Endangered (17 page)

I'd traveled the Congo this way once or twice in my life, but more for fun when visiting village friends. I'd always been a passenger. It was safe to say I was a terrible punter, and after a little while, Wello told me it would be better if I stopped. I let the pole drop from my stinging blistering fingers, pride taking a distant second to fatigue. I lay back in the pirogue, Otto scrambling on top of me, happy for some full body contact.

It was a magnificent boat, solid and heavy in the water, over twenty feet long and carved from the trunk of one giant tree. Against my back I could feel the lines and divots where the wood had been scoured away by Wello and his fellow villagers. When the sun went down I was still lying there, seeing only walls of wood and the open sky, blue-gray as a pool. We were punting in the shallow waters along the shore, and Wello told me we would pull over to the bank once it was fully dark. But it seemed like that might not ever happen; once the sun set the moon feebly took over, lighting the low thick clouds and setting them faintly aglow. Night was dusk.

As I listened to the thuds and laps of the river streaming against the wood hull, Otto wheezing little snores against my throat — his old congestion was back, though not too bad this time around — I found I wasn't able to sleep, or even keep my eyes
closed. Though Wello was stroking at the pirogue's rear, the dugout canoe was long enough that, lying on my back and staring at the stars, I felt like Otto and I were alone. Maybe other pirogues were passing us, but they had no lights and made no sound I could hear over the wave-slaps of the river. The Congo and its surrounding banks were plush-dark. All I could see were stars crowding above, fixed in space even as I moved. As the wispy charcoal clouds moved over them the stars throbbed, illuminating a vibrating halo of the darkness. I'd never seen them like this.

My skin buzzed, like it was crawling with microscopic organisms that had been accumulating steadily since my last shower weeks ago. I kept wanting to scratch myself, though my rash had subsided and I was pretty sure most of the itching was all in my head. I'd have loved some fresh clothes, though. I inventoried my missing duffel, mentally taking the clothes out and placing them on the broad soft rug of my dad's living room. The pale blue blouse with the pink ribbon threaded through the collar. Well-oiled moccasins. The striped socks my friends had made fun of me for, from pastel green-and-yellow to sharp black-and-red. The white cashmere vest, impossible for Congo, but which I'd wanted to show off to my mom and so had carted home. The one Otto had made his favorite, and was now probably serving as a blanket for one of those little girls sleeping in the airport. Assuming they'd made it there.

I stroked Otto's belly. I knew by now not to touch his legs or head when he was sleeping, as that would wake him. But a belly rub made him sigh contentedly in his sleep.

It was strange, but I missed those clothes. Not missed them like I wished I still had them to wear — though that, too, was true — but missed them like I missed my classmates. I didn't just want that cashmere vest back; I felt guilty for the cashmere vest,
that it had been run through the muck and cast off by its owner. Maybe I was tired, and feeling bad for lost clothing served as a place to shove a bunch of feelings: fear and stress and that nagging remorse over two furry bodies holding each other beneath a tree. But it was crazy to be sorrowful over things when I'd lost people, too. I thought about that girl fascinated by Otto outside the UN encampment and realized her mother would have gladly pressed her into my hands if she'd thought getting to my mother's island meant reaching safety; I could just as well be taking her with me as a bonobo. Wouldn't that be the better thing to do? Wasn't it my duty to protect my own kind first?

But that simply wasn't the way I felt. I loved Otto, which made all those facts hardly relevant. The moment he'd come under my care, it hadn't been a question how much I would do for him. Though I knew there was human suffering out there, it wasn't like there was a tragedy scale where some things outranked others, or that care given to a bonobo meant less left for people.

I peeled the foil back from one of the UN ration packets to examine the contents by moonlight. Inside were a tea bag, water purification tablets, sugar packets, tissues, bandages, a can of tuna fish, another of chili con carne, and a package with
BISCUITS
printed across the foil wrapper. I opened those and gasped when I saw the same brand of cookies that were in the dining hall at school. American cookies in Congo!
Thank you, United Nations.
I munched on one. I used to love these, with their mixture of nutmeg and molasses, but now all I could taste was the weird rush of sugar, the tang of chemicals. It wasn't unpleasant, but only added to my sense of being overwhelmed. I tucked the second half of the cookie back into its foil wrapper to give to Otto once he woke up.

