Drums Along the Congo Page 21

  “All alone forever,” Innocent whispers and tells me a Fang folk tale. Long ago a leopard fell into a pit and was pulled out by a turtle, which the leopard promptly ate. Its stomach bulging from the meal, the cat soon became wedged in the fork of a tree. Two monkeys helped free it, but the ungrateful leopard then ate one of them. The other hurled abuse from high on a branch and cursed the cat to walk alone for all eternity.

  We wait several minutes after the leopard leaves before approaching the lake, which is shaped like an eggplant and several acres in size. After inspecting the shore and finding no dinosaur tracks, I wade into the purplish water, which never comes above my waist. We collect a few giant mollusks and a dozen lake snails with handsome shells as big as croquet balls. Unwittingly, I also collect a few leeches, and Innocent helps burn them off with a lit cigarette.

  On our way back to the pirogue, Innocent stops next to a baobab tree, perhaps the most useful tree in the tropics. The pulp of its fruit is used as a seasoning; the young leaves are eaten as a vegetable; the seeds are pounded into meal; the ashes from the bark are a good soap; and, Innocent says, stripping away sections of the inner bark, “It’s great for making rope and cloth.” In a couple of minutes he plaits lengths of the inner bark into a serviceable net to hold our catch of snails and mollusks.

  Heaving the net over his shoulder, he says he feels like a Fang storyteller, men who go from village to village along the Atlantic coast carrying nets filled with items both common and rare. “I met one guy with dried-up fingers, teeth, hooves, stones, ship models, paint cans … locks of hair, beads, old socks … even a refrigerator handle,” Innocent tells me. For a fee, they tell fantastic stories about any item in their net. “If you picked the same thing twice, he had two different stories to tell.”

  At the other end of the lake, we see a welcoming plume of white smoke, suggesting that the others have had a successful hunt.

  “Escargots!” We hold out the giant snails as we enter the camp.

  “Monkey! Snake! Lizard” Theo replies, pointing to the carcasses they’re butchering. Gabriel and Raymond stand erect and hold up something stretched between them. It’s an impressive twelve-foot-long python, as thick as my arm and missing its head. Raymond boasts that his spear hit the snake and “took the head off in one throw.”

  At dinnertime, Innocent and I pass up the monkey stew for a surf-and-turf combination of snail and reptile. The python is greasy and chewy, but not unpleasant tasting; the snail is less appealing, its flavor reminding me of a vitamin pill. As usual, we all eat with our fingers; at this point, forks and napkins seem like distant memories. I mention that a scotch on the rocks would perk up the meal, but the men from Boha don’t understand. They’ve never seen an ice cube, and snow is something that happens on television screens in Epena; my attempts to describe ice only puzzle them further.

  Ange asks Innocent for details about the satellite lake we explored, and as he reports its location and shape, Ange starts cursing us.

  “Idiots! That is sacred land. Taboo…”

  “Was that where you saw Mokele-Mbembe?” Gabriel blurts, then tightens his lips, sorry he opened his mouth.

  Ange stares at his friend, and Gabriel looks away. I sit up, waiting for a reply. Ange, like everyone from Boha, doesn’t like talking about Mokele-Mbembe. When he does, it’s almost always a story someone long dead has told him.

  “I don’t know what I saw… It was big.”

  “Big as Mokele-Mbembe?” I ask.

  He turns his back to me, and when I repeat my question, he shakes his fist, spits on the ground, and threatens me with Raymond’s spear.

  “Bonne nuit.” Gabriel ushers me, Innocent, and Theo into the tent and suggests that we turn in early. The three of us poke our heads through the tent opening and see Gabriel apologizing to Ange. In a few minutes they shake hands, and Gabriel curls up next to the fire. Ange walks toward the lake, where he stands and stares out over the water.

  “Maybe he saw a dinosaur or maybe he saw something much bigger,” Innocent speculates.

  That night I dream of sauropods as big as the Empire State Building.

  CHAPTER 26

  A DEEP SOUND RUMBLES through the jungle as we’re eating dinner later in the week. It’s the Boha village drum pounding out a message: someone in Djéké has just died. Raymond groans.

  “A friend of yours?” I ask.

  “Worse … an enemy.”

