THE OTHER SIDE

“Dad? What’s Ethiopia like?”

“I know what I think it’s like.”

“You’ve never been there? But Uncle Albin’s a hunter there and you’re brothers.”

The boy’s father placed the book he’d been reading on the end table. “I’d like to go someday. You’re uncle and I used to hunt together all the time. My path just hasn’t taken me to Ethiopia yet. I’ve seen Uncle Albin’s pictures. I know what I think it is and I know that’s not even close.”

“What do you think it’s like?”

“What do you think it’s like?” The boy’s father asked.

“I think it’s like lions and elephants and zebras and hunting every day and living in huts and adventure.”

“That sounds pretty good doesn’t it?”

The boy started to nod, but saw that slight smirk on his father’s face. The one that told the boy to be careful of his next move. “Maybe.”

“Knowing what we know. Living like we live. That kind of existence would be fine to experience. Even to embrace and learn from. But we could not go back to that. You and Jon Jon and I, our lives are easier and in most ways better. Do you understand?”

“Uncle Albin went back.”

“Did he?”

“He lives half the year over there.”

“And he has great stories to tell, doesn’t he.”

“I love the one about the cowboy who wanted to rope a buffalo.” The boy started to laugh.

“Albin doesn’t talk much about the weeks he spends building camp, about the clients who expect the impossible, about how he loses trackers to jail, omens, and death. He don’t tell us about all them kids who catch malaria and die before they get a chance to dream about the other side of the world.”

The boy sat there for a moment and watched a tumbleweed roll across the prairie into a fence lined with tumbleweeds that had come before it. “How come you want to go to Ethiopia some day?” He asked.

“Because of the lions and the elephants and the hunting and the people who live in huts.”