"It must have doubled back," Tshingana agreed.
"So it must." Shamagwava shook his head again. "The first moso near our kraal in years, and not only is it slain, but slain by my son, my son who has just become a man. How could a father be more proud?"
"You are lucky indeed, Shamagwava," Uhamu said. Mafunzi’s father Ndogeni nodded. Mafunzi beamed at Tshingana, who smiled back at his friend. Inyangesa was smiling too, a little less certainly; he seemed to have trouble getting used to the idea that Tshingana was suddenly a person of consequence. Tshingana did not mind. He had trouble with that idea himself.
Sigwebana had not stayed around to listen to his half-brother praised. He was heading back toward the kraal, a small, lonely figure thinking in the distance. Tshingana had wanted to outdo him, yes, but he was not sure he’d wanted to outdo him like this. He might have made an enemy for life.
Tshingana supposed he would have to do something about that one day. Not today, though. Today his father was saying, "Now that you’ve killed the moso, my son, my man, have you thought about what you want to do next?"
"Two things, father." In the aftermath of the fight with the greatest cat, Tshingana found his mind clear as a stream in a pebbled bed. "For one, I want to make my warrior’s shield from the moso’s skin instead of cowhide, so everyone will know what I was able to do-and so I will never forget."
The clansmen murmured approvingly. Shamagwava said, "That is very fine, son. You will have a shield to make even an inDuna, a subchief, jealous. And what is the other thing?"
Tshigana grinned. "Now that I’m a man, I’m going to find out about ukuHlobonga for myself!"
BLUETHROATS
Have I ever gone birding around Nome with my daughter? Yes. Are the people in the story anything like her and me? No. And the lady I’m married to is just fine, for which I thank heaven every day. But Laura did see a golden-crowned sparrow in the back yard. She really did.
To get to where the bluethroats nest, you drive north out of Nome, up Bering Street. There’s not much traffic, but you drive slowly and cautiously anyway. The pavement ends a few miles out of town, near the Dexter cutoff, The cutoff is dirt and gravel. So is the Kougarok road, the one that takes you to where the bluethroats may be.
"Pothole." Your daughter rides shotgun in the rental’s passenger seat.
"I see it." And you drive around it. One jolt saved. "When the roads are good, they’re fine," your daughter says. But when they’re not…"
"They’re not," you agree. They have signs on them: NO MAINTENANCE OCTOBER 1-MAY 1. It’s June now. The sun shines twenty-two hours a day. It gets up into the fifties, the top few feet of the tundra thaw. Ponds and puddles and streams everywhere. Flowers blaze across the vastness. Millions if birds, which is why you’re here. Billions of bugs, which is why he birds are.
Your daughter points to a scattering of houses ahead. "Must be Dexter."
"Uh-huh." Before you got here, you wouldn’t have thought Nome, with not even 5,000 people, boasted suburbs. But you’re driving through one. Houses. A lodge. A little sell-everything hop. Gone.
Nome is half small-town America, half really weird. Satellite TV. Kids with backwards baseball caps and baggy jeans slouching around looking for something to do. An Italian-Japanese place run by Koreans- -pretty good, actually.
But… A reindeer in a red collar in the back of an Eskimo’s F-150. Musk oxen ambling around the slopes outside of town. More bars per capita than maybe anywhere. Loud, drunken arguments on the street outside your room at the Nugget Inn when the bars close at half past two.
It’s about sunset then. Night, such as it is, barely gets dark enough for you to need headlights. Then, a little past four, the sun comes up again and you start over-if you ever stopped. Midnight Softball-no lights-is a popular sport here. In the wintertime, so is ice golf on the frozen Bering Sea. And the Iditarod ends in Nome, across the street from the Nugget.
In the hotel lobby is a bigger-than-life photo of a bluethroat singing its head off. It’s an Asian bird, but in summer it spills over and nests in western Alaska. It’s sparrow-sized, but no other bird has that fancy blue-and-orange throat marking. If you want to see it in the States, you have to start from Nome.
A different photo of a bluethroat sits on the counter at the rental-car place, which operates out of the Aurora Inn, Nome’s other hotel. A lot of the summer visitors here are birders, and the locals know it. Next to the photograph is a journal of what’s been seen where. Nome is far, far away from the main highway system. But it sits at the center of its own network of 250 miles of these teeth-jarring roads. There’s a hand-drawn map in the journal. A little past milepost 71 on the Kougarok road…
Plenty of birding to do on the way. A few miles up the road from Dexter, your daughter points to a roadside pool. "Shall we stop?"
"Sure." You pull over to the side. You’re still half on the road, but so what? It’s straight as a Republican senator. Anyone coming can see the car from a long way off. Not that anyone is. After Los Angeles, having a road to yourself seems stranger than anything else here.
You and your daughter get out. You spray each other with insect repellent and rub it on your cheeks and forehead. A few mosquitoes buzz lazily. Only a few: it’s early yet, and cool, and you’re not very far out onto the tundra. But Alaska mosquitoes are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Even a few are too many. A postcard on a rack at the Nugget Inn shows the business end of one silhouetted against a sunset, with the legend ALASKA’S STATE BIRD. Kidding, but kidding on the square.
Strapped binoculars thumping against your chests, the two of you walk over to the pool. Except for your footfalls and the wind in the dwarf willows, everything is quiet. Your ears don’t know what to do with silence. Always something in L.A. An airplane overhead. Distant traffic. A neighbor’s TV. Not loud, but always there.
Two brown shapes swimming in the pool. "Ducks?" your daughter says doubtfully.
You raise your binoculars. "Beavers!"
They don’t give a damn about you. One swims to the edge of the pool, not twenty feet away. It’s a female; it has teats. It strips off some willows branches and drags them into the water, not very far, to eat. It crunches as it chews. Who would have thought beavers were noisy eaters? Who would have thought you’d find out?
"Wow." Not much more than a whisper from your daughter. She goes on, a little louder, "I wish Mom could have seen this."
"Yeah." These past few days, you’ve walked out on the tundra. Most of it is springy and yielding underfoot. If you come down wrong, though, you fill your shoe with freezing water. You feel that way now. Two years ago, your wife lost what everybody called a brave battle against breast cancer. You don’t argue. What point? You know how scared she was at the end, and in how much pain. Was that bravery? Perhaps it was. You go, "I-" and stop short.
One word too many. Your daughter sets her chin the way you do. "You were going to say something like, ‘I wish Dave could have come along,’ weren’t you?"
"Well…" You don’t deny it, but you don’t admit it, either. One word!
"Cheating prick." Your daughter is going through a divorce. They both teach at the state university, Dave in linguistics, your daughter in anthropology. Dave is dating someone younger, someone blonder, someone altogether more tractable. Someone less like you, in other words.
You always liked him before the mess started. You still do, till you catch yourself and remember you shouldn’t. Your daughter knows it. It pisses her off, bigtime. You can hardly blame her. Still… Dave was a pretty good guy. Is a pretty good guy, even if you won’t get to see him much anymore. Not perfect. You knew that all along, even if you aren’t sure your daughter did. But pretty good. With the world the way it is, that’s often more than enough.