The Serengeti wind blows, and the trees bow, and the grasses bend to its will. It brings rain which falls in unending sheets, and all living creatures lift their heads to drink the life-giving water. Then the wind turns, bringing dry skies and sucking the moisture from the land, turning it sere and brown. It drives the wildfires that destroy the grasses and scatter the beasts of the fields far away. Then the wind turns again. What it takes in one direction, it gives freely in the other--and both man and beast accept its vagueries, ranging far and wide to find the sustenance needed before each in his turn falls under the severity of the Serengeti.

  No one but God takes note of each creature. In one wild week of joyous agony, the wildebeests give birth all at once so that the kings and queens of beasts may eat and live another season. What the lion, leopard, and cheetah leave, the birds of prey, hyenas, jackals, and wild dogs carry away. What they spurn, the insects and ants devour until there is nothing left upon the ground.

  So, too, the people of the Serengeti bow to the wind with its promises and demands: planting, harvesting, pasturing their livestock, and moving from one depleted plain to another. They live uncomplaining under her laws, birthing and dying as all men must do. They die of starvation under skies of brass, in terror under the jaws of hungry predators, or of the ravages of berserk diseases which rampage through their villages. Only the Serengeti goes on, seemingly forever. The mother of all, she discriminates against none. All must obey her code.

~

  My mother died when I was thirteen, but I didn't care. To me, she was an angry, grainy-voiced person with red hair and a cigarette holder. That she hated me was no secret.

   "You look too much like your father," she'd state after staring at me a long time on the few times I visited her. I hated her back, glad in my heart that I did not resemble her. I spent my childhood in a boarding school in her homeland of Switzerland, and vacationed with aunts and uncles in Holland. That way she wouldn't have to see me very often.

  She had many lovers, the whisperers said. They came to her with missionary zeal and left discouraged a few months later because they didn't find any gold under her coarse exterior. She died as she had lived, driving too fast through the mountains in the car of one of her lovers. She didn't know how to drive, just as she didn't know how to live. We buried her in the Swiss sunshine with aunts and uncles in black patting me on the head and asking me why I did not cry.

   "Why should I?" I asked of them. "I hardly knew her. You have been my mothers and fathers."

   My father came from Africa for me, out of the distant foggy past like a god from a mythology book, tall with unkempt blonde hair, brawny and loud. My mother had often referred to him as "your wild father in Africa!" usually with a sneer, as though somehow he lacked brains or couth. My misty memories were of a loving, joyful man who lifted me high and told me stories which kindled my imagination. Now, he stirred those dead memories to life and my stunted soul began to imagine again. It was 1934 and until then I'd believed that girls were not allowed to dream.

  "No more uniforms and school, Brigitte!" he shouted, waving his arms majestically in the air, as if conjuring up an unimaginable world. "My sisal plantation will be your school! We'll have horses for you to ride, the Serengeti to roam, a house of our own! We'll go where it's warm, and never see snow again!"

  I packed my meager belongings in my brown suitcase, took off my brown school uniform, and clad myself in the jodhpurs and shirt he bought. I clutched in one hand the smooth spotted shell he brought to me from the Indian Ocean, my suitcase in the other, and we boarded a train for Holland and beyond.

  We traveled for two months. First, by train, we snaked down the Swiss mountains past neat farms and little towns toward the Dutch lowlands. The train rattled and swayed across bridges over diked canals with barges that patiently waited for the train to pass and the bridge to be lifted. Families lived on these barges -- men in baggy pants; women with voluminous skirts, winged caps and wooden shoes; children with bobbed yellow hair and bright staring eyes. In the distance, windmills turned in the breeze, pumping water from the canals to the neat fields.

  At Rotterdam, we boarded a freighter bound for Dar es Salaam. The huge ship loomed above me as we walked up the gangplank. Men on the ship and the dock scurried to load the huge boxes of supplies and goods bound for the hungry African market places. Crates of guns, medicines, clothes, matches, shoes, books, garden implements, and everything necessary to civilization were lifted by towering derricks from the dock and interred like coffins into the dark hold of the ship. I was both amazed and terrified.

  We sailed the next day with thirty other passengers keeping us company. We stopped briefly at Le Havre, then on around Spain to Gibraltar, where a gulli-gulli man came on board with a macaque monkey which performed tricks and begged for money.

  In Genoa we had enough time to walk the waterfront and shop, and visit the place where Christopher Columbus was buried. The Italian people were so different from the Swiss and Dutch. Their way of showing their emotions in their speech and gestures was so refreshing that I would have loved to stay and learn to imitate them.

  Alexandria in Egypt. Then we sailed through the Suez canal to the Red Sea, which wasn't red at all, but it was very hot, and in one place we were set upon by tiny biting flies. Aden in Arabia, where bold, swarthy Arabs in burnooses, looking like pirates, smirked at me. My father said some of them really were pirates when they weren't working on the docks.

