The Nightmare (1)

The urge to cough was so strong that it was hard for Abong to resist. It was quirky. In the situation he was in now, it was an unforgivable sin for him to make the slightest sound, say, with his feet walking or closed lips. His hands only brushed the leaves dangling on his path.

Abong did everything possible to suppress his cough. With his palms, he covered his mouth to prevent any sound escaping from it. Then, the urge made him wriggle his feet about and he knelt down where he would not meet dead sticks or dry leaves to make them snap or rustle. With the back of his cupped hands on the ground, he coughed into them.

Done coughing, he was somewhat relieved he had been able to muffle the sound as much as he could but he was perplexed at such an occurrence. It never happened to him before during any of his escapades. He sat down on the ground and stared at the bumper bunch of plantains with a few bitten by bush babies and pecked by the birds.

One mind told him it was a bad omen while the other told him to ignore the wimpy thought coming from the deep recesses of a coward. 

Naturally, Abong wasn't a coward. So he rose to his feet and his hand pulled out his machete from the soil as his ears keenly listened to be certain there was no danger lurking around.

For every farm he targeted, Abong chose apt time based on the distance from the village or tent and the frequency of the farmers going there. Where there was a tent and the farmers were regularly around, he knew almost every farmer here would want to stay back in the village during the weekend to relax with friends and family. It was the time too they set aside small sums for themselves in the ubiquitous thrift societies. He exploited the farmers' leisure moments to pilfer from their farms, using the daytime to survey the farms and shift the goods from them at night.

Abong used to hear the country was (and still is) rich in crude oil. While growing up, he saw parents working hard, clearing the bush and tilling the soil, to send their children to school and then pushed them later to leave for the big cities where the oil money abounded. Most of his mates left and never ever let their feet stray to the village again. The conditions of some parents later changed to reflect their children's progress in life and there were rumours that others whose parents were still wallowing in dirt could have hit the big time but as the big cities are full of trials and temptations, must have lost their way in the maze. Abong never had the opportunity to go and see what the realities were like living in the big cities. His father had a dozen of them and died when Abong was barely eight. They were all raised by his hardworking mother.

While his nates during the weekdays would go to the primary schools and later secondary schools near and far, he and his siblings were being taken from one farm plot to another across the many streams of the village to clear, till and bury seeds that would form the edible things they would eat and sell. As his mates graduated from schools, Abong graduated from working on the farm into foraging the adjoining jungle for a living. He would split the bush mangoes to garner their valuable kernels.

TO BE CONTINUED