The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr
In October of 1983, an American named Ward Beach was sent to Tanzania by the Ohio Museum of Natural History to obtain the fossil of a prehistoric bird. Teams of European paleontologists had found something like the Chinese caudipteryx—a small, feathered reptile—in the limestone hills west of Tanga and the museum was eager to get one for itself. Ward was not a paleontologist (halfway to his doctorate he had given up) but he was a competent fossil hunter and an ambitious man. He did not like the work itself—backbreaking hours with a chisel and sifting pan, blind alleys, dead ends, disappointments—but he liked the idea behind the work. To discover fossils, he told himself, was to reclaim answers to important questions.
He was driving the nameless ridge he’d driven to the dig site every day for two months when he came upon a woman running in the road. She wore sandals and a khanga tied loosely above her knees and her hair bounced against her back in a thick braid. The road narrowed and kinked as it climbed under a blazing sun, with a flat density of growth on both sides. He made to pass her but she darted in front of his truck. He braked, skidded, went up on two wheels and nearly slid over the edge. She did not look back.
Ward leaned over the wheel. Had that really happened? Had that woman dashed out in front of his truck? Up ahead she was sprinting now, her sandals raising dust. He followed. She ran as if chasing something, like a predator, running expertly and without wasted motion. He had never seen anything like her; she did not glance back, not once. He eased the truck closer until her heels were just missing the bumper. Above the engine noise he could hear her breath storming in and out. They went like this for ten minutes: Ward over the wheel, hardly breathing, possessed with something—anger, curiosity, maybe, already, desire; and the woman charging uphill, braid bouncing, her legs churning like pistons beneath her. She did not slow. When they reached the road’s summit, a puddled hilltop steaming in the sun, she spun and leapt onto the hood of the truck. He braked; the truck slid heavily in the mud. She turned onto her back, hooked her hands around the sides of the windshield and gasped for air.
Keep driving! she yelled in English. I want to feel the wind!
He sat a moment, watching the back of her neck through the glass. Could he say no, after chasing her up the hill? Could he drive with her on the hood?
But already, as if his foot was not his own, he had let up on the brake and the truck was coasting downhill, gradually picking up speed. There were tight, desperate bends in the road: he watched the muscles in her arms tighten as she clenched the frame of the truck. He passed the dig site and drove on, for a half hour or more, over sheer, badly rutted roads, the braid of her hair swinging over the windshield, the cords in her shoulders standing out. The truck bounced over potholes, lilted into curves. Still she clung to the hood. Finally the road ended: there was a dense tangle of vines and below a steep ravine at the bottom of which the rusting frame of a car lay mangled and bent. Ward opened his door; he was nearly hyperventilating.
Miss, he began, are you . . .
Listen to my heart, she said. And he did—as if watching from a distance he saw himself get out and place his ear against her sternum. What he heard was like an engine, like the engine of the truck thrumming beneath her. He could hear the great muscle of her heart washing blood into the corridors of her body, the wind of her breath howling in her lungs. Never had he imagined a sound so alive.
I’ve seen you in the forest, she said. Digging in the clay with shovels. What are you looking for?
A bird, he stammered. An important bird.
She laughed. You look for birds in the earth?
It’s a dead bird. We’re looking for its bones.
Why don’t you look for living birds? There are so many.
I’m not getting paid to look for them.
No? She climbed off the hood and stepped through the bamboo at the end of the road.
Two nights later he was outside her parents’ house wondering if he should have come. Her name was Naima; her parents, shy and prosperous tea farmers, lived above the bean fields and banana plantations on a small holding—four acres of tea, a three-room cottage and a glass-walled tea nursery—high in the Usambara Mountains, a craggy and forested range south of Kilimanjaro and west of the Indian Ocean, a last pocket of rainforest that had once stretched all the way to Tanzania from the West African coast. Locusts screamed in a bank of eucalyptus behind the nursery; the first stars guttered overhead. Ward had filled the flatbed of the truck with basketed flowers: hibiscus, lantana, honeysuckle, others he could not guess the names of.
Her parents stood in the doorway. Naima walked around the truck several times. Finally she reached in, pinched a daisy from its stem, and tucked it behind her ear. Can you catch me? she asked.
What? said Ward.
But already she was running, galloping around the tea nursery and into the trees. Ward glanced at her parents in the doorway— their faces were blank—and jogged after her. It was twice as dark under the canopy of leaves; exposed roots laced the path; branches lashed his chest. He caught one glimpse of her: leaping deadfall, dodging saplings. Then she was gone. It was so dark. He fell once, twice. There was a fork in the trail, then another; like arteries the trails branched out from central trunks, subdividing a hundred times; he had no idea which way she might have gone. He listened for her but heard only insects, frogs, leaves shifting.
Eventually he turned back, picking his way carefully down to the house. He helped her mother haul water from the creek; he drank tea with her father beside a charcoal fire. Still Naima didn’t return. Her father shrugged over the rim of his teacup. Sometimes she is gone half the night, he said. She will come back. She always comes back. If I prevented her from going she would be unhappy. Her mother said Naima was old enough to make her own decisions.
