Chapter 8. Bat
"Look at your feet!" Akili and Dogo’s mother Neema scolded. "You are filthy! Where have you boys been? We have been so worried about you!" Their mother shepherded the boys over to some blankets on the floor of the hut. She looked first at Dogo, feeling his forehead. He was sweaty, but he did not feel as if he had a fever. She could not see any cuts or wounds besides the cut on his foot.
"Mami, I was bitten by bats!" whined Dogo.
"Akili, what is this? Is this true?"
"We were in a cave, Mami, and we got attacked by bats! They were all over us! But I don't think Dogo got bitten. I do not see any marks on him." Akili whimpered, trying not to cry. "They came after me, too, Mami!"
Neema looked at the younger son's skin with grave concern. Then she looked at Akili with scorn, waving her index finger in his face.
"You were supposed to look out for little Dogo! And you took him into a cave? What were you thinking? You both could have been killed!"
"I am sorry, Mami! Dogo found the cave, not me."
"Oh, so that makes it okay?"
"Well, it did not look dangerous at first. Just a bunch of rocks. I didn't think we would get hurt."
Neema laid her youngest son down on the ground and put his head on a pillow.
"That's no excuse, Akili! You know better than that. Now you lie down here next to Dogo and I will get your father." Neema washed off the bat guano off the boys' feet, and bandaged Akili's foot. She then left the hut to find Joseph, the boys' father.
Joseph Nagatabu and his brother Elvis were down by the pier. Joseph was standing in his metal longboat, dressed in a bright red shirt and tan shorts, with flopping, silver-scaled fish piled all around his bare feet. Last night had been a good night for fishing in Lake Tanganyika, home to over 350 types of different fish. Elvis, dressed in his brown shirt and yellow, green-striped sweatpants, was talking a good game to the crowd of potential purchasers, some of whom were native Tanzanians and others who had come to the lake from foreign countries.
"Look at these big ones! Perfect for a king's feast! Reasonable prices! Step over to the boat, please!" Elvis was able to fluently speak both Swahili, the native language of Tanzanians, and English, the country's second language. He went back and forth with his sales pitch, first in Swahili and then in English. Joseph and Elvis made a good pair. Joseph was a skilled fisherman, while Elvis, with his big smile of white teeth, and a hearty penchant for exaggeration, was the natural salesman. Elvis grabbed a big silver fish solidly in both hands and turned to talk to a customer. Looking over the customer's shoulder, Elvis saw his sister-in-law running down the pier frantically.
"Joseph! Elvis! You must come quickly! The boys were attacked by bats! Dogo says he was bitten!"
Elvis threw the fish back into Joseph's boat, and grabbed Neema's shoulders, fixing his hands on her red and white-flowered khanga, a traditional, full-length Tanzanian cotton robe.
"Wait, wait, slow down! How could bats have bitten them? Are you sure?"
"Yes, I am sure! They found a cave, and a swarm of bats attacked them. Dogo says he was bitten by the bats!"
"Well, did you see any bite marks?" asked Elvis.
Joseph bounded out of the boat, handing the rope line to his brother.
"Elvis, when a bat bites, you can barely feel it. It is like a pin prick. Even if Dogo was bitten, there may be no marks on him. Don't you remember when Uncle Tamba was bitten by a fruit bat? He did not have any mark on him but he was sick for weeks. Elvis, you will have to sell the fish on your own. I am going to take the truck back to the village. At sunset, I will come back to pick you up in the truck."
Elvis reluctantly agreed and went back to peddling fish.
Joseph ran with his wife back to their beat-up 1978 aqua-green Chevy pickup truck and jumped inside. Joseph gunned it out of the parking lot. As they drove back the two miles to their village, he questioned his wife about the incident.
"Did they say where the cave was?"
"No, I never asked them that. I was too concerned about the bats, so I ran here."
"Akili knows better than to take his little brother into a dark cave by himself. What was he thinking?"
"I already told him the same thing. He will need to be punished. But for now, we have to make sure they do not get sick."
