Reincarnations

Only when the great cat still did not move did Tshingana dare to reach for the assegai. Just as his fingers closed round it, he heard a shout, thin in the distance: "I see you, half-brother of mine, you worthless clump of cow dung!"

Tshingana’s eyes flicked to the sun. It was into the western half of the sky. "I did better than you, Sigwebana," he yelled back.

His half-brother ran toward him. "You were just lucky, Tshingana," he said, still at the top of his lungs. "You didn’t even really hide the cattle; I saw them from a long way away. All you did was a lot of ru

Tshingana glanced around. Sigwebana was right-the herd could have been much better hidden. Others had spotted it besides his half-brother, too; behind Sigwebana, Tshingana saw Inyangesa and his father Uhamu, and more clansfolk behind them.

Still… "How I did it doesn’t matter, just that I did it," Tshingana said truthfully. "Besides, I’ve been busy with other things than hiding them prettily."

"Other things? Like what?" Sigwebana was getting close now, but not yet close enough to see through the thick, thigh-high grass in which Tshingana stood. "Like what?" he challenged again. "UkuHlobonga?"

"Go do ukuHlobonga between a hyena’s thighs," Tshingana retorted. He jerked his assegai free, waved it to show Sigwebana the blood down half the length of the shaft. "I was busy with things like this."

"What did you spear, a rabbit?" Sigwebana pushed his way through the grass so he could find out what lay at Tshingana’s feet. He looked at the dead moso, at his half-brother, at the moso again. "No," he whispered. "You didn’t. You couldn’t."

"Yes, I did," Tshingana said proudly. "Yes, I could."

"Did what, new man? Could what?" Uhamu came up, sweat making his lanky body gleam like polished ebony. As Sigwebana had, he stopped short when he saw the moso. "It wasn’t dead when you found it?" he demanded sternly of Tshingana. Just behind Uhamu, Inyangesa stared at his friend.

"I speared it still alive," Tshingana declared.

Uhamu was studying the ground where the moso lay. "I believe you," he said at last. "I see how it twisted and fought when the assegai went home." He raised an eyebrow. "I suppose you also smashed its hind leg there."

Tshingana felt his face grow hot. "No, of course not." More and more men and boys from the kraal came up and listened while he told the story of how he had killed the moso.

"So that’s why the elephants stampeded," Shamagwava said. He shook his head in wonder and put an arm round his son’s shoulders. Tshingana felt nine feet tall. Shamagwava went on, "We were still a good ways behind you when that happened. I didn’t think of the moso; I thought it had followed that other herd north."

"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 gri

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 I

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 I

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.