WHAT THE NANNY GOAT TOLD HER KIDS (CHAPTER 11)

CHAPTER 11

 

MR RANSOM BOUGHT HIS FIRST GUN when he invested heavily in farms and the wild animals almost made him run his business at a loss. He had cleared and planted with his family and hired hands hectares of land he rented from the village. He planted cassava, melon, corn and leafy vegetables.

They were fast-selling items as people from all the nearby big towns came to the village to get them. But the corn seedlings were being mowed down as if with a sharp machete, the newly sprouting cassava stems were being dug up and those still standing were at the mercy of zillions of caterpillars.

Mr Ransom complained to experienced farmers and they told him what was happening and what he needed to do.

Some had even suspected envious farmers were turning to the animals and destroying rivals’ crops so they alone could continue in the lucrative food business.

Mr Ransom, who got substantial financial backing from his wife, was desperate to do anything to deter the destroyers whether animals or men (as the women here were all exonerated from committing such mindless evil) to make sure he was successful with his endeavour and able to show a good balance sheet at the end of the year to his partner.

Pouring his woes to Perempe one day as they trekked together to their farms, his old schoolmate had suggested Mr Ransom should get a shotgun for the animals and for the insects, a sprayer and chemical he would dilute with water and spray on the crops.

Mr Ransom had quickly expressed his fears over his safety from the angle of the gun and the animals as they had seen buffaloes’ footprints too in the farms. But Perempe had quickly doused such fears assuring he would teach him how to shoot being a hunter himself and the two of them would be hunting together. It did not take Mr Ransom a long time to embrace the idea.

Perempe had first acquainted Mr Ransom with his dogs, Arrow and Bullet. Then, he had successfully placed an order with a gunsmith who made guns only for familiar hunters as he knew the implications if anyone was caught in illegal possession of a firearm. It meant in the eyes of the law, he was aiding and abetting the criminals and should be behind bars for as long as the law would deem fit.

He was fond of drawing the hunters’ ears again and again and asking them: ‘I hope this piece of metal is meant to kill wild animals ravaging your crops?’ And if the answer was in the affirmative, the old man would then go to work. Only responsible hunters he would sell his guns to.

The shotgun Mr Ransom paid for took a cartridge at a time. When the cartridge was spent, he would quickly reload before aiming the gun again at anything. For hunting reasons, Mr Ransom renovated his tent to look like the one Perempe pitched. Mr Ransom’s tent was on this side of the torrent and Perempe’s on the other side but in a remote location. The target practice was a massive tree still standing near the bank of the torrent at a far corner of Mr Ransom’s farm. Perempe would make two marks, assuming these to be the eyes on the head of an animal, and asked his friend to aim at them to see how many pellets would pierce the bark to show how accurate his aim would be when he was shooting the rodents.

The first night was a memorable and encouraging one for him when an animal's reflective and unnerving eyes were picked by the glare of his hunting torch strapped to his forehead. He quickly aimed his gun between those eyes, let it ring out and what fell down before him and he walked to pick up was the elongated fat body of a grasscutter.

On reaching it, Mr Ransom muttered his endearing late father’s name: ‘Ebomonkuku Udotong!’ Then he framed a rhetorical question: ‘So these guys were the ones destroying all my crops?’

His wife knew the real market value of the rodents. Mr Ransom knew with the first one down with its head smashed and bloody, their potential farming loss was gradually being reversed.

Mr Ransom heard a shot down the slope where Perempe’s farm on this side was and knew if the rodent did not escape, his friend would get his first prize that night too.

He had drawn out his machete from its sheath strapped to his waist, slit its throat and allowed it to bleed, then dumped it inside his homemade backpack. He cleansed his machete and hands with a rag. Then from the belt of cartridges, he removed one and fixed it in the gun; strapped his bag on his back and kept crisscrossing his farm with his torch pointed in all directions. It was not long before it picked up the eyes of another animal. He again swiftly let his gun ring out. That one had dropped down but there was the thudding sound of more scattering in different directions.

When Mr Ransom walked close and saw the dead animal was another grasscutter, he shook his head and said: ‘If you guys did connive to put me out of my farming business, I’m also here to embarrass you all.’ He slit its throat and put it in his bag. With a reloaded gun, he moved in the direction he heard a couple of thudding feet go.

When Mr Ransom followed the bank downstream and met Perempe and the dogs not too far, he had three grasscutters he kept in the tent and Perempe had four in his bag and said he covered two more grasscutters and a porcupine somewhere on a path nearby.

That rewarding first-night outcome endeared Mr Ransom to his shotgun. Their farms and even those of their neighbours began to thrive.

Later, Mr Ransom acquired his own set of dogs of the same breed like Arrow and Bullet and his friend helped train them. Still, his sons added more to their training, making them scale hurdles and crawl through barricades to pick objects thrown. The two dogs aided Mr Ransom, just like Arrow and Bullet aided Perempe, to keep the farms virtually free of the rodents.

But since the arrival of the ‘jackpot’ people and Mr Ransom had hoped he would soon land his millions, he had started sleeping the sleep of a multi-millionaire. And the hunting instincts of Muscle and Bone looked like they might soon be left to rust.