A Girl Named Disaster by Nancy Farmer

Author:Nancy Farmer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

23

So much work to do! Nhamo had to find food, build a shelter, dig a garden, cut down a tree, and carve it into the shape of Crocodile Guts’s boat. The boat and garden would have to wait. Even the shelter was less important than an immediate food supply. She didn’t dare use up her stores from the njuzu island until she was certain she could replace them.

The rainy season was past and so, therefore, was the largest supply of vegetables. Still, on the stony slopes of hills she found many small tsenza bushes. Their roots could be roasted like yams or even eaten raw if she was really hungry. In the marshy ground where the stream met the lake she found dense patches of sedge. The small brown tubers under the soil would be available throughout the dry season.

Wild spinach, mowa, was still present although sparse, and several varieties of wild beans had escaped foraging baboons. The beans were dry, but she could soak them. On termite mounds Nhamo discovered jabvane bushes with purplish black fruit, and in dense thickets near the water grew brambles with dark, sweet berries.

She found wild loquats and waterberries, monkey oranges, and marula. All had been plundered by baboons, but quite a lot of food was left. Nhamo noticed that some trees were hardly touched, and when she tasted the fruit she understood why. The animals had so much to eat they could afford to ignore food that tended to be sour. Later in the dry season they wouldn’t be as fussy.

Nhamo collected a basket of the pale yellow marulas from the ground and returned to her cook-fire. In the middle of each fruit was a nut that, broken open, produced three edible seeds. Nhamo craved oil, so she ate the seeds right away. Some of the white, pulpy fruit she also devoured, and some she boiled to make a drink for later.

She found a number of large grasshoppers, pulled off the heads to remove the guts, and roasted them on a flat stone over the fire. She tossed them in a basket to knock off the wings and legs.

In the afternoon, Nhamo harvested gourds to turn into calabashes and storage pots. She cut slashes in mutowa trees and collected a ball of sticky sap. She hacked off the outer shell of a mupfuti tree and began peeling off long strips of the inner bark.

By sundown, Nhamo was exhausted. She lay in the mouth of the cave and wearily chewed and twisted the bark strips into twine. The bark tasted good—like raw beans—and gave her the illusion she was eating as well as working.

The cries of the baboons echoed in the trees across the grassland, but they didn’t attempt to approach the cliff. In the middle of the night the unknown creature came out of its hiding place and whisked its long antennae over Nhamo’s legs.

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