A Society of Hyena-Owning Witches

It was Yusuf’s idea that we walk down Nyagaka’s tea plantation and cross the river at the point where a giant tree had been felled weeks before, and the people responsible for the tree felling had not decided to make timber out of it. It was a nice spot during the weekends when we found another plank of wood, splayed it atop the giant tree, and made a see-saw upon which we swung and played all day.

At the crossing that morning, we might have just passed the giant tree had Orare not remembered that Casper had lost a twenty-shilling coin there the weekend before. Somehow, school became secondary to the idea that we could find the coin and enjoy those fresh samosas by the gate during break time. We each started to skirt around the giant tree, rummaging through the wet grass and mulch as we looked for the coin.

— What is that? Amos said, alerting us from our respective search points.

— Did you find it? Yusuf said excitedly, and we all ran toward Amos.

— No. But look.

Under the giant tree lay what might have passed as a grey, abnormally huge, dead dog. But it was not a dog. Its fur was patterned with little flakes of orange and black, and its hind paws were shorter than the front. Its tail was flurried, and its jaws were wide open, revealing yellow-stained teeth and a grey tongue that lazily hung out of its mouth.

It was a hyena. A dead hyena.

Hyenas might be native to Africa, and we, the people of the Gusii highlands, were aware of this, but a sighting of one meant something. Not to say that we didn’t have bush animals around. There were hares and porcupines, wild geese and moongeese, but big things like hyenas were unheard of, at least in the wild.

Yusuf fished one of his father’s stolen knives from within his bag and flicked it around.

— What are you trying to do? Stop. I told him.

— Relax, I just want to see. Here, hold my bag, he offered his bag to Orare.

— Look at its feet. They are gnarled, Amos said.

Yusuf used the knife to hold the paws aloft. They looked abused. Blood stained the otherwise off-white tissue underneath, where the outer skin-coat had peeled away, as though someone had grated the paws on hard concrete.

— Let’s see what the interior is made of.

— No, Yus. I don’t like this idea. I said to Yusuf, already apprehensive.

— Don’t be a little girl. We just want to look.

— Guys, we need to be in class for prep right now, I pleaded desperately.

— Come on, it’s the first day of school. Amos, turn it up.

— Ok, Amos said, holding the hind paws and exposing its underbelly. With the blade of his knife, Yusuf patted the animal’s belly on the underside, and a fleshy, quiet, uniform thud rang with every pat.

— Let’s open it up, Orare said, visibly excited.

— Guys, this is not a good idea.

— If you don’t want to see, just go to school, you coward!

— Fine, I am going. If trouble comes, don’t involve me.

I started to walk away, then stopped when I noticed the three of them looking at the corpse with renewed interest.

— What is it?

— It’s meat.

— What? I said, running back.

— Its stomach is full of undigested meat.

— What kind of meat is it? I said, angling in to take a better look.

Like a true butcher’s son, Yusuf had dissected the belly perfectly, laying the intestines and stomach apart. But the pouchy thing had ruptured, exposing chunks of half-chewed meat, one that none of us had seen before.

— What the hell is this?

— I think we should go now, Orare said, and Amos nodded.

— And there are layers of black skin mangled inside the chunks.

— We should go now. I said with urgency, knowing I now had the majority supporting me. But Yusuf lingered, flipping the innards about.

— Let’s go! I pushed Orare and Amos along.

— Wait, Yusuf said.

— No. That’s enough. We are already late for school.

Yusuf got up, his nose crunched up. He must have poked something foul, because soon, a tangy smell spread around the area, chasing us away.

The whole walk to school was silent until Yusuf admitted:

— I saw a human finger.

— Stop lying! Amos and Orare both said.

— Why lie! I saw a human finger. God one! I swear.

— Why didn’t we see it? Orare asked.

— Because you girls were in a hurry to go.

— You know you can be such a liar. And you do it with no reason at all. Like now, why are you lying?

— Okay, if you don’t believe me, your fault. And if I am lying, may lightning strike me.

— Don’t play with God, Yus, Amos said.

We were silent all through the walk to school, and all I could think about was back to that time when Ouya told me he saw a human arm fall out of Nyang’uono’s ceiling, right onto the floor of her kitchen. Ouya said he had been terrified, and she, Nyanguo’no, had threatened to eat him alive if he ever told anyone.

Of course, I wouldn’t have believed it, were it not known in the two villages that Ngang’uono was a witch. The kind of witching that people said she practiced was the dark kind, the one where they cast spells on people’s fortunes, rode in the night on giant hyenas they called omansamu, ate dead people, all guided by an ever-glowing torch they called rimore. She didn’t do it alone, it was believed. There was a whole coven of them, across the two villages. The old couple that lived right at the junction, headed to the swamps made the coven three. Nyanguono’s own lastborn son, Nyangaresi, made it four, and three other unnamed individuals from our village made it seven. A perfect number.

We were children, and we might have believed these things just because we were young and susceptible to anything, except that there were more sinister things that made the settings behind these stories more believable. Like the disappearance of Ouya. That morning had marked three years since his disappearance, and nothing; not the police looking for him, not his parents appealing to the local radio stations to announce his missing and report even the slightest clue about his whereabouts; nothing had helped anyone find him.

