by David Gilman
As they sat with the other men, who kept a respectful distance from the shaman, they ate food the women had prepared. Strong-tasting eland meat, some root bulbs cooked deep in fire embers, and a mixture of some kind of cornmeal that Max did not recognize. It made no difference, because he was famished, and the food disappeared quickly. All the time he ate, the BaKoko’s words simmered like steam from a boiling pot, a steady low murmur of storytelling that !Koga could only translate in fits and starts. But the essence of the old man’s words was clear. The Bushmen still believed Max’s arrival was foretold, that his journey demanded courage and that he was brought to them so that the snake might strike, that he would fall, that the scorpion would sting and that the great darkness would come upon him. It was meant to be. He must understand that this world they lived in was a dream, that few could be shapeshifters, that as he understood more of what now lay within him, he could use the creature he desired to guide him through danger. If Max allowed the thoughts to take hold, he could experience the essence of any animal. This was a rare privilege and carried with it a responsibility to be used wisely—if it was not, the force that had now been set free within him would devour him.
All of this the old man explained until the sun skimmed the top branches of the trees and the shadows deepened. Finally the old man nodded to !Koga. The boy presented Max with the hunting bow he had made while Max lay unconscious, a sheath full of arrows and a small pot of deadly poison for the arrowheads.
They had made him a hunter. Honored by their gesture and humbled by their care for him, Max solemnly accepted the gift. Across the flat wilderness the sun retreated. The shadow raced like a tide, smothering everything before it. Max caught a shimmer of movement through the trees, at the edge of darkness, and thought he saw a jackal’s eyes watching him.
Max and !Koga ran: steady, loping strides through the night. Their lungs burned for the first hour and leg muscles tightened, but then they pushed through any debilitating thoughts of pain or discomfort and settled into a comfortable pace. Once their breathing eased, their efforts were almost silent as their feet padded rhythmically into the sand. The black-edged mountains, so far away they looked like a troubled wave rising from the sea bed, snared a dark blanket of storm clouds where frayed whips of lightning disturbed the night.
Max was uncertain where he was going. Instinct—and something else, something he couldn’t put his finger on—guided him. It was as if his mind had projected a picture of the journey. It wasn’t exactly clear, because it had no shape or form, but maybe it was a kind of mental radar, he explained to himself. Whatever it was, he trusted it. Throughout the night they kept up a steady pace, but it was Max who led the way now and !Koga who struggled to keep up. Dawn gave them renewed energy, the sunshine easing fatigue. Max gazed at the mountains; the plateau he saw was the same he had seen in his dream—or vision, he wasn’t sure just what to call it yet—and it played back to him like a recorded film. He had flown from the cliff face, had swooped beyond the ravines and riverbeds to the trees. For a moment he hesitated, the memory catching him unawares, the urge to fly again almost irresistible. Max’s relentless pace determined that the boys seldom spoke—both needed their energy and single-mindedness to go to the place of the dream. They traveled north and east for two days, leaving the mountains behind them, moving towards the place where Max’s father had witnessed the death of several Bushmen. The last place he was seen alive.
At night they ate the dried meat !Koga’s people had given them; Max refused to let !Koga hunt and light a fire. They were nearing danger and Max did not want to take any unnecessary chances. As he slept on the hard ground, no longer worried by the discomfort, his sleep was confused, his mind unable to separate scattered dreams from images of shapeshifting which appeared murky, as if seen through smoked glass. His body twisted and turned as his mind tried to find a place of stillness.
By the third day he knew he needed less sleep than usual. There was no denying the tiredness, but his rest took the form of a deep sleep for a couple of hours, and the remaining hours became a light-headed meditation. Conscious of being unconscious was how he described it to himself. But there was one image which came to him of which he could make no sense and which frightened him. It was the maw of a giant creature, its worn-down teeth covered in matted slime; it was deaf and blind and breathed a vomitous steam. In one of his visions Max stood on the edge of the creature’s jaws, saw the monster’s bile gush from its stomach to its throat and heard its wheezing gasp for breath as the mist rose from its depths. He knew without doubt that it was the gaping jaws of hell—a bottomless pit that sucked bodies down to be devoured. And the picture he could not erase from his mind was of falling into the churning cauldron.
When the Bushmen died at the place !Koga’s father called “where the earth bleeds,” the hunting party had dug their loved ones’ graves, smeared the dead with animal fat, covered them with red powder, then laid them in a curled sleeping position, like unborn children. The shallow graves faced the direction of the rising sun and their hunting bows and spears were placed beside them.
The two boys stood in the clearing; wind swirled dust cones, momentarily obscuring the burial site; then, as the wind changed direction, the haze settled and the desecrated graves could be seen. The bodies were gone and only their scattered weapons remained. Some were broken, others seemingly tossed aside. This was not the work of wild animals digging up the corpses.
