Walking with Abel (28 page)

An expression came to my mind, the American military slang term for images of humans killed in drone strikes, killed by a push of a button. “Bug splats.” Baby Afo crawled out of his mother’s lap with a howl. Then the plane submerged behind the low treeline to the south and was gone.

“Praise the Lord!” said al Hajj Saadou. He had pilgrimed to Mecca seven years earlier and possessed knowledge of the world that extended beyond the Sahel. “I thought they were going to drop bombs right on us. Okay, let’s eat.”

But Oumarou was pensive.

“That plane was looking for something,” he said. “I think it was looking for the way back home. It is easy for strangers to get lost in the bush.”

After lunch the men made their devotions. They aligned two goatskins, a polyester carpet, a straw mat, and a torn pagne in a mismatched row that faced the immensity of the plateau and took turns washing their feet and hands and faces from a plastic kettle. They stepped upon their makeshift prayer rugs almost in unison. Saadou’s son Hassan, in a white boubou printed with tiny images of kitchen utensils, performed his ablutions, spat, took the cellphone on its lanyard from his neck, placed it carefully on a cow patty, and bent down in prayer.

The men were engrossed in supplication and did not notice that at the hearth Afo stood up and let go of his mother’s skirt and walked toward them through dung and straw and red dust, brave and unassisted. A nomad taking his first steps upon the Sahel.

L
ater that day Oumarou measured a dozen feet south from a solitary thorn tree nearest the calf rope and, with the heel of his plastic shoes—light green, with tiny pictures of airplanes and the molded writing
BOEING 767
on the sides: airplane shoes—traced in hard ground a circle approximately eight feet across. Ousman watched, then retraced it with his own blue-and-white plastic heel. This was the circumference of his father’s future temporary house, his shelter until it was time to move on.

Sita’s upturned carts were barely visible in a low thicket of dwarf persimmons more than a hundred yards to the southeast. To the west, halfway to the river and from Oumarou’s campsite appearing no larger than three grains of rice, stood the three huts of Saadou, who wintered on the plateau. The physical distance between the camps did not signal aloofness. It served the symbolic purpose of respecting one another’s boundaries. In the high scrublands of the Sahel no place existed to sequester oneself, to be completely alone. When the nomads went to sleep at night they spread mats and plastic sheets near the cattle, with nothing to shield them from one another, from passing herders, from somnambulist cows, from the sequined sky above, from off-course warplanes. But I have noticed: no one ever intruded on the silence of others. My hosts made up for the absolute lack of physical personal space with exceptional respect for the sacred limits of internal peace.

Along the notch marked by his father’s heel Ousman began to dig foot-deep holes for future posts. He used his broadsword. He dug a hole, measured a sword’s length from it along the scored perimeter, dug again. Later he would forage for the frame among the wreckages of former Fulani homesteads, set up and dismantled during earlier migrations. When he grew tired of digging he handed the sword to Allaye, who dug without enthusiasm and grumbled that the outline of the hut was not perfectly round. But Amadou and Kajita already were running in and out of the imaginary door, pushing against imaginary walls, palming the wainscot not yet there. They shrieked with delight at being the first to populate their grandfather’s hut and overhead, in the leafless branches of the thorn tree, twenty yellow weavers shrieked as well.

That morning Amadou had asked Gano to bring him and Kajita a puppy from Djenné.

“Okay,” said Gano. “I’ll bring you a puppy if you get me a bag to put it in.”

“But,” Amadou said, “won’t the puppy cry in a bag?”

—

In the reddish glow of the setting sun emaciated herds returned to the campground. Dust rose at their heels in low red waves. Hassan tied up the calves and Ousman strode up to the herd with the milking calabash, shuffled a notch in the ground to steady it, untied a calf, petted it, let it suckle. He milked. Oumarou lay on a mat beside his future hut and looked away, not studying the herd, not taking it in. He had spotted the animals’ deflated humps and prominent ribs from afar and he did not want to see up close their crushing hunger. As if sensing her father’s sadness Hairatou paused over her mortar, pensive, her eyes stilled at some distant point in the maroon clouds.

The nomads talked for many hours after dinner. They moved in small groups from camp to camp, men and women separately, carrying with them braziers and baggies of sugar and tea. Reacquainting themselves with old friends, new babies, relatives they had not seen for many months. I stayed put. Baby Afo slept against my hip and I floated in and out of conversation as it came and went. Then Hassan took the cows out to pasture into yellow moonset and I fell asleep.

