Endangered (16 page)

We didn't have to go far before we found them. There, in the lee where a fallen tree rested against a standing trunk, lay two little black furry forms. They were curled up, one inside the arms of the other, impossibly small. Their spooning bodies together barely amounted to the size of Otto. They were covered with sores. Flies hovered over the carcasses, landing in the creases of their closed eyes.

Otto started shrieking, scuttling to the two bodies and then scuttling back to me. I tried to shush him, tried to grab him whenever he neared me, but then he'd dart back to the bodies, shriek at them aggressively, kicking at them. I guess he was trying to protect me from those two pitiful dead creatures.

“Stop, Otto,” I said, my voice full of tears. “Leave them alone.”

The smaller bonobo had a wide sweet face and ribs stark, like pencils in a row. She still had a rope around her waist, frayed green nylon. I knew very well that her death was my fault, and that soon sorrow would swell in me like illness, but right then all I felt was fury at the UN peacekeepers, that they could cast her and her sister out back without even removing the rope around her waist. Her hips were covered with angry blisters, which oozed a fluid that had matted with the strands of old rope.

If I had taken a healthy young bonobo and shot her, I could repent and atone. But I'd become part of a system, as permanent and complex as war itself, made a dozen small choices that had led to these dead creatures with their wide faces and chapped lips.

Otto had calmed somewhat and was preoccupied with trying to bring the smaller bonobo back to life, lying next to her and murping, blowing on her mouth, trying to get her to react. Gently, gently, I picked at the knot in the frayed green nylon. I got one strand loose and then the other, and untied the loop. It fell open
around her like a cuff, keeping the shape of a circle. When I finally got the rope untied, I tried to pull it away, but found I couldn't. The end was tight in her dead fist. In her last moments she'd curled over the rope like a sleeper around a pillow, clutching it to her cheek. It had been her treasure.

Otto finally lost interest in the smaller bonobo and climbed on my back, wrapping his arms around my neck and barking furiously at the dead sister. He sat in my lap and slapped my chest, trying to attract my attention. In my misery, I hated Otto for his jealousy. I threw him out of my lap and heard him hit the soil behind me. He murped in bafflement, then was back on me and barking angrily.

“Stop, Otto, please stop,” I said. He got distracted by my tears, dabbed at the wet corners of my eyes. Once he'd seen that the dead bonobos weren't going to take all my attention away, he calmed.

I kissed Otto on the side of his head and pressed him close to me. Too close, and too hard, and I knew it. He yelped, and I softened my grip. I thought not only about these two bonobos but of the stream of homeless refugees, of my dead friends in the sanctuary, of the larger and yet-unknown tragedies elsewhere in the country, in the world. The creature in my arms wasn't an answer, but it did somehow make the question of how to keep going irrelevant. The weight of him, the prevention of his misery, was the answer that defied all logic.

As I re-entered the clearing, swiping at my eyes with the butts of my palms, one thing was very clear to me: I was
not
leaving Otto here.

I knocked on the mobile unit's window, relieved when no one answered, and went inside. Otto climbed down and clamped onto my leg as I opened the cabinet. There were foil-wrapped rations there, but what I was really hoping for was iodine; if Hector had treated the water, there had to be more, and — yes! — in the bottom
drawer I found dark plastic bottles of it, with printed instructions on how much to use to purify water. I looked around for a container and found a plastic grocery-style bag lining the wastepaper basket. I pulled it out, dumped the contents under the desk, and filled it with rations and one of the bottles of iodine, tying the bag around my belt loop in case my only way out of the UN zone turned out to be running for it.

I wished there was a computer in the office I could use, but there wasn't. I didn't even see a phone — Hector must have carried his satellite phone with him. I scribbled a note on a pad on Hector's desk, saying I had to go and leaving my dad's e-mail address and phone number so he could let him know I was safe. Then I opened the door and stepped out into the sweaty, frantic afternoon. Figuring I could count on the base's chaos to ease my escape, I stole toward the fence, Otto holding my hand and toddling beside me. Hector was loading boxes into the back of the helicopter. Maybe he didn't notice me, or maybe he did and was quietly relieved to see one of his responsibilities disappear. I smiled at the guard at the fence and said I had to go pee in the bushes and would be right back. He seemed about to yell at me, then his attention returned to the latest batch of pleading refugees. We slipped past him. Otto and I were out.

