Forest of the Pygmies (3 page)

In order to take advantage of the coolest hours of the day, the wake-up bell rang at 5:45
A.M
., though earlier, with the first ray of sun, they had awakened to the unmistakable sound of colonies of bats returning after flying the entire night. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee was already on the air. The visitors opened their tents and stepped out to stretch their limbs as the incomparable African sun, a magnificent circle of fire that spanned the horizon, began to rise. The landscape shimmered in the dawn light; it seemed that at any moment the earth, enveloped in a rosy mist, would fade and disappear like a mirage.

Soon the camp was boiling with activity. The cooks called the party to the table, and Mushaha issued his first instructions. After breakfast they would meet for a brief lecture about the animals, birds, and vegetation they would be seeing that day. Timothy and Joel readied their cameras and the employees brought the elephants, which were accompanied by a two-year-old calf that trotted happily alongside its mother. Occasionally the baby needed to be retrieved because it had stopped to puff at butterflies or roll in the mud near waterholes and rivers.

From atop the elephants, the panorama was magnificent. The great beasts moved silently, blending into the landscape. They advanced effortlessly and with massive calm; they also covered many miles in very little time. None of them, other than the calf, had been born in captivity; they were wild animals, and as such unpredictable. Mushaha warned his party that they must follow his directions closely, or he would not be able to guarantee their safety. The only person who tended to violate that rule was Nadia, who from the first day established such a special relationship with the elephants that the director of the safari simply decided to look the other way.

The visitors spent the morning roaming around the preserve. They communicated with gestures, never speaking, so they would not be detected by other animals. Mushaha took the lead, riding the oldest bull of
the herd; behind him came Kate and the photographers on females, one of them the mother of the calf; then Alexander, Nadia, and Borobá on Kobi. A pair of safari employees riding young males brought up the rear, carrying provisions: canopies for the siesta, and some of the photographic equipment. They also carried a powerful tranquilizer they could shoot in case they came face-to-face with an aggressive beast.

The pachyderms occasionally stopped to eat leaves from trees where only a few moments before a family of lions had been resting. Other times they passed so near rhinoceroses that Alexander and Nadia could see themselves reflected in a round eye studying them suspiciously from below. The herds of buffaloes and impalas were not spooked by their passing; they may have picked up the odor of the humans, but the powerful presence of the elephants disoriented them. The party was able to amble among timid zebras, photograph at close range a pack of hyenas quarreling over the corpse of an antelope, and stroke the neck of a giraffe as it licked their hands and gazed at them with princess eyes.

“In a few years,” Mushaha lamented, “there will be no wild animals in Africa; you will see animals only in parks and reserves.”

At noon they stopped beneath protective trees, lunched from the contents of some baskets, and rested in the shade until four or five in the evening. At the hour of siesta, even wild animals lay down to rest, and the broad plain of the preserve lay motionless beneath the burning rays. Mushaha knew the terrain, and he was expert in calculating time and distance, so just as the enormous disk of the sun began to sink below the horizon, they sighted smoke from their camp. Sometimes at night they went out again to watch the animals that came to the river to drink.

O
N THE EVENING OF THE
third day they had to use the tranquilizers to subdue a group of drunken bandits. Mushaha and his guests were heading back to camp when they received a call that there was an emergency. Shortly afterward a staff member came rolling up in a Land Rover to take them back, leaving the elephants in the care of their keepers. At the camp they found a startling scene. In their absence a band of a half dozen mandrills had been busy demolishing the encampment. Tents lay on the ground and flour, manioc, rice, beans, and canned preserves were strewn everywhere; shredded sleeping bags hung from tree limbs, and chairs and broken tables were piled in the courtyard. The effect was that of a camp swept by a typhoon. The mandrills, headed by one more aggressive than the others, had grabbed pots and pans and were using them as weapons to club one another and to attack anyone who attempted to approach them.

“What's got into them?” exclaimed Mushaha.

