False dawn
by Joe Palmer
[ places - january 03 ]
The False Dawn rises in Somalia as suddenly as theatre lights go down. And for a minute you can see the outline and perspective of a gauzy proscenium. In those latitudes the length of the day never varies more than ten minutes. The light, the refraction of the light of the nascent sun in the atmosphere, rises at 5:40 in the morning. And then, the angle changes and it falls dark again, to rise quickly as the hour of six approaches. There we were, nearly on the Equator, on the Horn of Africa.
There we were, Al Corn and I, waiting for enough light for us to go into the bush, down from the coastal plain into the savannah of brush scrub, acacia, mimosa, seepweed, grevillea, mostly thorns. The coast is a rising one, a coral plateau that comes out of the Indian Ocean. Down below to the east is the Somali Trench, a deep rift in the earth under the sea that is echoed by the Rift Valley 500 miles to the West. The Rift Valley sundered Africa in recent times, perhaps 3500 years ago. It extends northward to become the Red Sea, where the guns of Aqaba face the sea, to the Dead Sea and the Jordan Valley. It peters out in Syria.
There, 50 miles north of Mogadishu, the capital city, we were sitting in a VW Beetle at the edge of a coral plain that stretches for 2,000 miles, no harbors, just rock, only enough moisture from the sea to make a little grass for the gazelle and the sheep and goats that pasture on it. Beyond the narrow coastal plain the savannah and desert extend to the mountains of Ethiopia, and comprise that place of death, the Ogadén Desert.
We were there for purposes that neither of us thought much about. We watched the false dawn, drinking coffee from a thermos bottle and talking about politics and our families. We were there for reasons that go beyond time, to rituals barely understood. We were there to kill a beautiful animal, a gazelle that might be there, that ought to be there, for we were there. And so it must have been written somewhere that we would be there, sitting in a little car at the edge of the coastal plain, waiting to descend into the sandy regosol, to pick our way among the thorn trees, to search, to kill, to eat flesh and to be among the conquerors.
To kill for what? Because to kill gives honor and food. Because the memory of hunting and gathering is in our blood. Because we love the animals. We are not pastoralists and nomads like the Somali. We take. We don't give back. We take, and to Hell with the rest.
The Somali are content to kill one another, to live in a complex give-and-take with their relatives and friends. They have a sodality wherein in the worst of times someone owes them something. They are perfect communists. We have freedom and dignity.
We go out and kill beautiful animals to prove that we are the sons of the earth to whom everything is owed.
To kill a big animal takes but a moment. A large-calibre rifle propels a bullet at great speed. Ideally, it causes a kind of shock, and cessation of vital functions. When it does not do this very soon, a small .22-calibre shot behind the ear usually suffices.
Then the important business of butchering begins.
You cut the animal's throat to make it bleed, and then you suspend the animal by its hind feet. You slit its abdomen, taking out all the guts and heart and lungs and genitalia, being particularly careful of the anus and the lower bowel and the gall bladder. You save the liver, the best part. Then you skin it. And then you chop it up into cookable pieces.
There were no grocery stores in Mogadishu in those days. We got most of our meat from the Italian butchers, who bought the poor skinny animals that the nomads drove to us across the plains because the animals were worth much more money in the capital city. A consequence of the daily drive of animals was that the only highway was strung with the carcasses of the sheep and goats and bullocks and camels that did not survive the forced march or the vehicles.
The dead ones smelled very bad. They swelled until they burst.
The smell of Somalia is a subject in itself. Death and decay are everywhere. You get used to it. There are so many vultures and other scavenging beasts like marabout storks that a dead donkey is gone in a week. A dead camel takes longer. The birds make quick work of sanitation most of the time.
So there we were, waiting for the light of sunrise. Al had, as usual, decided to be the shooter. I had no particular pleasure in doing that. He sat on the roof of the car. The signal when he wanted me to stop the car was his foot in front of the windshield.
* * *
The dawn came soon and quick. I drove slowly among the thorn trees, making as little sound as I could. There in the bush it was easy to surprise animals.
On the coastal plain the little Speke's gazelle looked like toy animals set out on a billiard table. You could see them from a mile away. There in the bush among the twelve-foot-high spidery trees, each change of position gave a new aspect. I would drive slowly fifty or sixty feet and stop the car, letting the engine idle, and we would look for colors and shapes.
With the coming of the dawn, the rising sounds of innumerable birds grew louder with the brightening landscape.
Of course every animal within earshot of the car heard the sound of the motor. Our advantage was that few large animals in the bush could know that a car was to be feared. There was only one paved road in the entire country in 1966. It was a large country: 394,250 square miles, with one paved road for trucks to carry bananas to the ports of Merca and Kisimayyo from the valleys of the Shabelle and Juba Rivers. Yet the few major centers of trade were served, if not by camel caravans, by trucks that used the immemorial sand tracks that interlace the sources of water.
Also the Somali do not hunt. It is beneath their dignity. Only the Riverine Bantus in the Juba Basin, who are sedentary agriculturalist, have a caste of hunters. The Somali kill each other and predators, not wild game. The large animals of the bush never expected or feared what happened to them when we were about.
The big beasts of the bush: warthogs, wild dogs, waterbuck, gerenuk, hyena, ostrich, baboon, elephant, leopard, lion. In the rivers crocodile and hippo. On the plains, competing with the Somali livestock for grass, live twenty-nine sorts of gazelle. They range in size from the tiny dik-dik, about the size of a house cat, to the waterbuck, which is the size of a large pony. Think of the oryx with his beautiful long curved horns. Or of the gerenuk.
