The Hyena's Dream: A Desert Story About the Predictions That Can Never Be Wrong

 

The valley where Umm Theeban dreamed. Photograph by Saleh Suliman. 

Umm Theeban came out of the cave before the light did.

She stood on the ledge where the mountain shoulders down into the wadi, and she waited until she heard the others stirring behind her. That was half the trick. Say a thing to sleeping animals and it stays in the cave. Say it to waking ones and it walks.

"Last night I saw a great thing," she said. "Something is coming to this valley that has never come to it before."

Nobody asked her what. That was the other half.

She had been thin for three summers. In a pack, a thin hyena eats last and speaks never, and she had learned both. Then one morning she said she had dreamed, and for the length of that morning the young ones stopped shoving each other and looked at her, and she found that being looked at fed her in a way that meat did not.

Theeban, her eldest, took it down the slope at first light and told it at the water hole, which was not a water hole anymore, only a bowl of white stones. He was a big animal with a small imagination, which is a dangerous pairing. By the time he finished telling it, the great thing had a shape. By the afternoon it had a direction. It was coming from the north.

Hashraj laughed at him. Hashraj laughed at most things.

"She's hungry," he said. "Hungry animals dream of food and call it a sign."

"She saw it."

"She saw the inside of her own eyelids."

Salma said nothing. She was the youngest, and she was trying to hold the sentence in her head the way you hold water in your mouth without swallowing it. A great thing. Something that has never come before. She turned it over and found that it had no good in it and no evil in it. It was an empty bowl, and the whole valley was already tasting it.

The story went out along the ridge the way fire goes through dry grass, which is to say sideways and fast and never in the shape you expect. Ghubra told it to her sisters and added that the mother had woken up shaking. The sisters told the pair from the eastern gully and added that she had woken up shaking and calling out a name. By the fourth telling there was a name. By the sixth there was a night, and the night was the night of the next full moon.

Misfir came over the shoulder of the mountain nine days later. He was old, and he had walked a long way on bad legs, and he came straight to the cave and stood at the mouth of it with his head low, the way you stand in front of someone who knows a thing you need.

"They say you saw the water," he said.

Umm Theeban did not move.

"They say you saw the water come down black out of the north and take the low ground on the full moon," Misfir said. "I have a daughter denning in the low ground."

Salma looked at her mother then, and this is the part she would carry for the rest of her life. Her mother did not say yes. Her mother did not say no. Her mother let a long breath out through her nose and said, very quietly, "I said what I saw."

Misfir thanked her. He walked back the way he had come, on his bad legs, in the heat.

Nobody had said water. Salma was sure of it. She had held the sentence in her mouth for nine days and there was no water in it.

What happened next is the part the valley never tells right, because it is not dramatic. The pack simply stopped.

They stopped ranging north, because the thing was coming from the north. They stopped denning low, because of the water that had never been mentioned. They stayed on the high stone and they watched the sky and they waited to be present for the great thing, and a hyena that is waiting is a hyena that is not hunting. The cubs got quiet first. Quiet is worse than crying in a cub. Then the old ones stopped coming out at all.

By the second week they were eating the dry hide off bones they had cleaned in the spring.

Hashraj thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened. He said so, loudly, from the top of a rock, to animals too tired to look up. He had stopped believing anything at all, and he wore it like a full belly. When Salma told him she had heard something in the hills at dusk, a sound like a long breath under the ground, he grinned at her with his ruined teeth and said, "You too? She's got you dreaming now."

"I did not say I dreamed it. I said I heard it."

"Same animal, different noise."

The rain fell on the twenty-second night, and it did not fall on them. It fell forty miles up in the granite, where nobody was watching, and it came down the wadi at moonrise in a wall the color of old blood, carrying whole trees and the roofs of animal burrows and a hundred drowned things.

And it was a great thing. It truly was. Nothing like it had come to that valley in the lifetime of anything living in it. In the morning the wadi ran brown and loud, and the flood had strung its dead along the banks in a line that went on past where the eye gave out. Meat for a month. Grass by the fourth day, green fur on stone that had been white since Salma was born.

Umm Theeban stood on the ledge above all of it with the pack gathered under her, and she said:

"Did I not tell you?"

They came to her one by one that morning and put their heads down.

Theeban went into the water at noon. He went in because there was a carcass turning slowly in the current in the middle of the channel, a big one, and because forty animals were watching him, and because he was the son of the one who had seen it and there was a way a son like that has to walk. He got eleven strides out. Salma remembers eleven. The current took his legs and turned him around once, almost gently, like something deciding, and then he was gone downstream and there was nothing in the water where he had been.

Hashraj went in after him. He had spent a month saying nothing was real, and it turned out he had not learned to tell a river from a rumor either. He came out a long way down, on the far bank, on three legs. He never used the fourth again.

They found Theeban in the evening, in a snarl of thorn scrub two miles down, and they brought what they could of him back up the mountain.

Umm Theeban stood over her son for a long time. The valley waited.

"Did I not tell you," she said.

Nobody moved. It was the same sentence. It was exactly the same sentence, word for word, in the same voice, and half the pack wept at it and the other half could not have said why their skin crawled.

Salma waited eight days. Then she went into the cave and lay down where she used to lie as a cub.

"Mother," she said. "That night. What did you actually see?"

The old hyena was quiet so long that Salma thought she had slept.

"I saw," she said at last, "what was coming."

"Say it the way you saw it."

"A great thing was coming. I told them. They heard me."

"You said nineteen words." Salma had counted them, in the dark, more nights than she wanted to admit. "There was no water in them. There was no moon in them. There was no north in them. There was nothing in them at all, Mother, and Misfir walked forty miles on bad legs, and Theeban went into the river because he thought he already knew how it ended."

She waited.

"I saw," her mother said, "what was coming."

And that was the whole of it. Salma understood then that she would never get another answer, and that her mother was not lying, exactly. Her mother had said a shape with nothing inside it, and the valley had filled it, and now her mother could not tell her own dream from what forty hungry animals had poured into it. There was nobody left in that cave to ask. There had not been for a long time.

Salma got up and went out.

She did not go far. She lay down at the top of the wadi where the ground rises toward the granite, in a place where you can hear the hills behind you and the channel below you at the same time, and she put her head on her paws.

She stopped asking what things meant.

She learned to listen for water.

THE END

NAMES IN THIS STORY

Umm Theeban (أم ذيبان) — "Mother of Theeban." In Arabic custom a woman is often called by her eldest son's name rather than her own. She is never named in this story, which is the point of her.

Theeban (ذيبان) — from theeb, the wolf. The eldest son. He carried his mother's words further than she ever said them.

Hashraj (حشرج) — from hashraja, the rattle in the throat. The mocker. He doubted everything equally, which is only another way of seeing nothing.

Salma (سلمى) — from salim, whole and unharmed, the one who comes through safely. The youngest. She counted the words.

Misfir (مسفر) — from asfara, the moment before dawn when light begins to show but has not yet broken. He walked forty miles on a sentence that was never spoken.

ABOUT THE PROVERB

Hilm al-Dhab'a, "the hyena's dream," is an old Saudi saying. The hyena wakes and announces she has dreamed of something enormous, without ever saying whether it is a blessing or a disaster. Whatever happens afterward, she says the same thing: I told you. It is said of anyone who speaks in two directions at once so that no outcome can ever prove them wrong.