They offered a choice piece of bush baby to me. I choked down the meat, only a few stray chromosomes from my own flesh. Annihilation is consumption at the most basic level. Soon enough, the primate was trans formed into me, amino acids, corpuscles, muscle fiber and DNA.
After eating, we sat in a silence broken only by the convulsive cough- ing of the hunters, who had sucked two cigarettes to the filter as if they were the last smokes on earth. The men moved close to one another. They began to sing. One laid down a remarkable baritone, another led with lilt ing complex phrases, the last three combined in strange and powerful harmony. The moment tran- scended language, and I knew that the men sang of both remorse and hope from a place deep in history and human emotion. When they finished, we stood up to walk back to camp. Something crashed in the bush so close even I saw it. The brown-red flash of an impala grazed our periphery. The hunters sprang up the riverbank, and I took off chasing them. Then I stopped. Staying with them would be impossible. I had lost the
will generations ago. I was bound for the Land Rover and a flight home, where my pos sessions were a weight to me like a brick to a drowning man. The
hunters remained in a place so free of possession that everywhere they walked was home. My tribe will
probably survive for some time. Theirs has about the same chance as a treed bush baby staring down a speeding arrow.
o o