  We ploughed through storms down the Indian Ocean to Mombasa, where many of the bales and crates were unloaded. The countries from the glossy pages of my geography book came to life before my eyes, flooding my senses with languages, music, and exotic smells of sweat, food and spices. Absorbed in the ever changing scenes, I rarely left the deck rail of our ship.

  "Brigitte," my father laughed, "you've claimed that part of the deck as yours! Carve your name in the rail, since it now belongs to you!" I only smiled in response, knowing he was joking.

  We left the boat at Dar es Salaam where the rest of the goods would be unloaded and replaced by peanuts, pungent copra, and fragrant spices from Zanzibar. We traveled by train again, all the way north through Tanganyika to Mwanza on Lake Victoria. The three day trip was hot and dusty, with the cinders from the thick, black engine smoke drifting through the open windows. We swayed across a hot, dry plain which gradually gave way to rocky hills. These amused me, since they resembled child's blocks piled atop one another. As we gained in altitude, my father told me the African legend of giants who warred with each other, piling up the rocks as arsenals. But a heavy rain washed the giants away leaving behind only their accumulated ammunition.

  Mwanza, the tiny town at the end of the rail line which boasted of not much more than a bank, a post office, and a supply store, was not the end of our trip. A large truck which my father called a lorry was there to take us even further away from civilization. We bounced and roared in low gear over a horrible road and through rivers to my father's plantation at Bwiru. Abandoned by the Germans after the Great War and confiscated by the British-run government of Tanganyika, it was leased to the highest bidder who just happened to be my father.

  I was more than disappointed. The five room house of whitewashed mud bricks may have seemed a mansion to the African workmen, but surrounded by dust with no grass or flowers and with only a cracked cement floor with no carpets, it was not the mansion I envisioned. Ants came up through the cracks and searched out every crumb. The corrugated tin roof creaked in the heat while lizards scritch-scratched across it, then when it rained it leaked in odd places, never choosing the same place twice. The roar of rain on the roof and the pinging of drops in pans and buckets became the music of the rainy season.

  The bathroom was a basin and a tin of tepid water on a bench in an alcove with a path to a shanty behind the house which my father called a library. Spider cocoons infested the walls and lizards glared at me, silent, appraising, disapproving of my occasional invasion of their privacy. There were no books in this library, only pages from magazines and newspapers torn into squares for wiping oneself.

  This was now my life. I could reject it and die, or accept it, adapt to it, and live. Seasons and years in the sun and rain passed. I learned to speak Swahili, the language of trade, and Kisukuma, the local dialect, and bantered with the workmen as cleverly as my father did. The plantation covered miles and miles. Everywhere you looked were kitani, sisal plants, all in a row -- sharp, straight, thick leaves six feet long with a thorn on the end, growing out of a central stalk. The mature plants put out a long trunk which stretched twelve or more feet in the air with a stubby growth at the top. Sisal poles were light-weight and straight, and coveted for roof beams in African mud houses.

  The sisal mill was on the main compound. The men would strip the long leaves of a mature plant in the field, cutting them close to the core stalk and removing the sharp thorn. Then they were brought in to the mill where they were run between rollers and the pulp and caustic juice were pressed out. "Someday, we'll discover a use for all this juice," my father would say. In the meantime, it ran out with the pulp on the ground where it dried and was gathered for kindling.

  The fibers were put on racks to dry, then soaked in water before being woven into rope or string. Fibers for marine ropes were soaked in oil instead of water, for weather resistance.

  "Hemp, " Father called it now. Expert ropers wove the long strands together. Hawsers as big around as my thigh for tying up large ships. Sail rigging ropes. Packing rope for freight. String for tying packages. Every kind of rope was woven, then coiled in circles like dormant cobras and shipped all over the world.

  Father rejoiced over each shipment. He took pride in his skills, which really were the skills of his workmen. He taught me to keep books, so he could spend more time doing what he loved most -- working the fields with the men. And hunting.

  He loved to hunt. He taught me to shoot, and took me hunting on the Serengeti plain, long before it was a game preserve, when one could ride out and say, "I think that kongoni looks fat," then bring it in for dinner. I grew as wild as he, loving the golden grass and the big sky, the land of animal grunts and roars, the masses of migrating wildebeest, wild birds stalking the insects, and the heat. I loved the dry heat after the Switzerland cold. I grew tall and brown, with sunlit white-blond hair. The Africans called me Nzela, the white storm bird, the whitest thing they knew.

  In my second year in Africa, he bought me a horse. Ordered from Kenya, it came on the steamer on Lake Victoria and we rattled in to Mwanza to pick it up. A fine brown horse, snorting and blowing in fright as it was hoisted off the deck by the derrick as the workmen laughed and cheered.

