Win a Copy of "Four Fields"

UPDATE: THIS CONTEST IS CLOSED

We're giving away five copies of Four Fields, courtesy of Couterpoint Press. To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment at the bottom of this page by logging in with a viable email address (it will only be visible to us). Scroll down for the official rules. The contest ends at 11:59 p.m. on Monday, March 2, 2015.

In the meantime, read a passage from chapter 3, in which author Tim Dee travels to Africa and goes hunting for beehives with a honeyguide.

The first time I flew from London to Cape Town, I looked down and saw how fields, such as I thought them, barely made it across the Mediterranean. 

The sand of the Maghreb and then the bones of the mountains dust them out of existence. The swaddle of equatorial forests smothers the ground, permitting only rare clearings. Further south is a steaming tangle of vegetation and swamp. Only into coastal southern Africa, the strip of temperate Africa beyond Africa, do anything like regular recognisable fields return. As I was born in Europe, a child of enclosure and settlement, a farm still means to me something other than the farming of Africa that happens between the Atlas Mountains and the Cederberg—its scratched livings, unfenced cattle, children minding goats, and tiny stands of maize next to simple one-room houses. There are big farms now of course, and rich local farmers as well as international business interests busily growing profits as they feed the world from the soil of the poorest places, but Africa still farms and feeds itself as it has done for thousands of years—those children around the goats, forever. Put it this way: throughout most of Africa the word countryside remains meaningless. Habitats are being degraded, forests are cut to nothing, lakes fouled, fetid shanties grow as large as cities, but the whole continent is still living in nature. In Africa there is only bush. And it runs, scratchily real and as a landscape of the mind, for 7,500 miles from north to south.

Everything here is under the sun. We’d left the fields and were almost home when we heard the call. A dirt track snaking back to the farmhouse had put us on the edge of an old tobacco plot. The call came again, chakka chakka chakka chakka, loud over the toil of the four-wheel drive. We stopped. Once more the bird shouted against the judder of the switch off. It had come closer, and this time Lazaro, who works in the fields of the farm and knew what he was hearing, was already out of the car and answering it, his mouth full of whistling and tutting and Tonga chatter. We’re coming, kacheka kacheka, he said. Lazaro had seen the kacheka, as well. Fumbling with binoculars I had managed a glimpse of a brown flycatcher-sized bird with pale undersides, far smaller than its stone-sieving call would suggest. It dropped from a high branch towards us through the air in a mock fall, fanning its tail to show white outer feathers and twisting upon itself. Having successfully caught our eyes as well as our ears, it flew on ahead. We were hooked.

A bird calls with some news for someone who is passing. Across Africa, south of the Sahara, the same bird has called to people for thousands of years for the same reason. The hunter coming home, the herdsman driving his goats, the woman carrying water from a well, her son walking back from school—all of them at one time or another have looked up to listen, and knowing what the honeyguide’s call meant, they moved towards the bird and followed it. Because they have done this, the bird has kept calling and will call to you if you pass, as it called to me. It knows us for what we are. Sweet-toothed.

The honeyguide’s chatter is good news. Sweet news. It has found a wild bees’ nest, a hive of honey, with a combed stack running slowly with its sweet warm sap. But the prize is locked in the dark of a hollow tree. The bird has seen the bees going in and out of their hole; it knows what that means and, remembering how things are, it has gone in search of help. It loves to eat beeswax but it is not a woodpecker. Instead, the honeyguide employs us as its tool. A chimpanzee will strip the leaves from a fine twig and poke it into a narrow hole from where termites run, before sliding the stick and the insects it has disturbed through its lips. We are to play the part of the stick for the honeyguide. It will hunt, we will gather. And, as he walked towards the bird, answering its call, because he knew the deal, Lazaro had an axe in his hand.

The field edge here in southern Zambia was no longer clearly an edge at all. The field might be a field no more. Spindly but confident saplings were already advancing across it, breaking from the thirty-foot-wide wooded corridor that doubled as field edge and track-way. The bush is coming back. The new trees reached towards four old termite mounds, wooded islands rising from the tall yellow grass, never taken into the field when it grew tobacco. Pythons thicken there beneath knotted dark-leaved trees and the honeyguide calls from the canopy. Unless someone cuts at the trunks, old and new, the clearing will soon disappear, its open green eye shutting to some- thing darker, older and shaded. Today, the honeyguide doesn’t mind. People are still passing, but what will happen if Lazaro is no longer available to listen?

