Memoirs of a Porcupine Read Online Free Page A

the ritual drink, and all this time I was getting more and more frantic out there in the in the forest, the bush pressed in upon me, I couldn’t bear to be there, I was trying to get out, so I could go and live near my young master’s village, at that time I didn’t know I would incur the wrath of the old porcupine who used to rule over us, who did nothing but rail against humans, from sunrise to sunset
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    this was the most turbulent time of my life, when I had to weigh up the demands of the child and our little family of porcupines, I put up with the governor’s rages, as he became increasingly intransigent, as though he had got wind of the huge changes taking place in my life, as though he’d guessed what was going to happen to me, he held more and more meetings, sneering down at us, raising his voice, with affected gestures, stroking his little beard with his claws, then crossing his front paws, his snout pointed skywards, in imitation of some human being calling on Nzambi Ya Mpunga, no point our saying anything, he always had the last word, for example, he’d tell us such and such a river used to flow round the other way and when we asked the old guy how long it had taken for the water to make this spectacular change in direction, he’d toss his worn out quills, make a show of closing his eyes and thinking, point to the sky, it made me roar with laughter, and then he got angry and began to threaten us, issuing an ultimatum we all knew by heart, ‘if that’s how it is, then that’s the last time I’ll tell you anything about men and their
ways, you’re just plain ignorant’, and when we went on laughing he’d add enigmatically, ‘when the wise man points to the moon, the fool looks at his finger’, but when he saw I was still keen to go check out what the monkeys’ cousins were up to, the aged porcupine flew into a rage, telling his stooges to keep a close paw on me, could he possibly have known I was due to enter upon the scene, now young Kibandi had drunk his initiatory drink, he’d no idea, my dear Baobab, when I left I did it discreetly, sometimes with the connivance of two or three sidekicks, who wanted to hear from me how it really was with humans, because the aged porcupine always tended to exaggerate, and almost seemed to be calling for a war between the animal and human species, I would vanish into the bush for whole days and nights and it got so that that I only felt at ease when I was close to my future master’s village, whenever I got back home I found the governor in a rage, calling me every name under the sun, and to further tarnish my image, he’d tell my sidekicks that too much contact with humans had sent me mad, I was heading straight for the fox’s jaws, soon I’d have forgotten our ways, I would lose touch with what made us the most noble animals in the bush, he swore, our aged philosopher, that one day I’d get caught in one of those traps men leave in the bush, or worse still, even fall into the silly traps set by the kids from Mossaka, who knew how to capture birds with one of their mother’s aluminium bowls, and the other porcupines all laughed themselves silly, because they too considered it better to fall into a trap set by a real hunter than one left by a human being who wasn’t yet weaned from its mother’s breast, you’d always see them at the gates of the village in the North, but I must say, dear Baobab, that only the birds of Mossaka got caught that way, and mostly the sparrows, who are
the stupidest birds round here, I wouldn’t like to generalize and say all vertebrates with feathers, beaks and anterior limbs used for flight are that stupid, oh no, I’m sure there are some intelligent species of bird, but the sparrows of Mossaka had such a low IQ that I actually felt sorry for them, sparrows the whole world over must be the same, I can see they must be cut off from