Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [60]
We walked for the rest of that day up and down rolling swells of savannah, along animal tracks, well used by who knows what. Dag and I walked side by side. Donkeys, I thought, that’s us. Native bearers. All right for him, the size of him like an ox, but it was hell for me. Sweat ran into my eyes. My shoulders burned from the weight of my pack, and the stakes I carried rubbed them raw. Dan and Tim and the Malays were less heavily burdened, them being protectors and great hunters, weapon-bearers, trackers. Tim looked back and laughed at us, me so small and dark, and Dag so big and fair. I never really knew Dag before this. He was about twenty, a quiet man with a gentle, watchful air, and as he was easy-going, he made a good travelling companion.
“Is it cold where you come from?” I asked him as the heat cooked me.
He grinned. “Very cold in winter. Snow to here.” He motioned above his head.
I whistled. “How do you bear the heat?”
“At first,” he said, adjusting the coil of rope upon his shoulder, “it was difficult. But I”—he made impatient winding motions with his finger and I saw that his nails were seriously bitten, almost as bad as Ishbel’s—“I … I got used to it.”
“Perhaps I should have gone north,” I said, wiping sweat from my brow with my filthy palm. “To the ice. See polar bears. Eskimos.”
He smiled. “We want what we don’t have. I could not wait to see the palm trees. I saw pictures in my father’s books.” His smile was big and completely semi-circular, brightening his large, square face. It seemed to me exotic that a father should have books. I got a picture in my head of a gent in a black suit of clothes like a country vicar.
“Your father had books?”
“About the places he’s been. He was a sailor too. And my brothers. I have three.”
Dan turned and glared at us. He was going on ahead now with the Malays, and John and Tim were bringing up the rear. We shut up and plodded on.
“Do you have Eskimos where you live?” I asked an hour later. I would have said it was late afternoon, but it was hard to tell from the sky, which was still sullen though the rain had not materialised.
“Not where I live,” he replied. “They live in Greenland. And Canada. And other places. No, we have the Lapps.”
“What are the Lapps like?”
“They are northern people,” he said. “They keep reindeer.”
It was funny walking along in that hot place talking about the far north. How beautiful those icy regions seemed to me. I imagined the deck of a ship all briny with frost, ice sharp as an arrow, tincture of emerald, tincture of blue. A frozen ocean, magnificently still and serene.
Ahead, the Malay with the tattoo held up his hand and everyone froze.
How long we did not move I don’t know. Everything became very clear, every blade of grass. When I swallowed my throat creaked. Dan motioned us cautiously forward with his hand without even looking back. We crept. And when we were gathered—
Sudden, so my heart jumped up like a man started from sleep by a bell—bolt upright, stab!—then the hammering as of a demented woodpecker … a deer, leaping across the path ahead of us. One instant, a graceful prancing arc, and it was gone into the long grass.
We stood staring and waiting. The silence roared. Then we followed the Malays’ stalking feet, step by wary step, a distance of no more than a few yards before we stopped again, brought up short by a stink like a blocked privy.
The grass sang.
Something huge and dark came out of the scrub twenty yards or so ahead of us, running very fast on four bow legs. It plunged into the high savannah in the direction the deer had gone. Time speeded up. We moved forward at a good pace, and all I knew was the high grasses on either side of me whispering at our passage, and the back of Dan’s head, and my shoulders hurting and my breath beginning to scrape a little. A good hour of it till we slowed down and closed ranks again close by the edge of some kind of rocky escarpment. There could be no more talking. We’d come so far now into the island that I’d lost all sense of scale and direction,