The sleep meats

There is no word in your language for what I’m doing now. Tutoch we call it in our tongue. It is a soft, reassuring noise we make to calm a coati, allowing us to approach and kill it. Ndaal in my tribe is so good at Tutoch the coati sometimes fall asleep.

 

Tutoch is why we are known to other tribes as Amagano, the sleep meats.

 

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A writer once told me how he constructs a story: with a beginning, a middle and an end. So a story about a hunt would begin with the rituals, the middle would be the walk through the forest in search of prey, and the end would be the capture of a prize animal.

 

The writer is wrong, of course. You cannot separate the three. If the hunt fails it’s because someone failed to administer the pre-hunt ceremomy correctly, or one of the party has offended a god in some way. The end, the middle, the beginning, they’re all the same thing.

 

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I saw a white man once, when I was very young. He was spending a year living with the Zazzy to learn their ways. Mamam, who speaks for the Zazzy, told me that white men have forgotten many things that we remember, which is why they have to come here and learn them for a second time.

 

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When I am a man I will have two wives like my father, like all Amagano men - there are too many women and we must all bear the burden. Sometimes, my father says, he has to bear the burden more two times a night, which the men of the tribe find funny. This is a joke about making the happy yaar - yaar is our word for the cries and groans of pain, but sometimes women make these noises at night because they are happy.

 

The Amagano haven’t always had two wives, of course, but we inherited the women from the Tatato. That Tatato had a war with a tribe who had white weapons. They killed all the Tatato men and boys, every single one. The women came to us, they are Amagano women now, although they still don’t all talk proper Amagano.

 

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A feast. The hunt brought back two coati. Also, Amora, who does not hunt with the men, found a bee hive and brought back honey. So tonight we have woffuz, honied meat. This is the best food, warrior food, cooked on the fire.

 

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My story ends when I die, and as I won’t be hear to write about my death I end the story here, eating honied meat by the fire with my tribe. For if this is how I am remembered it is how I will spend eternity. It is a good way to spend eternity.