The lost boy. Aher Arop Bol
our hunger had been satisfied, we started wondering what to do next. We might as well return to our camp, we concluded, as the cattle herds were leaving the area. Many of the other boys agreed. They knew the way back, so we tagged along.
Chapter 9
The situation at the camp did not improve. One day one of the elders offered to go and shoot a monkey for supper. There are people who refuse to eat monkey meat because their faces and hands look so much like a human being’s, but the soldiers in the camp did occasionally hunt monkeys. If you found a troop you could kill as many as you wished, they said. But I had once witnessed one being shot and knew that it was anything but easy to shoot a monkey that was begging you not to kill it. In this case, he had hung from a branch, touching his wound. When he had seen his own blood, he had started crying and reaching out to the hunters as if in supplication, showing them the blood on his fingers. “Kill him,” a soldier had said. “If we leave him like that, he will only suffer and die anyway.”
An elder once told me a story about monkeys that left a lasting impression on me. In a forest, he said, there were so many monkeys that the villagers would steal their babies to play with. One day a gang of boys caught a baby monkey and took it home to be their pet. The mother, who refused to give up her child, furtively followed the boys to the village, where a woman had also given birth to a baby.
When the boys grew bored with their new toy they left it in the house and went to play in a nearby compound. As soon as everything was quiet, the little monkey’s mother scurried down, grabbed the human baby – from where its mother had laid it down in the shade of her house while she was going about her chores – and ran up a tree. The human mother saw it and screamed. People came running. The monkey was gently cradling the human child in her arms, but as soon as anyone attempted to climb the tree she made as if to throw it to the ground.
“We’d better ask her nicely, not force her,” someone suggested.
So the monkey was asked kindly to bring the baby down. She repeated their gestures, but the villagers didn’t understand what she was trying to tell them until the boys returned and confessed to what they had done. Then everyone understood why the monkey had come to the village.
The little monkey was released and it immediately dashed up the tree. The monkey mother received her child and carefully examined its body. Then she nodded in acceptance. She was, however, still afraid to come down, fearing that the people below might kill both herself and her child. But the elders guessed the reason for her reluctance and asked the villagers to disperse, to give the monkey a chance to come down the tree. When they had gone the monkey climbed down very carefully. She gently laid down the human baby, then disappeared up the tree again. The bystanders applauded, realising that monkeys knew something about life. She could experience pain, like human beings. Some were still threatening to kill her, but others guarded her until she and her child had found their way back into the forest.
A starving child, however, will eat anything.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.