When he left she still hadn’t returned. It was a long way down to his hotel, two hours bouncing over potholed roads, and Ward could not shake the memory of her clinging to the hood of his truck, the way the cords in her arms strained against her skin, the arch of her fingers, the drumming of her heart. Two nights later he returned to her house, and again two nights after that. Each time he brought her something: a fossilized trilobite hung from a gold chain, a tiny wooden box with an array of purple crystals nested inside. She’d smile, lift the gift to the light or press it against her cheek. Thank you, she’d say. Ward would look down at his boots and mumble that it was nothing.
During dinner he’d describe where he was from: Ohio, the gleaming skyscrapers, the rows of town houses, the collection of butterflies in his museum. She listened avidly, her palms flat on the table, leaning forward. She asked many questions: What is the soil like? What kind of animals live there? Have you seen a tornado? He invented half-accurate natural histories of Ohio: dinosaurs battling on the plains; vast flocks of prehistoric geese flowing over stunted trees. But he didn’t have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn’t explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him. He couldn’t tell her that at night, sweating in the folds of his mosquito net, he had begun to recite her name over and over, as if it were a spell that might summon her into his room.
Invariably, after dark, she’d gallop into the labyrinth of trails behind her house, challenging him to catch her. Each time he managed to pursue her a bit deeper down a path before he stumbled over a rock and cut his palm or fell into thorns and shredded his shirt. He began staying later and later into the night, tinkering in the tea nursery with her father or sitting at the table with her mother in polite, awkward silence. Always he had to leave before she returned, driving south toward the hotel in Tanga, with the truck shaking over the road and the first shafts of light springing above the mountains.
Months steamed forward: December, January, February. Ward got the museum a complete fossil of their prehistoric bird—its delicate needle-sized bones folded into a block of limestone—and they wanted him back in Ohio. His airplane ticket was for the first of March but he delayed it
He brought her tennis shoes and T-shirts; packets of pumpkin seeds for her mother, paperback novels for her father. Naima would give him that same inscrutable smile. At dinner she asked more about the world he came from: What does winter smell like? How does it feel to lie down in snow? But every night, chasing her farther through the forest, he lost her. Tell me what to do! he’d shout into the darkening hills. Tell me which way you’ve gone! And when he lay on the cot in his room, gripped with exhaustion, her name spilled from his lips: Naima, Naima, Naima.
The date for his return ticket passed, his visa expired, his malaria medication ran out. He wrote the museum to beg a month of unpaid leave. The Long Rains came: violent showers followed by choking humidity, steam in the streets, rainbows on the mountains. Sometimes a deluge swept goats into the river by his hotel. From his balcony Ward would watch them drift past, speeding between the banks, paddling hard to keep their noses above the water, and he felt sometimes that he was like those goats, swept up in circumstances beyond his control, swimming hard against the current, churning with silent desperation. Maybe living was no more than getting swept over a riverbed and eventually out to sea, no choices to make, only the vast, formless ocean ahead, the frothing waves, the lightless tomb of its depths.
He began to long for home, the steady seasons, the mild air, the ordinariness of the land. As his truck wound down through the hills, alone and after midnight, he’d gaze westward where the hills sloped a bit lower and imagine that Ohio lay just over the next ridge. His house was there, his bookshelves and his Buick; he imagined the refrigerator stocked with cheese and eggs and cold milk, daffodils standing primly in their beds. He was tired of sleeping in mosquito nets, tired of brown shower-water, tired of eating boiled maize in silence with Naima’s mother and father. Although he had been in Africa only five months he could feel himself becoming saturated with fatigue; his heart was moldering, crumbling. The sun broiling overhead and the fire inside his chest—it was too much; he was going to burn up.
Then April: the wettest days. The museum sent a telegram to the hotel. They had been unable to replace him and wanted him back. They offered a promotion to curator and a pay raise. To accept he would have to report by the first of June.
Two months. He began to run. The sky was a furnace, the sun was blazing and white, but he ran as much as his body could stand, staggering up hills, lunging back to the hotel. At first he made it only a few miles before the heat bowed him under. The people along the roads stared unabashedly, this curiosity, this big mzungu gasping through the streets. But as he strengthened they soon lost interest—a few even clapped him on. By the end of April he could run ten, then fifteen, then twenty kilometers. His skin grew darker, his muscles leaner.
Every day he sent a driver into the mountains with a gift: desiccated moths, fossilized corals, a blue jar with eight tiny medusae floating inside. Three swallowtail butterflies pinned to velvet in a small plastic case. Returning to his hotel, his heart sounding evenly in his chest, Ward began to feel the glimmers of something burgeoning inside, a strange and bottomless strength emerging from the pit of him. Flesh fell from his body. His appetite was endless. By the middle of May he could run and keep running and felt, suddenly one morning, moving out past the basket merchants and the clay pits south of town, the vast pan of the sea glittering before him and the blue smoke of charcoal fires hanging above the beaches, that he could run forever.
