No Way Home
Alone on the plains and nowhere to belong, Zalika wondered if she would be better off back in the herd with the zebras and without her memories. Part of her very much wanted that, but that path leads nowhere.
The Maasai were determined to retrieve something they believed was theirs. Zalika was just as determined not to be retrieved. Staying out of their territory was the logical solution, but she had no clear idea what the Maasai considered theirs. She was also reasonably certain that they weren’t likely to let a border get in the way of property rights.
She and the mare were most comfortable in open country, where she could see anything that approached. Without the protection of the herd, she needed constant vigilance. The Maasai are getting better at hunting her by day, and the lions are hunting at night. She had to find another way.
Bush had concealed the unseen people from the Maasai herders. Maybe it would hide her. Sometimes in the outcroppings, there were rocky places she could squirm into that were too small for the lions to follow. She could move from cover to cover by day or night until she found her people.
With a plan in mind, Zalika headed off at a jog to find the nearest outcropping of rock. During her time with the herd, she had walked over a great deal of this ground and remembered what had been important to the herd. Now she wanted to know where to find cover and the people she grew up with. Both things the herd tried to avoid.
After an hour of jogging towards the morning sun, Zalika spotted something. She recognized the rocks. Connected to that was the smell of fast cats. Where there were fast cats, the herd was less wary.
The herd remembered what they saw, smelled, and felt. She could recognize landmarks and whether the herd felt safe or not. It was easy and very fast to spot a threat, react, and run. Planning was not straightforward. She had two brains. One reacted quickly to things it knew, but slowly to new problems. The other brain could solve new problems but respond more slowly to a threat.
Zalika thought that if I left an antelope for the fast cats, they wouldn’t be hungry and would leave me alone. The zebra would let her walk up and touch them, but they were a part of her. She couldn’t bear the thought of killing any zebra. She felt no such conflict when planning to kill an antelope. The cats have to eat. They should eat antelopes, not family.
With a dead antelope in tow, she walked until she became aware of the fast cats and simply dropped it. Confident that it would be found, Zalika climbed up to where she had shade and could see if someone approached. She listened to the normal sounds for a moment and lay down to nap in the shade.
Days passed into weeks as she traveled mostly at night, retracing the migration path remembered from cover to cover. Near the river, she began to encounter the people she grew up with. The Maasai were easy to spot. Noticeably taller and leaner than other people, and always with their cattle. They were just as easy to avoid, at least until they knew she was in the area. Her people were everyone else, but the Arabs, and her chances of coming across one of her father's people were next to nothing.
When Zalika came across a small group of men quietly foraging in the bush for whatever they could find, she knew her people would be close. That she had not encountered any farming told her she was still on Maasai land.
Hoping for help finding her way home, Zalika stepped out of the brush. The foragers spotted her almost immediately and froze in place, uncertain whether to believe their eyes. When Zalika tried to approach, they yelled and ran away across the river. Before they disappeared, a Maasai herder came to investigate.
Zalika ran for cover and hoped she had seen him in time to hide. She had to give up that idea when his shouts were answered from several different directions. As the noise grew both in volume and area, the bush she was in gave her some cover and time to think before she had to run. The noise came from a large ark surrounding her with a hole in the noise in the direction the foragers had run. She knew better than to run after the foragers. This was a trap, and she would probably have to run all night.
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Zalika picked a direction not quite at random, avoiding the creek bed. She had used such cover until the Maasai started putting more herders there, and in the densest bush. Sneaking through their lines was also getting harder. She needed a better way past the line of the Maasai.
If there were more Maasai in the dense bush and creek beds, they would not be somewhere else. Zalika would try speed. Most of the Maasai slowed in the dense bushes. She might be able to out-sprint them long enough to tire them out.
Collecting a handful of sand and dirt, Zalika stayed in the light bush for the little cover it provided until she was close to the Maasai. Charging at near her best speed, she reached the line while all but three of the men she could see were waist to chest deep in the bush. They would not get clear in time. The three Maasai, clear of the bush, moved to stop her flight.
Always in the past, she had veered away from even small groups of the Maasai, not wanting to risk getting too close to people so much bigger than her. With three of them so close to her, that was not possible. Zalika would have to run nearly over one of them. For no reason, she ran at the man on the left. As soon as he raised his hands to turn her, she let the mare’s reflex throw it at his face with all the force she could muster. The sand had little effect. Most of it just dispersed into the air, but there was a satisfying clunk sound as that man lunged at her, missed, and fell to the ground. Smiling to herself, she thought Oh, there was a rock in that handful.
Zalika would remember that for later. Right now, she was too busy with the middleman. He had moved to block her path and was holding his spear level to the ground. She had seen this many times with the cattle, and they were almost always turned by it. If she dodged around the spear, it would slow her, and he would soon catch her and push her to the ground. That would give other Maasai time to get out of the bush and catch her.
Taking a firm grip on her spear, Zalika charged this man and shoved one end of it into his stomach just below his ribs. Zalika had not paid attention to what end she led with, but luck was with her a second time. When the spear hit him, Zalika’s hands slid down the shaft and would have been sliced badly if the spear had been reversed, to strike with the steel point rather than the butt end. He was completely unprepared for an attack and dropped his spear as he fell to his knees, gasping like a fish out of water.
Grabbing the now-abandoned spear in place of the one knocked from her grasp, Zalika ran as hard and fast as she could. She had startled these men, but was not out of danger. Other men were working their way through the brush, and it would be foolish to forget their spears.
Zalika caught a new movement to her right and heard a whooshing sound. There was a man swinging something over his head. She turned right as hard as she could to try to put the two men on the ground between herself and the man with the rope and rocks. She had seen it used once on a calf. When thrown, it would entangle the calf’s legs, tripping it long enough for the herders to catch it. Her memory gave her the image of the rocks coming at her and stepping over them while running. The mare knew what to do.
Between her hearing and wide vision, Zalika kept track of the man swinging the rocks and two other men who would soon be free of the bush. The man with the rope and rocks was not much of a runner and would have to throw as she ran through the choke point. Zalika angled towards the closest man still in the bush, putting herself as far from the man with the rocks as she could get. Just before she reached the choke point, she heard the whooshing noise change. Focusing her attention on the rocks coming at her, she had no trouble tracking them, as they came high to avoid the knee-high bush she was running through. She ducked, putting a hand briefly on the ground as the rocks and their rope went right over her and onto her closest pursuer, just as he came free of the tall brush. An image came to her mind of something she would later come to know as a buck!
From this point, it was a foot race. She had enough of a head start to easily win and could feel the mare’s excitement.
They gave up the pursuit after an hour of hard running, and after the excitement of the chase wore off. Zalika took some time to think. The Maasai are getting better at this. Today was way too close. I traded spears with a man, and had it not been for a comedy of errors, we would be property of the Maasai.
This was the last time Zalika would linger near either the river or any known Maasai villages. She would never allow them to organize on that scale again.
Over the next few weeks, Zalika found some villages of her people, but if she tried to enter them, the people would grab what they could and flee. She could easily outrun them, but the terror in their faces when she did unsettled her. She was looking for a home, and terrorizing your neighbors seemed like a bad way to start. She tried approaching people out in their fields, in the bush, on the outskirts of town.
Over time, they did quit running. They had to know she could easily catch them. Not fleeing in terror was not the improvement she had hoped for. Now they refused to see, hear, or talk to her. Unlike the Maasai, they simply shunned her.