Makena awoke terrified, with no idea where she was. She came crawling up from the dank, dark swamp of a nightmare and surfaced blind, damp with sweat. Her cheeks were wet too, as if she’d been crying.
For a minute that felt like a year, she could see and hear nothing. Gradually, mercifully, sounds and shapes made themselves known: the music of the nearby river, the curve of the tent-flap open to the stars, and her father in his sleeping bag beside her.
She shook his arm urgently. There was no response. She shook him again. Nothing. Holding her own breath, she waited for him to inhale. He didn’t. She breathed twice more and still he was motionless.
He was dead! Her baba was dead and she was alone in the wilderness, easy picking for hungry wild animals.
Makena grabbed his hand. ‘Baba, don’t leave me,’ she half-sobbed.
His eyes opened a fraction. ‘Don’t be afraid, Makena girl,’ he mumbled. ‘The hyenas won’t hurt you while I’m here. They’re not as fierce as they look.’
Then he was gone again, snoring faintly.
It was enough. Makena lay back down, reassured. Her pulse rate slowed. She told herself off for being so silly. So childish. Hadn’t her mama said that nightmares were simply brain soup? Fears, ideas and memories all mushed up together.
The horror of the dream was not easily dismissed. The details had slithered away, slippery as a mamba, but the black, suffocating venom of it throbbed in Makena’s veins.
She fixed her gaze on the comforting triangle of night sky. Before turning in, her father had tied back the tent-flap so Makena could lie in her sleeping bag and see stars sprinkled like sherbet above the black crags.
Strange that she should suffer bad dreams after one of the best days of her life. She blamed the hyenas. Their laughter had unsettled her. There’d been nothing funny about it. One minute she’d been enjoying a peaceful dinner by the campfire; the next it was as if the dead were being raised.
The first primal, ghostly whoop had sent her scuttling to her father’s side. He’d hugged her tight and told her the hyenas wouldn’t hurt her while he was with her. ‘They’re not as fierce as they look.’
It worked until an unseen cackle of hyenas joined the chorus. Their deranged howls and coughs ricocheted round the gorge. Spooked, the fat, fluffy tree hyraxes responded with equally chilling screams. Makena saw red eyes and hunch-shouldered silhouettes lurking in every shifting shadow.
‘Should we hide in the tent, Baba? What if they gang up on us, like wolves?’
Her father laughed but not unkindly. He was making her a bush hot water bottle – a brick-sized rock heated by the fire and wrapped in hessian.
‘No, Makena, they will not be coming for our fresh curried trout and rice. They’re too busy squabbling over their own dinner – probably something rotten. They prefer carcasses when they smell more … interesting.’
Makena was not convinced. She’d heard too many stories about hyenas using their immense jaws to snap off people’s arms as if they were twigs.
‘These Mount Kenya hyenas are clever,’ her father continued. ‘They know the Swahili proverb: “A cowardly hyena lives for many years”. It’s one that works for people too.’
‘But it’s bad to be a coward, Baba. If you’re a coward it means you’re weak and pitiful and can’t be trusted.’
His eyes twinkled. ‘I can see you’ve given the matter some serious thought. As you get older, you will discover that life’s not so simple. There are times when it’s wise to be cautious and avoid too many risks, especially if you have a family and want to be around for years to take care of them.’
‘Like you?’
‘Yes, like me.’
‘But you’re brave, Baba. You wouldn’t be a climber if you were not. If being cowardly is sometimes a smart thing, does that mean being brave is sometimes a stupid thing?’
He laughed. ‘It’s too late at night for trick questions. All I know is this. If you are brave for a noble cause, because you want to help others or fight for justice or save a life – perhaps even your own life – then being brave is the best thing of all. Now this chattering is making me thirsty. Are you going to help me make some chai or do I have to do it on my own?’
Makena tossed and turned in her sleeping bag. There wasn’t a whole lot of sleeping going on. Her mind teemed with images. If she heard a noise outside, she tried to persuade herself that it was a rock hyrax looking for scraps, not a hyena on the look-out for a crunchy and delicious child. She reminded herself that, so far, the mountain had proved itself a friend.
On their walk through the mossy glades of the cloud forest that afternoon, she and her father had not been threatened by marauding buffalo or elephants. Far from it. The largest creatures they’d clapped eyes on were a troop of colobus monkeys and a dainty, black-fronted duiker.
At this altitude, the trees were mostly short, their branches twisted and plastered with lichen. The only evidence that elephants ever passed between them was a lone footprint. Makena had bent to examine the faint, lacy sketch of it. Her own boot prints were twice as deep.
‘But where are the others? I mean, it can’t be a one-legged elephant.’
‘They’re there if you know how to look for them, but you might need a microscope,’ her father told her. ‘Africa’s giants are light on their feet. There are Mount Kenya mole shrews who leave deeper tracks.’
He showed her the place where he’d broken his ankle just hours into his first ever job as a mountain porter.
‘If I’d been doing something daring it wouldn’t have been so painful, but I just tripped over a tussock of elephant grass and landed badly. The other porters nearly died laughing. I nearly died of embarrassment.’
Mobile phones had not yet been invented and two-way radios were never much use on the mountain. The expedition clients, wealthy businessmen, had been keen to proceed, and no guide or porter could be spared to help Baba. He’d been forced to hop, crawl and drag himself down the mountain to a point where he could wait for help. The only thing that had kept his spirits up was the tea he brewed from the yellow flowers of St John’s Wort.
Makena had heard this story many times but seeing where it happened made it more real.
‘How come you didn’t just give up and choose an easier job? Lion taming or something. That’s what I would do if I broke my ankle on my first time up the mountain. I’d think it was a sign.’
‘A sign? A sign of what? That I was too clumsy or stupid to be a mountain guide and must give up on my dreams? No, Makena, climbing is like the journey of life. You start slowly. You try one way and if it doesn’t work out or you meet some obstacles, you keep searching until you find another trail. There is always a second chance. If you keep on walking and keep on trying, you’ll get there in the end.’