Drums Along the Congo Read online

  Raymond remembers seeing hippos in the lake when he was a boy, but Pygmies and hunters from Boha decimated the population years ago. There may be a few cloistered in the remote small lakes to the north and northwest, but that’s Pygmy territory, and men from Boha won’t venture there. Jungle elephants are still a common sight on these shores, I’m told, coming and going along regular routes. When I ask about exploring the land of the Pygmies, Raymond starts talking in Lingala, shaking his head and wagging a finger. Innocent translates.

  “He says you’re crazy… That land is taboo. Devils are everywhere… Even talking about it is crazy.”

  Several hundred yards off the starboard rail, we spot an animal the size of a small deer taking a sip of water. It’s too far away to identify, but its spindly legs and bluish color suggest a duiker. Unlike the hog, it casts nervous glances in every direction; sighting us, it retreats calmly into a thicket of vines.

  Raymond wants to steer across the lake, skipping the northern section. “Only birds over there,” he complains. With Innocent’s help, I prevail and keep the boat headed for the waterfowl. They don’t seem to mind our presence as we drift in for a closer look. Near the shore stands a goliath heron almost five feet tall, with long stick legs and massive grayish wings. Its bill is longer than my forearm. A little farther out is a blue-brown tiger bittern. The species is known to be both jittery and elusive, taking flight at the first inkling of danger, but this particular bird appears unconcerned about the three men in a pirogue; perhaps, for the first time, a bird is enjoying my soft renditions from my avian songbook. Flocks of tree ducks and Hartlaub ducks bob in the deep water and dabble closer to shore. Off to one side, as if shunned by the other fowl, is a gaggle of knob-nosed geese. Their necks and heads are splotched in black, and a large ugly comb resembling a goiter sits atop their bills. To the right, in a snag jutting out into the lake, a nesting dabchick eyes us nervously.

  Raymond digs in his spear and impishly thrusts the pirogue toward the birds. The tiger bittern leads the others aloft. The ducks run along the surface, the muffled patter of their webbed feet building as they gain speed. The herons pump their mighty wings and throw out their necks, straining skyward, but once aloft, they make flight look easy.

  “Shhh!” Raymond bids. He turns the canoe around and starts flashing instructions with his left hand while he aims the spear with his right hand. I watch the veins in his neck bulge as he cocks his arm again.

  “Nice shot!” Innocent says.

  With a twang, a lizard is nailed to a tree twenty-five yards away. We land, and Raymond jumps ashore to retrieve the two-foot-long reptile. It has a triple-homed snout and a stubby tail, with yellowish skin flecked in black.

  “Good eating,” Raymond guarantees, “but I want his grandfather.” He flings the lizard onto my feet in the bilge. Its legs twitch, and I jump backward, nearly capsizing us.

  Two years ago he speared a twelve-foot lizard with the same coloring on the western shore. “It was longer than the pirogue,” Raymond says. I roll my eyes in disbelief—not even monitor lizards grow that large. He opens his juju bag to show me one of its horns, about the size of my thumb. Could it have been a small chipekwe?

  “No … no,” he repeats. A chipekwe horn wouldn’t fit inside his bag. According to Raymond, they are indeed twenty-five to thirty feet long. “Chipekwes are big and powerful gods… I could never kill one. The spirit would speak to me here and here,” he says, pointing to his right temple and his heart.

  Raymond doesn’t embellish his stories about giant creatures. He neither talks about nor believes in fire-breathing beasts and animals that can disappear into thin air. “I just say what I saw and what I know,” he claims. Innocent confides to me that he believes Raymond’s accounts of record-sized fish and animals, but I haven’t made up my mind, still anxious to see evidence of the monster menagerie.

  There’s no one at the camp when we return. Raymond buries the lizard under a mound of leaves and takes off to look for snakes, leaving me and Innocent to set up the campsite. Previous expeditions have left us three lean-tos and several raised platforms. Bits of aluminum foil lie crumpled in the ashes of a campfire pit, and gobs of plastic hang from the sides of two semi-charred logs. Someone has made racks for drying clothes and hanging bags. After adding our initials to those of the Brits carved in a nearby tree, we reroof the lean-tos and collect fronds for our beds.