  Raymond excuses himself and walks off talking aloud. We soon hear the whacking of his machete, and he returns to the fire carrying a bundle of saplings, which he strips of leaves and fashions into an arch. We help him install it in front of a lean-to and watch as he selects some items from his juju bag to suspend from the top of the arch.

  “Protection,” Innocent says quietly. He explains that revenge is a far greater threat from the dead than from the living, and the most dangerous period is the interlude between death and burial. Normally the spirit moves on once the corpse is in the ground but until then, it can go on a rampage. The pygmy rail we heard days ago may have been someone’s spirit in such a state. The fetish-strewn archway will protect Raymond while he sleeps tonight, unguarded by his shadow spirit.

  “I didn’t know the man,” Raymond tells us, tucking a small doll under his pillow of leaves, but his family and the dead man’s family have been locked in a blood feud for two generations. “My father met the man once, I think. It all happened in my grandfather’s time.” If the man’s death was caused by a visible wound, things won’t get worse between the families. However, if he died of internal causes, Raymond believes that he and his family will be accused of murder.

  “They will say we put a curse on him,” he observes.

  “Did you?” Theo asks.

  “Of course we did. Our families are enemies.”

  The state won’t get involved in the dispute, but the witch doctors in Djéké and Boha surely will, casting spells and counterspells for their clients. “My family must be protected from that man’s evil,” Raymond says, confident that his father is with the witch doctor right now, engineering the family’s defense. Before we go to sleep, Theo hangs a charm from his juju bag above the tent flap. “Extra insurance,” he says, kissing the charm.

  Getting dressed has become the most distasteful part of my morning, and I bitch and moan while slithering into my clammy rags. My old shoes have now deteriorated into sandals of a sort, held together by duct tape and vanilla-bean vine. It has been ten days since we left Boha, and all of us have grown beards except Gabriel, who likes to stroke the few hairs that sprout on his chin while urging them to grow and multiply.

  Since the soaking that greeted our arrival at the lake, we have had good weather, that is, partly sunny days followed by a sunset shower and a midnight downpour. We’ve all established routines—for example, my day always begins with some birding before dawn. So far I’ve identified seventy-eight species around Télé, including a pygmy woodpecker, only three inches long and a rare, unexpected sight; most likely a jungle storm blew it here from its usual haunts in Cameroon. The hunters have had excellent luck, and the food locker is almost filled to capacity with salted meats. Innocent and I, though, haven’t found a single trace of Mokele-Mbembe. In fact, we haven’t seen a four-legged creature of any sort in almost a week, not since spotting the leopard at what Innocent now calls Taboo Lake. All the molombo vines we monitor are intact, not one fruit missing, and the goliath heron is the largest animal I’ve sighted on Lake Télé. We’ve investigated all but one of the inlets and most of the jungle within a mile of the lake, and our most extraordinary discovery has been a leech the size of a vacuum cleaner nozzle.

  For the first few days at the lake, I tried luring butterflies with snake and lizard meat, as one American lepidopterist had suggested. A few swallowtails came, but no blues, whites, julias, or nymphalids. Then one day I left a pair of ripe socks at the end of a stick to dry, and butterflies by the dozens fluttered to them, obviously attracted by my irresistibl
e odor. Every morning since, I’ve been using the same technique. Today’s visitors include the rare Salamis cacta cacta, a handsome chestnut-brown butterfly with a blush of violet on its forewings.

  Innocent intends to spend the day fishing once again for the giant perch, so I head out alone in the other pirogue for Bompale Stream, the last inlet left to explore. Again water lilies clog the mouth of the inlet, and it takes me almost two hours to cut a path through them. I pole to the jungle side of the tunnel and moor the pirogue, sighting a water chevrotain while tying up the boat. This squat, deerlike animal with spotted tan fur, staggers left, then right, before turning left again and dashing off. I walk beside the shallow Bompale for several kilometers until a snapping of twigs brings me to a stop under an ironwood tree. The noise comes and goes, but my attention is diverted by a giant millipede, eight inches long and rust red in color, racing past my foot. Though harmless, millipedes are considered evil in Congolese folklore; when I tried to catch one earlier, Innocent held me back, saying I would get leprosy and possibly infect him. This particular one, the largest I’ve ever seen, nearly fills a bug-collecting jar. It has 112 pairs of legs, by my quick count.

