The Sleeping Baobab Tree (14 page)

“By what?”

“Well, by this rock,” I said, pointing to something that couldn’t really be called a rock. More like a small stone.

“You mean this pebble?” Madillo said.

I must write down Madillo’s sole purpose in life in my notebook: Never Let Bul-Boo Get Away With Anything At All.

“This pebble could change the course of a hurricane. Geology is a complex thing,” I said, hoping that would end the conversation.

At that moment a small shadow fell across the paw prints. Nokokulu had arrived.

She looked down at the ground and said nothing, which was unusual for her. Suddenly she didn’t look like her usual bossy rude self. She looked scared.

“Did you make these?” she said finally, looking at the three of us.

We all shook our heads.

She crouched down next to them and looked up at us again. “Are you sure?”

“We didn’t, Nokokulu,” Fred said. “But why are there only two?”

“Ha!”

Sometimes when she says “Ha!” she sounds triumphant, as if she has just reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro carrying three cheetahs on her back. But this “Ha!” had an “I told you so” sound to it.

“How many paw prints do you want?” she said, grinning at Fred as if she’d just said something really clever.

“I don’t want any prints, Nokokulu, but I don’t understand why there are only two.”

“Why do you need to understand everything, boy? Two feet, three feet, four feet, why is there a problem? Maybe its other feet were bitten off by a lion, so now it has to walk on two? A sad two-legged hyena. Don’t be thinking about them any more. Leave these silly things and come and help me put out the fire so we can go to sleep.”

We left the paw prints reluctantly and followed her back to the fire.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something she was not telling us. Something she knew about the prints. Anyone looking at them would see they were real, so why had she asked us if we had made them? It was almost as if she didn’t want them to be.

She stopped when we got near the fire. “You two,” she said, pointing at Fred and me, “you get some sand to put out the fire.”

“And me?” asked Madillo.

“You…” Nokokulu thought for a minute. “You can go back to those silly hyena prints and cover them over with sand. Then they’re gone. If a hyena can’t see his own prints he won’t come back to that place.”

“What?” I said, confused.

“Come on,” she said, ignoring me. “Run along now, Mad Girl.”

Madillo didn’t wait for a second instruction.

I know that it’s not true about a hyena’s paw prints. If it was true it would mean that a hyena would never go anywhere new. In fact it would never even have taken its first steps, as it would have looked up at its hyena mother and said, “I can’t move, because none of my paw prints are on this earth.”

Then it would have just stood completely still till it died.

But there was no point telling Nokokulu that.

After we’d put out the fire and Madillo had come back, Nokokulu said, “Don’t be frightened tonight. The Cow Who Lies Down is watching over us, and the two-legged hyena has gone for ever … if his paw prints have been fully erased.”

A simple goodnight would have done me.

“And I’m right here in the next tent if anything happens.”

“As if that’s going to make us feel any better,” Madillo said under her breath. She still hasn’t learnt that Nokokulu is The One Who Sees All and Hears All.

“Ha!” Nokokulu said as she crawled into her tent and zipped it up.

We all went into our tent but we left the flap open as it was still quite warm. The sun had gone down but the night air wasn’t cool yet.

“We can’t stay in here all night,” I whispered. “We’ll melt.”

What I meant was that I couldn’t bear the thought of lying awake in the tent worrying about those prints. And remembering Nokokulu’s face when she first saw them.

“We could wait till she’s asleep then go outside and play
nsolo
?” Fred said hopefully.

“We won’t have to wait long,” Madillo replied. “Listen. She’s started again.”

She was right. The rumbling snores could be heard once more.

Fred looked at us expectantly. “So?”

Madillo and I looked at one another.

“Is it safe?” Madillo asked.

“You mean from the hyena?” I said.

She nodded.

“We’ll be sitting right outside the tent flap and if we hear anything we’ll jump back in,” Fred said.

Fred loves
nsolo.
He forgets all his worries once he starts playing it.

“Well, OK,” I said. “You dig the holes and we’ll get the stones. We can use my torch.”

“But,” Madillo said, “no shouting. It will have to be a silent game, OK?”

