Circling the Sun Read Free

No African mother would ever have thought to abandon a child. I was healthy, you see, not maimed or weak. So they stamped out that first start and gave me another as Lakwet, meaning “very little girl.”
    I was thin and knock-kneed with unruly white-blonde hair, but my new name and place soon helped to toughen me. Running up and down our hill to the Kip village, my feet quickly turned to leather. Portions of our land that had frightened or intimidated me before became as familiar as the zebra skins that covered my bed. When the daylight bled away, I would climb under the skins and watch the houseboy pad soundlessly into my room on bare feet to light the hurricane lamp. Sometimes the sudden flare and hiss sent skinks in the hut walls flitting into hiding, the sound of them like sticks against straw. Then came the changing of the guard as the daylight insects—hornets and mason flies—tucked into mud nests in the rounded walls, and the crickets woke, sawing in a rhythm only they knew. I would wait an hour or more like this, watching shadows twist over the furniture in my room, all made of paraffin boxes and all the same until the shadows rounded and changed them. I listened until I couldn’t hear my father’s voice any more, and then I’d slip out of an open window into the inky dark to join my friend Kibii around a low spitting fire in his hut.
    Kibii’s mother and the other women drank a murky tea made of bark and nettles and spun out their tales of how everything had come to be. I learned most of my Swahili there, more and more eager for stories…how the hyena had got his limp and the chameleon his patience. How the wind and rain had once been men before they failed at some important task and were banished to the heavens. The women themselves were wizened and toothless, or supple as polished ebony, with long-muscled limbs under pale
shukas.
I loved them and their tales, but I wanted more to join Kibii and the other
totos
who were becoming warriors, young
morani.
    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