I think I’m kind of funny. Reasonable-seeming but incorrect people might disagree. And, I suppose, if you only know me here on Substack you might not recognize my sense of humor. For some reason, writing makes me turn more serious. So, aside from a sarcastic parenthetical here-and-there, my stuff has trended more tear-tear jerking rather than laughing-tear jerking. Today’s post is a deliberate departure. We’ll see how it goes. If you don’t like it, rest assured I’ll probably be back to more heartrending stuff soon. I just think we all need to laugh from time to time, especially hard enough that we cry.
Listen to me read this post here:
We were just a quarter of a mile into our regular jog when my running companion made a small change to her gazelle gait. Behind her, I found myself doing the same on account of the head on the trail.
Yeah. You read that right.
Right there in the middle of a popular running-walking-biking path through Karura Forest – a green oasis nestled in the heart of Nairobi – was a small head.
Momentum being what it is, we continued down the path, but our strides lacked pizazz or conviction – the runner’s equivalent of rubbernecking at an accident scene on the interstate except there were no first responders, no swirling lights or sirens, and we definitely weren’t traveling at 80 miles per hour. Just us, the birds singing like any other day, the trees. And the head.
About twelve more strides down the trail, my friend turned back.
“Should we do something?”
I had been thinking the same, but what?
“Yeah. Let’s.”
We walked back up the hill and looked at the head that previously (one can only assume) sat atop and attached to the body of a dik dik.
Dik diks are tiny honey-I-shrunk-the-Bambi antelopes. Little chihuahuas on stilts. Their stature makes them considerably less graceful than deer because any movement from an animal that size seems spastic. The males have these adorable horns sticking out of their head like reinforced toothpicks. This head lacked horns, so I concluded it belonged to a female.
I glanced around briefly looking for her body. I don’t know why.
There was no stench. No bugs crawling out of her eyes, which were shiny, brown, pebble-sized orbs frozen wide open in surprise (it’s possible I was reading into that). Her coat still shone with what looked like life. A few vertebrae of her spinal column stuck out, the bony remnants of a neck. The scene was remarkably sterile, like unfinished taxidermy.
In my mind I changed it from her head to the head because it felt better to separate the head we were dealing with from a (recently) living being.
I grabbed a stick and swept the head off the trail.
Then, we went about finding sticks and leaves to cover it. Maybe we were protecting other forest visitors from the circle-of-lifeness (which looked quite a bit more like death). Maybe we were protecting our consciences – doing something instead of just-another-day running by.
For a while afterwards, we talked about it.
“That was weird. What do you suppose killed it?” I asked.
“Maybe a wild dog?” my friend speculated. “There aren’t hyenas in this forest, right?”
The question floated over her shoulder.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I feel like there would be signage warning us about hyenas,”
I reassured myself reasoning that we would know about hyena sightings given that lots of people come to the forest with their babies in strollers or kids toddling around on foot or bike. Plus, hyenas are consummate scavengers; they wouldn’t leave behind a head filled with brainy goodness.
And then we changed the subject and moved on.
By the time we finished our five-and-a-half kilometer jog – always a mix of business and friendship, always productive in a feeding-two-birds-with-one-scone sort of way – we had forgotten the disconcerting start to our jog.
My friend’s Uber boda motorcycle sped away. I went to the cafe, got out my laptop, and worked on something. I drank chai.
We forgot to report our sighting to the park rangers at the entrance.
Later I told my husband Eric about this sighting. “What do you suppose did that?” I asked him.
He shrugged his shoulders.
The next day back at the forest waiting for another running buddy to arrive, I went to the visitor’s kiosk thinking they would want to know about a dead animal.
“Hey — I wanted to let you know that yesterday my friend and I found a dik dik head on the trail just about a half kilometer from here. I forgot to report it to you.”
The Kenyan forest-ranger-gate person, clad in her militaristic, army-green uniform, looked bored.
My friend arrived to pay her entrance fee. While she fished out cash and her ID, I turned to catch her up to speed.
“Yesterday we saw a dik dik head on the trail. Just a head. Isn’t that weird? I forgot to report it then, but that’s what I was just talking to the ranger about.” I gestured to the woman sitting at the entrance kiosk.
As she accepted my friend’s payment, the ranger looked — impossibly — even more bored.
Undeterred, I earnestly continued my report. “I’m not sure which number marker was close, but I’ll take a look today and let you know when I’m back.”
The ranger slow-llama-blinked back at me, judgmental, irritated, and disinterested all at once.
“What do you suppose caused that? Are there predators in Karura?” I kept going.
She might have shrugged her shoulders.
My friend joined in. “Do you think it could have been a jackal or something?”
Without lifting her head, the ranger offered, “Well, it has been pretty cold.”
My friend followed up in what was the most endearingly earnest way possible “But, being cold doesn’t make your head fall off.” Her tone of voice somehow struck a gentle at-least-in-my-experience-I-don’t-think-so deference.
I pursed my lips as tiny bits of air escaped and walked away around the corner from the kiosk to avoid laughing in this poor woman’s face.
And then, I laughed until tears streamed down my face.
Several times on our run I had to stop, doubling over laughing as I imagined a chilly dik dik, shivering uncontrollably, its tiny stilty legs shaking, exclaiming “Brrrr-rrr!” And then, all of a sudden, her head just falling right off her body.
But still, on cold mornings I’ve caught myself thinking about grabbing an extra layer.
❤️,
Becca
😂
I feel like you’ve got the makings of a fabulous inside joke.
“Bring an extra layer honey. Remember the dik dik?”