Them Bones

Leake III

Call him Ishmael.

We had gone down to the edge of the River to see what was there. The day was warm and the sun was bright, though by my reckoning it should be late November.

Took had a fishing spear with him. Mounted on the shaft were three copper prongs. A rawhide thong passed through the head, through the shaft and onto a coil tied around his waist.

He walked to the sandbar’s edge and studied the water, shading his eyes against the sun.

Something large was moving under the water down the bank.

‘What’s that?’ I asked. I thought it might be an alligator. Took turned, saw what I pointed at. He grabbed my arm, squeezed it in a sign for me to be quiet. He held out his hand for my javelin. I gave it to him.

He walked slowly back off the sandbar, then turned into the grass alongside the River. I stayed where I was. I couldn’t see him for a few minutes, but knew he was moving slowly through the tall grass. I saw a few fronds bend.

Whatever the thing was, it disappeared underwater from time to time, surfacing nearer or farther from the bank. I still couldn’t tell what it was. It looked like a dark lump in the shadows from the overhanging trees.

I didn’t see Took until his fishing spear shot out on its thong from the last of the grass. It flashed in the water.

A ton of foam shot into the air.

‘Hoo-eee! Hoo-eee!’ yelled Took. The thong stretched tight. The spear shaft went cartwheeling up the rawhide and slammed into the trees overhead.

‘Yaz!’ he yelled.

Other men were already running out of the village and the fields.

As I ran toward him I saw my javelin arc out into the frothing water. A huge coughing noise came from the River. As I ran through the grass I saw other large dark shapes, which I had not seen before, disappearing downriver.

Some of the guys got there before I did. They threw their spears out. The water turned red and quit splashing before I got there.

Others jumped into canoes at the landing, yelling, paddling toward where the other dark shapes had gone.

I reached Took and grabbed the thong he was holding. Someone came over in a canoe, dropped a rope down into the bloody water, then threw the end to us. We heaved and hoed.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

First came a flat forked tail, then wrinkled mounds of pink skin, then flippers with spears in them, and last, something like the head of a walrus without the tusks. The damn thing must have weighed half a metric ton.

Its face was covered with bristles the size of No. 2 pencils.

It was a manatee, the largest I’d ever seen. In the time I came from, they were nearly extinct. They were always (before the War) getting run over by assholes in speedboats, or shot by kids with .22s, or something. Once there had been huge numbers of them in the rivers of the south.

Well, they’re still here. A couple of the canoes had harpooned one, and there was shouting all up and down the River as the rest of them got away.

There was general happiness all around. A ton of meat was a ton of meat. They began to dress out the two manatees on the shore.

I went around to the head of the one Took had harpooned. It still had a water lily hanging out of one side of its wide flat mouth.

The whole village was ecstatic.

This is a place for boys and girls who never grew up.