Soon, winds subsided but rain continued to fall. Thunder grumbled in the distance. It must be their rainy season, we decided. Ours often started this way. Each day for months, rain would fall, either in the morning or afternoon. Crops grew in great abundance. Children sprang forth months later. Our harvests were usually plentiful. There were years when this wasn’t so. Sometimes rains failed to come or came only sparingly. When this happened, we performed rituals of atonement to the earth and sky, and set things aright. Then rains came freely, as they poured now. But there would be no harvest this year. Or the next. What would our people do? Our children had been exiled in our own villages. They, and the very old, were left to forge a life alone. Elders would certainly teach them our way, but they couldn’t show them, so many truths would be heard but never understood. Most levels of initiation would have to be skipped. Our people would survive, surely, but much of what we had achieved would drift into a glorious past, which they would not experience. We realized this as rain soaked the earth.

And we still wondered what the bird had to say. It looked at us, each of us, with a quick jerk of its head as if dumbfounded that we missed the point. Hard as he tried, Oluwagbotemi could not discern the bird’s message. He stared at the winged creature, hoping something magically, something meaningful, might seep into his consciousness, but it never did. He simply didn’t know enough. He was only eighteen rains. No one his age back home possessed such power. It would’ve come much later, if he’d sought it at all. Knowing himself, he probably wouldn’t have. Such knowledge hadn’t captured his imagination back then. He’d wanted to marry and have lots of children. Nothing else mattered. Perhaps if he’d valued what animal speakers knew, they would’ve taught him things in his youth. Those things might’ve been enough now to help him interpret the bird’s presence. But he’d ignored such mysticism. Now, try as he might, his spirit could elicit no clarity.