Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [73]
As the trail took them into a grove of trees close by the path, Kunta tightened his grip on the spear he carried, as he had been taught to do. Cautiously, he continued walking—then stopped and listened very quietly. Lamin stood wide-eyed behind him, afraid to breathe. A moment later, however, his big brother relaxed and began walking again, toward what Kunta recognized—with relief—as the sound of several men singing a working song. Soon he and Lamin came into a clearing and saw twelve men dragging a dugout canoe with ropes. They had felled a tree and burned and chopped it out, and now they were starting to move it the long way to the river. After each haul on the ropes, they sang the next line of the song, each one ending “All together!,” then again, straining hard, as they moved the dugout about another arm’s length. Waving to the men, who waved back, Kunta passed them and made a mental note to tell Lamin later who these men were and why they had made the canoe from a tree that grew here in the forest rather than near the riverbank: They were from the village of Kerewan, where they made the best Mandinka dugouts; and they knew that only forest trees would float.
Kunta thought with a rush of warmth about the three young men from Barra whom they were traveling to meet. It was strange that though they never had seen each other before, they seemed as brothers. Perhaps it was because they too were Mandinkas. They said things differently than he did, but they weren’t different inside. Like them, he had decided to leave his village to seek his fortune—and a little excitement—before returning to their homes ahead of the next big rains.
When the time neared for the alansaro prayer in midafternoon, Kunta stepped off the trail where a small stream ran among trees. Not looking at Lamin, he slipped off his headload, flexed himself, and bent to scoop up handfuls of water in order to splash his face. He drank sparingly, then, in the midst of his prayer, he heard Lamin’s headload thud to the earth. Springing up at the end of the prayer intending to rebuke him, he saw how painfully his brother was crawling toward the water. But Kunta still made his voice hard: “Sip a little at a time!” As Lamin drank, Kunta decided that an hour’s resting here would be long enough. After eating a few bites of food, he thought, Lamin should be able to keep walking until time for the fitiro prayer, at about dusk, when a fuller meal and a night’s rest would be welcomed by them both.
But Lamin was too tired even to eat. He lay where he had drunk from the stream, face down with his arms flung out, palms up. Kunta stepped over quietly to look at the soles of his feet; they weren’t bleeding yet. Then Kunta himself catnapped, and when he got up he took from his headload enough dried meat for two. Shaking Lamin awake, he gave him his meat and ate his own. Soon they were back on the trail, which made all the turns and passed all the landmarks the young men from Barra had drawn for Kunta. Near one village, they saw two old grandmothers and two young girls with some first-kafo children busily catching crabs, darting their hands into a little stream and snatching out their prey.
Near dusk, as Lamin began to grab more and more often at his headload, Kunta saw ahead a flock of large bushfowl circling down to land. Abruptly he stopped,