  But the horse only lived a few months before it grew sick and died. "Brigitte, I am sorry," Father said. "They told me that horses can't live in this country, but I didn't believe them. It's the tsetse fly. Horses can't live here with the tsetse fly."

  So he bought me a motorcycle, also ordered from Kenya. Until the Second World War, when gasoline became scarce, I roared up and down the paths to the workers' villages, frightening children and women and scattering goats. Little boys looked with eyes of wonder, wishing they, too, could ride such a wild beast.

  I knew what the women were saying. They didn't think I knew their language. An old woman would nod knowingly. "She's a girl, I think. But she doesn't know it. She thinks she is a man. Remember what I say, she will find out some day," then they all would cackle about it and go do their ages-old women's chores. I didn't care. Until Sam showed up.

  I was seventeen when Sam Lystulka showed up. Whispers of war in Europe soon turned to shouts from the newspapers, and orders for sisal rope came in faster than we could fill them. I was working on the books in the office, barefoot and uncombed, when a cloud of dust and an engine roar announced the arrival of a visitor. The blond Africaner from Witwatersrand in South Africa was bigger and louder than us all, even my father. Two wild Dutchmen together make a mad party, and by nightfall we were all three laughing and talking over fresh kongoni which he'd brought with him.

  "One of my men shot it just down the road," he said, and Father brought out the special liquor kept hidden for such an event.

  Long into the starlit night while the insects shrilled and the faraway hyenas laughed, the two wild men drank and sang and told half-true stories of wild adventures. The next day both were holding their heads in pain as I brought them good strong coffee.

  Sam had a foreman's job on the dock in Mwanza and became a frequent visitor at our plantation. Soon he moved in with us to be my father's partner. He had a dangerous reputation among the workmen. He killed a man in South Africa they whispered, not giving proof. He killed in revenge they said, because the man stole his woman. A perfectly good reason to the African mind, so they trusted and respected him, though they took care not to raise his ire.

  I found him fascinating in his combination of mirth and thoughtful consideration. We walked gingerly around each other, watching but barely speaking. Some mornings I rose to find he'd placed a flower by my breakfast plate. I wanted this man more than anything I ever wanted before and he looked at me with interest in his eyes, but every time I glanced at him he turned his eyes away.

  It was my father who came to me, alone, while I weeded the kitchen garden. "Sam wishes to have your hand in marriage, Brigitte. How do you feel about it? He's a good, hard working man, and there's not many of our kind out here." I blushed and said yes, so Father rode off to get the padre at the Maryknoll Mission near Mwanza. No reason to delay the inevitable.

  We married under the bougainvillea bushes beside the house, the ones I had planted because I wanted color in my life. With no time or inclination for a fancy gown, I wore a clean cotton dress and Sam wore a clean shirt. The workmen and Father were our witnesses.

  After the ceremony, we jumped in Sam's old truck and bounced our way to Mwanza for our honeymoon in the only hotel in town, a seedy, rat-infested place with holes in the mosquito screens and no hot water. It was fine for us. We were used to that. Never having loved a man, I was nervous, wondering what to expect. I was surprised at how gentle and loving Sam was, as though he had two sides to his nature -- one wild and untamed and loud, the other quiet and thoughtful and loving. He taught me what it was to be a woman.

  We went back to the plantation, where Sam moved into my bedroom and things continued as they had before. Father hunted and dreamed. Sam worked with the men and gave me contentment. I kept accounts and the house, ordered rugs and cushions and books, turning it into a comfortable haven for my two men, comfortable in my new-found womanhood.

  Then one day Father's rifleman came back alone from a hunt, running and panting with terror in his eyes. " Bwana, the boss, is dead!" he gasped. "A buffalo caught him, right here," and he pointed to his abdomen.

  I ran barefoot to where Sam worked in the ropery, my heart beating a dirge in my head, my eyes wide with unspoken grief. With the rifleman to point the way, we tore out of the compound in Sam's truck, back to the body of my father -- my beloved, wonderful father. The vultures had already gathered and hyenas whooped in the bushes, smelling but not seeing the body. He lay beside his truck covered by a tarpaulin, a thoughtful gesture on the rifleman's part.

  We lifted his body carefully and put it in the bed of the truck. I drove slowly in second gear so as not to disturb Father's last ride home. The workmen ceased their tasks and their women came in from their homes and gardens, gathering together in the compound in mutual grief. As we gently lifted his body off the truck onto a plank, they began to sing a mournful song in harmony. Someone went for the padre, and the plantation carpenter had a box almost ready for his body.

  I sat by my father's body all night, only Sam and candles to keep me company through the dark, moonless night. My golden, glorious, loud, and funny father was gone. The sun in the sky would never be as bright. Owls hooted in the trees and hyenas laughed at us from outside the compound. Denied a feast, they whooped and yelled in retaliation.