The tan dust cloud kicked up from the dirt road all around them as they raced back to the village. The truck peeled through forest vegetation on either side. When they got to the village, Joseph ran inside the family's hut, holding his fishing net and metal fish-spear. His two boys were lying on a pile of colorful blankets. Joseph asked Dogo to stand up. Joseph slowly looked at his son's body. He could see what looked like spider bites on Dogo's right calf, his left arm, and his left thigh.
"These could be bat bites, I don't know."
"Dadi, my neck hurts!" said Dogo, putting his hand back near his neck and moving his big Afro around in a circle. Joseph put his net and spear down on the ground and inspected his son, lifting up the back of Dogo's Afro to inspect his neck. To his surprise, he saw a dark, gray mass, about the size of a large clam, stuck into Dogo's neck, just under the hairline. Joseph reached his hand over to pull the foreign object off, while his wife, leaning over his shoulder, put her hand over her mouth, worried what the object might be. The object seemed stuck. Joseph applied a little more pressure with his fingers, when suddenly, the object moved quickly, changing its shape and fluttering violently just past Joseph's face.
"What the fuck!" Joseph yelled, cranking his head back quickly away from the fluttering object, ducking down on to the blankets. Neema, Akili and Dogo all screamed and dove for the ground. "What was that?" asked Joseph. A few seconds later, he knew. It was a bat from the cave.
"Kill it! Kill it!" Neema screamed.
Bats are able to curl their bodies into tight balls. It appeared that the bat had hitched a ride under the bottom of Dogo's Afro all the way back to the village. Now the bat was flying around the inside of the hut, smashing into walls, and causing everyone to duck for cover. Joseph regained his senses and his courage moments later, grabbed his fishing net, and after a few tries, ensnared the small creature. He took the net with the captured bat and slammed it into the floor of the hut violently, stunning the bat. He was about to crush the bat with his big boot when Neema screamed again.
"Stop! Don't kill it in here! We will have bat blood all over the hut! Get it out of here! Get it out of here!"
Joseph quickly took the bat in the fishing net out of the hut and walked down to the forest tree line. He thought about killing the bat right here, but then he paused to think. What if Dogo had rabies from the bat? Would the doctors need to know what kind of bat it was before treating him? What if the type of treatment depended on what type of bat it was? The more he thought about it, the more he thought it was wise to keep the bat trapped but alive. He walked back to the back of his hut, where he kept some small wooden animal traps. He put the net with the bat inside the wooden trap and closed the lid. They could decide later what to do with the bat. He hid the trap in the weeds so no child coming by would discover the bat and get bitten. Just before he left the trap, he peered inside the trap at the bat. He wanted to see if there was any white frothing at the mouth. He wasn't sure if bats got rabies, and if they did, whether bats frothed at the mouth, but he decided to check to make sure. He did not see anything white around the bat's mouth. Joseph tapped his spear on the top of the trap. The bat was motionless in the trap. He was an ugly little thing.
That night, Neema served the boys a healthy serving of ugali, a Tanzanian corn mash, some rice pilau, and plantains. Exhausted after a long and terrifying day, the boys went right to sleep.
June 1499. Jungles of modern-day Panama.
Having left the island of Boyuca, John Cabot set his sights on the next point of interest on the Veraguans’ map: the ocean to the west. According to the map, there was a small strip of land separating the two oceans. If he could take an expedition across that strip, he might find the western ocean, and the passageway to the West, on the other side. It had taken a week to sail south to the correct point on the map. And as of today, it had been twenty-two days since they began their southwestern expedition into the jungle. His men, eighty in number, were beginning to doubt the tale of their Indian guide, who had promised a great sea brimming with pearls and a temple of gold. John Cabot slashed a patch of banana leaves with his machete and forged upward through the dense foliage toward the top of the jungle mountain. His longtime friend, Father Giovanni, walked behind Cabot, doing his own job hacking away at the vines and leaves. The friar, one of the few men on board the expedition who, like Cabot, was originally from Venice, spoke to Cabot in Italian, and addressed him by his Italian name, Zuan Chabotto.
