Jane (36 page)

Carefully descending, he had seen a group of the creatures moving with swift grace on two legs along a forest path. He thought his eyes had deceived him. These were
not
Mangani, though their bodies were the same dark brown. But the brown was not fur. It was skin, and except for color, the skin was smooth, the same as his own.

Too, they were not as broad and powerful as Mangani, nor their arms and digits as long. Their faces and the shape of their heads were—as he remembered seeing the reflection of himself in an undisturbed pool—much as his own.

They carried long sticks with sharp points and used them to throw and bring down several
wappi—
these were a small species of antelope
–
at one time. And they slung on their shoulders another odd pair of sticks, one of them curved and tied on two ends with the thinnest of twisted vines. From this shot a sharper pointed branch, shorter and thinner than the other, that flew into treetops with a speed that Tarzan had never imagined possible, bringing down
manu
and
neeta,
the thin sticks having pierced through the bodies of their prey.

All the while they moved through the forest they spoke in a language that sounded strangely familiar and soothing to his ear. With great stealth, Tarzan, keeping to the treetops, followed them on the whole day’s hunt till they reached a place at the foot of the four mountains. Here he had come upon a great pile of stone, very narrow but very tall. Taller than the top of the trees. He’d climbed to its highest point, a long rocky ridge, and looked down upon a puzzling sight.

It was—it had to be—the black-skins’ Great Bower. But this bower was set upon the forest floor and not above in the crooks of trees. Their nests were as high as the creatures stood and had holes through which they passed to go inside, much as the grey hookbills had a nest hole. There were many of the brown, two-legged, short-armed creatures, as many as the digits of his hands and feet, and that many times over. He saw males and females and young ones of every size. Short animal skins covered the males’ dangling parts. The females’ hips and upper legs were wrapped as well, though their rounded breasts hung as female Mangani’s did, and infants fed from them as he had done from Kala’s more pendulous ones.

The word he heard most was “Waziri,” and so the creatures came in his mind to be known by that word. Their chief—Tarzan knew him as chief by the heads that dipped as he passed, so like the cowering postures of Mangani as Kerchak came into their midst—was named “Waziri” as well.

The tribe became for Tarzan an endless source of wonder. He did not show himself to them, and he, deft in the treetops and silent as a cat, was not known to them for many long cycles of rain and drought. Once, while he was tracking their hunt to watch and learn of their weapons, the small party was set upon by
sheeta.
One Waziri was mauled, and in the sadness and confusion of carrying his mangled body back to the bower, one of the hunters left behind his curved weapon and pouch of pointed sticks.

Now they were Tarzan’s, and he determined to learn their use. So many times he had spied upon the hunters to copy their stance, their positioning of the bowed branch and the pointed stick. So many times the stick sprang prematurely and uselessly to the ground at his feet. Nothing he had yet attempted, save trying to kill Kerchak, was less successful than this. In the end the weapon defeated him. He finally set it aside in his bower, covering it with leaves and moss so he should not be reminded of the cursed object.

He did persist in observing the Waziri in the village, and Chief Waziri, who was much loved by all. Tarzan learned the name of the four sloped mountains to the east of their village, that which they called Sumbula. Though they spoke the word often and with a reverence greater even than the name of their chief, the Waziri did not go to the mountains. If a small child strayed too far in that direction, he was swept up into his mother’s or father’s arms and beaten. From this, Tarzan learned that Sumbula was feared above all else. And when smoke rose from the tree-covered mountains and the earth shook beneath them, the Waziri fell to their knees, trembling, and chanted the word again and again until the shaking stopped. We had seen as much during our first visit to the village.

As theirs was a great and proud tribe, if they feared the mountain, Tarzan believed he should fear it as well. He never, therefore, strayed any farther to the east than where the Sumbula foothills began.

It was here above the village that Tarzan saw a girl of his age, her taut brown flesh moist and shining in the day’s heat, pounding the
gomi
root into paste, saw her high round breasts … and felt something stir between his legs. He remembered with fear and loathing how Kerchak wielded the flesh stick against the female Mangani with as much violence and pain as he did a wooden branch. Tarzan slunk away flushed with shame, wishing never to inflict such anguish as his hated enemy had. After that day he began to wear, as the Waziri males did, a skin that hung from his waist to cover his loins. He continued to visit Waziriland often in secret, but never again did he feast his eyes on any young female.

