Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [84]
Fluttering white waves of egrets, cranes, storks, and pelicans rose from their sleeping places as he picked his way through the tangled mangrove down to the bolong. Kunta’s wuolo dog raced ahead chasing watersnakes and big brown turtles down their mud-slides into the water, where they left not even a ripple.
As he always did whenever he felt some need to come here after a night’s lookout duty, Kunta stood awhile at the edge of the bolong, today watching a gray heron trailing its long, thin legs as it flew at about a spear’s height above the pale green water, rippling the surface with each downbeat of its wings. Though the heron was looking for smaller game, he knew that this was the best spot along the bolong for kujalo, a big, powerful fish that Kunta loved to catch for Binta, who would stew it for him with onions, rice, and bitter tomatoes. With his stomach already rumbling for breakfast, it made him hungry just to think of it.
A little farther downstream, Kunta turned away from the water’s edge along a path he himself had made to an ancient mangrove tree that he thought must know him, after countless visits, as well as he knew it. Pulling himself up into the lowest branch, he climbed all the way to his favorite perch near the top. From here, in the clear morning, with the sun warm on his back, he could see all the way to the next bend in the bolong, still carpeted with sleeping water-fowl, and beyond them to the women’s rice plots, dotted with their bamboo shelters for nursing babies. In which one of them, he wondered, had his mother put him when he was little? This place in the early morning would always fill Kunta with a greater sense of calm, and wonder, than anywhere else he knew of. Even more than in the village mosque, he felt here how totally were everyone and everything in the hands of Allah, and how everything he could see and hear and smell from the top of this tree had been here for longer than men’s memories, and would be here long after he and his sons and his sons’ sons had joined their ancestors.
Trotting away from the bolong toward the sun for a little while, Kunta finally reached the head-high grass surrounding the grove where he was going to pick out and chop a section of tree trunk just the right size for the body of his drum. If the green wood started drying and curing today, he figured it would be ready to hollow out and work on in a moon and a half, about the time he and Lamin would be returning from their trip to Mali. As he stepped into the grove, Kunta saw a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye. It was a hare, and the wuolo dog was after it in a flash as it raced for cover in the tall grass. He was obviously chasing it for sport rather than for food, since he was barking furiously; Kunta knew that a hunting wuolo never made noise if he was really hungry. The two of them were soon out of earshot, but Kunta knew that his dog would come back when he lost interest in the chase.
Kunta headed forward to the center of the grove, where he would find more trees from which to choose a trunk of the size, smoothness, and roundness that he wanted. The soft, mossy earth felt good under his feet as he walked deeper into the dark grove, but the air here was damp and cold, he noticed, the sun not being high enough or hot enough yet to penetrate the thick foliage overhead. Leaning his weapons and ax against a warped tree, he wandered here and there, occasionally stooping, his eyes and fingers examining for just the right trunk, one just a little bit larger—to allow for drying shrinkage—than he wanted his drum to be.
He was bending over a likely prospect when he heard the sharp crack of a twig, followed quickly by the squawk of a parrot overhead. It was probably the dog returning, he thought in the back of his mind. But no grown dog ever cracked a twig, he flashed, whirling in the same instant. In a blur, rushing at him, he saw a white face, a club upraised, heard heavy footfalls behind him. Toubob! His