Bear Bob's Story as told to Edward Summer

Chapter Seven
The Other Men
 

In the morning, I found a small piece of leather and made a bag. Into this bag, I placed the seven baobab seeds. They had been cleaned shiny by the sweat of my hands as I carried them back home across the miles. A thong of leather hung the pouch around my neck.  The bag bounced on my chest as I walked through the village. Were all the people staring at me? I was not sure. I did not want them to stare, but if they had not, I would have felt unimportant. I smiled to myself and shook my head.

     I was supposed to work today, helping the men to repair a hut. When the heat of the day became bad, we all stopped. The men sat beneath the trees, resting. I could not rest. The excitement flowed still through my veins, and I could not sit still.

     So I walked. I walked out of the village. I walked into the trees. I walked because it felt good to walk and walk.

     I passed a clearing full of waving grasses. They were brown from the days of sun and no rain. The wind stirred them and the tail of an animal swam through the waves of grass.  The sky was everywhere.  Deep and blue as the sea which my father had told me about only once. In the sea,he told me, water was everywhere. It was a different blue than the sky, but they touched each other, the sea and the sky. I thought that at the edge of the world they must flow together into the home of the gods.

    What do the gods do when the day is hot and tired? I wondered about this as I walked.  Perhaps the gods stirred the sea with their fingers and made the waves of water. Perhaps the gods stirred the sky with their fingers and made the clouds move.  Perhaps they stirred so hard some days, that part of the sea was thrown up into the sky and came down upon us as rain!  The gods could do anything they wanted, I thought. Anything they wanted. The could yawn and exhale winds that would make us sleepy. They could sneeze and make winds that would blow us and our huts away!

    My father said there were boats that sailed upon the sea, bigger than the hollowed logs we used upon the rivers. What if the gods were bored and stirred the sea? What would happen to those giant boats? What would happen to the men who sat inside them? The gods must have long and powerful fingers to stir so much water all at once. The gods could stir anything including our lives.

    “Ha,” I laughed. “Ha!” I have crawled up the tree of the gods and come down alive! The winds of the gods have not blown me away. And I felt very strong and happy inside myself with my bag of baobab seeds bouncing on my chest.

    Then I stopped in the middle of the huge field of grass. I felt a breeze on me. I felt the sun on me. I turned slowly, looking miles and miles and miles into the empty air. So much space. So much room. There would never be enough people to fill it up. There would never be enough animals to fill it up. I was so small in the middle of all this quiet emptiness. So small, looking up into the empty sky.

    I turned and turned and turned in the breeze. Around and around I turned.  My arms flew out and I spun faster and faster! My head was dizzy and I laughed and spun and spun faster until finally I fell on the ground laughing and panting for breath.  My eyes closed and I let the sun fall all over my body. It was so warm. So warm. So warm. For a long time I lay. I must have fallen into a sleep of floating on soft, warm clouds. Floating in the air, floating like a boat in the air high up with the clouds. In my dream I tried to peek at the gods who were above the clouds, but they were hidden from me by the puffs of whiteness. What did they look like? I wanted to know. But they were hidden from me.

    A darkness fell over my dream, and now I was not so warm. The glow of sun that came through my eyelids turned dark. Dark. And I opened my eyes. A shadow was there. I blinked. There was still a shadow that barely moved. My eyes focussed.

    Just past the sharp point of a spear I saw a man standing. He was holding the spear just in front of my face. I started to rise, but the spear did not move. I could not rise or the spear would have gone right into my eyes. I rolled to my left and there were the legs of another man like a wall that I could not roll past. Now I could sit up, and I saw six men all around me.

    They were not the men of my village, the men of my tribe. Their clothing was wrong. Their faces were strange. Strange. They were not happy, these men. And they all held spears and knives pointed at me.

        One man grunted in my language. He did not speak it well. "Get up!" he said. "Get up!"  I wanted to run, but they were in a circle around me.

    They led me away into the trees. They led me out of the huge open field, away from the grass, away from the sun, and into the dark trees. One man grabbed me by the shoulders. Another man pulled my hands behind me. My wrists were tied together. I could not get loose.

    They led me through the trees to a small dark clearing. There were other people there. Men, boys, girls, women. Some were from my village, some were from a neighboring village, and some I had never seen. They were all tied, hands behind them. Then a long rope passed between them and they were tied together in a long chain.

    Men came and tore away our clothes. They took the cloth. They took all the cloth. But no one took the bag around my neck. Perhaps they did not look there when they took our clothes. I do not know why.

    There were other men with spears: Other men who stood silent, pointing their spears. They fastened me to the chain of people. They tugged on the front of the chain, and we all moved.

    Twenty of us. We moved through the woods. No one spoke. I had to move my legs fast to keep up with the rest. Fast.

    Now I was frightened.

    "Let us go!" I shouted.

    A man with terrible scars on his face hit me on the back of the head with the handle of his spear. I did not cry out.

    "Quiet!" said the man with the terrible scars. "Quiet, you!"

    We moved through the trees. We moved toward the south. We moved toward the west. I could tell from where the sun was. I could tell from how my shadow fell. We moved farther and farther away from my village and my family.

    The ropes hurt my wrists. My head hurt where the spear had hit me. My bladder was full, and I longed to empty it!

    After many hours when we came to a stream. We stopped. The men were tugged to one place on the stream, the women to another. At last we could empty our bladders. Then they forced us to drink from the stream. There was no food for us though. No food.

    Then we must march again. As fast as before. It was hard with no food in my stomach. It was hard for us all. The darkness was coming faster. The shadows were long. The air lost its heat.

    We came out of the trees to an open place. There was barely light to see. It was like no open place I had ever been before.  The sun sizzled and burned on a vast, shiny place. The place stretched farther than the grass, farther than the trees. It stretched to the end of the world.  It rippled like the grass, in waves, but it sparkled with the blood red of the drowning sun. All at once I knew what it was. It was as my father had told me. I knew exactly what it was.

    The sea.