Travel and Mali
When You Decline the Dinner of Puff Adder Snake, You Know You’ve Arrived
A true tale from Mali
The canvas bag slung across Issa’s body dripped with blood. The sack changed from its original flax color at his shoulder to crimson red by his belly to deep rust at his hip. At that hip, the bag hung with a weight of something large and ponderous.
Issa beamed. He laid down his machete, a two-foot-long straight piece of steel set into a battered wooden handle, and asked me excitedly if I wanted to see what he’d killed.
Typically, Issa presented bush rats or birds; the former his wife cooked and fed to the family, the latter his son used as a toy, tying it around the neck with a string and swinging it in wide arcs.
Issa bent at the waist in his rough hunter’s shirt, made with cotton grown in the village, twisted into thread, and then woven into lengths of cloth. It may have originally been flaxen in color, too, but later matched the Malian earth, the mud huts, the feet of the children.
He wore a gris-gris amulet around his neck, a leather pouch he’d made by hand filled with materials of which he would never speak. The gris-gris protected Issa from malevolent spirits when he walked in the bush.
