Wheeling the car onto the dusty grounds of Kehancha Clinic with my latest patient on board I took in a distressing sight. A little girl not yet two, crying pitifully as the mother on whose lap she sat, labored in vain to console her.
These and others made up a gathering line of ill and injured awaiting their turn to be seen. The group, most strangers to one another, sat on a shallow wooden bench butted against the clinic’s outside wall. Bare spots in the building’s whitewashed veneer marked areas where chunks of plaster had at some point released their hold.
My attention kept returning to the small child, her eyes clamped as if glued shut, her face ballooned out, a tormented ball of puff.
I never learned the child’s fate, just the tale of what brought her to the clinic – a swarm of bees descending without warning from upper branches of a tree. Her older siblings, seconds earlier happily playing beneath the tree’s limbs, had fled in a panic, leaving the little one the bee’s lone target.
Killer Bees. A term suited to theatre marquees promoting the latest horror film. Some years after the distressing scene at the village clinic, a ferocious swarm nearly cost a friend of mine his life.
“Ray, what’s going on with the dogs. . . sounds like they’ve gone crazy.” The missionary couple moved to a window to see their two beloved German Shepherds taken in a wild frenzy, crying, barking. Without pausing, Ray rushed outside. Margaret watched as he raced across the big open farm yard. Then looked on in horror as she witnessed the stinging bees blanket her husband as well.
As Ray flailed at the dive-bombing attackers with one hand he worked frantically to free the dogs of their long running-leashes. “Come Princess!”
But the beautiful animal lay motionless, heavy against Ray’s hard tugging, already a casualty to the angry swarm.
The battle had only begun.
©2018 Jerry Lout