieved to be told there, by Paris himself, that he had done the right thing.
The body lay there for the rest of the afternoon under a blanket to keep off the flies. It was quite unmarked and Paris could discover no certain cause of death. The boy had not died by drowning, there was no water in the lungs; he had been dead when thrown over the side. It seemed likely that a flux or fever had carried him off. Or the shock of captivity, Paris thought, remembering some of the deaths on board the Liverpool Merchant. Fixed melancholy, that had been Thurso’s phrase for it. But no children had died from this cause, none that he could remember, only adults. Children did not die of unhappiness, they were still too close to the dawn of life … The brandmark on the boy’s chest was an S and an L joined in the shape of a loop with one side curving and one straight. It could be the mark of any of a thousand merchants from a dozen nations. The only one that could be definitely excluded was his uncle. K for Kemp. A long way from Liverpool to this wrecked life. There came into his mind an old adage of the Guinea traders which Barton had let fall to him once – Barton could seldom resist a quote: Heaven is high and Europe far away…
For some time he stood there, in the long, open-fronted hut where he kept his jars of herbs and his instruments and his few belongings, looking at the face of the dead boy. The faces of the dead resemble no living face, but Paris judged this boy to be about the age of his own son. Quite unexpectedly he felt the pricking of tears. Only by fortunate accident had Kenka been born to freedom and kind treatment …
Several people had seen Calley with his burden and the news of the dead boy passed around. Almost everyone in the compound or the immediate surroundings came at some time during the afternoon to see the body. They stood for a while and discussed with one another where the boy might have come from and what people he belonged to. Most saw some resemblance to their own people. Kireku’s woman, Amansa, came with a funeral mat of palmetto leaf. The children stood in a ring and stared at the face whenever it was uncovered. Paris gave Kenka a task of special responsibility, much envied by the others: he was armed with a fly-whisk in the form of a stick with palm fibres fastened to it, and told to sit at the boy’s head and guard his face from flies. This he did with utmost diligence and gravity, resisting all attempts of other children to relieve him. It was to remain a day of high event in Kenka’s mind through all the years to come, coloured by the pride and importance of this task enjoined on him by his father.
So the dead boy lay there while his grave was being dug by Calley and Bulum Iboti. Patterns of light and shade moved over him as the sun shifted lower, until finally it sank below the trees and he lay in shadow. They had decided to bury him in the common burial place, which was on a bluff at the edge of the pine ridge, overlooking a sizeable creek. Here were the mounded remains of an ancient settlement of the Indians, long abandoned. The ground had been raised to a dozen feet or more by an accumulation of earth and a heavy dust of shards and shell fragments, making it possible to dig graves deep enough to cheat the animals. Customs vary, and some of the dead were elsewhere. Some lay under the huts they had lived in; two had been exhumed and their bones placed in palm-leaf baskets. But most who had died in the years of the settlement were buried here and their graves marked by posts with an initial or abbreviated name burnt on. Stitched in their palmetto shrouds, Delblanc and Wilson had been laid to rest here, and the man Wilson had killed, and the child that Tabakali had lost. There was a post here too for Deakin; occasionally the wandering Calley came and sat beside it and remembered his friend.
The boy was stitched into his tough shroud and slung to a pole borne by Billy Blair and Shantee Danka. On the mound of the cemetery there was some sunlight still, broken by the long, straight shadows of the graveposts. Nadri was in the last of the sunlight as he stood beside the grave. As a man generally respected, he had been chosen to say a few words.
‘Nobody sabee where dis boy come from,’ he said. ‘To Vai people he look like he come from Vai people, to Susu people he look like he Susu an’ so it go like dat. Everybody say he look like dey own people. Dis boy got no tribe cut, he got no cockskin cut. Slavemark on him, look like done only two-three day, mebee dis boy nearly die already when dey put burnmark, mebbe not. Who put dis slavemark on him, Frenchman, Inglisman, Danaman? Only ting we ken say buckra man slaver done it. If he got no mark tell us who he belong, we oblige say dis dead pikin belong nobody. But wait one minnit, what dat mean? My pinion dat mean he belong everybody. He belong all of us here.’
Nadri’s voice had deepened on this and his listeners saw that he was moved. ‘Dis pikin belong everybody,’ he repeated. ‘So we go bury dis one here, longside us people, an’ we go put dat burnmark on him gravepost. Dat burnmark him name.’
With that, the body was lowered into the grave. Iboti, who had helped to dig the grave, stayed behind to fill it in. He was too poor a man to work for nothing and had been promised a rabbit and a bag of chestnut meal – quite valuable this, as the nearest chestnut trees lay far to the north. This was a bad time for Iboti, perhaps the worst since the terrible days of his capture and enslavement. His woman did not want him and treated him with scorn. He was due to be charged with witchcraft next day and he was deeply frightened and unhappy at this. Also he was afraid of being caught here among the dead at nightfall. For this reason he worked rapidly, protesting his innocence and uttering propitiatory phrases in a continuous mutter as he worked. He was a fearful man and not blessed with great intelligence. Only fear of devils and hope in Tongman’s advocacy kept him from running off into the night.
Sullivan adhered to his plan in every detail. He ate no supper. The tension of his feelings took away appetite. There was not much to eat in any case: he had neglected to provide for himself and he felt in no frame of mind for the communal supper at his woman’s hut, along with one and quite possibly both of her other men, Libby and Zobi, and her four children, the latest only a year old.