Fred and I nodded. It is almost impossible to play
nsolo
silently, but I reckoned the thought of Nokokulu waking up and finding us outside the tent would keep us quiet.

We played for what seemed like ages – and the whole time I felt as if there was someone watching me. But there was no one. Madillo was not her usual self, even though she was trying hard to be. I don’t think either of us felt like playing, but it was better than just lying in the tent wondering. Fred didn’t seem too worried, especially as he kept winning. His doom feeling seemed to be forgotten for now. I reckon he could have carried on playing all night.

The night was very still, so once the cicadas stopped their singing all was quiet apart from the steady rumble of Nokokulu’s snores. We had set up the torch on a stone and it made strange shadows across the game. I was relieved when Madillo said, “I’m tired now, Fred.”

“Tired of losing?” Fred asked.

“No, just tired,” she whispered. “And I think Nokokulu might be waking up.”

We listened. The snores had stopped. That was enough to persuade Fred, so we all crawled back into our tent.

When
we got back inside the tent we zipped up the flap. I didn’t mind how warm the night was, I wasn’t going to sleep with the flaps open. We then laid out Fred’s sleeping bag on the floor and used our jackets as pillows. Fred lay down between us. He’s always the one in the middle.

“It’s funny to think we’re lying on ground that all those ancient people lived and died on,” Madillo whispered once we were all settled.

“It is,” I said. “I suppose we’re always on ground that ancient people lived and died on, but it seems more strange now, being here. Especially thinking about Bukoko running about on this very spot on her little legs.”

“I keep thinking about those paw prints,” Fred said. “I have never, ever seen only two prints like that. It’s weird. I wish we’d taken a photo of them. Maybe that would have been better than just wiping them away. I remember Sister saying that photographs steal your soul or something.”

“Not a hyena’s soul,” I told him, wishing he hadn’t raised it again. “What she said was that in some cultures people used to believe that if you had your photo taken your soul would be stolen and imprisoned in the picture.
She
doesn’t believe that. And it’s not something I’ve heard of in relation to animals.”

“It’s all right, anyway,” Fred said, “because the prints aren’t there now.”

There was a silence in the tent, and if it’s possible to be especially silent that’s what Madillo was being.

“Aren’t they, Madillo?” Fred said finally.

A few seconds later she spoke, and her voice was thin and quiet.

“I didn’t wipe them away.”

“I knew it!” Fred sat up and banged his head on the tent pole.

Madillo didn’t answer.

“Why, Madillo?” I exclaimed.

“I don’t know! I went back to the spot and I was going to kick sand over them but then I couldn’t. I don’t know why.” She sounded upset.

“They will have blown away by now anyway,” I said quickly to reassure her, “and that thing about hyenas never coming back to a place if they can’t see their own paw prints is just something Nokokulu made up.” Madillo should have told us she hadn’t wiped the paw prints away but I hate it when she’s sad.

“But if she said we must wipe away the prints then she must know something,” Fred pointed out. “Something we don’t know. I know you don’t believe in her having powers, Bul-Boo, but you’ve never proved scientifically that she doesn’t.”

“That’s like saying you can’t prove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not real, so therefore it probably is,” I said. “Science is not for proving that mad things are just made up. That’s just wasting Science’s time. Even the people who created the Flying Spaghetti Monster admit that they did. So why would you drag Science out to prove it?”

“Science isn’t a person. You can’t waste Science’s time,” Fred said. “And do you remember that story about how Nokokulu made a man grow goat’s horns on his head? How would you explain that?”

“The difference is that we never saw it, did we? She told us she’d done it. She could have been making it up. Like she is about the hyena prints,” I added.

“But,” Madillo interrupted, still in her small voice, “I should have wiped them away. Even if there is 0.0001 per cent chance that Nokokulu’s not making it up, I still should have wiped them away. I don’t know why I didn’t. It was as if my feet were paralysed – I couldn’t kick the sand over them. I’ll have to go back there and do it.”

Fred and I went silent for a few seconds.

“Madillo,” I said eventually, “you don’t have to. It was just Nokokulu being Nokokulu. She likes seeing the scared look on our faces, that’s all.”

Madillo didn’t answer.