“Wello?” I called out. “You want a cookie?”

He grunted a negative reply, his voice nearly lost in the
thuck
of the waves against the hull.

“Otto?” I said softly, dragging him up around my neck. I hoped he might open his eyes for a moment, so I could look into them. But he stayed asleep.

Eventually we pulled ashore and spent a quiet night; Otto and I offered our rations and Wello shared his ground cloth. Wello didn't say anything more than “over here” or “over there” or “good night” — I figured he was very tired. But our wordlessness hadn't changed in the morning; he got up and settled back into the pirogue without a sound. I scrambled to get Otto and me in and arranged before he pushed off from shore.

After a while, I asked him how things were in the capital. At first he didn't answer. Then, a couple of hours later, while I was making a few lame attempts to stir the river with my pole, he spoke up out of nowhere.

“There are more of us than them. I would think it would be better than this.”

I sat up. “What?”

“In Kinshasa. It is truly very bad. I hated to do it, but it was only the
mayi-mayi
that I could trade my fish to. No one else would come out of their homes to buy. They have all fled. I do not know if they are locked in their homes or in the jungles. I had many friends there. I do not plan to go back again until after this war is over.”

“You think it will happen? That the war will be over someday?”

There was no answer beyond the suck of the pole through the murk of the river bottom.

 

We didn't go ashore in the villages we passed; if the villagers had anything to sell, they would run up to the Congo's banks, offering it in outstretched arms. Often it was familiar fresh fish like tilapia, but sometimes it was long unnamed beasts, still gooey from the sludge at the bottom of the river, fangs and whiskers drooping; clusters of snails suckered to broad leaves; honey so fresh that it was swimming with bees; chunks of bushmeat, smoked to black, animal origin unknown. Wello would manage the transaction from the boat. He'd gone to Kinshasa with a pirogue full of fish and traded it all for three bags of salt and a hunk of soap. The salt he kept for himself, but from the soap he would shave thick peels to trade for food. He was deliberate with his measurements, somberly weighing each pale pink peel in his hand before offering it in trade.

Nervous about attacks, we took whatever food we bought upriver a ways before pulling into secluded reeds to eat. Dinner would be whatever strange thing we'd been able to buy at the side of the river, but breakfast and lunch were always limp cassava bread and fish wrapped in banana leaf.

Wello bought much more food than we needed. I saw his reason when, after leaving one village, we didn't pass another for a week. We lived sparely, but it wasn't too bad. We ate a fist-sized piece of fish meat at each meal, accompanied by dark green leaves, rigid as cardboard, that Wello foraged for us out of the underbrush. Otto refused the fish, but he did love whatever snails I found for him on the leaves. He'd take them in whole, crushing the tinkly shells under his sharp teeth, smacking the gummy creatures down with his mouth wide open, giving me a terrific view of the whole process.

Otto's favorite position in the pirogue was at the prow, on his hind legs with his arms hitched over the side, dragging his hands in the water. Once he got bored of that he'd slump down, his back against the hull, and stare at me as I paddled.

I got the punting stroke down eventually — it was more of a pull with the lower hand than a push with the upper — and I was able to help Wello out more often. I could see where he got his boxy, top-heavy shape, and I imagined my own body starting to do the same.

Wello told me that in normal times he operated the pirogue with an outboard motor hitched over the flat stern, but he ran out of gas soon after the war started and was unable to locate any more. So he was back into the old mode by which the Congolese economy had operated for centuries, sticking near the shoreline and punting the pirogue. He had hopes of hitching it to one of the gas-powered barges that usually traveled up and down the river, but none ever passed, yet more evidence that fuel was nowhere to be found. Wello complained, but I was secretly relieved; if there had been fuel, the rebels would have taken those barges for their own use, controlling the Congo or launching attacks on the riverside towns. Though we were slow making our way up the river, I was fine with that. My mom was up there waiting for me, and if going slower meant getting there alive, I could deal with the delay.

