₦airaland Forum

Close to midnight along a desolate stretch of road near a sleepy southern Nigerian town, a subsistence hunter ventured out into the night with his foul-smelling calcium carbide headlamp strapped in place, and his locally made muzzle-loading Dane gun slung over his shoulder. He made his way towards the turnoff that would take him to the corn farms where he anticipated a good evening’s hunt, seeking to shoot that elusive and delicious quarry, the African Grass-cutter Cane Rat, which invades farmland in the dead of night, in large family groups capable of decimating crops in a few a short hours.

As the hunter rounded a corner in the road, he spotted a passenger bus parked with the lights off, in the middle of the road, with several men sitting on the ground near the vehicle in the moonlight smoking weed. Living in an African nation where the possession of marijuana still sees many slammed in jail for years without trial, the hunter knew that the sweet fragrance lingering in the air meant he had wandered into the midst of hardened outlaws, and would need to keep his wits about him to survive the chance encounter.

One of the men exhaled a huge cloud of smoke into the night sky, and rose to his feet to address the approaching hunter. “Baba, you no dey fear ? See how as you dey wakka for this bush road for night. You no know say we dey here ?”

Keeping his voice calm and steady the hunter replied “Na meat I say make I find go this night oga. Na hunter be my work, wey I sabi pass, so as nothing dey house, na him I come face hunter bush go.”

From the shadows several gravelly voices laughed briefly, and the smell of the weed grew stronger. After a pause that seemed to last forever, the hunter was allowed to go on his way, in exchange for a promise to share any bush-meat that he harvested during the night’s hunt. Hugely relieved that he had been allowed to walk away from a group of hardened highway robbers unharmed, the hunter headed off into the night, noting as he walked by, the pair of Genera-Purpose Machine Guns leaning against the parked passenger bus, their lethal chains of 50-caliber ammunition coiled on the ground like angry serpents.

Several hours later in the half-light of pre-dawn, the hunter headed back to his village along the same road on which he had earlier met the highwaymen, his confidence of a peaceful passage home buoyed by the fat cane rat that he had bagged after much patient stalking in distant corn farms. By now he could make out the litter of emptied bags and cases once owned by road travelers, and the bandits were gathered in a circle, sharing amid much shouting a substantial pile of cash and personal effects, all harvested during a full blockade of all lanes comprising a nearby federal inter-state highway, creating a motorists’ hell on Earth that lasted for much of the night.

As he edged his way past the arguing gang members, a familiar voice called out to the hunter. “Baba, how far? I see say ya bag don full. Wettin you kill for bush? “

The hunter turned over the fat cane rat he had shot to the gang, and in return they tossed him a wad of cash that was far in excess of the price his bush-meat harvest could have fetched in the village. Satisfied at having scored a profitable deal with the gang, the hunter resumed his walk home, with a spring in his step. A few more minutes down the road, the returning night hunter met up with a fellow hunter just starting out for the forest in order to hunt for monkeys at dawn.

The returning night hunter quickly warned the outbound day hunter about the gang of bandits out on the road to the forest. The day hunter ignored the warning, and continuing down the road towards the forest where he had hunted his whole life, had just one sharp bend on the road to turn, before he would have been face to face with the gang, when he spotted an antelope in the roadside undergrowth. Forgetting in that excited, instinctive moment the dire warning of his fellow hunter, the man took careful aim at the antelope with his single-shot muzzle- loading blunderbuss, then touched off a monstrous, reverberant boom that sent the nearby gang diving for their assault rifles, with which they then proceeded to light up the surrounding landscape in a sustained barrage of automatic weapons fire that was heard for miles in all directions.

To be continued ....