  The crackling of twigs erupts into a loud crashing. There’s a swath of freshly trampled ferns and arum plants up ahead, and I cautiously start to follow it.

  “Bah-grumph,” something says. I climb a tree buttress to scan the area. Nothing unusual.

  “Mokele-Mbembe?”

  “Bah-grumph … gumpa-pa.”

  A tremendous noise rends the air. A liana tumbles to the ground, whacking limbs and leaves as it falls through the middle canopy. Seconds later some heavy-footed creature starts barreling through the brush. I break into a trot to catch up with it. Eventually, saplings start bending just ahead of me, and I glimpse a dark form just as a foul odor hits me. The creature veers right and enters a clearing. It’s black and hairy and hunched, with a white, almost silvery band running above its rump. I’ve been trailing a western lowland gorilla, a large silverback male.

  I pull up short, acutely aware that the massive knuckle-walker can bend me into a pretzel. Thankfully, the gorilla continues on its noisy way, grumbling, grunting, and snorting. Listening to its unearthly sounds, half-animal and half-human, I wonder how often a gorilla has been mistaken for Mokele-Mbembe.

  All around me are fallen trees in various stages of decomposition, a perfect breeding ground for beetles. I’m still hunting for one to name after my fourth-grade teacher; to qualify, it must be particularly ugly, with a countenance inspiring fear, and it must be a new species, of course. I don’t find an appropriate specimen, but I do manage to capture an attractive green and black beetle, as well as a dozen others in different shades of purple.

  Come four o’clock in the afternoon, cocktail hour, as I’m packing up the insects and tweezers, I suddenly realize that I’m lost. While chasing the gorilla, I failed to mark my trail. I sense that the pirogue lies somewhere to the southeast, so I trudge off in that direction, this time notching trees with my machete and constantly referring to my compass. The light is fading fast, the guenons are grunting, and a hornbill blares out like a ship’s horn in the fog. As evening falls, the thin cries of bats echo overhead, and night-walking galagos start their day, greeting neighbors with high-pitched yips and yaps. A West African wood owl calls its ghostly “whoo-whoot-who-who.” Like the pygmy rails, owls are believed to be agents of evil spirits. I close my mouth and cover my ears.

  Without the sun’s warmth, the moist air in the canopy quickly condenses. Droplets ploink down on me, the ground temperature starts to drop, and I begin to feel cold, but instead of making a fire and hunkering down for the night, I press on, expecting to stumble on Bompale Stream and the pirogue. All around me creatures bark, groan, whir and purr, peep, churr, whoop and croak. Mosquitoes hum and fireflies blink amorously, while their terrestrial cousins, Gephitomorpha centipedes, glow like bits of neon crawling along the ground. Small animals occasionally dart across my path; sometimes they pause to stare at me, but most seem neither frightened nor particularly interested. Whenever I flick on the flashlight, moths fly toward it, knocking into my head, shoulders, and hands. Spider webs, a nuisance during the day, turn into messy tussles when I run into them at night.

  My watch reads 11:55 when I hear the splashing of water under my feet. It’s neither Bompale Stream nor Lake Télé, but I’m too tired to care and too thirsty to be particular. After straining some water through my handkerchief and taking a drink, I decide to build a fire, resigned to spending the night alone.

  To make kindling I use the machete like a draw plane and skim off shavings from a fallen tree. A few pages from a field guide serve as the wick. The paper ignites readily, but the wood hardly sweats. I try again, crumpling more pages, and toss on a roll of film, which emits a kaleidoscope of colors, yet the wood merely smokes. Some gauze bandaging plus the indexes from my field guides and the alcohol from my bug jars finally jolt a fire to life. I pile on some branches, hoping the flames will deter visits from inquisitive cats. After a spare meal of one Camel, with another Camel for dessert, I lie down for the night.

  I quickly slip into a deep sleep, and Morpheus carries my soul to the edge of a sea. Waves are breaking with deafening thuds; the night sky is streaked with crimson clouds lined in gold. A sauropod rises from the ocean depths, sucking in air like a giant turbine. Water sheets down its massive flanks. The beast thunders up the beach, shaking the earth. Slowly it lowers its head, its giant, vulgar eyes glaring at me, and its mouth opens, revealing a lone tooth. I begin walking into its maw.