“I'm afraid they're a little drunk,” suggested one of the guards.

The baboons always hung around the camp, ready to steal anything they could stuff into their mouths. At night they dug through the garbage, and if provisions were not secured, they stole them. They won no points for charm—typically they showed their teeth and growled—but they had respect for humans and kept a prudent distance. This assault was out of the ordinary.

Given the impossibility of overcoming them, Mushaha gave the order to get the tranquilizer guns, but hitting the target was not easy because the mandrills were running and leaping as if possessed. Finally, one by one, the tranquilizer darts hit their marks and the baboons dropped in their tracks. Alexander and Timothy helped pick them up by ankles and wrists and haul them two hundred yards away from the camp, where they snored unmolested until the effects of the drug passed. Their hairy, foul-smelling bodies weighed much more than one would have expected from their size. Alexander, Timothy, and the employees who touched them had to shower, wash their clothing, and dust themselves with insecticide to get rid of the fleas.

As the personnel of the safari labored to restore some order to the chaos, Mushaha discovered the source of the trouble. Through carelessness on the part of the staff, the mandrills had got into Kate and Nadia's tent and found the former's stash of vodka. They had smelled the alcohol from a distance, even though the bottles were sealed. The lead baboon stole a bottle, broke the neck, and
shared the contents with its buddies. With the second swallow they were intoxicated, and with the third they fell on the camp like a horde of pirates.

“I need the vodka to ease my bones,” Kate complained, realizing that she would have to guard the few bottles she had like gold.

“Doesn't aspirin help?” queried Mushaha.

“Pills are poison! I use nothing but natural products,” the writer exclaimed.

Once the mandrills had been quieted and the camp reorganized, someone noticed that Timothy had blood on his T-shirt. With his traditional indifference, the Englishman admitted that he had been bitten.

“It seems that one of those fellows was not completely out,” he said in way of explanation.

“Let me see it,” Mushaha demanded.

Timothy lifted his left eyebrow. That was the only gesture ever seen on his horse face, and he used it to express any of the three emotions he was capable of feeling: surprise, doubt, and annoyance. In this instance it was the last; he detested any kind of bother, but Mushaha insisted, and he had no choice but to roll up his sleeve. The bite wasn't bleeding any longer, and there were dried scabs at the points where teeth had perforated the skin, but his forearm was swollen.

“These monkeys carry a number of diseases. I am going to give you an antibiotic, but it will be best if you see a doctor,” Mushaha announced.

Timothy's left eyebrow rose halfway up his forehead: definitively too much bother.

Mushaha contacted Angie Ninderera by radio and explained the situation. The young pilot replied that she couldn't fly at night, but that she would be there early the next day to pick up Timothy and fly him to Nairobi. The director of the safari could not help but smile: The mandrill's bite would give him an unexpected opportunity to see Angie, for whom he harbored an unconfessed weakness.

Soon Timothy was shivering with fever. Mushaha wasn't sure whether it was because of the wound or a sudden attack of malaria, but in either case he was worried, since the well-being of the tourists was his responsibility.

A group of Masai nomads who often crossed through the preserve had arrived in camp, driving a herd of cattle with long horns. The people were very tall, slim, handsome, and arrogant. They bedecked themselves with intricate bead necklaces and headbands; the cloth of their skirts was fastened at their waists, and they had spears in their hands. They believed they were the chosen people of God; the land and all it contained belonged to them by divine grace. That gave them the right to appropriate any livestock they saw, a habit that was not well received among the other tribes. Since Mushaha had no cattle, there was nothing to steal from him. His agreement with them was clear: He offered them hospitality when they passed through the park and in return they never touched a hair on the wild animals.

