Oscar and his catapult
By Rosey Ssembatya
If you want Oscar’s face to light up, talk about birds. At first I thought it was just the talk of their colourful feathers that excited him. I was wrong. Then maybe how they chirped in song early in the morning. He always said, ‘: “not that”, but he never said what. It was only when I saw how he protected his catapult that it came to my mind that Oscar just liked catapults.
His love for catapults must have started during the Term two holidays. During that holiday, Oscar and his brother, Kaye helped out on their father’s coffee plantation. Because the planation had a lot of shade, there were various nests and birds flew around the plantation all the time. It was a chorus of beautiful bird voices all the time.
“Perhaps we should do something about these birds,” said Kaye.
“We should!” answered Oscar
It was difficult to separate Oscar from his catapult. Unlike others that had been handed down by his brother, Kaye, this one, he had made by himself. His own two hands. Oscar had looked for the two long sticks that together made a Y, cut the black rubber into strings and knit them to the Y to make a strong aim. When Oscar put a small stone in the aim, it went so high up that he smiled in glee.
Oscar could not stop aiming. He shot at leaves, shot at tree stumps, and even aimed at the clouds. He was so immersed in his aiming game. One day he aimed at a red-beaked bird and only got a cluster of raw mangoes when the bird flew away to its family.
This would not have been a problem since him and Kaye ate the raw mangoes with a sprinkle of salt. But these were Mr. Katayi’s mangoes.
Mr. Katayi was a ruthless old man. Although he had a bent back, everyone said that he could stand up in the night and run as fast as a bullet. Everyone knew that he could tell even when someone was about to steal the mangoes, pawpaw, sugarcane and jackfruit on his land. When Oscar saw the cluster of mangoes from Mr. Katayi’s tree fall to the ground, his heart started racing.
