—
Tom kept us up for a good long time, tracing a wide circle over our valley, towards Njoro to the east and Molo to the north. The tip of the wing was like a bright, silvering wand. Watching it, I felt a whisper of hope and something like redemption. It wasn’t God I saw at this height, but my Rift Valley. It stretched in every direction like a map of my own life. Here were Karen’s hills, the flat shimmer of Nakuru in the distance, the high ragged lip of the escarpment. White-bellied birds and red dust. Everything I’d lived through lay unfurled below me, every secret and scar—where I’d learned to hunt and jump and ride like the wind; where I had been devoured a little by a good lion; where arap Maina had stooped to point at a cloverleaf-shaped print in drying mud, saying, “Tell me what you see, Lakwet.”
This valley was more than my home. It beat in me like the drum of my own heart.
Only when we needed fuel did we make our way back to Melela. Tom stayed to dinner and, because he would fly out again at dawn, took himself off to bed early while my father and I stayed up with hot, bitter coffee. There wasn’t any sound in the room—just low light stretching out against the wall and the feeling of something important coming towards me.
“I’m going back to Nairobi,” I told him after we’d been quiet for a long time. “I’ll leave with Tom in the morning. I’m going to take up flying again.”
“I wish I saw the point in it,” my father said.
I’d obviously surprised him—and though I didn’t know if “it” meant aeroplanes or leaving Melela, I said, “Come up in Tom’s plane one day. Maybe then you’ll see.”
He’d been reading the black studbook, his longtime bible. His fingers caressed the spine for a moment, and then he shook his head. “I know where I’m meant to be.”
“I do, too,” I told him, and the minute the words left my mouth I knew they were true.
“What shall we do with the horses?”
“I’m not sure at the moment. They’re Mansfield’s, too, after all. It might be years before our divorce is settled. But however all of that turns out, I want to earn my own living. I need to know I can take care of myself.”
“You can do that flying?” He sounded incredulous.
“Maybe. Tom says one day aeroplanes will ferry people far and wide, as ships do now. I could be part of that. Or transport mail and parcels, or I don’t know. Denys had a scheme about scouting for hunters from above.” It was the first time I’d said his name aloud since the day of his funeral. Even though my throat ached, it also felt right to call Denys into this room. He was the reason I’d thought of flying for myself at all.
“It’s awfully dangerous. I know I don’t have to tell you that.” He stared into his coffee, thinking quietly. “But you’ve never been afraid of anything, have you?”
“I have, though,” I said, surprised at my own emotion. “I’ve been terrified…I just haven’t let it stop me.”
It was quite late by that point, and we were both too tired to say anything more. I kissed him on the forehead, wishing him good night. But as I settled myself in bed, no matter how drained and exhausted I felt, there was a strange kind of energy pulsing through me, too. Thoughts appearing more plainly than they had in many years. Melela wasn’t safe. It would more than likely dissolve one day as Green Hills had. Pegasus would die as Buller had, both of them my earliest heroes. My father would drift away little by little or all at once. Great rocking changes would come again and again…and I would survive them the way I had long ago, when my mother had boarded a train and become smoke. The tribe had found me then, and given me my true name, but Lakwet was only a name after all. I had forged her myself, out of brokenness, learning to love wildness instead of fearing it. To thrive on the exhilaration of the hunt, charging headlong into the world even—or especially—when it hurt to do it.
Now I stood at the threshold of another great turning, perhaps the most important of my life. The sky had taken Denys, but I knew there was life up there, too—a combination of forces suited to me, to how I was made, in powerful ways. That great soaring freedom and unimaginable grace came fully tethered to risk and to fear. Flying demanded more courage and faith than I actually possessed, and it wanted my best, my whole self. I would have to work very hard to be any good at it at all, and be more than a little mad to be great, to give my life over to it. But that’s just what I meant to do.
The next morning, I was awake even before Tom was. I packed my few things quickly and waited for him in the dark. When he saw me he smiled, understanding immediately the decision I’d come to and what would happen now.