My plan from there was simple, if terrifying: Head up the Congo River to Mbandaka, and then skirt past the city to my mom's release site. Given the UN encampment was on the road to the airport, I knew I was beginning the journey north of Kinshasa, with half a mile of marsh separating me from the river. If I headed straight for the setting sun, I should be at the waterfront before dark. I retied the plastic bag to a back belt loop, rolled my sleeves up, took a steadying breath, and started.

Almost immediately the hard soil gave way to marsh, and I was glomping through muck up to my ankles. It was nothing new for my poor sneakers, which had spent the last weeks perpetually brown and moist. But as the sludge came up to my knees, I entered a new realm of worry. Carnivorous fish. Or snakes. Cobras love to swim, and I'd seen them often enough arrowing through water hyacinth, their wide flat heads spading up out of the water. I was going slowly enough now that I figured I'd startle one away before it would strike me, but as the sun rapidly descended I became less sure. Otto avoided the matter entirely by taking to the overhanging vegetation, but the reedy swamp trees weren't nearly sturdy enough to carry my weight. Not that I had the strength to do the kinds of acrobatic leaps Otto was pulling off, hitting a stiff reed and using the rebound to catapult to the next. He'd make it way ahead and wait at the top of a tree, lips anxiously pulling back over his teeth as he watched my slow progress.

Catching up to him kept getting harder, because the water was getting deeper. My pants were wet up to the thigh now, and I wondered how much higher the marsh line would get before I hit the riverbank. I knew the stretch of the Congo River north of Kinshasa was a big setting off point for fishermen returning to their villages from the capital's markets, and that a straight shot to the water should place me in their midst, assuming that fishermen were still trading in the capital.

The Congo is such a huge river that as I got closer it felt like I was approaching the seashore. Around me were seabirds, egrets, and herons, as well as species of murky fish, many of them probably unknown to science, the only evidence of them the occasional spiny fin rising from the surface.

I was still in water up to my waist when the sun went down. I steered myself toward a strip of solid land with the wide, flowing river beyond. Otto had already arrived there, standing on his hind legs and murping at me.

With moonlight my only guide, all I could see clearly was the occasional white curve of a wave. My goal became steering for the darkest space, where no river water could catch the light and I knew Otto was waiting.

As I neared, I heard a cry from the air and felt sudden warm arms around my head. A real bonobo mother would have been able to catch her son, but I rocked back and fell. We were both submerged, Otto flailing around. I pushed off the mucky bottom, hand sinking deep into silky mud, and came back to standing. Bonobos can't swim, and when I fished into the river and plucked Otto out, he was shaking and shrieking in fright. I was desperate to get us out of the water, but still paused for a moment, hugging him to me. Only once he had calmed down did we slog to the dark spot that meant land.

I crawled onto the sand on all fours, invisible creatures skittering away as I collapsed onto what felt like a pile of leaves. Otto, too, collapsed, panting on my chest as we lay flat and stared unseeingly at the stars. The plastic bag of supplies was a mound against my back, but I couldn't muster the energy to untie it.
Later. Now sleep.

 

I woke up fitfully throughout the night, shivering before curling closer around Otto's wet body. The morning sun, when it came, was hot, and I woke up feeling baked. I smacked my dry lips and rolled Otto off me, groggily sitting up. I freed the container of water from the plastic bag and took a long swig. The bag was half-full of water itself, the wrapped packages of UN food bobbing. I drained it and retied it around my waist. As soon as I nudged Otto awake he was at the water's edge, lapping away. I wanted to give him some of the purified water, but he was drinking like the bonobos in the sanctuary did, and I figured his system was more tolerant than mine.

