kopje overlooking the plain.
Carrying the dead hare by one of its hind legs, Roosevelt approached my outcropping and squatted just beneath me in the lee of its overhang. He had decided to eat his catch in solitude rather than carry it back to camp, where the others would expect and probably receive placatory allotments of the carcass. Although Odetta, his consort, probably deserved the consideration of a rabbity drumstick, I did not half blame Roosevelt. He had taken the risk and he had won the prize.
I peered down on him with respect and great excitement. Roosevelt, ignorant of my presence, knapped some sharp flakes from a lava cobble and began to perform deft surgery on the limp underside of the hare. The single-mindedness with which he was dismembering his dinner suggested that unless I revealed myself, he would never awaken to the fact that he was being watched. Sheer youthful carelessness on his part, but a break for Joshua Kampa.
Carefully, then, I got to my feet and balanced on the edge of the kopje. The sun was sinking toward Lake Kiboko, and my shadow fell behind me to the east, out of Roosevelt’s line of sight. Catching my breath, I leapt as far out into the savannah as I could and twisted about in midair so as to be facing Roosevelt when I landed. My backpack banged my shoulder blades as, instantly crouching and spreading my arms to prevent the Minid’s escape, I hit the ground. Roosevelt shrieked and dropped the mangled hare. Unfortunately, he also dropped the contents of his lower intestines.
Dear Ngai, I thought. Not again.
I let my backpack slide into the grass behind me and tore off my T-shirt by way of a hasty peace offering. After demonstrating how it might be used to clean one’s backside, I thrust the undershirt toward Roosevelt with many solicitous murmurs and smiles. He regarded the garment with the utmost suspicion and attempted to sidle past me to the right—but I stayed with him, and he seemed to understand that he would have to grapple with me to win his escape. Consequently, he showed me his teeth—his tongue—his liver-colored throat—while the hair along his shoulders and upper arms crackled erect and undulated in the faint twilight breeze. My height advantage seemed irrelevant. I did not want to fight him.
“Take the T-shirt,” I intoned sweetly. “Please take the T-shirt, Roosevelt.”
Against all my expectations, he did, snatching it from my hand as if retrieving something that had belonged to him in the first place. He then set about a swift, comprehensive clean-up campaign, never taking his eyes from my face. A moment later the soiled T-shirt was lying in a wad at my feet and Roosevelt was sidling along the face of the kopje to the left. I moved with him. Our clumsy little waltz was getting neither one of us anywhere. We halted.
What now? Roosevelt’s beetle-browed expression appeared to inquire.
From the thigh pocket of my bush shorts I removed my last unwrapped package of Fruit of the Loom cotton briefs and nimbly extracted them from the plastic. Like a matador displaying his cape, I shook them out. They were clean and bright, so seductive that a week ago I had almost broken down and changed into them as a means of combating my can’t-get-started-with-you-habiline blues. Now I was glad I had not. The briefs had a waistband of resilient elastic completely encircled by a single golden thread. I posed behind them so that Roosevelt could see how they were supposed to be worn.
Roosevelt’s mamma had not raised a blockhead. He quickly made the necessary notional leap and snatched the briefs away. Then he retreated to the southern end of the kopje’s overhang to fondle and examine them. Warily eying me as I gestured encouragement, he stood on one foot long enough to insert the other through the garment’s leg opening, then hurriedly switched feet and completed the job, shinnying the briefs up his lean thighs and over the hairy knot of his genitalia. Voilà! A habiline in immaculate Fruit of the Looms.
I was misty-eyed. “Jesus, Roosevelt,” I told him; “Jesus, you really look nice.”
Still leery, he swaggered back toward me and retrieved the gutted hare. This, without ceremony, he gave into my hands, apparently in exchange for the underwear. Before I could assure him that there were no strings attached to my gift—beyond the heretofore badly frayed hope that it might establish my trustworthiness as an ally—Roosevelt had darted off across the