In the night the plane returned. The deep hum of its engines woke me up and I lay in the dark trying to make out its silhouette against the sky. I could not see the plane, or even gauge from the sound where to look for it. I listened and worried. It circled the camp into predawn. The night was cool and humid and mostly still and mosquitoes whined around my mat. My leg was warm where Afo had wet himself and I pulled the heavy polyester blanket tighter around us. When I fell asleep again I dreamed that an American plane had flown in to bomb the camp while we were drinking tea. I had seen aerial bombardment in real life, in wars, and the mechanicals of my dream were precise and horrendous. The dreamplane banked; the first bomb struck the river; the earth jerked and gave way. A fountain of hot dirt mixed with water and tongues of fire woke me. It was just before sunup. Afo was snoring lightly, Oumarou was already awake, Hairatou was squatting by the hearth, and a pot of Lipton was beginning to boil.

S
o began the last day of al Izar, the Veil, Epsilon Boötis. The next day would be the ascent of al Nashira, the star that determined whether there would be enough rain that year. There was no sign of rain at all. Only the clouds of dust, the chittering of weavers, the rusty clucking of Kumba’s guinea hens. In the morning the sky frowned a little, then the sun came out again. At a certain angle you could see the few spots where the laterite had sprouted the finest film of grass. Like patches of oxidized copper. Oumarou’s mood was somber.

“This time last year there was grass. This year there is none. This year I am looking at the cows and I’m seeing a big difference since they left Doundéré. They look worse. They were fatter in Doundéré. And there is still dust under the hooves of moving cattle. That’s a very bad sign.”

With no rain to tamp it down dust blew almost as steadily as during the ocher months of harmattan. Gusts churned columns of debris, pushed them around the plateau. One whirred through Oumarou’s camp that morning, picking up buckets and twirling them away from the hearth. It was a good thing that no one was at the camp just then. Dust devils were very dangerous. If you found yourself encircled by a dust devil you became sick for the rest of your life. If you threw a stick at it blood gushed from your arm as if from a wound.

In the afternoon Ousman dragged to his father’s camp the skeleton of an abandoned hut he had found nearer the river. He sunk the beams into the holes he and Allaye had dug and roofed that frame with the thatch he had salvaged from Doundéré and bundles of straw he had found nearby. He strapped the bundles to the frame of the hut with rope and fabric and whacked them with long sticks into being more watertight. Dust and two praying mantises flew out of the straw. To the top of the hut he strapped a blue tarp. A signal flag, an appeal to the sky, a plea for rain.

—

As for the warplane, the Fulani did not talk about it. It had been some communal futuristic nightmare, not worth dredging up. They did not see another so low over Ballé again.

O
n the first morning of al Nashira fine rain wafted down for a few minutes. A tentative gray mist. Then it stopped. White egrets flew. Oumarou settled under the thorn tree to receive and return the greetings of neighbors, to study the sky. By the time he had finished his Lipton, all was dry and through a nacre sheet of clouds the sun shone very bright, solid, unblinking.

“Was your night peaceful, Oumarou?”

“It was peaceful. But I am worried. Before this morning I wasn’t really worried but today I am very, very worried.”

“We are also worried. The cattle are hungry.”

“True, true. But the day is long. God willing, it will rain before the end of the day.”

“Amen, amen, amen.”

Rain or not, the cycle of chores kept on. Ousman milked the cows and Hassan took them back to scanty pasture. Allaye took the goats to the river to drink and brought them back. Bobo took the dishes to the river and stood ankle-deep, scrubbing them with sand and a sponge made from a fishing net, and schools of inchlong fish dashed about, feeding on breakfast scraps. Hairatou tidied up the camp and set off, with Djamba, to forage for firewood. The hungry cows did not make enough manure to keep the hearth going, and besides, manure would become useless as fuel when it rained.

The girls walked single file upon clay hard and windpolished to a sheen, like the surface of a frozen lake. For thousands of years hyena had hunted giraffe here, and men hunted lion with spears. When Oumarou was young, hyena and lion took weak cattle and infants. Now the land was emptied of large wild predators. Giraffe had been extirpated from most of West Africa by early-twentieth-century hunting and mid-twentieth-century drought; Thurston Clarke wrote that in 1908 French colonial authorities had hired Tuareg gunmen to kill giraffe because the animals’ long necks had been ripping down telegraph wires. Elephant were a rare sight. Weak cattle remained. And man: bewildered, hungry, clinging to old ways that seemed to be rapidly losing to new, careening toward self-extinction. Man in a fierce and unwitting battle with himself.

Djamba started a wordless song and Hairatou joined in, and after a mile or so they entered a low coppice of shrubs. There they wound separately through the brush, pulling long gnarls of barkless deadwood out of bramble thickets, using one dry branch to knock inchlong thorns off another, heaping the firewood into long stacks. They tied these woodpiles with strips of fabric, bits of rope, the bark of African myrrh. They wandered apart and came close together again and their song split and spliced, split and spliced. A hunter-gatherers’ duet.