The Grassland Hides Nothing

“Kagiso, do cheetahs grieve?”

Cheng Lan asked me this just at daybreak, while the dew on the grass was still too sleepy to wake. She was standing at the waterhole in front of camp, a blue cloth scarf, washed nearly white, wrapped around her head. Her eyes were puffy, as if they’d been pelted with grass seeds.

I’ve been a guide on this grassland for twenty years. Guests have asked me how fast a cheetah can run in an hour, why lions sleep twenty hours a day, whether elephants are afraid of mice. No one had ever asked me whether it grieves.

I didn’t answer right away. I said, “Go wash your face first. This morning, I’m taking you to see something.”

But to make that morning understood, I have to start from the beginning, from a modified booking.

It was Naomi who showed me the booking. She’s the camp manager—handles the accounts, the meals, and the foul tempers of a camp full of men. The reservation had been made for two people; a week before departure, the company called: change it to one. In the notes field was a single line: “The other one can’t come. Don’t shorten the itinerary. I’ll see it for her.”

See it for her. I didn’t think much of it at the time—just politeness, I figured.

She arrived on a small plane. A Chinese woman in her thirties came down the steps with one small suitcase and a box of tea wrapped in red paper. When we met she gave a slight bow: “Thank you for the trouble.” Over the course of the day she must have said it ten times. Naomi asked me privately, are all Chinese guests this polite? I said, this one especially.

She learned our greeting—Dumela, hello. Her tongue kept tripping over it like a pebble; it took her three tries to get it smooth. Once she had it, she was delighted, saying Dumela to everyone she met, even greeting the mother warthog and her piglets that guarded the camp entrance.

She said she was a writer. Travel essays, and essays about women. “Women from here?” Naomi’s eyes lit up. That afternoon the two of them talked for hours while I tidied the vehicle nearby, hearing Naomi talk about saving money to learn to fly a small plane, about her daughter studying nursing in the city. Cheng Lan wrote it all down in her notebook, her pen flying.

On the first evening, I showed her elephants at the waterhole. A whole herd, the old ones leading the young, drinking in their unhurried way. She held up her camera, hands trembling, and murmured, “You really can’t see the end of it.”

I asked her who she was seeing it for. She smiled. “For my mom. She can’t travel far.”

At the time, I took “can’t” to mean her legs.

When night fell, she tipped her head back looking for the Big Dipper. She searched and searched, and got flustered: “The stars are installed backwards!” I pointed out the Southern Cross to the south. She looked at it for a long, long time, and said, “If my mother could see—” and stopped herself mid-sentence.

That night, hyenas called in the distance, one long, one short. She asked what it was. I said, hyenas laughing. She asked what they had to laugh about. I said, they laugh because they know things we don’t know yet.

She laughed. It was the brightest laugh of her first two days. That night at dinner she cooked the noodles she’d brought and shared them out, with chili oil so fierce it brought Naomi to tears—Naomi wiping her eyes and saying this stuff wakes you up better than crying. That got a real laugh out of Cheng Lan.

On the second evening, as we sat around the fire waiting for dinner, Naomi came over quietly and touched her arm. “Ms. Cheng, there’s a phone call for you from home in the office.”

The camp lay deep in the grassland; the call had been transferred through the office. She rose and walked toward it, walked into the night. From a distance I watched her standing beneath that little lamp, a long, long time. When she hung up she didn’t come back right away; she stood in the open ground a while longer, head tipped back.

When she returned, her back was ramrod straight, like a stretched wire.

“I’m sorry to interrupt everyone,” she said. “My mother passed away this morning. She went quietly.”

Then she apologized first: “I’m sorry for spoiling the mood.”

Our people grieve loudly—we cry and we sing, sing for the one who’s gone, and as we sing, the heart comes loose. Not her. She said “I’m sorry” line after line. I didn’t understand it then. I do now: she was afraid we’d be sad.

The supply plane came every three days, and that day’s had already left. The next one wouldn’t come until the fifth morning.

She was quiet a moment. Then: “Then… I’ll wait.” She looked up at me. “These next few days, could we carry on with the outings as planned? My mother gave her blessing to the ticket. If she knew I was holed up in my room, she’d call me wasteful.”

I said all right. And I thought: this girl’s mother must be a formidable woman.

A hunting eagle never flies in a straight line. It circles, each circle lower than the last, until it’s seen clearly—then it lands. When something enormous happens in a person’s heart, they circle too. Cheng Lan’s first circle was empty: that night she sat by the fire with a cup of tea until the small hours, and said nothing at all.

My father was in this trade too, an old tracker. He taught me two things. The first: when you keep company with the grieving, you don’t need to speak. Just stand beside them, the way a tree stands.