The next morning we saw the first signs of Mbandaka. Right where the banks of the Congo turned marshy and indistinct, a cluster of pirogues appeared. They dragged parallel in the current, like as many pencils in a desk furrow.

“Here I take the right branch, the Ruki,” Wello said. “So now is when we part ways. Once you are past the city, you will see the river split once again. Then you, too, will take the right branch. It is smaller still. Once you have reached the village of Ikwa — not
the big village far away, but the other one, a little one that is near here, it is easy to miss, so you will need to ask which one it is — you can ask how to get to your reserve.”

“Any advice on how to pass through Mbandaka safely?” I asked.

“Avoid everyone,” Wello said.

He gave me the name of his village; if I sent the money to the chief there, he would get it. Not to worry if I forgot, he promised me — he would track down my mom's sanctuary after the war. I had Wello memorize my father's e-mail address so if he ever came across Internet access he could send him a message to let him know I was alive. Wello memorized the letters solemnly, like the syllables of a spell. After we'd finished negotiating, we went to shore, said our good-byes, and then he was gone. It was just me and Otto on the bank, the empty pirogues marking the start of the city before us. Otto had his hand in mine, staring up at me.

I squeezed his hand tight and lifted him onto my back. “Don't worry,” I told him. “We'll get through this.”

I had spent nearly two weeks in that dugout canoe with Wello, and our sudden parting left me at a loss. After he dropped us off at the shore of a sheltered inlet, I sat in a tight ball on the hot hard earth, knees to my chin. While I steeled myself, Otto devised a new game, digging into the dry dirt with his fingers, tilting his head back, dropping the whole pile onto his face, and proceeding to lick up whatever dirt his tongue could reach. His face gradually became lighter and lighter shades of brown, his pink mouth the only part of him that wasn't filthy.

I couldn't see much of Mbandaka from where I sat, only the canoes needling the water. But I had to get my mind around the fact that a city at war was there out of sight, and I'd have to get past it to make it to my mom — past it without ever going near it. But I'd never been to Mbandaka, had no idea how far I'd have to go out of my way to circumvent it.

While I puzzled through what to do, Otto climbed onto my lap and pulled my arms up and over so they covered him. He rubbed himself against me to comfort himself, then pursed his lips and exposed his small sharp teeth when I blew on him. Eventually bored, he climbed down and wandered into the foliage.

Don't go far
, I said. Or thought I said — without quite realizing what I was doing, all I did was make a couple of head bobs and grunt.

Normally I'd wait for Otto to wander back, but I was feeling antsy and directionless, so I followed him, ambling after him into
the undergrowth. I found him in the lower branches of a tree, playing by swinging from side to side, oblivious to the bright green shock of a praying mantis walking across his knuckles. He dropped to the ground and raised his arms to be lifted. My pirogue-weary biceps protested as I picked him up.

Immediately Otto struggled to get back down. I released him, figuring he had to go pee, but he stood on his hind legs and raised his arms to be lifted again. Strange behavior. It was like his personality had shifted sideways a few inches. There were all sorts of possible reasons, from our days cramped in the pirogue to our proximity to an unfamiliar city.

From what Wello had told me, Mbandaka dominated one side of the river, blooming along it for quite a ways. Because the city was crisscrossed by water, clumps of buildings were interspersed with overgrown jungle, all muddled together with occasional sprints of broad avenues. Though I could cut my way through the jungle and go around, that could take me days out of my way, and without the Congo River to follow, I was likely to lose my bearings. Maybe instead I'd approach the city as long as I could reasonably keep hidden, and see if I could spot a way to make it through while keeping under cover.

Simplest would be to pass right along the shore, but I'd be too exposed. So I eased into the bush, Otto at my back. The ground was striped with streams of fast-moving ants, which I tried to step over. When once I failed, I felt a flurry of starbursts on my ankles. I soon had my ratty sneaker off and was banging it against a trunk, big fat ants raining down. Not to be left out, Otto imitated me by thumping his palms against another tree. I examined my ankle. I had at least five bites, each of which would throb for days and rise into a teacup-sized ring with a blister in the center. A good start.

