Me Cheeta Read Online Free PDF

sharpthunderclaps. Little sequences of these long-echoing thunderclaps, out of a stormless sky, far away but loud. Crack, crack, crack. Crack-crack. In six months, I’d be sucking on a Lucky Strike and making prank phone calls in a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. So. What happened was this.
    We were on our way back to our old territory when we came across Kirk, lounging between the roots of a msuba in a shaft of sunlight that illuminated a haze of golden flies. He’d been stuffing himself with passionfruit and his front was matted with juice and seeds. And then I saw the white bars of his ribs and all the turmoil in there and understood that the seeds were flies and the juice was Kirk’s blood. Archie darted toward him, then away, and Mama barked feverishly at the air and pounded the earth on all fours. Victoria raced back and forth, blindly, very fast, cheeping, and I realized that something very bad was happening. Archie darted up to Kirk in his cloud of flies, lifted his hand and let it drop. He recoiled and did it again and Kirk’s hand did nothing—and still I didn’t really make the connection that he was dead, like a bushpig or a blue-tailed monkey could be dead. It was too hard to grasp: Kirk, our heroic rain-dancer, our thunder-conquering king!
    We moved on, quickly, without grooming, and Mama’s hair wouldn’t stop bristling beneath me. Death was sticking to us. I became frightened because I thought I’d done something very wrong and was going to be punished for it. It hadn’t been me, I wanted Mama to understand. It was a leopard—or maybe he’d fallen out of a tree, like Stroheim! We crossed the stream back to where we’d been when Mama’s swelling started, and the feeling of Death forded the water with us. It climbed up among the empty nests of our old roosting tree and slept beside us too, and woke with us in the night to the echo of more of those far-distant cracks, louder in the blackness, and when morning came, slow and white and wet, we saw anotheradult male, whose name I didn’t know, caught in a tangle of branches high above, gnawed by the baboons or leopard that had left him where he was hanging and much more dead than Kirk.
    Even Victoria and I knew it then, I think. What else could have done this if not the hostiles? All we knew about hostiles was that they were hostile. In fact, it was absolutely typical hostile behavior, if you thought about it. Mama climbed to the crown of a custard-apple tree and pant-hooted in four directions, but got no answer: the whole forest seemed to be teeming with death. At a fast trot she led us up one of the deep-grassed ridges that spoked off from the escarpment and gave a view of the canopy below but there were no black blobs moving in the treetops, no chains of dots leaving a wake through the long-grassed slopes; neither friends nor enemies. High up we climbed, toward the escarpment, into the tatters of mist that beaded our coats, and then, where the ridge finally flattened and was reabsorbed by the forest of the escarpment, at last we heard a long, low hoot from ahead, and though Archie bristled, I recognized the voice as Spence’s.
    Poor Spence was limping. Fucking hostiles, I remember thinking (my translation). He gave another weak hoot and tried to move toward us out of the trees and down the ridge, but wasn’t really able to. He whimpered and tried to lift his arm to show us, and Mama set me down in the tall grass and scampered up toward him, followed, after a nervous grin, by Archie. Victoria pitter-pattered after them, through the skeins of mist that scudded over the ridge. Mama paused, and held out a hand to her, and as she caught up, and the three of them got to the edge of the trees, Spence suddenly disappeared from sight and the hostiles came screaming out of the long grass toward them.
    Archie was engulfed in a tide of bristling black and that was the last I saw of him. I never saw Victoria again; the last I rememberof my sister is