Primal Spirits

When I was a child, I heard stories of primal spirits, spirits that took the form of animals and were created from some primal desire. It was said that primal spirits were most often created from bloodshed or hunger. I never believed it until I was hired to work on the Kenya-Uganda Railroad in 1898.

My name is Henry and I was hired as a translator for an English railroad company. I was sent to Tsavo, even though I spent all my life in Mombasa, but I was excited for the change and the work. I was to translate the English orders to the workers and anything that the workers had to tell the English. It was easy until we came to the Tsavo River and the bridge builder came, then the attacks started.

The morning that the bridge builder, Col. John Patterson, came was also the day that we discovered the body of one of the workers. He had been torn apart and most of him had been eaten, the doctor said that it was a lion attack, but there had to be more than one to eat a full-grown man. Then the workers reported seeing two lions that were different from the other lions in Africa, these two lions were males but they had no manes and almost no hair at all. The workers were scared of the lions, of the attacks, and the bodies that would be found in the mornings.

Patterson was there for only a couple weeks and there were already ten people dead from the lions and one that had been injured but survived. He had me announce his decision to sit in a tree at night and keep watch, he said that he would shoot anything that moved; he was going to be where the most killings took place. I woke up the next morning, I had woken up at dawn and I walked out of my tent, ten feet away from my tent was the bloody and half eaten body of one of the workers. I could smell the dead flesh, I saw the blood that painted the ground and what was left of his flesh, it was disgusting and the smell was wafting towards me because of the wind. My stomach leapt into my throat, I barely left the body before I was sick, some of the other men came out at the sound and they saw the body. Patterson came running, his face red from the run and his gun bouncing against his back when he stopped, the workers looked at him and they whispered that he was a demon and that he was the cause of the killings.

Patterson ordered the workers to burn the body and then to get back to work on the bridge. They did but they were not happy and they continued to whisper in Swahili to each other, I listened to them before I was ordered to help in the makeshift hospital. The injured workers told me more about the lions and what they were.

“They are from the devil, sent to kill us for helping the white men.” Some would say.

“The lions are demons sent to stop the work.” Another worker said.

I saw three men in the corner of the hospital and I walked over to them. One was one of the older workers, Makalo; he had a bloody bandage wrapped around his head from when another worker hit him in the head with a hammer. There was also Kasim, one of the cooks, with a bloody hand from accidently cutting off part of his thumb. The last man was an orderly, Tumo, he had gotten attacked by one of the lions when he had been riding a donkey, Tumo’s leg was wrapped in bandages and I knew that was the only thing keeping his skin on his leg. I had to change the bandages and I could hear them speaking about the lions, they knew that the other patients would not understand them because they were speaking in Arabic.

“What do you know about the lions?” I asked them as I began to take off Makalo’s bandage.

“These lions are not normal, they attack and they eat us.” Kasim said; his deep voice rumbling from deep in his chest.

“They are here because of the bridge. The primal spirits are hunting us for what we are doing.” Tumo added as I started to wrap the new bandage around Makalo’s head.

“Primal spirits?” I asked, barely remembering the stories from my childhood.

“Spirits of hunger and slaughter, they kill and eat, that is all they do.” Kasim told me.

“Primal spirits, like these lions, they hide as animals and they do not stop.” Tumo continued.

“They are spirits that live only to kill and to eat. They take the form of animals but they hunt man as man hunts them.” Makalo told me.

This did not make sense to me, my father’s teaching pounding in the back of my mind, how there is no such thing as spirits and that there is only the devil trying to tempt people from God. All my life, I have lived in Africa and I have seen things that make me doubt my father’s words, these lions were only the latest in the series of events and incidents that made me think that there was something more in the world.

“The primal spirits will kill and eat until they are killed, they will not stop.” Makalo told me and I nodded in silence.

I thought about what they said as I changed their bandages and continued with my work. I could not help thinking about the lions and I wondered if they could be the primal spirits. Spirits that pretended to be animals and killed men, it could be possible, I was not sure either way. The thoughts of the lions and primal spirits filled my mind until one of the supervisors came to me and told me that Patterson wanted me to give some new orders to the workers.

Patterson orders were for some of the workers to build bomas, walls of thorns, around the camp so that the lions would be kept out. The workers were then split into two teams, one team went to the bridge and the other built the boma around the camp. I helped build the bomas, the thorns cutting into our hands made it difficult but Patterson wanted them done by night. We ate dinner with bloody hands but the bomas were finished before night came, just barely though. That night was bad, we could hear the lions roaring and we went to our tents in fear.

I went into my tent and heard the lions pacing on the other side of the boma; they were trying to find a weak spot. Fear rippled in my gut and I knelt down on the floor, thinking about my father and the lions, and I prayed for the first time since I was a child and then I turned the lantern down and lied down on the ground to sleep. I could only hope that the lions did not find a way through the bomas, that they did not get into the camp and kill someone else.

As I slept that night, I did not dream, my mind was too troubled to dream and then I woke up because I was moving. I opened my eyes and my sight was blurred for a moment, I could smell the dry grass and the dirt. I could feel something tugging at my feet and I lifted my head as my vision cleared, the grass and ground was moving around me and I could see a lion tail. I had been dragged out of my tent by one of the lions. The lion stopped and I heard the heavy steps of the second walk up towards me, I saw the eyes of the lion and shivered; the eyes looked like they were red and they shined when the moonlight hit them. I could only watch as the lion swiped at my belly and split it open and it began to eat, the other one staying at my feet and keeping me from trying to run. I could only watch as the one lion ate my insides and then they switched places.

“They really are the primal spirits.” I whispered as I started to get lightheaded and dizzy.

The lions growled and continued to eat. I could only pray for my end to come soon as my vision went dark, the sounds of the lions chewing and my bones crunching were slowly fading away from me as I died.