Perhaps humans are not essential to honeyguide happiness; perhaps there are other ways to wax. Can’t they do it without us, as they must have done when we were otherwise occupied and only good for putting twigs in termite holes? No evidence exists but some have speculated that honeyguides once used honey badgers as their field labourers. It might be that the birds sacked the badgers when it became clear that people had learned, presumably by watching the badgers and the birds, and had rapidly become better at the job. It’s hard to know because it is hard to watch a honeyguide without it watching you. And if we are watched and there is honey to be had, we are to be pressed into service.

For now, Lazaro was talking back to the bird. He said, in words I found myself assuming the honeyguide understood: show us what you have found. The bird obliged, thinking we were obliging it. Lazaro stepped into the field barefoot from the car, and moved his axe from his hand and slid it down his neck inside the back of his shirt until its shaft lay straight along his spine and its head faced out from above his collar. This was in preparation for tree climbing, but it also allowed him to roll and light a cigarette as he walked towards the bird. His paper was a scrap of old newspaper; his tobacco—flakes and filaments of brown crumbled leaf and stem—came from the next field. Last year’s crop, planted, tended, cut and dried—all on the farm in the fields about us. His lit cigarette sent up thick grey smoke, like a smouldering bonfire of damp leaves and grass, and for a moment his faun-face was lost in a cloud. He looked out on the same scene as me but as if from another country.

After each call the honeyguide flew on 200 yards or more, sometimes straight, sometimes zigzagging, through the field trees and hedge until it reached the more continuous miombo woodland at the back of the farm. As we caught up with it there, instead of flying on, it came closer to us, buzzing about the treetops, swooping down nearer to the ground. "One honeyguide," Lazaro said, "showed me four hives; one hive then another then another; and sometimes, because it is interested, it showed us other things as well, a snake or a dead animal in the bush."

Climbing wasn’t necessary. The bees’ nest this honeyguide had found, and brought us to, was at the foot of a muyongolo or snake-bean tree. Lazaro gathered twigs and a few strands of dry grass, fire was set, and smoke made to coil round the trunk. I saw the soles of his bare feet as he knelt; they looked like the cracked earth. He dug a little in the sandy soil to expose the base of the tree and hacked at it.

Smoking grass was held to the gash. Bees started seething at two exit holes higher up the trunk, driven from their comb by the smoke rising, through their nest, up the chimney of the tree. Swirled in smoke himself, with half-stunned half-furious bees crawling over his head, Lazaro reached his hand into the hole he had made and pulled out the buchi, the wild honey. The comb came twisting like snakeskin. It was eighteen inches long and three inches wide, a dripping tongue. He pulled at it, laughing and breaking it apart. A rope of honey ran from the chunk in his left hand to that in his right. It stretched, glooped, broke, and spilled to the ground. Something precious and potent was being desecrated so that we might eat. Lazaro passed me a piece of the chambered wafer. I felt its tug back from where I was taking it. On my palm it looked like a block of flats at sunset. There is a similar building, Soviet-style, in the centre of Lusaka. The comb itself was the colour of our fingernails, but the honey that drained from it was a uniform and clear golden-brown varnish that coated everything it flowed over. I sucked it from my fingers: the sun itself had been distilled, the forest and the field captured and concentrated.

Something beyond sweetness caught at the back of my tongue and throat and burned there with the rasp of pollen or a balm that stung. I picked off two bees glued to the comb by their own honey and drowned in it in the chaos of excavation, and bit into three stories of the apartment block. In my mouth the comb was all texture. I pressed the sweetness from its gum and what was left was too chewy to swallow. I spat it out as Lazaro stuffed more dripping mess into his mouth. He ate it all. Today was a quick opportunistic feast for him, a raid on a sweet shop; on other occasions he puts the comb on a plate of bark and carries it home for his family. Now, he placed one piece back into the hollow tree, so that the bees might return, sealed the smoke hole he had made with a wedge of bark, and on the ground placed a last lump of comb for the honeyguide. In our honey lust we had lost sight of the honey bird. It had stopped calling, but sat silently in a tree a few yards away, watching us doing its bidding. 

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