“Zuan, how much further do you think it is? I hear the men grumbling every night. We have lost three from this terrible heat and twenty from the last battle with Cacique Ponca and his tribe. Many are coming down with malaria. The men want to be back on the ship. I hear them say this is a fool’s errand, like our trip to Boyuca.”
Cabot was annoyed. These English men were lazy. They drank ale from the barrels every night and unnecessarily exhausted the food supplies. They had no discipline. They always wanted immediate gratification. Didn’t they understand that no great deeds were ever established without hard work? Cabot looked ahead to their young Indian guide, a Taino who had defected from Cacique Careta after being promised a pig and a barrel of ale if he could successfully lead them to the South Sea and temple of gold. Cabot wasn’t sure if he trusted the Indian either.
Cabot took out the Varaguan map and studied it. Were they off course? Cabot grabbed the elbow of the Indian and pointed to the map. Cabot held up his hands in obvious frustration. The Indian understood. Cabot was irritated that instead of riches, they had only encountered snakes, mosquitoes, and mud. The Indian babbled something in his native tongue with some urgency, and kept pointing to a symbol on the hand-drawn map. The Indian pointed to the top of the mountain they were climbing. Cabot looked back to the friar.
“I think he is saying it is at the top of the mountain here. Just a little further.”
Cabot was happy he had decided to leave his armor on the ship. It was just too hot. Luckily, the resistance from the local Indians had been modest, and his men were more than up to the task. But even without armor, he still felt like he was walking through an oven. A very wet oven. Cabot trudged up the muddy mountainside, his clothing soaked through. The air under the canopy of leaves was so saturated with moisture, it felt like the wet fog he had often encountered back in Bristol. Cabot passed a bush loaded with black berries. He took out his hunting knife, cut off a small branch and was about to put the berries in his mouth when the young Indian turned and grabbed his wrist fiercely. “No!” yelled the Indian, repeating one of the few English words he had learned. Cabot was surprised by the Indian but put down the berries. They must be poisonous. Cabot passed the word back to his crew not to eat the berries.
They walked for another hour up the mountainside, following their guide, until the Indian suddenly became agitated, jumping up and down and pointing ahead. It looked like they were very near the top of the mountain. Cabot hacked through a final set of small trees and bushes and came out upon a grassy clearing near the top of the mountain. He walked to the apex and looked south and west. The Indian stood next to him, pointing off toward the horizon.
Cabot first saw miles of jungle in front of him below but then, as he looked toward the horizon, he saw it. A ribbon of blue stretching as far as the eye could see. Another ocean. The friar joined him at the mountain top. The priest crossed himself and said a silent prayer. Cabot and his friar were the first two Europeans to see the Pacific Ocean.
Cabot yelled with enthusiasm to the rest of his men, who ran up the mountain in anticipation, wanting to know what was ahead. When the men crowded into the clearing, they gazed in amazement at the new sea and then cheered and slapped each other’s backs. They were all going to be rich. It looked like the Indian would get his pig.
Present day. Western Tanzania.
The next day, Akili and Dogo rose early in good spirits and seemed healthy and happy. However, their mother did not want them adventuring by themselves for a while. In addition, she had to punish the boys for going into a cave by themselves, so she sentenced them to helping their father at the pier with the fish, a chore the boys hated. As Dogo sat at the end of the pier in the hot sun, cleaning the piles of fish, he groused at his brother:
"If you hadn't gone in that stupid hole, we wouldn't be here right now!"
"You were the one who found the cave to begin with!" retorted Akili.
"Yes, but I just wanted to look around, not get attacked by bats! Now look at us, we will stink like fish all day!"
"Stop being such a crybaby! Oooh, they bit me! They bit me! I don't see a single mark on you! You made it sound like your hand was bitten off by a lion!"
"I am telling you I felt them bite me! You wouldn't know, because you went into the hole first, leaving me all alone in the cave with all those bats. They were everywhere!"