Almost as soon as our thirst was dealt with, I began to itch. I'd been sleeping in some type of vine, and wherever my body was exposed my skin had a sprinkling of pink rash. I couldn't resist the urge to scratch, and when I did the rash sprang back red. I lifted the hem of my pants and was relieved to see it hadn't spread up my leg. But there was a sort of black leaf stuck to my calf. I tried to pluck it away but failed.

It wasn't a leaf.

It was a leech.

I prodded at its middle, hoping it was done feeding and would drop off. But it didn't budge. The center came up, but the suckers on either end wouldn't lift. You're supposed to wait for leeches to
fill with blood and drop away. But it was hard to sit and watch something suck my blood. Shuddering, I let the pant leg fall.

Where there was one, there were probably more. I resisted the urge to take off my shirt and pants and examine the rest of my body. It wouldn't do any good, because I'd have to wait for those to fill up and fall off, too. I ran my fingers over my face and neck, and found none there, and none in my ears. I examined Otto, and he made pleased sighs as I groomed his hair. He had two, one on each butt cheek. He tugged at them, but when a spot of blood appeared at the end of one he shrieked and ran up my torso. I tickled him for a few minutes, and after that he seemed to forget about the leeches, rolling around on the ground right over them. I wrenched his mouth open and checked his throat. That was the biggest danger, because as a throat leech filled with blood, it could cause suffocation. The only solution was to lance it and let the blood it had collected run down into your stomach. At least Otto didn't have any in there.

I withstood the urge to scratch my increasingly prickly rash, and instead dug some soft mud from the riverbed and wiped it on my ankles and wrists. It didn't take the itch away, but made it difficult enough to scratch that I hoped I'd be able to resist. Otto didn't seem to be scratching, so I assumed his thick black hair had protected his skin. He was much more suited to this journey than I was.

As I sat there, thoroughly miserable, waiting for the leeches to finish sucking my blood, I thought back to Anastasia and Mushie and Ikwa and Songololo, going about their daily lives as best they could. I smiled. Then I thought about the bonobos back at the sanctuary, the mothers with their wide-eyed, bald babies wrapped around their bellies, and hoped that by some miracle they, too, were okay.

Enough. If I didn't stay engaged with my present, I wouldn't be
able to continue. The riverbank wasn't more than twenty yards away, and once I was there, I could somehow get a boat and make it to my own mother.

The vegetation closed in as I neared the river, making it impossible to avoid clomping through bushes and thickets. As Otto and I blundered through the bushes, we surprised a Nile Monitor, a sharp-fanged lizard that would have been fearsome had it been more than two feet long. Even so, I was happy to see it scramble away and plop into the water.

Even though the Congo is the second longest river in the world, its breadth is almost more impressive. I couldn't see the other side, just water and horizon. Normally it was thronged with boats — in a country with few paved roads, the Congo was the closest thing to an interstate. Though the stretch I was in seemed deserted, I could hear fishermen calling out to one another farther along downstream. These fishermen were headed in the wrong direction for me, but they gave me hope for more. I settled down at a clear spot by the water and waited for someone to arrive heading upstream.

After an hour or two I felt something fall loose and heavy on my sock. When I stood, an engorged leech fell into the mud and lazily wriggled away. I shook my clothing, but no more came out. Relieved, I settled in to continue waiting. Soon after, another boat appeared, this time a massive dugout canoe, a pirogue heading downstream filled with racks of drying fish, one of the rows still wet and glistening and breathing. A small bird must have had a nest behind one of the racks, as it sometimes zipped in or out. I let the boat pass around the corner.

The next pirogue was heading upstream, much more slowly, and I watched it go a ways before deciding whether to call out. If I reached out to the wrong person, it would be difficult to escape, and something about this man didn't feel right. His pirogue was
empty, which made sense if he were returning from the markets in Kinshasa; but there weren't any containers or racks, either. It's like he wasn't a fisherman at all, and his shut-down expression didn't offer any explanations. I let him pass.

