Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [136]
Kunta swung in a wide arc to avoid two toubob farms where he could see the familiar big house with the small, dark huts nearby. The sounds of their wake-up horns floated across the still air to his ears, and as the dawn brightened, he was slashing through underbrush deeper and deeper into what he knew was a wide expanse of forest. It was cool in the dense woods, and the dew that sprinkled onto him felt good, and he swung his knife as if it were weightless, grunting in his pleasure with each swing. During the early afternoon, he happened upon a small stream of clear water tippling over mossy rocks, and frogs jumped in alarm as he stopped to drink from it with his cupped hands. Looking around and feeling safe enough to rest for a while, he sat down on the bank and reached into his pocket. Taking out a piece of the dried rabbit and swashing it around in the stream, he put it in his mouth and chewed. The earth was springy and soft beneath him, and the only sounds he could hear were made by the toads and the insects and the birds. He listened to them as he ate, and watched sunlight stippling the leafy boughs above him with splashes of gold among the green, and he told himself that he was glad he didn’t have to run as hard or as steadily as he had before, for exhaustion had made him an easy prey.
On and on he ran, for the rest of the afternoon, and after pausing for his sundown prayer, he went on still farther until darkness—and weariness—forced him to stop for the night. Lying on his bed of leaves and grass, he decided that later he would build himself a shelter of forked sticks with a roof of grass, as he had learned in manhood training. Sleep claimed him quickly, but several times during the night he was awakened by mosquitoes, and he heard the snarlings of wild animals in the distance as they made their kills.
Up with the first rays of the sun, Kunta quickly sharpened his knife and then was off again. A while later he came upon what was clearly a trail where a number of men had walked; although he could see that it had not been used in a long time, he ran back into the woods as fast as he could go.
Deeper and deeper into the forest, his knife kept slashing. Several times he saw snakes, but on the toubob farm he had learned that they would not attack unless they were frightened or cornered, so he let them slither away. Now and then he would imagine that he heard a dog barking somewhere, and he would shiver, for more than men, he feared dogs’ noses.
Several times during the day, Kunta got into foliage so dense that in some places even his knife wasn’t stout enough to clear a path, and he had to return and find another way. Twice he stopped to sharpen his knife, which seemed to be getting dull more and more often, but when it didn’t work any better afterward, he suspected that the constant slashing at briars, bushes, and vines had begun to sap his strength. So he paused to rest again, ate some more rabbit—and some wild blackberries—and drank water that he found in cupped leaves of plants at the bases of trees. That night he rested by another stream, plunging into sleep the moment he lay down, deaf to the cries of animals and night birds, insensible even to the buzzing and biting of the insects that were drawn to his sweaty body.
It wasn’t until the next morning that Kunta began to think about where he was going. He hadn’t let himself think of it before. Since he couldn’t know where he was going because he didn’t have any idea where he was, he decided that his only course was to avoid nearness to any other human beings, black or toubob, and to keep running toward the sunrise. The maps of Africa he’d seen as a boy showed the big water to the west, so he knew that eventually he’d reach it if he kept moving east. But when he thought