  In a short time, ants and beetles are swarming over the lizard carcass, and I suggest we build a food locker, one we can hoist into the air. I sketch a design for a cage with a latching side panel, but an hour later, when we string it from a tree, it looks more like a medieval torture device.

  “No more design projects for you,” Innocent declares.

  Nimbostratus clouds, greasy black and wet looking, start rolling in from the west. Squeezed under them is a menacing wall of battleship gray streaked with lightning. Soon day becomes night and rain pours down.

  During the next two days, we see more rain than a Bedouin might experience in a lifetime. The downpour never lets up, but the wind comes and goes, swirling in squalls and then leaving us long stretches of calm. Around the camp tempers flare. It’s impossible to keep a fire going, and cold roast monkey is the only item on the menu. Ange and the other hunters periodically go hunting, but return each time empty-handed. Innocent and I search the forest for dinosaur trails and molombo vines, but we, too, come up empty, finding a few vines, but none that bear fruit.

  CHAPTER 25

  A FRESH EVENING BREEZE chases away the clouds, and the sky flicks on its lights. The constellation of the Ship floats over the treetops; off its bow and a bit to the east, the Wolf winks at me, and the Crow, with its bill pointed at Sipca, seems ready to steal the virgin’s jewel. Moonlight transforms the dull-colored lake water into a silvery ellipse. Everything seems larger in this light; the lake looks to be an inland sea, and the trees are masts of an outsized fleet, the vast armada of Mokele-Mbembe riding at anchor.

  Mole crickets emerge from their burrows with a whirring sound; ground crickets stridulate, playing their comblike organs. I time their chirps over a fourteen-second period and add forty to determine the temperature, a trick I learned as a child reading The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Tonight’s results seem accurate, 69 degrees Fahrenheit. A hornbill shouts from the west, and a greater bush baby punctuates the night with its disturbingly childlike screams. The first Western explorers to hear the call of a bush baby, thinking it was a lost toddler, went out to help, only to discover a dog-sized animal, with a long bushy tail and a powerful set of lungs. Bush babies leave messages for one another by depositing varying amounts of urine on a tree limb, and I wonder how much urine it takes to describe six men seated around a campfire.

  “Kree … kree.” An unusually shrill noise is getting closer by the second. Ange and Gabriel stop cleaning the rust off their guns and glance about. As I stand up, a bat zips past my face, and behind it, in hot pursuit, is a bat hawk.

  “Kree … kree,” the hawk skirls, pursuing its prey like a fighter plane.

  We catch glimpses of the chase in the moonlight. The bat soars and swerves, changing direction every few seconds, but it can’t shake the raptor.

  “Kree … kree.” They head toward us again.

  Theo picks up his machete, holding it as if he’s a batter at the plate, and swings wildly at the fliers. Crepuscular predator and prey spiral around the campfire until the bat flies into the side of the tent and clings to it. The hawk banks and heads in for the kill, but Innocent waves a stick and shouts, forcing it back over the water.

  “Shall we add it to the stew?” Gabriel asks, looking at the fruit bat, and we shake our heads no. He’s already stirred in monkey meat, lentils, wild butter beans, water, and half a bottle of scotch.

  Ange tosses a slice of lime at the trembling bat, which refuses to move. “Take it, eat,” he urges. “Tonight you live; tomorrow … who knows?” Turning to look at me, he adds, “Death can come at any moment
in the forest, eh?” I muster a smile and nod.

  Up well before dawn, invigorated by a cloudless pastel sky and calm breeze, I launch a pirogue. Taking soundings after every third paddle stroke, I’m unable to find any water deeper than nine feet, and that’s near the middle of the lake. Anywhere within a kilometer of the shore, I can touch bottom using the seven-foot-long paddle. Not much water for a large creature to hide under.

  As the sun climbs above the horizon, dozens of birds start flying across the water toward the eastern shore. I follow the parade to a pair of fruiting fig vines, where a party of barbets are greedily pecking at the fruit, chattering between bites and whistling as they preen their red chest feathers. A few gray parrots crowd in, hooting and shrieking as they climb over the vines. When the barbets take off, green fruit pigeons and warblers land. More and more birds arrive and depart in waves, with one species displacing another as if they’re on a scheduled breakfast plan. By seven-thirty only a few stragglers, mostly forest robins, are left on the two vines.

