9780545470018 Endangered by Schrefer Eliot & Eliot Schrefer

Author:Schrefer, Eliot & Eliot Schrefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Paperbacks
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

I stayed there four days, leaving the man to care for the boys each morning while Otto and I brought the two eldest to go harvest manioc from the abandoned fields, carrying it back in groaning bamboo-and-liana crates the man kept behind the clinic-school. By the time those four days were over, we’d built them up a good store of food. The man’s fire pit was a blessing, and I ate manioc with a gusto I would never have thought I could muster. It didn’t hurt that we roasted it with whole bulbs of fragrant wild garlic pulled from the yard. The combination of manioc and garlic and well water and a forest antelope caught in the man’s snares made for the first balanced meals I’d had in weeks. By the second or third day, my insides were running normally, and I no longer had that bloated feeling from my greens-only diet. Otto ate a piece of the duiker, which surprised me since I’d always thought of bonobos as vegetarians. But I guess the circumstances were extraordinary for all of us. He enjoyed sleeping in a bed with me, and his lingering cough finally cleared up.

During a quiet moment it struck me that Congo was an easier country to survive in than most during a time of war. In peacetime the teacher couldn’t afford to buy food at the markets, which meant he had a field, and snares for wild game, and a well for water since the government had never run pipes out here. I tried to imagine getting by if the same thing happened in Miami and couldn’t. When a country was as primed for civil war as Congo was, when it came apart, the pieces weren’t as heavy.

It was wonderful to linger in bed in the morning, listening to the sounds of Otto playing with the boys downstairs. I thought a lot about Songololo, and debated whether it would be a good idea to fetch the other bonobos and bring them here. Though I made sure during the manioc gathering never to go near the spot where I’d left them, because I wanted to keep their location a secret, I often scanned the jungle line for them. Only once was I successful, when I saw a distant Mushie and Ikwa lounging and grooming in the clearing of the burned-out house. I missed them so much at that moment and was struck through with concern for their well-being.

But I thought better of bringing them to the plantation house; they had a much better chance of staying alive in the abandoned village, away from people. It seemed unlikely the schoolteacher and his boys would turn to eating bonobos — they treated Otto reverentially, the old man once even calling him “our national heritage” — but if things got worse and they began to starve, everything could change. And there were those duiker snares. They were designed to capture antelopes, but I’d seen bonobos at the sanctuary with hands or feet missing from snares like those.

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