The role of girls in the village was entirely domestic. I had a different position—a rare one, free from the traditional roles that governed Kibii’s family set and also my own. At least for the moment, the Kip elders allowed me to train with Kibii: to throw a spear and hunt warthogs, studying stealth as Kibii did from arap Maina, his father, who was head warrior in the village and also my ideal of strength and fearlessness. I was taught to fashion a bow and take down wood pigeons and waxwings and vivid blue starlings, and to snap a rhino-hide whip and wield a knotted wooden throwing club with deadly accuracy. I grew as tall as Kibii and then taller, running just as swiftly through the tall gold grasses, our feet floured with dust.
Kibii and I often went out walking into the dark, past the freshly scythed grass that marked the edge of our farm and the damp higher grasses that brushed wetness up to our hips, past the Green Hill and the edge of the forest, which took us in and in. There were leopards there at night. I’d seen my father bait them with a goat while we crouched on top of the water tank for safety, the goat beginning to quake when it smelled the cat, my father zeroing his rifle and hoping he didn’t miss. There was danger everywhere, but we knew all the night sounds and their messages, cicadas and tree frogs, the fat, ratlike hyraxes, which were actually the distant relatives of elephants. Sometimes we heard the elephants themselves crashing through brush in the distance, though they dreaded the scent of horses and didn’t come too near unless provoked. Snakes in holes vibrated. Snakes in trees could swing down and cut the air like rope or make only the lowest rub of smooth belly against smooth-grained mahogany.
For years there were these perfect nights with Kibii, and long slow afternoons made for hunting or for riding, and somehow—with machetes and ropes and feet and human salt—the wilderness gave way to proper fields. My father planted maize and wheat, and they flourished. With the money he made, he found and bought two abandoned steam engines. Bolted down, they became the beating heart of our gristmill, and Green Hills the most vital artery in Njoro. Soon, if you stood on our hill and looked out past the terraced fields and head-high maize, you could see a line of flat oxen-drawn wagons bringing grain to our mill. The mill ran without stopping, and the number of our workers doubled and then tripled, Kikuyu, Kavirondo, Nandi, and Kipsigis men, and Dutchmen, too, cracking their whips to drive the oxen. The iron sheds came down, and a stable went up, then several more, the newly built loose boxes filling with cut hay and the finest thoroughbreds in Africa, my father told me, or anywhere in the world.
I still thought about Mother and Dickie sometimes when I lay in bed before sleep, listening to the night noises push in from every direction, a constant, seething sound. They never sent letters, at least not to me, so trying to picture their life was a trial. Our old house had been sold. Wherever they had finally settled, the stars and trees would be very different from what we had in Njoro. The rain would be, too, and the feel and the colour of the sun in the afternoons. All the afternoons of all the months we were apart.
Gradually it became harder to remember my mother’s face, things she had said to me, days we had shared. But there were many days ahead of me. They spread out further than I could see or wish for, the way the plain did all the way to the broken bowl of Menengai, or to Kenya’s hard blue peak. It was safer to keep looking forward—to move my mother to the far edge of my mind where she couldn’t hurt me any more, or to imagine, when I did think of her, that her going had been necessary. A kind of forging or honing, my first essential test as Lakwet.
This was certain: I belonged on the farm and in the bush. I was part of the thorn trees and the high jutting escarpment, the bruised-looking hills thick with vegetation; the deep folds between the hills, and the high cornlike grasses. I had come alive here, as if I’d been given a second birth, and a truer one. This was my home, and though one day it would all trickle through my fingers like so much red dust, for as long as childhood lasted it was a heaven fitted exactly to me. A place I knew by heart. The one place in the world I’d been made for.