In the Morning

Those Polite Enough Not To Wake Us

The tracks resembled the Moon’s craters, round and smooth and blue in the dust of the early morning. A whole stream of them skittered through camp, past the thorn trees which stood like guardians in the silver grass, and ran down the valley towards Manyara. Brambles danced across the grey stage set for the dawn. The wind battered the shawl I’d wrapped around my head. My tentmate emerged.

“Did you hear anything?” he asked.

“No.”

“Maybe they came through yesterday afternoon, while we were out at the watering hole.”

“Everyone else was here, then. No way would they have come through in this number.”

“But surely the askaris must have heard something.”

I squatted down. Stretched from the tip of my thumb to the tip of my pinky, my hand was still not big enough to cover one of their tracks.

“This one was big.”

“They all are. You want the first shower?”

“No. You can take it.”

“You comin’ back in?”

“In a minute.”

The edges of the footprints were fragile—wind toyed at them like a painter at a first draft. I stared. I could still smell the earth they’d been rolling in, feel their wrinkled sides running down their great forms like grey blankets over boulders, ears so large that they seemed to whisper a language of their own while straining to hear you, snouts playfully slapping their tree trunk knees, and above all — that which I still dream about — eyes like the surface of a calm, deep sea, which drown you in silence. Listening, hearing only their playful ears, you wait for one them to speak.

They never do. Instead they sit, munching, and wait for you to guess their name. All the things we know and we still haven’t figured this out.

Wind blew down from the ridge and swept dust over where they’d tread. Maybe they’d just been shy. Not a single tent pole nudged nor stake upturned. We’d been asleep in our ships and a great pod of sentience had swam through, invisible and unheard.

Hamza came over and motioned towards the ground.

“Tembo wengi,” he said. I nodded, lest those great ears in the valley below catch a word.