On the day when, one after the other, another of our teachers left us, the sun climbing the sky in Ghana had not reached its zenith. After Grandma’s death, Okomfo Gran-pa was next to go. As he began his journey home to his village, Linet, jolted by the memory of ink on a patch of pink, turned to her upstairs window.
I was halfway through watering our livestock in wolf-light. Overhead, a hawk drifting in the sky arched a wing, and blocking the last of the sun, cast her shadow on me. The shadow hovered. I looked up and at that moment a flash of insight set my wolf eyes blazing. I watched events unfold.
On Bodmin Moor I saw what Linet was seeing: Nana Merrimore, head high, back straight, long strides taking her to the lake.
‘Nana. Nana, stop,’ I hear Linet cry.
Heartbeats drumming, I follow her down the stairs.
‘Run, Linet, run,’ I tell her.
‘Nana! Nana,’ she screams. ‘Stop!’
She tries to sprint, but Bracken, a cat bewitched, pounces and, clawing at her feet, foils Linet’s attempts to run unhindered.
Wolf eyes sharp as a sabre, I race past Linet. In a white nightdress, hair braided, Nana Merrimore sees my shade at the edge of her vision and ignores me.
‘Think again,’ I tell her sensing her intention. ‘Think of Linet!’
Her reply is to open her arms wide and wade into the lake.
‘No! No!’ Linet sobs.
Deaf to her cries, Nana Merrimore ventures deeper. Dipping, slipping, she croons to the women of the lake as to long-lost sisters and summons them to her side:
‘Sister swan, sister auk,
Sister starling, sister hawk.
Sisters of day, sisters of night
Owl, raven, curlew and kite
Watch over my Linet-girl!
But you, sister chough, settle on her,
Red in beak and feet, build a nest for her.
Hold her through life’s brawl and squall.
Watch over my Linet-girl, sisters all!’
Nana Merrimore sings as the lake splashes her waist, her chest, her neck. Then with only her head above water, she closes her eyes and with a sigh allows the drowning pool to claim her.
I looked on, stunned, Linet’s whimpers of pain in my ears: ‘Hush, Linet, hush,’ I said to her.
The answer I received was a deafening roar that shook my body. An explosion. Not where I stood by the lake with the hawk overhead but far away. Around me, our camels continued lapping water; our horses continued grazing. Altan, no longer thirsty, was rootling through scrubland for blades of fresh grass when Pa’s horse, Takhi, neighed. Altan did the same. Then Takhi, tossing his head, cantered in the direction of where his master was, towards the mountains of the Sleeping Giant.
Ears pricked, Altan sought me out with his muzzle. He brushed against my arm and straight away the scene thrust before me shimmered into motion.
‘Pa,’ I whispered.
He had left early that morning for the Sleeping Giant in a truck with several herdsmen. According to our sources, in preparation for the mining of copper to begin, an Australian company would start blasting the terrain that day. With our pleas ignored by our government, the plan Pa and his friends conceived, was to make it impossible to damage any part of our sacred space by demonstrating on it. Not a crevice or a canyon of the mountain range would be harmed by skin-walkers. Not when our lives depended on water that after settling in the Giant’s mouth ran down into the steppes.
While some of our herdsmen argued with skin-walkers, Pa led two men up a ravine to the site of the proposed blast. The men down below pointed at them. That’s when the white men, arms waving, shouted. One of them took out a phone, tapped the keypad and shook his head at the same time as Pa’s intuition made him stop and turn. Pa saw arms signalling and alerted his friends. Between them they deciphered the gestures and bolted.
A minute later, the blast sounded, and the mountain shuddered. Columns cracked, shattering into rocks that careened in a tempest of boulders. Blocks tumbled down a side of the Giant and, collapsing into rubble, took on the shape of a crouching Siberian tiger. The tiger growled and for a second, I believed the worst was over. The rocks seemed to slow to a crawl, faltering in their descent before the tiger roared, pelting the valley with pebbles and stones.
I watched, petrified, a prisoner captured in the haze of my grey, unblinking gaze, as Pa, leading his friends, skidded down the mountainside. I tried to call out but couldn’t. Tried to point out a path to safety though none existed.