Instead he’d fashioned for himself a long pointed stick weapon and learned to throw it with deadly force. He took Waziri words back to his own nest and laughed to hear the grey
neeta,
Lu-lu, speaking in that tongue. Too, Tarzan marveled at the fires, the “captured lightning” that danced all yellow and orange in pits in many places in the village, fires over which the Waziri placed their kills. It had been the sight of the strange flickering flames that had caused the undoing of Tarzan’s secret presence.

As he was drawn from the rocky ridge and treetops, his descent had taken him lower and lower. Then suddenly his sure footing failed him, and with a resounding crack, he crashed through boughs and liana, catching himself finally just above the heads of the Waziri females at the fire. They shrieked at the shock of a white-skinned, four-limbed, long-haired creature dangling by one arm with an expression they perhaps perceived as fierce but was to Tarzan more akin to shame. He must escape from this humiliating confrontation!

With the sound of Kerchak’s most bloodcurdling roar, Tarzan had risen in a wide arc and, gaining a barely existent foothold, catapulted himself—flying—through an immense void. Then catching hold of a gnarled vine and soaring up and away with the effortless grace of a
manu,
he vanished in the deep folds of the canopy.

The fearsome “Wild Ape-Man of the Forest” became Waziri legend that day.

The first time he’d swung down from the trees with the purpose of “making talk” with the Waziri, he had caused a great sensation among the tribe, with females shrieking and little
balu
crying. The males had drawn their spears and bowed weapons, but Tarzan had quickly begun to speak in their language, all the words he had learned by secretly observing them from above. He repeated
“Waziri”
many times,
“bongullo”
for food, and
“mpinga”
for village. He pointed to a young one, saying
“lunimi,”
and to the growing delight of the tribe cried
“tinkalo”
and began kicking a large nut pod with his feet as they did while playing their favorite game. But when he uttered
“Sumbula,”
the spears were raised again, if only briefly, for Tarzan quickly assumed a pose of submission as a Mangani would do when an angered Kerchak approached. He later learned that “Sumbula” was a sacred word, not spoken lightly, and he silently vowed never to say it again. He stayed only a short time to assure the tribe he meant them no harm and only wished to make talk with them.

On the second visit, they’d complied, even inviting Tarzan to eat with them, and bringing him into
zozo-thango,
the “men’s house,” in which all the Waziri males involved themselves with palaver of great and minor import—the need to hunt and kill a man-eating leopard that had struck for the third time in one cycle of the moon, negotiations for a marriage, the punishment for a stolen pig, even jokes and pranks they played on one another. So besides talk, there was laughter, and this was pleasing to Tarzan, as the laughter sounded not like the shrill Mangani squeals but like his own.

Here he had met a man, the only one of his tribe to ever have left Waziriland and gone
seta,
in the direction north, and come back alive. His name was Ecko, and he stood examining Tarzan very closely for a long while, pointing north and bobbing his head up and down in a signal that he had learned meant “yes.” Then Ecko said quite loudly to all the males at the palaver, “
Techa mpinga
Tarzan, Tarzan, Tarzan.” He had on his journey seen a village of Tarzans.

But what did
techa
mean? Tarzan had asked.

“Large. Very large,” Chief Waziri answered.

Ecko.
This, then, was the man whom Ral Conrath and Paul D’Arnot had met at the dock in Port-Gentil, the one whose golden pendant had led the Porter Expedition to Eden. It was all very strange indeed.

Once back in the clearing beneath our fig, I fashioned a crude target of banana leaves tied to a tree, the concentric circles drawn on with charcoal from our cook fire. I stuffed it with soft nesting material so that the arrows’ carved wooden tips with grooved teeth would not be damaged by repeated practice.