As always, Mushaha offered them food and invited them to stay. The tribe wasn't pleased with the company of the foreigners, but they accepted because one of their children was ill. They were waiting for a healer, who was on her way there to treat the boy. The woman was famous throughout the region; she traveled miles and miles to heal her patients with herbs and the strength of faith. The tribe had no way to communicate with her by modern means, but somehow they had learned that she would come that night, which was why they were willing to stay in Mushaha's domain. And precisely as they had predicted, when the sun was about to set they heard the distant tinkling of the healer's little bells and amulets.

A wretched, barefoot figure emerged from the red dust of early evening. She was wearing nothing but a short skirt of rags, and her paraphernalia consisted of gourds, medicines, pouches of amulets, and two magical sticks topped with feathers. Her hair, which had never been cut, was divided into long dreadlocks coated with red mud. She looked ancient—her skin hung from her bones in folds—but she stood erect, and her arms and legs were strong. The patient's treatment was carried out only a few yards away from the camp.

“The healer says that the spirit of an offended ancestor has entered the child. She must identify it and send it back to the other world, where it belongs,” Mushaha explained.

Joel laughed; he found the idea that something like that could happen in the twenty-first century very amusing.

“Don't laugh, fellow. In eighty percent of the cases, the patient gets well,” Mushaha told him.

He added that on one occasion he had seen two people writhing on the ground, biting, foaming at the mouth, groaning, and barking. According to what their families said, they had been possessed by hyenas. This same healer had cured them.

“That's called hysteria,” Joel alleged.

Mushaha smiled. “Call it what you want, the fact is that after the ceremony they got well. Western medicine, with all its drugs and electric shocks, rarely gets results that good and that fast.”

“Come on, Michael! You're a scientist educated in London, don't tell me that—”

“First of all I'm African,” the naturalist interrupted. “In Africa, physicians have realized that instead of ridiculing healers, they should try to work with them. Sometimes the magic gives better results than imported methods. People believe in it, and that's why it works. Suggestion can work miracles. Don't sell our witches short.”

Kate got out her pad to make notes on the ceremony, and Joel, ashamed that he had laughed, readied his camera to photograph it.

They placed the naked boy on a blanket on the ground, surrounded by the many members of his family. The old woman began to beat her magic sticks and shake her gourds, dancing in circles and chanting, and soon the tribe joined in. After a while she fell into a trance; her body shook and her eyes rolled back. As that happened, the child on the ground grew rigid; his back arched until only his head and heels supported his body.

The energy of the ceremony shot through Nadia like an electric current, and without thinking, propelled by an unfamiliar emotion, she joined the nomads' chanting and frenetic dancing. The healing lasted several hours, during which, as Mushaha explained, the aged witch absorbed into her own body the evil spirit that had taken possession of the boy. Finally the small patient's rigidity relaxed and he began to cry, which everyone interpreted as a sign of health. His mother took him in her arms and began to rock and kiss him, to the joy of all present.

After about twenty minutes, the healer herself emerged from her trance and announced that the patient was purged of evil and from that very night would be able to eat normally; however, his parents must fast for three days in order to placate the expelled spirit. As her only food and reward, the old woman accepted a gourd containing a mixture of sour milk and fresh blood, which the Masai herdsmen had obtained by making a small cut in the neck of one of the cattle. Then she retired to rest before undertaking the second phase of her labor: drawing out the spirit, which now was inside her, and speeding it to the Great Beyond, where it belonged. The tribe, grateful, moved on farther to spend the night.

“If the system is so effective, we should ask that woman to treat Timothy,” Alexander suggested.

“It doesn't work unless you believe,” Mushaha replied. “And besides, the healer is exhausted; she has to build up her strength before she can help another patient.”

So the English photographer continued to shiver with fever for the rest of the night, while under the stars the little African boy enjoyed his first meal in a week.

Angie Ninderera showed up the next day as she had promised Mushaha in her radio communication. When they saw her plane in the air, they set off in the Land Rover to the landing field to pick her up. Joel wanted to accompany his friend Timothy to the hospital, but Kate reminded him that someone had to take the photographs for the magazine article.