Seed of South Sudan Read Online Free PDF Page B

our language, we hesitated to become friends with them, because they could trick us by speaking strange words to each other. We wouldn’t know if they were plotting to harm us, or talking about finding water. We would hurry ahead. But still we would stop where a group of people was gathered on the ground when we needed to rest. Others would be resting, too, each home group arranged around its own tree, and we would be under a separate tree.
    In one of these stops we heard boys like me speaking our dialect. We talked, and I found out one spoke our Agar subtribe dialect, so he was of our people. Another boy in the group of people sitting in that group picked up on our conversation and he also spoke the same way. The first boy was Matoc, and the second was Laat. They were from an area near Rumbek, but not our village. When we talked more, we found that we did the same thing back home—watched cattle. And that we enjoyed playing the same games with other boys while we grazed cattle.
    For instance, we all knew a kind of tree that produced gum, and we would collect the goo, roll it up and form a ball, and hit it with a stick to move it forward. In the game, called adeir , we would push the ball with a stick with teams of 10 on each side, pushing the ball to a goal. Or we would make shields out of plum-tree wood and practice war with sticks and shields, an imitation of the buffalo-skin shield our Dinka warriors used.
    We decided we would walk together, and I was glad to have companions my age. My uncle told the other boys to go gather some palm leaves by the path, and my uncle braided palm rope he later attached to squash gourds for Matoc and Laat to carry water. The walking was much easier with my friends.
    The talk as we made our way east on the path was about the dangers around us. The Sudanese Army had attacked our villages, and we didn’t know if we might meet them again. The Army could only move on the main road (there are only a few roads that tanks can move on in South Sudan), and so we walked on paths that avoided the road. People we encountered would tell us, if we could understand their dialect, where there were soldiers, or where there were animals about.
    â€œWatch out for the green clothes,” we’d tell each other, as the SA wore light green fatigues. We’d try to stay near trees, even though now in the dry season the leaves were dried and thin. At least they provided some cover.
    Next to those humans, our greatest fear was lions. Back in our villages, all of our homes were built up over the ground and we accessed them by ladders, primarily because of the floods that came in the rainy season, but also because of the lions. We kept dogs to ward off the hyenas and the lions. The lions usually were active around five o’clock in the evening, so we looked out for them. But if we saw hyenas, we were safe, for they kept the lions at bay.
    At that time, we thought hyenas would not kill a man, only other animals, but later, in 1989, while we were in Pinyudo camp in Ethiopia, a man was killed near my home in southern Sudan by a hyena, but I did not know this until people told me this in my village after the war. So now we know to fear them, too. But as we set out on our journey away from the SA soldiers’ attacks, we thought a hyena would be protection against the fearsome cats, for they prey on them. Besides lions, hyenas go after cattle, goats, and our own dogs.
    For such a small animal compared with a lion, a hyena, with its sloping back and oversized head, has tremendous power. A hyena can attack and kill a larger animal by the sheer force of its jaws. Once a hyena locks those teeth into a prey, the wounded animal jerks and runs and turns about trying to get free. The hyena just hangs on with those clenching jaws, letting the intense struggle work to his advantage; the animal will weaken and eventually die as the hyena rips the prey’s skin and limbs in the fight. So lions will flee