The obvious explanation had been that Nyang’uono had done something to him, because he had been telling everyone what he had seen in her small kitchen hut. But somehow, the adults and authorities didn’t buy the story. First, because Nyang’uono was a frail old woman who leaned heavily on a stick to support her bent back, and second, because Ouya was known to be a wild child, and had run away from home thrice before, returning after a month or so. If it were true that Ouya had run away from home, then he had done so for good, and three years of his waiting should have been an indicator for everyone to give up any hopes about his return, and along with this hope, any frivolous stories about corpse-eating witches.

Then there was this hyena thing. A half-horse hyena that just came out of nowhere, died near a river, and was containing what Yusuf said was a human finger in its belly.

— Yus. Don’t lie to me. Did you really see a human finger inside the omansamu? I asked him over break time. 

 — You know your problem is that you don’t believe me.

— No, just tell me if you saw a human finger in there.

— I saw a human finger inside the omansamu’s stomach.

— Are you sure?

— Yes, I am sure.

— Why didn’t you call us back to see it?

He kept quiet for a while, then said:

— I was scared. I had never seen anything like it before.

— Okay, we should go back in the evening and look at it again. We will also look if its back fur is worn out.

— Back fur worn out?

— Yes. To see if it is the one that… those people ride.

— You think it’s true?

— Yes. I think it is true. That hyena was just too big.

— How do you know it was too big?

— Because I went to the Nairobi Animal Orphanage, and I saw what a hyena looks like.

By evening, half the school had heard about the hyena, and Orare and Amos were recounting how Yusuf had dissected it. The bit about the human finger had been edited out of the story, surprisingly, but more stories had been made up around the hyena. The witch party had wanted to cross the river to our village, one story went, and the hyena, having been raised in a homestead like a goat would be, had stubbornly refused to cross the flooded river. Another one was about how the hyena itself had disobeyed its master, and the master had struck its head with a wand, cursing it to death. Then the master flew back home, because, apparently, no witch had an extra hyena upon which he would ride back.

I sat through my classes worried about both the collective consequence of us four meddling into affairs that we shouldn’t have (if it were true that the hyena had belonged to the witches) and the possibility that all this had meant nothing. Perhaps it had been just a hyena that had lived in the scarce bushes between the village until it met its mysterious death. But then again, in what bush would such a huge hyena manage to hide in, all its life, without being spotted by a human or two?

The village themselves were largely farmland, where tea plantations sprawled from crop shambas to forested riverines. There was hardly any wild bush; if there was, then it was in between the farmlands, and even then, it wasn’t a large bush, just thin enough to serve as a property boundary. Where had the hyena managed to grow up? Had it traversed the ridges, up from the Mara over at the edge of Maasailand, past Kilgoris and Nyangusu, past the riverlands of Kuja up the highlands into the two villages, just to die beside a mid-sized river? Could it be possible? If it weren’t possible, then who in the village had the guts (besides the so-called superstitious witches), to rear a cub until it grew almost into the size of a thikin cow, and feed it mysterious meat that would clamp its belly?

Where did the human finger come from? Did it eat a human? Was it a man-eating hyena? Did it dig up a recently buried body? But no one had died recently. Was there a missing person? Did it eat Ouya?

I do not recall why I had such thoughts exactly. It might have been because I too was scared. And it didn’t help that my childhood in the highlands was marked by some nights when I’d dream of these witches knocking at our door. In these dreams I’d be so alone, screaming while no sound came from within my throat. My desperation would grow with the intensity and incongruence of my screaming, while these witches approached from the door menacingly. Upon their reaching beside my bed, I’d wake up with a jerk, drenched wet with perspiration, and my heart thunderously slamming in my chest.

That evening, I shouldn’t have been afraid because a huge group of us foraged from the school to the river in anticipation of seeing this great mysterious thing that confirmed our fears.

But when we reached the spot, the grass was eerily empty. The hyena was just gone. Did it resurrect, stitch itself up, and travel back to the Mara? Did dogs carry the corpse away? But things like these, if they attracted the dogs, would bring out a struggle on the wet ground, paw prints in the very least. Did someone throw it into the river? We looked around, and nothing! Not even footprints except our own. There wasn’t even proof that the hyena had been there in the morning.

By the time we were going home, the sky was dusking, and having played on the seesaw for the entirety of the evening, everyone, including Yusuf, had forgotten about the thing. However, with the dark setting in from the woods along the river, I couldn’t help but start to fear for myself, and Amos, Orare, and Yusuf, and perhaps anyone who might have stumbled upon the dead animal. I couldn’t quite describe the fear back then, but memory serves me that I was apprehensive of the dream that I was sure would come in the night.

It must have meant something, I thought, that we stumbled upon an unlikely artillery to something beyond my reasonable understanding. It must have given some element of truth to the witch stories, the sudden appearance and disappearance of this hyena thing. If it was just another daily phenomenon, then we would stumble upon another of its kind, dead, in the next three, four, five rainy seasons, or, at the very least, Ouya would return home.