Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [41]
“He meant you no harm?” asked Omoro.
“He acted very friendly,” said the old man, “but the cat always eats the mouse it plays with.”
“That’s the truth!” said Omoro.
Kunta wanted to ask his father about this strange toubob who came looking for rivers rather than for people; but Omoro had bade farewell to the old man and was walking off down the footpath—as usual, without a glance to see if Kunta was behind him. This time Kunta was glad, for Omoro would have seen his son holding onto his headload with both hands while he ran painfully to catch up. Kunta’s feet had begun to bleed, but he knew it would be unmanly to take notice of it, let alone mention it to his father.
For the same reason, Kunta swallowed his terror when, later that day, they rounded a turn and came upon a family of lions—a big male, a beautiful female, and two half-grown cubs—lounging in a meadow very near the path. To Kunta, lions were fearsome, slinking animals that would tear apart a goat that a boy permitted to stray too far in its grazing.
Omoro slowed his pace, and without taking his eyes from the lions, said quietly, as if sensing his son’s fear, “They don’t hunt or eat at this time of the day unless they’re hungry. These are fat.” But he kept one hand on his bow and the other by his quiver of arrows as they passed by. Kunta held his breath but kept walking, and he and the lions watched each other until they were out of sight
He would have continued to think about them, and about the toubob, also somewhere in the area, but his aching legs wouldn’t let him. By that night, he would have ignored twenty lions if they had been feeding at the place Omoro chose for them to spend the night. Kunta had barely lain down on his bed of soft branches before he was into a deep sleep—and it seemed only minutes before his father was shaking him awake in the early dawn. Though he felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, Kunta watched with unconcealed admiration how swiftly Omoro skinned, cleaned, and roasted their morning meal of two hares, which he had caught in night snares. As Kunta squatted and ate the tasty meat, he thought how he and his goatherding mates used up hours of catching and cooking game, and he wondered how his father and other men ever found time to ever learn so much—about everything there was to know, it seemed.
His blistered feet, and his legs, and his back, and his neck all began to hurt again this third day on the trail—in fact, his whole body seemed to be one dull ache—but he pretended that manhood training had already begun and that he would be the last boy in his kafo to betray his pain. When he stepped on a sharp thorn just before midday, Kunta bravely bit his lip to avoid crying out, but he began to limp and fall so far behind that Omoro decided to let him rest for a few minutes beside the path while they ate their afternoon meal. The soothing paste his father rubbed into the wound made it feel better, but soon after they began walking again, it began to hurt—and bleed—in earnest. Before long, however, the wound was filled with dirt, so the bleeding stopped, and the constant walking numbed the pain enough to let him keep up with his father. Kunta couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to him that Omoro had slowed down a tiny bit. The area around the wound was ugly and swollen by the time they stopped that night, but his father applied another poultice, and in the morning it looked and felt good enough to bear his weight without too much pain.
Kunta noticed with relief, as they set out the next day, that they had left behind the thorn and cactus land they had been traveling through and were moving into bush country more like Juffure’s, with even more trees and thickly flowering plants, and more chattering monkeys and multicolored landbirds than he had ever seen before. Breathing in the fragrant air made Kunta remember times when he had taken his little brother to catch crabs down along the banks of the bolong, where he and Lamin would wait to wave at their mother and the other women rowing homeward after work in their