A Girl Named Disaster

14

She slept soundly until dawn and awoke with a feeling of hope. “I’m being silly,” she declared. “Hippos never stay long in one area. They run out of food.” She scanned the water carefully for crocodiles and then eased herself over the side for a bath. It felt wonderful! She was no longer quite as afraid of the river.

I wonder if I could learn to swim, she thought. Hippos do it. Even people swim where there aren’t crocodiles. Nhamo shivered at the thought of crocodiles. This corner of the Musengezi, however, flowed over a wide, flat expanse of stone with the remains of trees jutting out here and there. It had recently been dry land, she realized. When the Zambezi was dammed, the water had pushed up into the river and drowned part of the shoreline.

Nhamo hung on to a low-hanging branch and experimentally lifted her feet from the bottom. Oho! The branch moved! She put her feet back down quickly.

How did you keep your nose up when your body wanted to go down? Nhamo found a place where the water barely came to her knees. Here she practiced, holding on to a jutting rock and letting her body float out straight. Once she tried to let go, but panic made her claw her way back. Still, she was pleased with her progress. Eventually, her grumbling stomach told her it was time to think about breakfast.

She collected supplies and climbed onto shore. Nhamo set about making a cook-fire in a clearing next to a jumble of boulders. Not far away was a grove of muzhanje, or loquat, trees. It was too early for them to have fruit, so Nhamo paid them little attention until she noticed a stealthy noise in the dry, brittle leaves that littered the ground. She came instantly alert.

Crick-crack went the leaves. Nhamo’s heart raced. The trees lay between her and the boat. She squinted at the loquats. Their massed branches created deep shadows, among which streaks of harsh sunlight confused the image of what lay beneath. Flames caught the dry twigs of the cook-fire and smoke spiraled up, but Nhamo’s attention was riveted on the trees. The fire flared briefly and died. Crick-crack went the leaves.

She didn’t know whether she was looking for something very large or very small. Hippos were enormous, but they could glide like spirits when they wished. On the other hand, a lizard could make as much noise as an elephant.

Crick-crick-crack-crack! Nhamo was up the rocks between one breath and the next. So what if she was fleeing a lizard? No one was around to make fun of her. She scrambled higher until she was at the top of a huge boulder that leaned out over the clearing. She peered over cautiously.

Crack-crack-crick went the leaves, and out of the dappled shade came a fat guinea fowl—and another and another. It was a whole flock! They patiently hunted for seeds in the clearing.

Silently, Nhamo edged back from the cliff. She found the biggest rock she could lift.

Slowly, the guinea fowl approached the cook-fire, which was now only a drift of ashes. They found the sack of mealie meal. It was tied up, but they clearly sensed it was something they might enjoy. They clustered on top and pecked at the fabric. One of the birds wandered close to the bottom of the cliff. Nhamo slowly lifted the rock over the edge. Her arms began to tremble from the weight.

Closer, closer—ah! She lost her grip. The rock fell straight down. The guinea fowl panicked—and fluttered in the wrong direction. The rock caught it squarely on the back. The other birds blundered into the air, their heavy bodies crashing through branches as they fled.

Nhamo slid down. The guinea fowl was squashed flat as one of Masvita’s honey cakes. She cleaned it as well as she could with Uncle Kufa’s broken knife and soon had it boiling over a crackling fire. As it cooked, Nhamo made up a song. It was like the boasts the boys chanted when they wanted to show off. Girls weren’t supposed to use them, but Nhamo was so elated, she didn’t care. It went:

“I am she who lifts mountains

When she goes to hunt,

Who wears a mamba* for a headband

And a lion for a belt.

Beware!

I swallow elephants whole

And pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns.

I drink up rivers to get at the hippos.

Let them hear my words!

Nhamo is coming

And her hunger is great.”

She sang it over and over. After a while, she hauled everything back to the boat and ate as much of the guinea fowl as she could manage. She had to pick numerous fragments of bone from the stew. She ate and dozed and ate again. The only way she could store the meat was inside her round belly.

The hippos floated far and near, unmoved by Nhamo’s threats. They paid no attention to the boat or to her when, late in the day, she attempted another swimming lesson. All in all, it was a most successful day.

Still, when darkness fell, so did her spirit. “Why do I need people?” she wondered as she huddled in the damp boat. “I’m full of food and comfortable—well, fairly comfortable. I’m safe—well, fairly safe. Soon I’ll go on to Zimbabwe. But right now I wish I could see Aunt Chipo. I don’t care if she beats me. I even want to see Zororo, and he’s a pig! I don’t understand it.”

As for Ambuya and Masvita, Nhamo didn’t dare think of them. Her longing was so great, she might throw herself into the river. She fell asleep with her arms around the mealie bag. “If I eat all the grain, I’ll have to fill the bag with grass,” she told Mother. “I seem to need something to hold on to.”

Nhamo stayed at what she named the guinea-fowl camp for several more days. She didn’t try to flatten another bird—that had been sheer luck, and besides, it wasn’t exactly pleasant finding shreds of bone and intestines in her soup. Instead, she made a trap. She laid a trail of beans leading to a very deep, circular hole in the ground. Then she hid nearby in a clump of elephant grass.