"Well, it's all over now, just clean your fish quickly so we can get out of here."
The two continued to blame each other for the previous day's events and their current punishment, and, as children do, spent more time complaining about the job than actually doing it. Finally, their father got frustrated by their sloppy and lazy work and sent them home to their mother.
For the next six days, the boys continued to work down at the pier. On the seventh day, however, neither Akili nor Dogo wanted to get out of bed, and both complained that their backs were hurting. Their father, disgusted by their laziness, and sensing the boys were faking to get out of work, scolded them harshly, yanking them out of bed and hitting their bottoms.
"Get dressed in five minutes and get in the truck, or there will be no supper for you."
"But Dadi, my back really hurts!" complained Dogo.
"Your back is going to hurt a lot more if you don't get dressed and get in that truck!" yelled their father.
As the day wore on down at the pier, both Akili and Dogo started to feel faint and nauseous. Joseph came up on the pier from the boat and looked at his boys. Dogo was sitting in a pile of fish, but he had stopped cleaning the fish. He swayed back and forth for a few seconds and then vomited all over the pile of fish. His father was angry. He didn't want to throw the fish out. That was half a night's labor! They would just have to re-clean all these fish in order to sell them.
Elvis was also disgusted. "Ahh, look at this mess! Joseph, get these kids out of here!"
Joseph took both of his boys by the arms and took them back to the truck, while Elvis took pails of lake water and washed the bodily fluids off the pile of fish. As Dogo got to the truck, he vomited again on the gravel of the parking lot. Akili, who also felt ill, helped his brother get into the truck. Joseph felt bad that his children were sick, and felt guilty he had made them get out of bed this morning. When he got to the village, he took Dogo in his arms and held him over his shoulder. Akili walked sluggishly behind his father towards their hut. As he got back to the front of the hut, Dogo vomited again, all down his father's back.
"Aaaagh!" groaned Joseph, disgusted by the mess.
"What is happening?" asked Neema, coming out the door and taking Dogo.
"Both of the boys got sick down at the pier. I had to get them out of there. Dogo vomited on a whole load of fish. Ruined the whole lot!"
"Akili!" Neema yelled, looking over her husband's shoulder at their older son, who had just passed out on the ground.
Joseph and Neema went back to Akili. Joseph took him in his arms and took him into their hut. They laid both boys down on their cots. Neema felt their foreheads. They were running a high fever. Akili had a large rash on his leg as well as the ankle of the previously-cut foot. Neema felt their throats. Both boys had enlarged lymph nodes, a sure sign of infection.
"Joseph, we must take them to the hospital!"
"But the nearest good hospital is Kigoma Baptist Missionary Hospital, and that is two hours away. I will miss a whole day of work. Plus, there is the money for gas to get there and whatever the hospital will charge us. How do we know they don't just have the flu?"
"They don't have the flu! I know my boys. They are very sick. They might have rabies from those bats!"
"You know that is a missionary church. We are Muslims. You know what they think of us. Elvis went there once and they tried to convert him to Christianity! Jesus this and Jesus that! Their mission is to convert us!"
Neema's eyes flared. "Joseph, I hope your faith is strong enough that you will not convert to Christianity because you meet a Christian doctor. We are not going for religious instruction. We are going for medical help. You knew those boys were sick this morning and you made them go to work! Now they are very ill! I don't care how far away it is, or how much it costs us, or what religion the doctors are, we need to drive them to the hospital! Now!"
"Okay, okay! Let me get my things together."
Ten minutes later, the family boarded the pickup truck and sped down the road to the hospital in Kigoma.
Near Kasiha, Tanzania. Fishing Pier.
Back at the pier, Elvis had finished washing the vomit off the fish. He stared down at the pile of silver fish. He should probably throw them out. But it was almost a whole day's catch! Surely if he cleaned the fish thoroughly, no one would ever notice. He bent over the pile with his brush, taking extra care to clean the fish well. Later today, he would pile them in with another load. No one would ever know the difference…