That night I brought her a blanket and a cup of ginger tea, and stood. The hyenas were still laughing somewhere far off. Deep in the night she suddenly spoke: “Kagiso, when the animals of the grassland die, what happens to them?”

I gave her the second thing my father taught me: “The grassland hides nothing.”

She didn’t understand. So I showed her: here, death lies out in the open, and so does life. Last month I took guests past the bones of an old elephant, lying right there in the grass, wind and sun working on it, nothing covering it. The grass growing up between its ribs was the greenest of that year. It doesn’t lie to you. Cities hide death behind doors; the grassland lets it sit in the sun. And as it sits in the sun, it becomes something else.

She hugged her knees and stared at the black waterhole for a long time.

The third afternoon was too hot—the animals were all resting—and we sat in the shade of the camp deck. Suddenly she began to talk about her mother.

Her mother was named Zhou Xiulan, and she’d run an alterations shop in a small city her whole life. One old sewing machine, one thimble, and those raised her. Her father died young; the days in that shop were stitched out one thread at a time. Her mother took everyone else’s measurements for a living, but never once measured her own dreams.

She dug something out of her pocket to show me. Steel, dented all over, polished bright.

“My mother’s thimble,” she said. “Look—doesn’t it look like stars?”

It did. It truly did. A little patch of starry sky that fit in the palm of your hand.

Her mother worked the sewing machine at night with the television on, animal documentaries above all. Watching the African savanna, she’d say: “That much grass would make ten thousand quilts.” And she’d ask: “A grassland that big, with no fences—don’t the cattle and sheep wander off?” Cheng Lan said, Mom, when I’ve saved enough, I’ll bring you to see the real thing. Her mother waved her off: “Waste of money. It’s plenty clear on television.”

Then came the diagnosis. The plane ticket was already bought. Her mother pushed her toward the door: “You can’t get a refund, can you? Then you go. See it for me, and come back and tell me about it.”

When Cheng Lan got this far, she smiled—a smile fainter than crying. “When she went, I was watching elephants. I’ve written so many farewells in my life, everyone else’s, one better than the last. When it was my own turn, I couldn’t manage a single whole sentence.”

“Who am I supposed to tell it to, now?”

I didn’t answer. My father’s teaching: at a time like this, be a tree.

The blue scarf on her head had been her mother’s too—worn for decades in the shop, keeping out the lint. She clenched the thimble in her fist until it left a white ring in her palm. She also taught me a saying of hers: grief is like a loose thread on a piece of cloth. If you yank at it, the whole cloth puckers; if you turn it to the back and lift gently, it comes out on its own. I’ve lived half my life on the grassland, and it was the first time anyone had taught me to think in terms of sewing.

That night she sat with me by the fire and found the Southern Cross. She said, good, I’ve found it—doesn’t matter if the stars are installed backwards; what would be terrible is if Mother couldn’t find her bearings. Only the next morning did I understand what she meant. That night after the phone call, standing in the open ground with her head tipped back, she was learning the way for her mother.

Now, back to that morning.

The fifth day, before it was properly light, the trackers radioed in: a cheetah on the termite mound to the east, a female with three cubs. I said, today I’m taking you to see the cheetah. Her hands paused as she tied her scarf, and she asked suddenly:

“Kagiso, do cheetahs grieve?”

I didn’t answer right away. I said, “Go wash your face first. We’ll see what there is to see.”

In the dry season the grass is yellow enough to dazzle, and when the wind passes, wave pushes against wave. We parked the vehicle thirty meters from the mound and killed the engine. The termite hill stood there like a small old castle. The mother cheetah lay on top of it, three cubs tumbling around her. One got too pleased with itself and rolled down the slope; the mother leaned down, took it gently by the scruff, and hauled it back. That gesture was exactly like every mother’s in the world.

And then, she saw Cheng Lan.

Across a hundred kinds of wind sound and the smell of grass, she raised her head and looked at her. You’ll ask me what sort of eyes those were, and I can’t say. Not fierce, not evasive. Just looking, quiet and steady, like someone who has watched many sunrises and seen off many sunsets. Cheng Lan later wrote in her book: like a mother looking at a child who has walked a very long way and finally reached the door.

The mother called her cubs, and what came from her throat wasn’t a roar but a string of birdlike sounds, like little bells.

Cheng Lan’s tears came all at once. She smiled and cried at the same time, without a sound. “She can’t roar, can she?” she asked me.

“She can’t,” I said. “Even in a hurry, that’s all the sound she makes.”

She nodded, watching for a long while. “The fastest one on earth,” she said, “calls the softest.”