  I arrive back at camp in time for the first pot of coffee. Theo hands me a cup, and to my surprise it tastes better than any we’ve had on the trip. Lake Télé water is so bitter that I expected the coffee to be barely drinkable.

  “Spices,” Theo announces proudly. “I’ve added scotch to the jerry cans… Two shots for every liter.”

  Usually I make my medical rounds after dinner, but working by flashlight has taxed my already marginal skills, so I decide to switch office hours to the morning. Gabriel has a long gash across his right side, the result of a cousin carelessly swinging his machete. When I first looked at it in Boha, maggots were wiggling in the pus, but now a scab is forming. The wound on Raymond’s thigh is also healing. Ange, though, has foot trouble that I doubt will go away until he sees a real doctor in Impfondo. We thought we had discovered the source of the pain two days ago when I located and removed a nail-sized splinter near the ball of his left foot; however, the aching persisted, and this morning I understand why. I can see the head of a worm where the splinter had been. Knowing that any segment of the parasite left in his foot will rot and fester, I have to dig most of it out with a scalpel, using only gentle pressure with the tweezers. Ange grits his teeth, yet he assures me that the blade doesn’t hurt; he groans only after I show him the extracted worm and tell him that more are likely to emerge.

  All in all, we’re in good health, except for the diarrhea that plagues each of us. To augment our supply of antidiarrhetics, I’ve been collecting shavings from the wood of the Garcinia punctata to brew a tea. Patrick taught me this curative in the Bronx and predicted that I would learn dozens of other useful herbal remedies from African witch doctors. However, the witch doctor in Boha told me he had not collected plants in years. “Penicillin is better than anything I ever came up with,” he observed. He never wrote down the traditional herbal remedies, and “it has been so long that I’ve forgotten what works on what.” Gabriel’s favorite medicine is Alka-Seltzer; he loves the bubbles and fizz.

  Once the clinic closes, we pair off for the day. Ange and Theo head west to hunt monkey; Raymond and Gabriel go east after snake and hog; Innocent and I climb aboard the pirogue and set off around the lake. We begin our circumnavigation by looking for molombo vines and for wide swaths near the shore. Drifting as much as paddling, we take our time. Innocent tends a fishing line off the stem, using one of my lures, a Rebel Call, a yellow plug the size of a minnow covered in green and pink acrylic hair. When he works the line, pulling it with sudden jerks, the lure looks just like a gaily colored tadpole.

  “I’ll make a believer of you,” he says, assuring me that he’ll catch a giant perch today.

  We locate and map eight more molombo vines, three laden with fruit. I examine the ground carefully around each of them, but find no footprints bigger than a mongoose’s. Together we clean out the debris and smaller plants around the molombos, to make it easier to read future tracks.

  We’re back aboard the pirogue when Innocent, looking through the binoculars, says, “Liambas,” Lingala for hemp. It was one of the first words I learned in the native tongue, and I start paddling in the direction he’s looking. We jump ashore near a fine cluster of cannabis plants basking in a sunny patch near a mangrove. Unfortunately, all of them are stripped of buds, and a few have had branches ripped off. I select handfuls of the smaller, more flavorful leaves and wonder how to dry them in this humid environment.

  “Just eat them … like him up there,” Innocent recommends, nodding toward a male mangabey who lolls in the crook of a tree with the remains of a cannabis branch dangling from one hand, totally uninterested in us.

  The next day, after coffee laced with scotch, we decide to explore the inlets and feeder streams, the so-called pathways of Mokele-Mbembe. As we paddle into the first inlet, a half-dozen lily trotters, Actophilornis africana, loose one-note staccato calls as they bound from pad to pad and disappear from view. The inlet is so tightly packed with huge lilies that we have to slice through them with a machete to move along. Frogs croak their displeasure as we disrupt their floating kingdoms, and scorpions arch their stingers as we sink their ships. Fish follow in our wake, sucking in the displaced insects. Slowly we work our way into the mouth of the feeder stream, a flattened green oval at the entrance to an arbored tunnel.