He waited in his own hut until the cooking fires were low and the meal-time gossip over. The shouts of children continued afterwards but they too were hushed after a while. The moon was high when he emerged and a faint light from it lay across the compound. There was a chill in the air and a smell of wood smoke and mist. Sullivan shivered a little. He had taken pains with his appearance, tying back his long hair with a leather thong, trimming his beard, chewing mastic to clean his teeth and sweeten his breath.
There were people still moving about here and there, but no one took much notice of Sullivan as he made his way to the corner of the compound where Dinka lived. No light showed from her hut, but he was not particularly surprised at this; people in the settlement generally slept early and rose with the sun. Dinka would be roused from her first sleep by his music and what better way for a woman to wake?
He chose a place some yards from the entrance and seated himself on the ground. After waiting a while to steady his breathing he settled the fiddle to his shoulder and began to play the air of ‘Oh, Hear Me!’ He had a husky tenor voice, not very strong, but pleasing – he had used it in dusty lanes and cobbled streets of the past, in another life, singing for coppers, dragging a leg for more pathetic effect. Now he put all the feeling he knew into it:
Oh, hear me, my charmer!
Wouldst kill me with scorn?
See, the east lightens,
Soon cometh the dawn.
He was aware of movements, voices, people stirring in the huts around, but he kept his eyes on the entrance to Dinka’s. There had been no response from this quarter so far. He repeated the first two lines of the melody on his fiddle, drawing out the notes as tremulously as possible. Still no sign of anything. He began the second verse:
Hear me, oh, hear me,
Give ease to my pain …
Abruptly he fell silent. A figure had at last appeared at the threshold, naked, but not the one hoped for and not the right sex even – a fact grossly apparent to the staring Sullivan considerably before he knew the face for Sefadu’s. The voice, when it came, was not unkind: ‘She no ken hear you now, fiddleman, she busy too much. Come back in de mornin’.’
The strains of the fiddle had come to Kenka as he lay between waking and sleeping. He had heard fiddle-music before and knew that it must be Sullivan. At the same time, perhaps because he was not fully awake or because the music was distant and sad, it seemed like a voice of the night, not coming from any particular place or person. There was something magical about it and for this reason Kenka never asked any questions concerning the music, nor indeed mentioned it to anyone until many years later in a different place, when he was an old man and nearly blind.
As he lay looking through the darkness he heard the silence left by the ceasing of the music fill again with small accustomed sounds, faint rustles in the thatch above him, the deep, regular breathing of his brother and sister lying nearby, the distant sibilance of the sea – not exactly a sound, this, but a very faint escape of silence.
He began to think about the night-time deer-hunt which he had been promised – his first. It was due to take place very shortly now, before the full moon. Shantee Danka was back, after an absence of several days. He had returned for the Palaver. It was Danka who had seen the deer-tracks and the cropped shoots in a hummock no more than an hour away, beyond the freshwater lagoon. Danka would be leading them. He was a notable hunter and very strong – Kenka had once measured Danka’s bow against the thickness of his own wrist and found no difference. About him, as about almost all the older men of the settlement, there was a legendary glamour. Danka had been one of those who brought the ship up from the sea …
Kenka had never been to the hummock where the tracks had been found, but he felt he knew it because he had questioned both Paris and Nadri at different times and both had described it to him in detail, just as they had described the method of the hunt. There was a bayhead over a narrow stream. The stream flowed out of a tunnel of moonvines and there were small red fish in it and it opened into a pool that was completely roofed over by the branches of trees like a room with a floor of water.
He began to rehearse the hunt in his mind, as he had done often before. Every phase of it had taken on the colour of ritual, and everything had to be done in a precise, unvarying order. They would leave while it was still light. He would see the silver stream flowing out of the vines and the red fish flashing in the clear water. He would wade upstream with the others, through the low opening in the tangle. They would wait at the edge of the clearing, making sure they were on the right side of the wind so that their scent would not be carried to the thickets where the deer came. The deer liked dark and secret places, Kenka knew, they were timid and swift to take alarm. But in spite of this, they always wanted to know the meaning of things and it was this that was their undoing. Dat de ting capsai dem, Nadri had said. Same-same ting every time.
When it was growing dark he and Tekka would be allowed to light the fires of splinterwood in the shallow pans that the men carried on their backs in a rope harness. These made a light just strong enough – too much light would frighten the deer away. Deer don’ stan’ for blazelight … Kenka lay completely still, on his back, his hands held down by his sides. The dark shapes of the deer would approach silently through the trees, drawn by the light. They would be dazzled but still they would come nearer, not seeing the forms of the hunters or the tightened bows with the heavy arrows. The light of the fire would shine in their eyes – their eyes would be wide open and blind. Perhaps at the last moment some fear would turn them away, but then it would be too late. There would come the twang and swish and the deer would fall and kick for a little while and then be still.
With the death of the deer the night would be empty … Kenka was obscurely troubled as he lay there. The deer was killed because it wanted to know the meaning of everything and he understood this because he was the same himself. He had heard his father say it to Tabakali. Dis Kenka cur’us boy, allus want de answer, what dis mean, what dat mean …
His father had seemed pleased … The glowing, sightless eyes of the deer faded in the darkness among the trees and Kenka drifted towards sleep.