Twisting and turning this way and that, diving to one side, then the other, Pa and his men scrambled for their lives till the moment came when the tiger leaped and, opening its jaws, devoured them in the crush.
*
I sank to my knees, dazed.
‘Pa, Pa,’ I kept saying, unable to believe what my eyes had seen or conceive of a world without him. Through summers spent grazing our animals on the steppes, over winters that froze the ground we trod on and chilled our bones, Pa guided us up to the mountains and back again. Who would lead us now?
My brothers Chinua and Gan were ten and seven, still young. Could Ma shoulder Pa’s mantle?
The uncertainty I felt about life without Pa hitched onto a caravan on a trail to nowhere. Most unsettling was my doubt. Even though Grandma had forewarned me of the events I’d witnessed; even though she’d cautioned that one after the other our teachers would be taken from us, when truth spoke to me in the voice of an old woman, I was too fond of her face to hear clearly.
Straight away distrust ensnared me, separating me from Pa. What was the purpose of being a shaman if he couldn’t foresee his own fate? More to the point, why have a presentiment of disaster when there was no chance of stopping it?
Incandescent, I stretched my arms to Father Sky and wailed. Where were my sisters now that they too were in mourning? And Little Linet? Alone, what would become of her? What would become of us all? I thought of my sisters and yet sobbed for myself, thrashing Mother Earth first with my fists, clawing at her with my nails.
My horse nuzzled me gently while a southerly wind stirred, rustling the long grasses of the steppes. Above me, the hawk was still whirling, and when her shadow grazed me a second time, the heat in my tears cooled. Somehow, hawk, wind and horse combined to ease my distress and despite the insults I’d flung at them, earth and sky conspired to help me.
Once I’d stopped crying, Altan nipped me, urging me to sit up. Bit by bit he persuaded me to stroke him. I was sitting on the ground caressing his forehead, when Ma appeared. She’d been out since late afternoon, scavenging for herbs to season our evening meal. One look at my tear-stained face and she knew something was gravely amiss.
‘Are you hurt, Zula?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
Her face grew pale. Her fingers tensed, gripping the pouch at her side as her eyes darted, glancing at the dirt on my clothes, my hands and nails blackened from the thrashing I’d given Mother Earth.
‘What is it, Zula?’
The bite of tears stung me once again. Unwilling to say the words she had to hear, I covered my face.
Ma looked on and absorbing the fold of my body, the tussle between pain and fury on my face, she asked: ‘Has something happened to your father?’
I gagged and my soul sobbed as Ma stifled a scream in her throat. Even so, she sat down, and as she held me, stroking locks of my hair that fell like smatterings of snow over her hand, I howled like a lost wolf cub.
*
On the day that Pa’s body was due to come home, the faint grumblings of a storm hung in the air. Our animals sensed it: the horses were skittish, the sheep unable to graze, while our camels, usually docile, refused to settle. I sniffed the wind and felt prickles of dust in my nose. A fork of lightning flashed across a pale afternoon sky that darkened as thunder rumbled. Then, all at once, a cold wind swirled from the mountains. Whistling over the steppes, it stirred grass this way and that, like a giant’s hand would a mighty cauldron. I turned to look at the horizon and saw billows of black clouds. Clouds laden with dust. I called my brothers, Ma as well.
We were dressed in our best clothes in readiness for Pa’s arrival: long-sleeved tunics in yellow, folded at the chest over trousers. We quickly took the tunics off, put on our work clothes, and set to.
Thankfully, we each knew what to do. You don’t spend years breeding livestock without understanding the hazards involved: drought, ferocious dust storms and freezing cold winters that few creatures survive. Pa once told me that the times we were living through were confused. Nothing was as it should be because the earth was changing; and as it changed it behaved with the unpredictability of an angry child: weeping one moment, sullen the next. A child that spits and rages, stamping its foot at every turn. Wind magic was futile in the situation we found ourselves in. Nothing would soothe the child’s lament; nothing could ease its frenzy. And now that Father Sky had taken to hoarding rain high above the clouds, the frequency of dust storms carried over the mountains from China was intensifying.