Then, after a moment: “She’s raising three cubs alone.”

“Mm. Male cheetahs don’t keep house.”

“Like my mother.”

She said it without crying. That’s what it looks like when you’ve circled down to the innermost ring—when a person reaches that ring, they stop making a fuss, and go quiet.

The sun climbed. The mother rose. Down in the grass below the mound a herd of impala was hiding. She lowered her body low, one step, another step, like a bow being slowly drawn. And then the string released.

A few short seconds. The grass waves closed, and the grassland went quiet. No cry, no ceremony. Far off, vultures began to circle—and look, circling again; they were waiting too, more patiently than anyone.

The mother came back to the mound and called her cubs to eat. They jostled and scrambled; she moved aside and lay keeping watch. Cheng Lan watched all of it and did not turn away. When it was over, she opened her notebook and wrote one line. I can’t read Chinese—Naomi translated it for me later. Just one line:

“Here, death is not a wall. It is a door.”

Toward evening, rain came. September shouldn’t have rain; this year it came early. The wind arrived first, pressing the grass into waves, and the raindrops struck down, knocking up a smell of earth. Naomi was shouting to bring the cups in; Cheng Lan didn’t take shelter. She stood at the very edge of the eaves and held out her hands to catch it.

When the rain softened, she asked me to teach her one word of our language. I taught her: Pula. In our tongue it means rain, and it also means blessing. Whatever you ask for, whatever you hope for, you call it with this word.

She repeated it. Then she walked forward, out to the edge of the waterhole, her back to us, facing the dark grassland, and spoke, line after line, in a low voice. I caught only one sentence:

“Mom, the grass really has no end. Enough to sew ten thousand quilts…”

The rest, the wind took.

I didn’t follow. My father said some words are meant for the wind alone; if other people stand too near, the wind feels too shy to come.

The next morning the plane came. She untied her blue scarf, shook it out, held it up to the wind for a while, letting the wind pass through the cloth, and through it, for a good long while. Then she folded it carefully and wrapped it back around her head. “The wind has smelled it for her,” she said.

She hugged Naomi and formally pressed the box of red tea into her arms. Before climbing into the vehicle, she turned back to me. “Kagiso, you still haven’t answered the question I asked you the other morning.”

“Which one?”

“Whether cheetahs grieve.”

I thought for a moment, and gave her this:

“Yes. Everything alive on the grassland grieves. But it doesn’t shut its grief indoors. It loads its grief onto four legs and runs it out for the wind to see. And as it runs, the wind catches half, and the grass catches half.”

She nodded. “I’m taking that sentence with me.”

The plane taxied, lifted, shrank, and vanished. Naomi wiped her eyes and said she’d gotten sand in them. I said, where would sand come from in the dry season? This grassland has everything—except lies.

When the rains came, a package arrived at the camp. A book, its cover a sweep of golden grassland, the title four characters: The Grassland Hides Nothing. Naomi opened it to the flyleaf for us, and read it out line by line:

“To my mother, Zhou Xiulan. She never came to the grassland. The grassland remembers her.”

And on a new line:

“To Kagiso. The words were his.”

Inside was a page answering the question she herself had asked on the grassland. Naomi read it to me: Before leaving, I asked the guide whether cheetahs grieve. He said yes, but that the cheetah carries its grief on its back and runs, and as it runs, the wind catches it. Later I understood: my mother did not lose her way. It doesn’t matter that the stars are installed backwards. The wind knows her.

There was another chapter in the book, about a woman, titled “Naomi Who Will Fly.” Naomi photocopied that page, framed it, and hung it on the office wall. Now she really has gone to learn to fly; she’s already passed the theory exam.

The following year, I saw that mother cheetah again in the old place. Two of the earlier cubs had grown and gone off to make their own way in the world. Two new ones trailed beside her, still wobbly on their feet. That’s how the grassland is—one warp after another, like a length of cloth: when this one is woven, the next one begins. That’s something Cheng Lan taught me, thinking in terms of sewing.

What you all asked me around the fire last night—I haven’t forgotten.

Do cheetahs grieve?

Yes. Everything alive on the grassland grieves. The grassland hides nothing—not because it feels no pain, but because it doesn’t lie. It lays its pain out under the sun, and as it lies there, the pain dries. It becomes wind. It becomes grass. It becomes the first rain that falls the next year.

If someday you get one of those phone calls too, you needn’t rush to fly here. Just remember one thing: don’t hide it. Take the grief out, set it in the sun, and let it run one circle.

And as it runs, you’ll hear its voice again. Not a roar. Like a bird, like a little bell—softly.

This story is adapted from true events. All names are pseudonyms.