to Poppa.”
I picked my daughter off Helen’s chest again and, cradling her in the crook of one arm, mouthed an incoherent goodbye to my lady. Then I darted out of the windbreak in desperate pursuit of the other Minids. The ridge sluiced with yellow mud, but I kept my balance and overtook the habilines in the very meadow where I had first learned that Helen was going to have a child.
Hot ash was showering down. From the vantage of the meadow it was evident that Mount Tharaka had blown away a good four to five hundred feet of its summit. Most of the smoke and soot—or at least the darkest plumes—trailed off to the east, while the sky directly above the mountain had the benighted look of a mirror draped with a black mantilla. Rivers of mud—of scorched tapioca—were oozing down the northwestern flank from the fractured summit, and several of these had already breached the timberline.
Chance and the mountain’s peculiar topography had diverted these floods away from Shangri-la, toward the citadel of Attila Gorilla and his unfortunate people. Unless they had been far more prescient than we, it was hard to imagine that they had escaped their lofty fastness.
Numb, the Minids and I walked away from Mount Tharaka. The men had clubs of one sort or another, but otherwise we had fled the volcano without any worldly goods. The Grub and Helen’s red bandanna were all I had salvaged from the catastrophe still unfolding behind us.
On the savannah elephants trumpeted and guinea fowl paced. The foremost concern of every creature was not to kill a fellow refugee for lunch but to put a healthy distance between itself and the angry mountain. Therefore our evacuation proceeded almost like a parade. We saw baboons abreast of us, unruffled ostriches sprinting into thorn brakes, and giraffids moseying along in self-possessed pairs. As for us, we seemed to be heading toward our old capital cities in the gentle hills east of Lake Kiboko.
The Grub soiled me and began to cry. Her high-pitched mewling alarmed the Minids. I held my daughter at arm’s length, scrutinizing her pallid body and monkeyish features. Her head, too heavy for her scrawny neck, lolled. Her face was a jigsaw puzzle of splotches and lines. Most surprising, her eyes were not the white-rabbit pink of pure albinism but a pair of obsidian dots, hard and penetrating. These dots disappeared when she howled, as she now recommenced to do, and I brought the child back into the cradle of my embrace.
Prolonged exposure to the sun would probably blister an infant so bereft of pigmentation. I tried to shade her with my chest, but the Grub did not stop crying. Shade was not all she wanted.
She was hungry. I was not equipped to satisfy that need and began to fear that I had rescued her from Mount Tharaka only to condemn her to starvation on the veldt. I might just as easily have left her writhing on Helen’s corpse. Milk was what she required.
Guinevere drew alongside me, gesturing for her granddaughter. I handed the Grub to her and watched the baby nudge the depleted reservoirs of her dugs. The futility of this struggle was dismaying—but Guinevere carried her forward to Nicole, who was striding along with A.P.B. sitting jockey-style on her upper back. The child’s dark, downy legs encircled his mother’s waist like sooty pipe cleaners; and when Guinevere tried to transfer the Grub into Nicole’s arms, A.P.B. poked at my daughter with jealous fingers. I hurried forward to deal him a hearty slap.
Nicole beat me to it, knocking A.P.B.’s hand aside. Then Guinevere removed the toddler from his mother’s back and put him on the ground. The Grub—as soon as she was in Nicole’s grasp—began to nurse, and this charity saved her life.
For much of that day Nicole treated the Grub as her foster child. She even took pains to keep my daughter’s body in the shadows cast by her own.
When the Grub was not nursing, I occasionally carried her. The men now seemed to regard me as a kind of habiline transvestite, for if you put on a child in this society, you were automatically dressed as a woman. They stayed clear of me. The Grub, meanwhile, was frustrated by the uselessness of my nipples, which she eventually learned to ignore in order to concentrate on sleeping.
In sleep her translucent eyelids flickered. Sometimes they fell back to reveal the jaundiced whites of her eyes, and I would carefully shut