My shoulder against a nearby tree for balance, I examined my
smelly moist sneaker, doing my best to ignore its odor. Once I'd decided it was clear of ants, I put it back on over my dingy socks and continued on my way. Otto once again took his usual position on my back. Presently we came upon a circle of straw huts, intact but abandoned. Otto and I stole between them, arriving at the far side to an empty phone card stand, with its colorful umbrella intact but looted of all contents. I kept to the back sides of buildings as I crept forward, checking for people before advancing, Otto's hot nervous breath at my back.

We passed more buildings — huts and shacks and gray, peeling businesses — all abandoned. I couldn't figure out why everything was so quiet; it was hard to think the rebels would have killed everyone. Whatever the reason, no one was around.

Or so I thought.

I heard a rustling and turned to the house across the street to see two rusty gun barrels in a glassless window. I dropped to my belly, Otto squealing at my back, and scrambled behind a ruined wall. For a while we stood there while I listened for someone giving chase. Hearing nothing, I risked a look out and saw two teenage girls, one my age and the other a little older, expressions hard and weapons gripped in trembling fingers. Seeing me, the older girl lowered the barrel of her gun and croaked out, “Do you have any water?”

At first I shook my head, intimidated by their guns. But then I saw their dull eyes, their dry lips. These two girls were
bapfuye buhagazi
, walking dead. I had a half-bottle of iodized water. I took it out of my tattered plastic bag, holding my free hand high to show I was unarmed, and slowly approached. The older one took the bottle and gave it to her sister, who drank nearly all of it, and then the first one finished what was left.

“I need the bottle back,” I said.

Reluctantly, she handed it over. She and her sister ducked out of view, transaction over. I cleared my throat and asked if they had any advice for getting to the other side of the city.

The older one raised her head and tilted it in my direction, though she didn't meet my eye. “They've taken everyone who is able to work to the gold mine in the east. Or the other men from before, they took our parents to dig for diamonds in the forest. Everyone who can't work is dead.”

I felt stuck. What could my problems matter to her? But I had to press on. “I need to get east to find my mother,” I said. “Can you help me?”

She ducked out of sight but kept talking, telling me about a hunting trail that skirted the edge of the city and stopped at a riverhead. If I forded the river, I'd hit a tributary that would lead me to Ikwa, the village nearest my mother's site.

I thanked the girls and ducked down the street, hiding in the shadows. The plastic water bottle was light and empty in my bag. I had two goals now: getting to the hunting trail and replenishing my water.

 

The hunting trail began where they'd said, between an abandoned haircutter's hut and a cluster of charred bed frames marking a looted furniture shop. I followed the trail for a ways, until it was crossed by a brook. I kneeled and took some of the water into my bottle. Holding it up to the sunlight, I saw it was muddy and full of mysterious particles, but I put iodine in until it was cast purple and hoped for the best. It tasted like liquid sea urchin. Otto refused the bottle when I passed it to him, so I took a big gulp, pulled his head back, and let the water fall through my lips. I was glad to see him suck it down.

We were back in the equatorial forest, but at least this time we had a trail to follow. Though there were plenty of flies and mosquitoes, I had a chance of avoiding ants and snakes and leeches.

As I continued, the trail became less traveled, turning from a corridor of beaten dirt to a line of trampled grass. Then it became more subtle, minor disturbances — a broken branch, a ring of flattened leaves — that I had to piece together to find a direction. Once the light waned and I grew unsure where I was going, I stopped for the night. I scratched an arrow in a tree trunk marking the direction I was heading in case I woke up disoriented, found a spot of thick grass that didn't appear to have any ant colonies near it, and prepared to wait out the night. We'd sleep if we could. There'd have been a much better chance if I could have built us a nest, but I'd never figured that one out on my own.