  We buried him the next day under a brassy, unforgiving sky in a corner of the compound. The padre murmured incomprehensible words of unattainable comfort. The workmen and their women gathered around and wept and sang and I was comforted by them.

  I couldn't cry, though Sam wept for me. He held me tight and rocked me like a baby, but now I knew I was strong -- strong as the wind that swept wildfires across the grasslands, strong as the wind that brought the rains every year to green the plains and bring the wildebeest, strong as the creatures that survived the droughts that eliminated the weak. I could take and I could give. I was Nzela, the storm bird. I was the Serengeti.

  A few months after the funeral, I knew I was with child. I nurtured near my heart the son of a wild man and a wild woman, the grandson of a wild man, all of Africa, though our skin and hair belied the ancestry. He, too, would be a golden son of the Serengeti. And he was.

  His birth was announced by the first thunder of the rainy season. As the wind sighed through the trees, laying the grass flat on the plains, a curtain of rain advanced across the land, purpling, then obscuring the hills. The wind cooled my brow as my son burst forth with a wail. We named him Lucas after my father.

  Lucas grew into a wild boy. Sam and I ran the plantation while Lucas learned African lore with the sons of the workmen. His red-blonde hair sparkled in the sunlight and they called him Ngongoli , the golden crested crane, the son of Nzela. His pale blue laughing eyes and freckled face were a familiar sight in every hut around. He loved everyone and hated to study his books. Sam was a gentle, loving father, a different man from the one who arrived so many years before in loud bravado and a cloud of dust.

  At eight, Lucas ran barefoot with his friends over the plains. He studied the weaver birds, how they made their nests at the ends of fragile branches, facing down so snakes could not get inside. He studied the tracks of different animals and knew when the game herds were due to calve, where the snakes slept at day, which snake made what track, and under what rocks fat grubs could be found and eaten like candy. He made crude bows and arrows and slingshots out of forked twigs and tire rubber, sharing them with his friends.

  Sometimes he and his friends would take off their kikois, cloth wraps, and run naked in the wind. They jumped in the lake to swim, keeping careful eye out for the evil-eyed crocodiles lurking in the shade of overhanging bushes. It was one of these games that got him.

  The boys were baiting a crocodile. A small dik-dik had been found dead, so they decided they would use it to trap and kill a crocodile. They wrapped a sisal rope around the dik-dik and dangled it from a tree, where Lucas held the other end of the rope. When the croc swallowed the bait, they would all leap on it and drag it out of the water to land where they would club it to death.

  But Lucas fell when the croc took the bait. He fell, naked, into the water beside it. The croc turned, spit out the dik-dik, and scissored his abdomen. The other boys screamed and pelted it with rocks, so the crocodile released my son and slithered back to deep water.

  The boys gathered up his body in their knotted kikois, then with him slung between them like on a hammock, they walked naked and crying back to the compound.

  I saw them coming, their black figures dancing in the shimmering heat waves a long way off, and froze in terror knowing, just knowing. A chill I had not felt since Switzerland fell on my heart as I ran out to meet them. Sam came in from the mill, and together we knelt in the dust beside our golden crested crane, our sun-boy with the happy grin, the freckle-faced wonder who had danced into our lives and so quickly out again.

  We buried him beside his grandfather Lucas. While the workmen and their families cried and sang the burial song, we covered the simple coffin with red African dirt and our tears. We planted a golden-hued bougainvillea on his grave, so the sun-filled blossoms would draw their strength from his body and continue to give us happiness, even though for me all joy ceased. This time, I cried my grief on Sam's shoulder, a grief which roared from my broken heart, a Serengeti mother made bereft of her child.

  The next day, without saying a word to Sam, I took down the rifle, loaded it, and walked down to the lake. I sat and waited by the tree from which my Lucas fell.

  A ripple in the shadows was all that showed the crocodile's hiding place, watching me with his evil eyes. I stood, aimed, and shot him. A splash of red in the water showed my aim was true. He wrenched his body back and forth, trying to throw off the pain and I shot again. The crocodile was dead. An African mother's revenge can be brutal, as can the Serengeti's.

  I walked out onto the plain of golden grass I loved. Ferrets scooted out of my way toward their holes. Birds flew up into the trees to watch, calling out warnings that an unknown predator was stalking the land. A hidden guinea fowl trilled kkkukkoya! kkkukkoya! A hyena off in the distance turned to track my path, and a bevy of tiny dik-diks flicked their tails and stampeded away toward a line of stony hills that raised their heads in eternal watch. A cloud built up far across the plain and the smell of rain filled the air. Life's seasons will continue. I am Nzela. I am the storm bird. I am the Serengeti.

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