My little brother, Gan, named for the boldness of his spirit, helped me open the gates of the corral as we started moving our animals behind our gers to shelter them from the storm. Pa’s youngest brother, Batu, had joined us the day before. He’d arrived on our pastureland with the ease of a late summer breeze, behaving as if he’d never been away. Struck by how warmly Ma had embraced him, how readily he praised Pa for helping him find a bolthole in the city, I hushed Grandma’s whispers in my ear.
My uncle had left that morning with family members of the other men killed in the rock fall to retrieve their bodies. Batu had brought with him a ger and three mouths to feed – his wife, Knenbish, and two small daughters. His ger gave us a second windbreak in the gathering storm, another pair of hands, another set of feet and the quick wits of Knenbish, could make the difference between life and death.
‘Hurry, Chinua!’ Ma cried.
Chinua, on horseback, hooted at our sheep. He rounded them up and whooping, forced them behind the two gers, where Knenbish and I tried to calm them.
In front of us sinister clouds of dust, rolling in from the mountains, crept closer.
When the sheep were safely in place, I returned to our corralled animals and called Altan. In the throng of horses, I heard his whinny. As soon as he was within range, l jumped on him and, steering him with my knees, drove our horses to where the sheep lay, heads down, eyes closed to the wind.
By now flurries of air blew in blasts, battering the earth flat, rattling at the doors of our homes. And with every gust came the pinch of tiny splinters of grime. They nipped at my ears and crept up my nose, half-blinding and throttling me at the same time. I tore the strip of cloth I wore around my neck in half. A quick flip and roll and it became a muffler protecting my nose and mouth, and a dust mask for Altan as well. My eyes I kept half-shut.
The storm was almost upon us when the wind rammed the gate shut and slammed little Gan to the ground.
Ma hauled him up and handing him over to Knenbish, said: ‘You two, go inside.’
Gan protested but Ma insisted: ‘I’ve no time to argue, son. But if you’re as bold as you’re supposed to be, make your father proud of you today and do exactly as I say.’
Knenbish dragged him into our ger.
To me, Ma yelled: ‘Faster, Zula, we’re just about out of time. The camels.’
I galloped back to the corral to round up the last of our livestock. Chinua opened the gate and riding on opposite sides we steered the camels behind our gers. We secured them in a way that created an outer ring with their bodies to shelter the rest of the animals. The reason being that the nostrils, eye-lashes and eyelids of a camel are so wonderfully made, they’re better able to filter dust than almost any other creature in the world.
We were nearly done, about to rope them in and run indoors, when a young calf broke loose. Its adopted mother scrambled up, clambering to reclaim him. Chinua managed to calm the mother and hold her in place. Not so the calf. Indeed, the sight of him lurching in the direction of the storm brought Pa’s absence closer. In one of the last rituals he’d performed, Pa had coaxed the camel and calf to bond. One had lost its mother, the other a calf, so Pa sang a song to encourage the cow to suckle the waif.
Mindful of Pa’s song, its sweetness and lilt, I yearned to hear his voice once again. My heart ached as memory flamed into grief: those low notes of his, the steady beat of his drum. If it hadn’t been for the sturdiness of Altan, I would have keeled over and wandered into the storm as distraught as the agitated calf. But Altan steadied me, and I heard Pa speak to me for the first time since his death.
‘Don’t chase the calf, Zula, if you chase it you will frighten it even more. Sing to him instead.’
Despite the clamour, I dismounted and standing resolute, eyes half-closed, I allowed Pa’s song to fill me. Then I sang about the love between mothers and their children, about ties that bind and continue down the ages from one generation to the next. Timid to begin with, faltering at times, I almost stopped. But as Pa’s presence grew within me, he swept me along and giving my voice wings, it soared. Before I knew it, I was singing a song Pa hadn’t had time to teach me: the song that makes camels weep.
The wind must have carried the tune, for by the time I’d finished, through my half-closed eyes, I saw the runaway calf coming towards me. Behind him, shepherding him home before the curse of dust-laden wind overwhelmed us, was Pa’s horse, Takhi.