As I lay back, Otto sat on my belly and stared at me, alert. I sensed huffiness, as if he were disappointed that this was the best sleeping spot I could muster. I bounced him up and down a few times, and he squirmed away, his eyes on the trees. I sighed, taking in his perfectly made little ears, his smooth flat nose, the wrinkled brow over thoughtful eyes.
I need you, Otto.
My desperation to see him calm and content gave me extra inspiration. When I gave him a thorough tickling session and some tremendous raspberries on his belly, he cheered, cuddling up to me.

“Don't turn weird on me now, Otto,” I whispered. “Please.” My voice came out teary.

Fatigue surprised Otto, soon sprawling him out.

I watched the unfamiliar world go dark while Otto snored in my arms. The air was heavy, like everything was raining. Moisture thickened the air and hung there, always present and never getting it over with. Because it never rained, nothing was ever dry; and because nothing was dry, nothing had a chance to freshen. My
white T-shirt glowed in the twilight, banded in modern art speckles of fungal reds, yellows, and blues.

I gingerly repositioned Otto to my lap so I could sit up and use the last moments of daylight to take stock of my supplies. As I was opening my sack and taking out everything I'd gathered during the river journey that wouldn't putrefy — some nuts and hard berries and a couple strips of dried fish — I heard the sound of heavy drops hitting the leaves above us. It was like my thoughts about rain had brought it on. The rainstorm in the enclosure had been strange enough, but another shower in August?

But I realized with a jerk that it wasn't August anymore. It was September. Or even October? Not October, surely … Could school have been going that long already? Did life go on in America when I was hiding from militias in Congo? Did I make it into the morning announcements?
No green elephant notebooks this year, kids.

The first giant drop fell through the canopy, hit Otto on the forehead, and bounced off. Otto was instantly awake, outraged and murping loudly. He leaped off my belly, his bony heels nearly knocking the breath out of me, danced a jig, then peered up at the leaves. He climbed a tree, dropped back to peer into my face, then climbed another tree, holding on to the trunk with his feet while his arms flailed in the air.

“Otto, calm down,” I cried.

The bouncing rainfall continued, and it took me a while to realize we weren't getting wet. Sprays of dirt flew up from the soil, like we were being strafed by gunfire. I investigated a nearby pock-mark and saw, in the ring of impact, the fat coil of a caterpillar. By now they were raining down by the thousands. Otto scampered here and there, seizing the fallen coils and cramming them into his mouth. They must have been in the trees all along, and by natural mystery dropped at the same time.

Otto ate until his belly was full and then fell against me like a contented drunk. He lazily plucked another living bracelet from the soil, held it between thumb and forefinger, and let his hand drop open on my chest. The caterpillar thrashed. Otto looked up at me and looked away, his hand holding still, and I realized he was presenting food for me to share. Hesitantly, I lifted the caterpillar. I wasn't really a bonobo, but could I eat like one? Then, without even thinking, I put the caterpillar in my mouth. It tasted like a sausage made from frothed soil and grass. I ate another.

Otto and I sat up and stared out into the near-dark clearing like we were watching a sports game on TV, the caterpillars a bowl of popcorn we chowed through without looking. When the sky went black, we brushed our spot of grass clear and lay down. Though I could feel small flies land on me and was distantly aware of mosquitoes drilling the air around my ears, they'd stopped bothering me much. A mosquito bite meant a bit of itchiness, that was all. If I got malaria, it wouldn't show for another week or two, so for now I was safe. If I started batting them away, like I'd once have done, I wouldn't sleep a wink. Tomorrow I had to make it past Mbandaka, and I needed energy.

My thoughts grew illogical and fuzzy, and I distantly realized that I might actually succeed at falling asleep. Otto was being a total brat, though, sitting on my face and pulling at my ears, then ignoring me when I tugged his ears back. Finally I shoved him away so I could sleep. I didn't feel too bad — if I'd been a real bonobo mother I would have struck him a whole lot harder. He didn't come back right away, and I figured he was having a caterpillar dessert and would come snuggle in later, ideally not waking me up in the process.