Suddenly, a beautiful morning calm occurred. The boy sat still atop the turret of the once deadly German tank to view the jungle’s silent majesty. The moment’s symmetry filled his breast with awe. How he loved the glory of all the teeming life around him. His lips rose involuntarily into a gentle little smile. He was so happy. If only Mother and Father were here, thought the boy.

The hushed forest on a sultry morning had beguiled the boy whenever he had seen it. Now the cerulean sky painted a fathomless backdrop to the tableaux that he witnessed. Giant oak and kapok and acacias barely nestled in a gentle breeze, and tall grass in the foreground swayed hypnotically. Several cranes swooped aloft in graceful, slow ascents. A small herd of wildebeests was ruminating nearby, and its pungent odor stung the boy’s flaring nostrils. Though lasting merely seconds, the silence and the smells and the beauty of that calm moment filled his soul. The boy was a part of the puzzling creation—a piece with a perfect fit. Sitting there on top of the German tank, the boy knew peace.

At that blissful moment, part of the boy’s world ended. Suddenly, a flurry in the leafy canopy to the north turned his head. A hundred birds launched in an instant. The loud cracks of two pistol shots stunned his ears. Then the frightened bird cries and shrill chatter of tree dwellers broke upon him. The calm moment was not merely broken. It had been obliterated.

Upon hearing the two loud pistol reports, the boy’s focus shifted from the treetops to ground level. In a matter of seconds, a scene unfolded that stopped his breath short and chilled him to the marrow. Where the plain met the forest, the boy saw three natives and two white men surrounding a huge tree. The natives were Mbara, bearing war lances and bows that they brandished upwards. The white hunters pointed aloft as well, but their motions resulted in more pistol cracks that shook the boy with a start. Shaking, he watched the white smoke that rose from the guns.

Lifting his gaze to view the hunters’ prey, the boy’s startled shock turned into utter terror. From that distance, details were blurry even for his keen eyes. The intended victim’s actions, however, told the poor child upon first sight that his own beloved father was then fleeing the killers below!

Among men, only his father and teacher could scale the forest towers with such ease. Yet speed and grace could not outrace the bullet. Scarcely had the tranquility been shattered by his father’s peril, when the boy witnessed the fatal blow.In an instant, the tanned figure of his father scaled the frail top-most limbs. The boy knew that his father’s escape was only a second away. So many times had he watched in awe as his mentor plummeted from a tree’s pinnacle, sailing great distances to catch the nearest vine or limb, and thus beginning a perilous dizzy flight through the canopy high above the forest floor. The leafy heights were his father’s arboreal haunts, and now they were the boy’s as well. Now, in a single second the pupil watched as the master leaped and stretched for that far distant branch that would begin his breath-taking flight to freedom—then two more shots—then came the fall.

Thank you for reading Chapter 1 of Bentari. If you want to read more of Bentari’s adventure, you may buy the book by clicking here:

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