The bow, a simple affair with both ends of its stave wrapped with narrow leather strips and the string of twisted leather, was, not surprisingly, shaped and weighted differently from its European counterpart. It took some practice of my own before I could hit the bull’s-eye. I could see Tarzan watching me with slack-jawed admiration (or was it amazement?). For in all the physical disciplines that had preceded this moment, he had been the teacher and I the student.

When I was confident myself, I stood Tarzan before the target. By my observations of him I guessed he was ambidextrous, and I could not determine which was his dominant eye. I was right-eye dominant and wished to make it easy all around, so I placed the bow in Tarzan’s left hand, as I would do myself.

“This is your bow hand or bow arm,” I said of his left, “and this is your drawing hand or string hand.” I stopped then, annoyed at the outset with the plethora of useless terminology. I would just
teach him,
simply, not talk him to death.

Picking up my own bow and arrow, I stood before Tarzan and assumed the correct posture, my body sideways to the target and shooting line, feet shoulder-width apart.

He copied me, striking a perfect stance almost instantly. I went to him then and had him watch as I loaded an arrow into my bow, careful to point it toward the ground and placing my fingers close to his eyes so he could see their positioning—the index finger above the arrow, two below, with the string held in the second and third, as I had been taught.

I lowered my weapon then to watch Tarzan’s loading of the arrow and adjusted his fingers accordingly. He was altogether silent, concentrating deeply.

When I was satisfied of his finger placement, I again took up my equipment and demonstrated the raising and drawing of the bow in one fluid movement, the string hard drawn to my face, resting lightly at the corner of my mouth, while the bow arm rose toward the target.

Again I went to Tarzan and, assured that he was ready, had him pull back the arrow to the anchor point. I stood close behind him, enjoying the feeling of him near me. My new physical obsession—becoming “strong and fast”—had for the time being superseded the more sensual pleasures we had enjoyed so frequently at Zu-dak-lul.

“Aim for center,” I said, “and when you are ready, let go of these three fingers on the bow.”

I watched Tarzan’s teeth clench and his eyes narrow as he homed in on the center of the target, the picture of single-minded absorption.

He let fly, and the arrow missed the banana leaf target by a fraction of an inch. I expected an angry oath, the usual reaction of a frustrated beginner. But Tarzan simply reached back to the quiver slung around his shoulder and withdrew another arrow. With intense deliberation, he reloaded and aimed. Then with perfect form took his shot.

When the arrow thwacked into the outer ring of the target, Tarzan turned and smiled fully at me. I was beaming with pride and admiration. Of course I had expected no less from the man, but that I had succeeded in my instruction of the art of archery gave me inordinate pleasure.

For the next several days Tarzan did next to nothing but practice, and in no time the pupil’s adroitness with his new weapon exceeded the teacher’s. But hunting with the bow and arrow was, after all, the point of the exercise, and he soon moved out into the forest and taught himself that skill. After delivering his first kill—a wild pig—and partaking of its succulent cooked flesh, he decided to take me with him on the hunt.

It proved an electrifying experience, first learning the skill from my student, then attempting, with little success, to bring down my prey. With a bow and arrow I had never practiced on a moving target, and with a rifle on the skeet range the target moved at a uniform rate. Even the bull elephant I had brought down had been coming straight at me and was therefore a reasonably fixed target, but here the prey was small and flitted about, or jumped sideways in short, jerky bursts of movement. But it was not so much my aim as the nearness to the prey that proved my problem.

Rare delicacy was required, as well as a quietness of being, to narrow the distance between me and my intended mark. I used what I had learned about quieting my breath and becoming still as stone. Yet I lost count of how many targets I missed.

I had become less squeamish about killing living things, for this was the wild, after all, and for better or worse I had become the wild man’s mate. Taking example from Tarzan’s dignified response to his early failures, I refrained from angry expletives when, time after time, my target evaded me.

But in this exercise Tarzan was stern. He meant for me to bring down our dinner, so I shot and missed, shot and missed, till my right arm burned with pain. When the blue-green
neeta
sitting above on a branch and twenty feet away was in my sights, Tarzan came to my side. He said nothing, merely breathed in a slow, steady rhythm near my ear. He wished for me to take up the same rhythm. And so I did.