Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [17]
Toumani finally decided to take notice of Kunta tagging along behind him, but he acted as if the smaller boy was some kind of insect. “Do you know the value of a goat?” he asked, and before Kunta could admit he wasn’t sure, he said, “Well, if you lose one, your father will let you know!” And Toumani launched into a lecture of warnings about goatherding. Foremost was that if any boy’s attention or laziness let any goat stray away from its herd, no end of horrible things could happen. Pointing toward the forest, Toumani said that, for one thing, living just over there, and often creeping on their bellies through the high grass, were lions and panthers, which, with but a single spring from the grass, could tear a goat apart. “But if a boy is close enough,” said Toumani, “he is tastier than a goat!”
Noting Kunta’s wide eyes with satisfaction, Toumani went on: Even a worse danger than lions and panthers were toubob and their black slatee helpers, who would crawl through the tall grass to grab people and take them off to a distant place where they were eaten. In his own five rains of goatherding, he said, nine boys from Juffure had been taken, and many more from neighboring villages. Kunta hadn’t known any of the boys who had been lost from Juffure, but he remembered being so scared when he heard about them that for a few days he wouldn’t venture more than a stone’s throw from his mother’s hut.
“But you’re not safe even inside the village gates,” said Toumani, seeming to read his thoughts. A man he knew from Juffure, he told Kunta, deprived of everything he owned when a pride of lions killed his entire herd of goats, had been caught with toubob money soon after the disappearance of two third-kafo boys from their own huts one night. He claimed that he had found the money in the forest, but the day before his trial by the Council of Elders, he himself had disappeared. “You would have been too young to remember this,” said Toumani. “But such things still happen. So never get out of sight of somebody you trust. And when you’re out here with your goats, never let them go where you might have to chase them into deep bush, or your family may never see you again.”
As Kunta stood quaking with fear, Toumani added that even if a big cat or a toubob didn’t get him, he could still get into serious trouble if a goat got away from the herd, because a boy could never catch a dodging goat once it got onto someone’s nearby farm of couscous and groundnuts. And once the boy and his dog were both gone after it, the remaining flock might start running after the strayed one, and hungry goats could ruin a farmer’s field quicker even than baboons, antelopes, or wild pigs.
By noontime, when Toumani shared the lunch his mother had packed for him and Kunta, the entire new second kafo had gained a far greater respect for the goats they had been around all of their lives. After eating, some of Toumani’s kafo lounged under small trees nearby, and the rest walked around shooting birds with their students’ untried slingshots. While Kunta and his mates struggled to look after the goats, the older boys yelled out cautions and insults and held their sides with laughter at the younger boys’ frantic shoutings and dashings toward any goat that as much as raised its head to look around. When Kunta wasn’t running after the goats, he was casting nervous glances toward the forest in case anything was lurking there to eat him.
In the midafternoon, with the goats nearing their fill of grass, Toumani called Kunta over to him and said sternly, “Do you intend me to collect your wood for you?” Only then did Kunta remember how many times he had seen the goatherds returning in the evening, each of them bearing a headload of light wood for the night fires of the village. With the goats and the forest to keep an eye on, it was all Kunta and his mates could do to run around looking for and picking up light brush and small fallen limbs that had become dry enough to burn well. Kunta