It wasn’t until late May that Ward drove north once more, across the Pangani, up the intricate, rutted roads, above the plantations, and into the rainforest. His legs crackled with a new energy—she would not get away this time. She met him at the door, breathless: he had brought his last gift. He stood trembling with his fists balled at his sides and watched her unwrap the silver ribbon from the box. Inside was a living monarch butterfly. It danced from between her hands and began to wander through the house.
It was sent here from the museum in a cocoon, Ward said, watching it bump against the ceiling. It must have just emerged. Naima was looking at him.
You look different, she said. You’ve changed.
All through dinner her attention passed over his face, his arms, the veins on the backs of hands. She lit a paraffin candle on the table and a twisting reflection of the flame stood twinned in her eyes.
I’ve come, he announced, to ask you to come home with me and be my wife.
Before he could stand she was past him and he charged after her, knocking over his chair, running beneath the eucalyptus, pounding up the trails. The night was dark and moonless, but he had become more agile and felt that new strength singing in his legs. He bounded past trunks, hurdled vines, spun down the path. Within twenty minutes he was deeper into the forest than he had ever been, climbing a steep trail after her. She was wearing a white dress and he kept his eye on it as he charged forward.
He chased her through the trees, into the bamboo above the trees, and eventually above the bamboo into an open woodland where sedge and tussock and heather grew in lumps among huge flat stones and bizarre tall plants like needled cabbages stood in the dimness swaying on stalks. Several times he came to a fork in the path and had to choose which way to go. Up ahead, every few minutes, he would glimpse her, springing forward. She was so fast—he had forgotten how fast.
He tracked her through a field of boulders, then a long swath of mud. He ran in her footprints, matching her strides. His lungs howled; blood thumped in his ears. Her tracks took him to a ridge, past a series of tall boulders and to the edge of a bluff. He stopped. Just below the horizon the ocean sprawled, reflecting back a dizzying smear of stars. He gazed all around him, hoping for a glimpse of white, the river of her body swinging in the night. But she was nowhere. He had lost her: it was a dead end—had he, despite all his confidence, taken the wrong trail? He pivoted, retreated, reapproached the cliff’s edge. He was certain he’d seen her dress flit between the boulders on which his hands now rested. And there were her tracks in the mud. Behind was the way he had come. Ahead waited what looked like nothing, space, a spiral of constellations reflected and real, and the hiss and splash of water on rocks somewhere far below.
A star fell from the sky; then another. Blood ticked in his ears. He leaned over the precipice, and although he could see nothing but those distant pinholes in the darkness, he felt a confidence, a resolution, and closed his eyes and stepped forward.
Years later he would look back and wonder: the footprints, the white dress—were these ways she revealed herself to him, ways she allowed him to catch her? Was he chasing her as a predator chases prey, or was he baited forward—was he the prey? Did he drive her off the cliff or did she lure him from its edge?
His fall took forever, too long, but then there was the smack of water beneath his shoes and on the bottoms of his forearms, and he was underwater, and back up, alive, gasping. From the mild current that flowed around him he knew he was in a river. The walls of a gorge lifted up around him. The river floated him to a gravel bar. He sat, half in the water, arms stinging, and tried to recover his breath.
She was standing on the far bank. Her skin was as dark as the river, darker even, and as she came toward him it seemed that her lower body dissolved and became part of the river itself. When she reached him she held out a hand and he took it. Though her hand was hot he could feel it tremble. Swallows drew loops above them; a crane, hunting minnows along the far bank, paused, its beak poised, one foot held above the water.
What a risk she was taking—what a fabulous, miraculous risk. Even Ward could see that she was the one stepping off a cliff’s edge, plunging through the darkness. She looked over his head, at the stars rioting in the sky. Yes, she said.
The next Sunday they were married by a priest in Lushoto.
In her window seat Naima tried to imagine herself hurtling through the sky, not cramped into this tunnel with strangers but really flying, arms stretched out, rafts of clouds scrolling by. She clenched her eyes, balled her fists; the vision would not come.
When Naima was ten she invented a game and called it Mkondo. Mkondo was this: from the network of trails behind her parents’ home, she’d choose a path she’d never traveled and follow it until it ended. When she reached the end she had to take one step farther. Sometimes this meant merely stepping over nettles or crawling through a net of vines. Other times paths edged their way into gorges and dropped to a river—the brown and quiet Pangani or some nameless creek slashing past—and she would hitch her khanga to her thighs and, trembling, wade in. Of if, in the final pinch of a ravine, a trail dead-ended in a grove of cedar trees, she’d clamber up twenty feet to a branch, then take her step forward.
Her favorites were the trails that climbed high into the mountains, winding through fields of giant heather and tussock to terminate at some crumbling pinnacle, and she would stand at the end of the trail and lift her foot. Far off, above the trees nodding their heads in the wind, above the flat and dusty plains, clumps of clouds would soar in from the horizon. She’d lean into the pulsing gulf of air, with her foot poised over nothing, and space would flood around her, a vertigo against which she held back in blissful panic, fighting an urge she had, always, to continue on, to throw herself forward.