The gerenuk, the giraffe gazelle (Waller's gazelle), is there in the thorn bush because he is adapted to eating the leaves of the acacia tree. Since this wide-spreading tree grows up to twelve feet high, the gerenuk must have a long neck. He browses the tops that other animals can't reach. There is this beige, buff, beautiful beast that looks like Bambi, except the neck bones are elongated. All mammals have the same number of bones in the neck. In some of us the bones are longer. And when the gerenuk stands on his hind feet, his front feet folded demurely in front, he can reach eight or nine feet into those trees. Such withered gray leaves! The camels love them. I have tried them. But they taste sour and bitter to me.
The gerenuk is a precious gazelle. It lives only in these bush forests. There are few of them. They seek their own society. They have lovely eyes. Those of us who have seen them do not believe that they are real. The fact of their existence is a gift. They are not of this world, but belong to another realm.
During the years in Africa I saw only three gerenuk. I would like to see
one again, with its long, gracile, beautiful neck, the spotted flanks, the strange agility of being able to extend its body so tall. And it must fear for its existence because it is easy prey for the dogs and jackals and hyena and leopard, for it is delicate, and fragile. Yet it is swift and smart.
A gerenuk family consists of a dominant male, his dam, and a younger female: a ménage à trois. Where the younger comes from is conjecture. A daughter, perhaps. Or taken from another family. 0, ethnology! The Somali say that the male pays the pride price for her. In what coin?
They live in that savannah bush and find enough peace to perpetuate themselves. The fact that they could simply be on the savannah and persist there fills me with wonder. What a marvelous symbiosis must exist! The balance! The necessity! It makes our selfish economics, the bargaining and stealing from each other, so unnatural. How could it be in this world that a species of animal so narrowly specialized could persist in its existence?
For the love of the acacia trees they do make their lives there among them.
But we were there in the bush listening to the shrill of birdsong and watching for the presence of edible beasts that could be killed.
Then I saw her.
So much like a running camel! Her neck stretched out in front, she was running low across the track in front of us. Then Al's foot was in front of the windshield. I stopped the car. The female ran in a profligate stutter in front of us. She was trying, like a bird, to draw us off, to distract us from her mate.
She went on to the left into the bush, like a leaf in the wind, clattering noiselessly.
Then on the right, a hundred yards away, we saw an old male gerenuk and a young one. They looked at us, hoping God knows what. Al lay down across the roof of the car and looked at me through the windshield and pointed to them. The sacrificial offer of the dam should have confused us.
A clever plan:
The old female must give herself to the predators. Or pretend to do so. Later, when they were back together again they could have had a good gerenuk laugh, or whatever.
Al's foot came down. I stopped the car. We looked at the pair of animals standing a good way from us to the right. I shut off the motor. There were a big old gerenuk and a smaller one standing under an acacia tree. They looked at us, their ears tilted forwards. Their plan was not working. There they stood staring at us, motionless. We were there with those animals from out of time. The older dam had fled flagrantly to distract us. I still see her, neck extended, running in mock or real terror.
Al braced himself on the roof of he car, spreading his legs. I heard him breathe out and pause. The sound of the rifle shot spread into a roar as it echoed off the trunks and branches surrounding us. Birds rose like confetti.
I opened the driver's door and took my shotgun from the back seat. Al slid onto the hood of the car and then to the ground. With ratcheting clicks he expelled the spent cartridge from the rifle and loaded a new one. The cartridge case lay steaming in the morning dew.
I jacked a goose load into the shotgun. You never knew what was beyond the next tree or bush in that land. That is why the Somali are so tall. The survival of the tallest. Tall people see farther.
The sky was bight now with the sun behind us. There was absolute silence. The million birds had ceased calling. They were waiting for better news from far above us and away, for the moment.
Al told me that he had aimed his rifle at the beige throat of the gerenuk buck that had stood facing us. But we could see nothing of the animals. The young one had not run away. That is, we had not seen her run. There was no motion, no sound anywhere. Just our breathing and the warm sunlight on our backs.
Al motioned for me to walk a few yards to his left. That way we could catch any attacking animal in a cross-fire, and my being to one side would give a double aspect on what we might find.
We made our way with great caution toward the place where the animals had been standing. A wounded animal will usually run, and you can see or hear its escape.
Here there was nothing but a fearful silence.
We walked forward, waving to each other, for vocal sounds are forbidden to hunters. I saw nothing but dried sedge and the threatening branches of olive-drab trees.
Al walked as directly as he could to the spot where the big gerenuk had been. I trailed him off to the left, riding shotgun.
Then I hear him moan. It was just a little sound with no words in it. I went to him. He was on his knees, his head bowed, his rifle in front of him in the sand.
I looked up and saw them lying there. The young female gerenuk had stepped in front of her master, no doubt to protect him, just as Al fired the rifle. The bullet blew off her face and struck the buck square in the chest.
"Africa will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty eternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated," Isak Dinesen wrote in Out of Africa.
Karin (Isak Dinesen) Blixen's Somali servant Farah once said to her, when her coffee-drying shed burned down, bankrupting her, "God is amused, Memsahib. He is playing with us. He must be very happy."