After a while a guinea fowl discovered the new source of food. It foraged along with one beady eye fixed on the next morsel. Soon it came to the hole and stuck its head inside. At once, Nhamo sprang out and wrung its neck. The trap was simplicity itself. If guinea fowl had been slightly more intelligent, it wouldn’t have worked, but fortunately they were as dull-witted as earthworms.

Nhamo ate one of the heavy birds every single day. Even in the village she hadn’t done as well. The birds around her home had been thinned by hunting, and the survivors were wary. For variety she found straggly mhuvuyu, blackjack weeds, and cooked their leaves as a kind of spinach.

One day she fashioned a fish trap, following the pattern she had learned at the trading post. She peeled off the bark of a musasa tree, then chewed and rolled it until it formed a kind of twine. She used this to bind strips of reed into a cone. She wedged the cone into a side channel of the Musengezi, with the narrow end pointing toward a fenced-in pool. The little fish swam into the wide end and slipped through to the pool. Then they couldn’t get back. The sharp points Nhamo had thoughtfully carved at the narrow end discouraged them. They swam round and round until she scooped them into her basket.

Nhamo gutted the little fish and smoke-dried them over her cook-fire. She wasn’t sure how to store guinea fowl, but she had often preserved fish. “Now I not only smell like Crocodile Guts, I act like him,” she told Mother. “Soon I’ll sit on my haunches and scratch.” The boatman had been alive with lice, which had disgusted the other villagers but seemed not to worry Crocodile Guts at all.

Nhamo practiced swimming several times a day. Part of her intense fear of water was due to crocodiles, but she saw no sign of any in the shallows, nor did she find tracks or the slidy print of their bodies in the mud. “Maybe they don’t like hippos,” she concluded. “Or, more likely, hippos don’t like them.” She remembered seeing a crocodile once in a mud hole near the village. It had been bitten in two, with its head at one end of the pond and its tail at the other. A hippo wallowed in between. No, the animals weren’t friends.

The absence of crocodiles made her swimming lessons slightly less frightening. Nhamo willingly let go now—if she was within reach of the rock. She could float and maneuver her feet to the bottom. She could even turn over onto her back, but she hadn’t figured out how to propel herself forward.

One morning, she sat up from the bed of grass in the boat and found the river deserted. She felt a sudden, odd stab of loneliness. Not that she liked the hippos—far from it—but they had become a familiar part of her world. Nhamo waited all day to be certain. They didn’t come back. After darkness fell, she couldn’t hear them snorting and complaining to one another. The night felt strangely empty. When Nhamo went to sleep with her arms around the mealie bag, she missed their constant muttering almost as much as the breathing of her cousins in the girls’ hut.

She untied the rope before dawn. “Today we’re going to Zimbabwe, Mother,” she said as she pushed away from the shallows. The current caught her, but Nhamo plied the oar expertly. She not only had learned a lot about boats, but she was less afraid of water. And her muscles were fueled with roasted guinea fowl. She sang:

“I am she who tosses trees

Instead of spears.

The ostrich is my pillow

And the elephant my footstool!

I am Nhamo

Who makes the river my highway

And sends crocodiles scurrying into the reeds!”

All day she paddled, with stops to rest and eat. She went on through the sunset on a blood-colored river. The moon was three-quarters full and cast a silvery sheen when the red faded. The forest was an indistinct shadow, now near, now far, as she struggled against the current. She kept turning at right angles and having to fight her way back. Eventually, she gave up and made for shore. Or where she imagined the shore to be.

That was when she discovered the sandbanks. The boat scraped alarmingly, broke free, and scraped again farther on. It took every ounce of strength to fight her way past. She didn’t dare get out to lighten the load. Nhamo began to pant with exhaustion and fear. It sounded as though the sandbanks were ripping out the hull. For a few moments the boat eased into deeper water, and she breathed more easily, but then it crunched into another obstacle. Something slapped Nhamo in the face: It was a sharp-leafed reed.

She reached out in the dark and felt plants all around her. Water rushed by on either side. This must be an island, she thought. She fastened the rope to a bundle of reeds and sat back to rest her aching arms. Suddenly, the many hours of fighting the river caught up with her. Her body shook as though she had a fever, and she leaned over the side to vomit what little she had in her stomach. She rested her cheek on the smooth wood until her head stopped swimming. Far ahead, she saw a bright star on the horizon.

It’s awfully low to be a star, she thought, and awfully big. Then it came to her: She was looking at an electric light.

As she studied that part of the horizon, she detected other lights winking as they were hidden or eclipsed by trees. It was Zimbabwe. “Oh, Mother! Oh, Mother! I wish we could go there tonight!” Nhamo cried from sheer disappointment.

When she tried to lift the oar, it slipped out of her hands and clattered to the bottom of the boat. She began to tremble again. All she could do was sit dumbly and watch the lights winking beyond the far trees. Eventually, she curled up with Mother’s jar at her side, but now and then she lifted her head to check that Zimbabwe was still there. And once, when the wind was blowing the right way, she thought she heard music.

*black mamba: The largest and most feared of African snakes. It is quick to bite if disturbed. Its poison can cause death within minutes.