  The sun-loving lilies thin out, and the going gets easier as we enter the cool shadows of the tunnel-like growth. We ship the paddles and grab the overhead lianas to pull ourselves along. The deeper we go, the quieter it becomes, and eventually we can hear little more than our own heavy breathing. Within seventy-five yards, we are out of the tunnel and in the jungle.

  “What’s the name of this stream?” Innocent asks.

  I flip through my notebook, looking for the map I drew with the name of each stream as identified by Ange and Raymond. “Here it is… Bokoupe Stream.”

  We tie up the pirogue and walk for several kilometers along the banks of the Bokoupe until the stream narrows and finally disappears under the soggy leaf litter. Innocent thinks the Bokoupe looks like an ideal trail for a dinosaur, but we find no giant footprints or trampled plants. Innocent does, however, find a colossal mound of excrement. I approach it with a skeptical eye and a pinched nose, knowing that similar finds attributed both to Yeti and Nessie have turned out to belong to some opium eater, either animal or human. In the end, Innocent and I agree that this is not dinosaur stool at all, but that of some large ungulate, probably a reedbuck.

  Off to our right we hear a loud belching sound and turn to see a goliath frog. As we run after it, the frog turns and threatens us with a doglike “woof,” inflating itself to the size of a soccer ball.

  “Watch this,” Innocent says, booting the frog and sending it flying ten yards through the air. When he was a kid, he explains, neighborhood teams used goliath frogs as footballs.

  “Woof,” the frog barks, apparently unfazed.

  As we sit down to take a break, leaning against the buttress of a plane tree, we hear a sniffling noise. Looking around, I see nothing unusual, but I feel a sharp jab in the rear and jump to my feet, sure I’ve been bitten by a snake. The snout of a pangolin pokes through the ground near the buttress, its sharp claws gripping the edge of a hole. Leaves must have been covering the opening because I had checked the spot carefully before sitting. Wanting to photograph the armor-plated ant-eater, we try to coax it out in the open, but it disappears back into its hole. Most jungle burrows are shallow affairs, but this one is deep enough to swallow the five-foot stick Innocent uses as a probe.

  We continue north, pushing into the uncharted land of the Pygmies. Innocent likens the maps I draw to the electrical diagram that came with his faulty Russian-made stereo system: “lots of lines that looked correct but weren’t.” We discover a massive termite hill encircled by arum plants, and we put our ears to it, listening to the hum of industry within. There may be up to a quarter-million termites inside the volcano-shaped nest, and to avoid being swarmed, we’re car
eful to cut only a small opening with our knives. Having excavated a dime-sized hole, we watch the blind workers busily repair the breach within minutes. They work like plasterers, using their mandibles as trowels to mix pulp with a paste they secrete through their mouths.

  The low-pitched hooting sound of a pygmy rail ominously fills the air. These ground-dwelling birds fly in short hops, and this one sounds as if it’s nearby, less than a hundred yards to our left. As I start to track it, Innocent grabs my arm and leads me away. He says pygmy rails are the voices of ghosts who cannot rest in peace; most often they’re souls who have been cheated or lied to in an earlier life. Before they can pass serenely into another form, they first must be satisfied with revenge. As the pygmy rail starts up again, Innocent tells me to close my mouth and cover my ears. “Don’t let the spirit enter your body.”

  A half-kilometer farther on we see a small lake in the distance, no doubt one of Télé’s satellites. Standing on the western shore are two bay duikers, not much larger than sheep, with short fawn-colored hair and a broad black stripe along their spines. They calmly lap water, each posed with a front leg in the air, bent at the knee. We approach carefully, but something startles them and they gallop off like horses out of a starting gate.

  “Get down,” Innocent cautions a few moments later. He falls to the ground and pulls me with him. “There … at the other end of the lake.”

  A leopard slinks into view. No wonder the duikers ran. It yawns, and I can see its teeth and pink tongue through the binoculars. The cat approaches the water casually, stretches out, and takes a drink, its front paws sinking into the mud.