“I’m not sure,” Fred said. “That would just be mean, and she’s not really mean. Well, not often. It could be true, you never know. It could be an old hyena who’s forgetful, like Nokokulu is herself.”

I wished for one moment that I was a witch and I could cast a spell of silence over Fred. With every word he spoke Madillo’s face looked more worried. She was twisting her hair round and round with her finger, which is what she does when she’s anxious.

“What if it’s true?” she whispered. “What if the two-legged hyena comes back here? Anything could happen, anything at all. I have to go and wipe those prints away.” She looked at me and her voice came back. “I have to, Bul-Boo. We have no other choice.”

I felt my heart sink. When Madillo gets that look on her face it would take an earthquake to change her mind.

“There’s no such thing as a two-legged hyena,” I said. “You know that the kryptops died out millions of years ago. And even if there was such a thing and it happened to be here, it’s dark and you don’t have any shoes on and I know there are scorpions out there.” Which was a bit of a low blow as Madillo hates scorpions.

She turned away, reaching for her shoes. “Shoes are easy to put on, Bul-Boo. I don’t care what you say. I’m going to wipe those paw prints away and there’s nothing you can do to stop me. I won’t sleep if I don’t.” She stood up. “I’m taking the torch. I won’t even be gone a minute. You two will be OK in the dark for that long—”

“But if you have the torch then the hyena will be able to see you,” an unsilent Fred interrupted.

“Fred!”

“A torch won’t make a difference,” said Madillo. “Hyenas have acute hearing and sense of smell, and they have night vision. A torch won’t make a difference. If it’s around, it will know I’m there, torch or no torch.”

“Madillo, don’t be silly,” I pleaded. “It’s late. We can do it in the morning.”

The minute those words were out of my mouth, I knew I had lost the battle. Madillo can’t stand it when I call her silly.

She raised her eyebrows. “Silly? I don’t think so. This is my business. I’ll sort it out. And you’re not always right, Bul-Boo. Sometimes you have to let me make my own decisions.”

I hate it when she gets like this. Dad says she’s as stubborn as a block of wood, and right now that’s exactly what she was.

“Listen,” I said, hoping to distract her. “We’ve been here for ages now. Have either of you heard anything that even vaguely resembles a hyena? No. There isn’t one out there.”

Fred suddenly started laughing in a high-pitched hyena-like way and Madillo and I both jumped. Sometimes he drives me mad.

Madillo looked at him and unzipped the tent. “That’s not funny,” she said. “I’m going to do this and then I’ll be back.” She hesitated. “If I’m not back in a few minutes come and find me.”

With that she stepped outside.

Fred looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders – I knew there was nothing I could do. When Madillo decides something, that’s it. A bit like me. Which is not surprising, I suppose. I could follow her but she’d be looking over her shoulder and then she’d get cross and Nokokulu would wake up and we’d all be in trouble.

There wasn’t any such thing as a two-legged hyena anyway, so there was nothing to worry about.

Each
step that took me away from the tent felt like a mile. I don’t know why I hadn’t asked the others to come with me. I would have felt better with them right next to me. The moon seemed to be creeping in and out of the clouds as if it was following me. I wished I had wiped the paw prints away when the sun was still out.

If I get scared at night-time, I always think about tomorrow. Tomorrow it will be morning; the sun will be shining. I’ll wake up and I’ll be talking to Bul-Boo and Fred. We’ll make breakfast from the leftover food and it will all be normal.

I was nearly at the paw prints but it felt as if I had been walking for hours. The moment I reached them the moon came out from behind the clouds, almost as if it was showing me where they were. Somehow they looked bigger than before and as I stepped closer I thought I heard something like loud breathing, in and out, in and out. I listened. It stopped.

I took another step and the breathing started again. Slow breaths, in and out, in and out. I turned my head but could see nothing. Only the moon and the clouds. The sound stopped and all I could hear was the high-pitched buzz of the cicadas.

I stepped forward again, ready to run if the breathing sound returned, and a shadow fell over the prints. I looked up at the sky but at that moment the clouds crossed the moon and it went completely dark. I felt cold suddenly. The kind of cold that takes over your whole body. My legs started shaking and I felt myself falling. As if in a dream. Falling, falling with nothing to stop me.