The Stuff by Sharlee Jeter & Sampson Davis & Marcus Brotherton

Author:Sharlee Jeter & Sampson Davis & Marcus Brotherton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery/Jeter Publishing

CHAPTER EIGHT

Focus Your Rage

Look—we outlasted it. The walls crumbled. We didn’t.

—Classmate of Wess Stafford

1

* * *

When You’re Furious

Wess Stafford slithers on his belly through the tall elephant grass.

He’s seven years old and is out bird hunting with a group of five other boys his age or younger. Each boy carries a slingshot. Each boy is already a skilled hunter. Overhead, Wess sees horizon-to-horizon blue sky, a beautiful day in Africa. Yet one of the littlest boys in the group gives a sudden start and cries out. He’s maybe five years old, and the rest of the boys stand and run to their friend. The littlest boy’s eyes are wide with fright, and he’s holding his arm, wincing in pain.

The children are hunting in Ivory Coast, near the edge of the Sahara Desert. They’re about a thirty-minute hike away from a cluster of mud huts and thatched roofs called Niellé, a little village where Wess’s dad and mom, Americans, work as linguists and translators. Aside from the elephant grass, the landscape is dry and arid. Thorny acacia and baobab trees dot the land. The temperature hovers at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, just another average day outside for the boys. Each year, Wess and his older sister, Carol, spend three months in Niellé with their parents and the other nine months at a boarding school in the neighboring country of Guinea.

Wess hates his time away at school. He loves the time he spends in Niellé, except for days like today.

With his smattering of four languages, Wess is able to ask the little boy what happened. The boy points to the dirt, where a short, slim snake with a sharp-tipped head still lurks. The sight is nothing unfamiliar. The boys have all killed uncountable numbers of venomous snakes in their young lives. They call these particular snakes “pencil vipers,” and the boys all immediately attack the snake with rocks and kill it. It’s small consolation to the littlest boy, however, who’s crying now. His arm is swelling.

The snake has bitten him.

Today’s outing, as always when the boys are hunting, is not about sport. Anything the boys kill, except for vipers, will be used for food. It’s the mid-1950s, and in that time and place, even young children are seen as important to the Senufo tribe’s survival. Already, Wess and his friends have learned how to hunt and fish and cultivate the fields. They’re given free rein to roam the land, and they’ve learned how to battle the ever-present baboons, who aren’t anything like the cute monkey-type animals you might see in a modern zoo. Baboons, to Wess and his friends, are huge attack animals, bigger than the boys themselves, with fangs the size of German shepherds’ teeth. Baboons run wild through the tribe’s cornfields, destroying a main food source of the families of Niellé, and one of the boys’ jobs is to guard the fields with their slingshots. Elephants are also known to stampede through the cornfields, and the boys bang pots and pans together to scare away the huge nuisances.

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