his brow a piece of parchment spread with mucilage. Now the males moved in, and I with them. Fortunately no one sought to prohibit or discourage my involvement. As the youngest hunters, Roosevelt and Fred bore the brunt of transporting Genly’s corpse down the hillside to the savannah, but the rest of us helped when the going got particularly treacherous. Beneath New Helensburgh the Minids rested briefly, girding themselves for a trek to the southeast—in the direction of Mount Tharaka, the throne of their world.
The travois on which we had brought the warthog back to our citadel lay at the base of the hill. I signaled to the habilines that, if we still had a good distance to go, Genly should be laid upon the travois. After debating this matter with glances and subtle eye narrowings, the Minids agreed to my suggestion. I insisted on gripping the forward poles of the sledge and dragging my dead friend’s body to wherever his compatriots wished it to go. Again no one gainsaid me. The other Minids, carrying staves or clubs, acted as outriders, and for approximately three miles we trudged in disorderly procession across the grasslands to a solitary baobab.
Here, to my surprise, Alfie, Malcolm, Roosevelt, and Fred struggled to install the corpse in the tree, as high among the great rootlike branches as they could lodge it without risking their own lives. Exempt from this labor by virtue of age, past service, or (in my case) fatigue, Jomo, Ham, and I looked on. We made ourselves useful by surveying the surrounding countryside for enemies, predatory gatecrashers. At last poor Genly sat slumped in a niche of baobab boughs, and the other Minids, sticky with sisal balm, cascaded to the ground one after another to offer their heartfelt obeisance to the corpse. I expected singing, but there was none until all the Minids except Ham had retreated to a patch of bush nearly a hundred yards from the tree. I withdrew with the majority, but I kept thinking that if a lion or a sabertooth or even a pack of wild dogs caught Ham out there alone, he would soon join Genly in the problematical Never-Never Land of Habiline Heaven.
Then Ham began to sing. His tired old throat gave out a rasping keen that went on and on, focusing the implicit meaning of the entire veldt on the baobab beneath which he stood. I shuddered to hear his song, shuddered to think that I might actually understand the immemorial impulse giving rise to such homage. Then Ham stopped singing and came sauntering toward us on his bandy legs, a naked, defenseless gnome paradoxically dwindling in stature the farther behind him he left the baobab—as if the reality of his person paled before the ideal embodied in his lofty, sour song.
I then expected the Minids to set out for New Helensburgh, to take back to their women confirmation of Genly’s tree burial. From dust to dust, from treetop to treetop. But even as the day drew on past noon, we remained in our blind of scrub plants and gall acacias. To stop the throbbing in my temples, I sat down and hung my head between my knees. Roosevelt and Fred paced back and forth in the undergrowth, heedless of the heat, impatient for a break in our vigil. Excitedly they signaled this break themselves by hooting softly and crowding forward to the edge of the thicket.
Beneath the baobab there had appeared a leopard, a long, handsome animal with caved-in flanks and sapphire-bright eyes. Although primarily a nocturnal hunter, this leopard—respectfully contemptuous of the dangers posed by the afternoon activity of its cousins, the lions—was answering Ham’s midday summons. It glanced about the landscape, gave a tentative growl, then flowed up the trunk of the baobab with the grace of a python. Here it took possession of Genly with its teeth.
Alfie, I saw, was pleased. So were the other Minids. Involuntarily, the corners of their lips had lifted into placatory smiles. Alfie was thumping the end of his stave against the ground as if applauding the leopard’s arrival. Dear Ngai, I thought, they want their comrade’s corpse to be eaten by this creature. And indeed they did. We watched the big cat tear away a portion of the dead man’s flank and bolt this down as a hungry dog gobbles down a can of Alpo. It now occurred to me that the women had anointed Genly’s body with the juice of ol duvai to