A few hours later another pirogue came by, this one with an old man inside, a tuft of grizzled white hair on his head like a dollop of cream. Punting against the river was tough work, but this guy was making good speed. I decided to call out to him once I heard singing. An old man singing to himself as he struggled against the river seemed like someone I might be able to trust. Maybe it was because the song he was singing was one I'd loved since childhood,
“Uélé Moliba Makasi”
:

“Monsieur!”

He looked up, startled, and saw me. He stopped paddling and let his pirogue drift, taking up again only once the current dragged
him backward. I watched him decide whether to respond to the bedraggled half-white girl wearing a nervous ape.

“Mbote,”
he finally said. “What are you doing on the river, daughter?”

“I am running,” I said. “I need your help. Where are you going today?”

He shook his head. “I cannot take anyone anywhere. The current is strong, and I am just one. Is that your ape?”

The fisherman knew Otto was an ape, not a monkey. Encouraging. I wanted even more for him to be the one to bring us up the river. “Yes,” I said. “Can you help us?”

He chewed his lip with gusto, like it was a strip of dried fish. It couldn't have hurt much, since he didn't have any front teeth. “I will make Mambutu by tomorrow. I will take you as far as that. For a cheap price.”

“Price? What is the price?”

“I will do it for the ape.”

My heart sank. “No. I will not give him to you.”

“Do you have money, then?”

I debated whether to lie, than decided against it, since it might cost Otto's life once I was found out. “I don't have money on me, but I will pay you as soon as I find my mother. She will pay you in United States dollars.”

“I need the money now,” he said, though he was already steering the pirogue to shore. Not a great bargaining technique. It made me trust him, though, that he was that un-slick.

“Is Mambutu your destination?” I asked.

“No. In a month I'll have made it home, to Lulonga.”

Terrific. That was as far as the release site and then some. “I need to go to a spot past Mbandaka. I will pay you fifty dollars,” I said. It was a huge sum, half a year's work for this man.

“But you already told me you don't have fifty dollars.”

“I will get it to you.”

“What if you decide not to get it to me, once I have worked so hard to carry you up the river?”

I wished I had something to give him to show that I was good for it. Then I realized I did — Dad's silver necklace. It had been around my throat this whole time, but I hadn't thought of it much at all recently. I unclasped it and held it forward. “Would this help? You don't find workmanship like this around here.”

I saw him appraise me, and had a pretty good guess what he was thinking. If I'd had purely black skin, he would have said no. But I was half-white. Any crazy thing was possible.

“Silver is not worth much. But I will accept this until you get me dollars. I'll need you to help with the pirogue,” he said. “The current is strong. I had enough trouble when it was me alone. Now I will have two more.”

“Okay!” I said. “And Otto is very light. He won't be any trouble.”

He steered the pirogue to shore. I dropped the chain into his fingers; after pocketing it, the old man helped us in. Otto murped and clutched me as we stepped over the side into the rocking boat. I set him down on the floor, kneeled, and took hold of the long pole by my side. The wood was blackened and thumb-grooved by years of hands.

“You pull on the right,” the man said. “I'll pull on the left.”

I didn't see how I could pull with a pole, but nodded.

He pushed us away from shore, and once we were in open water I tried to punt. Otto gripped his hands on the lip, peering over the side. Then the water freaked him out enough that he climbed up on me, coming to rest on my back and making worried murps into my ear. It would make pushing my stick off the river bottom harder, but I knew it would be impossible for Otto to sit still on the rocking boat without holding on to me.

“What's your name?” I asked the man as I sloshed my pole in the water.

“Wello. And yours?”

“Sophie.”

“That's pretty,” he said. Not in a worrisome way, but more like we were talking about someone else. I smiled and glanced back at him. He was a funny-looking man, with broad puffy shoulders, thick wrists, and kind eyes beneath gray brows. Despite the fact that he'd suggested buying Otto and presumably eating him, I thought Wello was going to be all right.