Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [75]
They hadn’t walked much farther when Lamin let out a choked scream. Thinking he had stepped on a thorn, Kunta turned—and saw his brother staring upward at a big panther flattened on the limb they would have walked under in another moment. The panther went sssss, then seemed to flow almost lazily into the branches of a tree and was gone from sight. Shaken, Kunta resumed walking, alarmed and angry and embarrassed at himself. Why had he not seen that panther? The odds were that it was only wishing to remain unseen and wouldn’t have sprung down upon them, for unless the big cats were extremely hungry, they rarely attacked even their animal prey during the daylight, and humans seldom at any time, unless they were cornered, provoked, or wounded. Still, a picture flashed through Kunta’s memory of the panther-mangled nanny goat from his goat-herding days. He could almost hear the kintango’s stern warning: “The hunter’s senses must be fine. He must hear what others cannot, smell what others cannot. He must see through the darkness.” But while he had been walking along with his own thoughts wandering, it was Lamin who had seen the panther. Most of his bad troubles had come from that habit, which he absolutely must correct, he thought. Bending quickly without breaking pace, Kunta picked up a small stone, spit on it three times, and hurled it far back down the trail, the stone having thus carried behind them the spirits of misfortune.
They walked on with the sun burning down upon them as the country gradually changed from green forest to oil palms and muddy, dozing creeks, taking them past hot, dusty villages where—just as in Juffure—first-kafo children ran and screamed around in packs, where men lounged under the baobab and women gossiped beside the well. But Kunta wondered why they let their goats wander around these villages, along with the dogs and chickens, rather than keep them either out grazing or penned up, as in Juffure. He decided that they must be an odd, different kind of people.
They pushed on over grassless, sandy soil sprinkled with the burst dry fruit of weirdly shaped baobabs. When the time came to pray, they rested and ate lightly, and Kunta would check Lamin’s headbundle and his feet, whose bleeding was not so bad any more. And the crossroads kept unfolding like a picture, until finally there was the huge old shell of a baobab that the young men from Barra had described. It must have been hundreds of rains old to be dying at last, he thought, and he told Lamin what one of the young men had told him: “A griot rests inside there,” adding from his own knowledge that griots were always buried not as other people were but within the shells of ancient baobabs, since both the trees and the histories in the heads of griots were timeless. “We’re close now,” Kunta said, and he wished he had the drum he was going to make, so that he could signal ahead to his friends. With the sinking of the sun, they finally reached the clay pits—and there were the three young men.
“We felt you would come!” they shouted, happy to see him. They merely ignored Lamin as if he were their own second-kafo brother. Amid brisk talk, the three young men proudly showed the tiny grains of gold they had collected. By the next morning’s first light, Kunta and Lamin had joined in, chopping up chunks of sticky clay, which they dropped into large calabashes of water. After whirling the calabash, then slowly pouring off most of the muddy water, they carefully felt with their fingers to see if any gold grains had sunk to the bottom. Now and then there was a grain as tiny as a millet seed, or maybe a little larger.
They worked so feverishly that there was no time for talk. Lamin seemed even to forget his aching muscles in the search for gold. And each precious grain went carefully into