Rest at last, she thought to herself as they sat by the camp fire, finishing off their meals of curreid goat jerkie, maize-pudding and palm-wine, and settling down for what was to be their fourth night in the bush. She stretched her kahki-trousered legs out across the ground as Mkwambe, a local tobacco farmer and her chief guide for the journey, poked absently at the fire with a stick and puffed thoughtfully on his pipe. The air was thick with the sounds of crickets from somewhere within the dark depths of tree-packed foilage- the 'bush', which surrounded them beyond the orange light of the camp-fire. The other two rangers had already pitched the tents, and were tidying up, checking the camp for venomous animals and chatting contentedly to eachother..
After a long journey from Matwele, the provincial capital, by light aircraft and then jeep and then days of endless hours of trekking mostly uphill through the mountainous and heavily jungled region, they were now deep in the territory of the rarely seen tribal group known locally as the Ehge Ki'Yguru.
The Ehge people were what westerners commonly referred to as pygmies, and had an average adult male hieght of around five foot. The Eghe had for hundreds of generations lived the hunter/gatherer lifestyle in the regions bushy and subsistance-unfarmable wilderness. This mountainous area of the country was a protien-poor environment with very few large animals, this meant the Eghe diet (apart from fruits and berries and nuts) consisted mainly of rodents, small-monkeys, a rare species of antellope that grew to the about the size of a dog and some of the larger 'worth-while' varieties of insect life. Thousands of years of this kind of eating was generally believed to be the cause of the Eghe's dimunative stature.
The Ehge people consisted of about twenty tribes, nineteen of which had been officialy contacted by the countries government and fellow anthropologists years before (the last, the Ki'Mosu, having been contacted back in 1978).
The Ki'Yguru were the only known Ehge group not yet officialy contacted by any body other then the local tobacco-farmers who were their closest neighbours, and occasionaly reported seeing Ki'Yguru hunters gorping at them from amongst the trees as the farmers tended their harvests. But whenever the farmers appraoched, the Ki'Yguru would melt silently back into the bush, like the illusions of shadows, rarely to be seen again. This was how they got the name given to them by the general community, 'Ehge Ki'Yguru' translating roughly into 'Shady Little Voyuers'.
Dr Sarah Jane Gudhinter intended to make the Ki'Yguru the focus of her thesis on uncontacted indiginous peoples. She had left Canada mere weeks before, determined to spend her six month sabatical in attempting to contact the tribe, half her time had already been spent arranging the funding for the trip. Now she was here, independantly in the field (deepest Africa), and tomorrow they would begin searching for the Ki'Yguru in earnest. She sighed wistfully. Feeling ready to sleep, she eased herself up, said good-night to Mkwambe and the others, and went to bed dreaming of the respect her peers would attribute her if she succeded. She was only twenty one, a prodigy no less- but with alot to prove.
Mkwambe's eyes followed the woman reluctantly as she left, he was a married man with seven kids and faithfull to his wife, but it was difficult not to look. Sarah was fantasticaly beutiful for any man that could see through 'plain'. Her slender figure, the shoulder-length brownish-blonde hair that she wore in a ponytail, her flawless lightly freckled pale-white skin and large grey rust-speckled eyes combined to make Sarah a stunning example of an academic young woman. She often wore thin rimmed glasses that suited her fine-boned handsome/pretty germanic features, but her self-image was generally plain and even in Canada she rarely wore makeup.
However she also loved to swim, ski, and ride horses back home. All of which gave her the figure of a dancer, full curves, a slender waist, perky modest sized breasts, long sinuous limbs and a gracefuly long neck.
Mkwambe smiled to himself, some young man would be very lucky one day, or some young man was already very foolish to have let her out of his sight. He chuckled quietly, and then began to hum an old folk melody, rocking gently on his haunches as he continued to smoke his pipe.
"""
She awoke with a start, the tent was completely dark, and the crickets were maintaining their drone. Something had awoken her.
She got the torch, dressed in her kahki safari-trousers and a teeshirt she wore with the sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, having followed Mkwambe's advice to sleep fully dressed (well, minus her safari-jacket, sandals and cap). After checking her tent for scorpions, snakes, lizards or rats, she put on her walking-sandals and egressed the tent to look around outside.
"Mkwambe?" she called, sweeping the torches beam across the campsite. The fire was smouldering, with the slouched figure of one of the guides beside it. She appraoched closer, and found it was Mkwambe, commotose and with a tiny arrow sticking out of his neck. Suddenly afraid she rushed towards the other tent, and noticed the sprawled bodies of the other two guides, twig-like arrows pertruded also from them.
She stopped, listened, the crickets chorus shrilled on.
She dashed back to her tent, grabed the shotgun and came out again. Her eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness, and as she peered into it, wondering whether she should get the radio and call for help, she began to make out forms beyond the week light of the campfire. The torchlight revealed dark, child-sized black men with white tiger-stripes finger-painted across their skin. They stared back at her impassively, holding long slender things that looked like spears. She froze again. Several thoughts rushed through her mind in less then several seconds, amongst them; whether to shoot in the air or say hello.
In those slow moments she noticed one of them raise his 'spear' to his mouth, with the other end pointed at her.
"Khiei!" she called in greeting, but then there was an ubrupt hollow sound and a sudden sting in her fore-arm. She looked at it in shock, her grip on the shotgun loosened unconciously when she saw the dart stuck there. She looked up, the pygmies were moving towards her, about seven of them- maybe more, forming a semi circle around her. Her head began to spin, she took a step back, bought the gun up again, felt suddenly immensely giddy (stronger then the rush of the potent skunkweed she'd occasionaly smoked in college)
She dropped the torch, touched her temple, dropped the shotgun, passed out.
"""
Drumming.
She was lying on her back, quite uncomfortably on her back, and there was drumming. Her eyes opened, and gradually as her head cleared she realised she was staring at the starry sky. She tried to move, but her hands were tied, her ankles were also tied down, drawing her body out in a star shape across what felt like a flat surface made of thin wooden poles, similar to a section of fence, or a rack.