  Startled awake by something cold and wet rubbing my cheek, I find a lungfish wiggling next to me. I flick it into the water with my machete. The fire is still blazing as I return to sleep, this time dead to any world.

  An early morning cloudburst rousts me as well as my uninvited bedmates, some two dozen, cockroaches and several carabid beetles. The beetles look benign, but this species is able to eject a caustic fluid that blisters the skin. Luckily, none of them seems to regard me as anything but a heat source. Ever since Theo found a scorpion in his boot, I’ve whacked my shoes before putting them on; today a caterpillar falls out. I survey the area in the faint blue light of dawn and find before me again the forbidden Taboo Lake, where Ange maybe saw Mokele-Mbembe. A pair of bronze-naped pigeons drink at its edge; mistletoe berries are stuck to their beaks and necks.

  After a hearty breakfast Camel, I move out, now certain where the pirogue lies. When I’m halfway there, a black-throated honey guide jabbers at me, “Kerr-kerr…,” and darts to the west. It returns and impatiently repeats the call. These birds are among the very few undomesticated animals that naturally seek out humans as partners. Honey guides feed on beeswax and lead humans to the usually well-hidden hives. The men smoke out the bees and collect the honey, leaving bits of the comb for the bird. Of all the symbiotic relationships in the rain forest, this is the only one I’ve witnessed that includes man. At another time I might follow it, but not today. I’m anxious to return to camp before the others are up.

  Leaves rustle, and a piece of wood snaps to my left. “Kerr kerr,” the honey guide rants, and three Pygmies step from behind a tree. I hear a sound behind me and turn to see two more emerge from behind another tree. Naked except for belts of liana, with short hair and no discernible tribal markings or jewelry, they stand only four and a half feet tall. Their skin is lighter than the Bantus’, more red than black, and though their legs are short, the Pygmies have long torsos and large feet. Their hands, too, seem disproportionately big, with thick, powerful fingers.

  I smile. They don’t.

  Two of them carry crossbows and quivers crammed with arrows. The other three tote iron-tipped spears and feathered blowguns. All of them have machetes as well. They walk toward me, one man, presumably their leader, a step ahead. His restless eyes seem to be examining every square inch of me. He says something, and they all stop. The headman slowly opens his mouth, exposing a few rotten t
eeth, and utters a shrill sound.

  “Bonjour!” I reply.

  He stares at me in silence. I turn and step to one side, trying to keep all the Pygmies in view at once.

  The leader ululates again, this time holding a high note for several seconds. I stand motionless until he stops, then venture a greeting in Lingala. The headman slouches and picks at his navel. The two Pygmies on my right join their companions, and they all start talking among themselves. I can’t understand anything they’re saying. They stop their conversation and take a few steps toward me, sniffing the air as they walk. From the way they rub their noses, it seems they don’t like my odor. That, at least, is understandable.

  “Following the honey guide?” I try in English, flapping my arms. Now they seem amused. The headman nods as I continue fanning the air. “Kerr-kerr,” I add, pointing up at the honey guide.

  “Kerrar…” one man sings, rendering a perfect imitation of the bird. He has puffy cheeks and a cleft in his round chin. Like the others, he has silky skin and no facial hair; he could be fourteen or forty.

  “Tokay,” I say and point to the honey guide.

  “Kerrar,” the man instructs.

  The headman shouts something that sounds like “Surf’s Up.”

  “Tokay.”

  He repeats himself, and I suggest that we follow the honey guide together, acting out my words as if we’re playing charades. The Pygmies stand silent. I take a step toward the bird, and they all shout at me. I smile and shrug my shoulders. They stare at me quizzically. I hold out my hand. The headman takes a swipe at it with his crossbow. We’re not making a good connection.

  “Listen.” I pull out my harmonica. The Hohner Marine Band seems to delight them. “Take it,” I offer, handing the harmonica to the bird caller. He passes it around and they all smile. But then, as I dip into my shoulder bag again and pull out a camera, the headman becomes alarmed. Perhaps, like certain desert tribesmen, he believes cameras are evil instruments that capture the soul. He shrieks louder than ever and doesn’t let up even when I put the camera away. The man next to me loads and cocks his crossbow. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I better do something to calm everyone. I notice that the headman has an infected cut on his right foot that’s oozing yellow-green pus. I drop to my knees and pull out my medical kit; everyone stares as I walk on my knees toward the headman.