The Trouble with the Truth

That had been two months ago.

A mynah bird scolded me from the trees, and I realized that I'd been resting in the shade for far too long. Sri Mani and Nanda had probably rappelled down the cliff face by now. Months of hunting honey had made me lean and strong; it had only taken me twenty minutes or so to climb the other side, but it would probably take them even less time. I got to my feet and started downslope, limping on the ankle I'd twisted in the fall, holding my bruised ribs.

Nanda had seen me pick up my latest find, a bone so obvious in its origin and design that there could be no doubt as to its species. A quarter of the way up the cliff face (I'd been re-ascending for several weeks by then), he'd simply leaned out with the Gurkha and cut my line. I'd plummeted, coming up short a second later at the end of my safety line, gasping to draw air into my wracked chest, dazed and terrified. Above me, Nanda walked across the cliff face and stopped by my secondary line.

He set the curved blade against the bamboo fibers and called down: "Throw it to me, Bahktur."

Above us both, dangling from his ladder, Sri Mani looked startled and confused. Nanda's action had taken him by complete surprise, too.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I croaked, hugging my chest, wondering how many ribs I'd broken.

"Under your shirt," he said. "Take it out. Show Sri Mani what you found."

"Leave me alone. I don't know what you're talking about," I repeated. "Have you lost your fucking mind?"

He drew back the Gurkha as if to strike the safety line in two.

I held up a hand. "Okay. Wait. I was going to show you later anyway," I lied. The truth was that this was the capstone to the monument I'd been building in my private corner of the namghar. There in the dirt beside my bed, I'd carefully arranged each piece. I'd no intention of showing anyone. This was private. Personal. This was between Pholo and me. This was the truth I'd come to Nepal to escape and, if I could confess it to my new god, perhaps he would do what my old god could not. Perhaps it would take the truth and set it right.

"Show it!" Nanda rasped.

I pulled it out from under my shirt and held it up. Sri Mani gasped, the whites of his eyes revealed to me for perhaps the first time.

The Nepalese sun gleamed from the tiny skull. The lower mandible was missing, but the skull's dome was bleach-white and nearly perfect, marred only by the gaping fracture which ran from the outer rim of the right occipital ridge around and down to the base of the skull. It had been a grievous injury, one which had surely cost the child its life. The fracture could have been made by a blow - perhaps even the slash of a Gurkha knife - but I knew differently. The injury had been the result of a fall.

I had let him fall.

"Throw it to me," said Nanda.

#

The trouble with the truth is finding someone to tell it to, someone who actually wants to hear it. And then there's the possibility that you'll never live long enough to tell the truth, that you'll take it to the grave with you, because for everyone who might want to hear the truth, there are ten or twenty who want to suppress it. No one really wants to hear the truth when it doesn't fit in their nice, neat ordered lives. Some people would rather see you dead than listen to it.

The truth will bite you on the ass if you let it.

Everyone has their own version.

The truth can get you killed.

These are the basic truths about the nature of truth itself.

"How did Sri Mani's son die?" I asked Nanda over the crackling of the campfire one night. We'd been hunting late, too late to return to Bahadur before dark. Sri Mani had already curled up in his woolen wrap and gone to sleep. The sound of that afternoon's hive still echoed in my skull. At times now, it almost seemed as if I could understand their song.

Beneath my shirt, cold against my belly, was a tiny femur.

Nanda shrugged. "Boy get sick. Die before we can take to Kathmandu to see doctor."

"Does Sri Mani have other children?"

He shook his head, his dark eyes catching the firelight and reflecting ... nothing.

"Who will hunt honey for the Gurung when Sri Mani is gone?"

He shrugged. "Perhaps you, Bahktur?"

I shook my head. "The bees frighten me."

"The bees know Sri Mani make them strong."

"What?"

"When Sri Mani cut into the comb, many are lost, but the strong survive."

I was surprised to find the basic principles of Darwin's theory alive in the Himalayas. And for Nanda to suggest that the bees understood it, that they permitted it? It was absurd. But the fact remained that the bees did not attack Sri Mani or his assistant.

"Once," said Nanda, "we harvest six hundred hives a season, between the time ravine floods in spring and first snow on mountains. Now we lucky to find eighty. Many forests gone. Many hives destroyed."

He was lamenting the death of the environment and their culture, the wasted landscape I'd walked through to get here, the end of Sri Mani's occupation and all that they knew, but I heard something else. In the spring, the ravine ran with melt-off from the mountains. That explained the dispersion of the bones I'd been finding, the reason why the femur I'd found that afternoon had been twenty miles or more from the rib I'd found that first day, or the finger bone I'd found a week ago, or those vertebrae, or ...

"Sri Mani's ancestors have always hunted the honey, always had Pholo's blessing and protection from the bees." He shook his head sadly. "But I don't know for how much longer there will be honey to hunt."

A thought came unbidden to me then, as if extracted from the very drone of the bees that still rang in the back of mind: As long as the bees desire to be hunted, there will be honey hunters.