!Koga wandered to the clearing’s fringe. Who, in such a desolate place, would dig up and take away the bodies of his people? Max looked in each grave; there were no clues as to who was responsible, so he gathered the weapons, put them in a neat pile and waited for !Koga. While Max squatted on his haunches in the shade of a withered tree, !Koga went further away from the burial site, his eyes searching the ground. Finally he went down on one knee, touched his hand to the dirt and walked back to Max.
“There were two vehicles.” !Koga nodded to one side of the clearing. “Those who came first went from here towards the rain mountains.”
Max followed him to the other side of the clearing. He could not see any signs as to who might have been in the clearing before them. There were no animal tracks, no scratches from hoofs or claws, but !Koga had spotted the faintest of indentations.
“The others,” he said, “they went towards the salt pan.” That meant searing unwelcome heat, but a vehicle would leave tracks.
Max walked across the same ground. It took some time, but then he too saw the marks. Flat stones had been moved slightly, they no longer nestled comfortably in the hardened earth. He felt fairly pleased with himself for having at least spotted that much. He walked a few hundred meters away from the clearing, where damp lines etched the soil. These whiskers of moisture seeped up from below ground, lacing the area, and, because of the red dust, they took on the appearance of blood trails.
Max searched his memory. There was something his father had said in his field notes when he read them in Angelo Farentino’s office. Evidence of borehole machinery, his father had written, which was not supposed to be in whatever area his father had been when he wrote about them. There was no evidence of excavations or tunnel digging here. But the Bushmen had taken Max’s father’s notes from him, and then Tom Gordon left. Where? Which direction? The natural conclusion was that he knew of a watercourse, an aquifer that seeped deep into this area; then it seemed likely he would have headed that way. But !Koga had said that there were two directions the vehicles had taken.
Confusion tangled his thoughts. He was finally getting closer to his father, so taking the wrong direction would be unbearable. It suddenly seemed faintly ridiculous to him. A western boy, without a compass, using a wristwatch for a bearing, caked in dried mud, with a primitive bow across his shoulder, standing in the middle of nowhere, without sign or sound of another living creature except a Bushman boy who squatted in the shade, waiting for him to make a decision. His father was missing, bodies had been dug up, he was lost, had sur
vived attack, lived through deadly poison, seen images he could not describe, yet forty thousand feet above his head an airliner made its ragged white incision across the sky. Four hundred people were sitting up there while he stood in this dust bowl with a useless cell phone in the pocket of his tattered shorts. He waved at the disappearing silver bullet. “Hello! Have a nice holiday! Don’t forget to send a card!”
He laughed at his own foolishness but quickly sobered when he saw !Koga looking at him with uncertainty.
“I’m sorry. It’s just too crazy for words. You understand?”
The boy shook his head.
“No, of course you don’t,” Max said. He felt slightly ashamed of his outburst and didn’t know whether he should make some effort at reverence for the desecrated graves, but he couldn’t think what form that might take.
Clearing his thoughts, Max suddenly knew what to do. He turned and headed for the dark mountains scarring the horizon.
“We go this way?” !Koga asked.
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do,” Max answered. Something was pulling him, he did not know what, but it was that same deep instinct that had brought him this far. And there was something else that comforted him. !Koga was more than a guide and companion. He and Max had straddled cultural barriers, and this friendship was forged out of dangers faced and hardships endured together. Other than finding his father, there was nothing more Max wanted to do when this was all over than to help the Bushmen. He would make sure the world heard about their plight.
!Koga had told him how they were prohibited from the land they had always known and hunted; vast tracts of national parks protected animals that the Bushmen needed for food and clothing, and cattle farmers were taking most of the land that remained. !Koga’s people were being squeezed into ever smaller pockets. It just wasn’t right. Their way of life was almost extinct. He caught the thought and mentally chastised himself—he was making himself sound too important. There was no prophecy in those cave paintings, nothing that suggested he was going to help the Bushmen. That was a fantasy created by the Bushmen from his father’s drawings.
He was simply determined to succeed but, perhaps because of those cave drawings, the Bushmen had nursed him and given him some kind of power. The same memory now flashed before his eyes. The eagle in his mind had soared and found the hidden dove. He knew he was going the right way.
Max was totally unprepared for the sudden onslaught when it came.
They had traveled all that day, rested through the night and set off again before dawn. !Koga kept checking the ground, and every few hours he told Max that the vehicle tracks definitely went towards the mountains. They reached the furthermost edge of the rising ground while it was still light. A dry riverbed gave them easy access to the foothills. Max could see the sparse forest of trees in the distance but !Koga kept warning him about the cloud that suffocated the mountaintop. It was now so black, it growled like a bear and the first few stinging raindrops raked them. A bitterly cold storm suddenly roared down the mountainside, as if angered by their presence. The wind hit them first, buffeting them so hard they almost fell, then a line of water, not deep enough even to cover their ankles, trickled towards them across the breadth of the riverbed.
“Let’s make for those rocks, in case this is a flash flood,” Max yelled, because now the wind howled venomously. Splashing through the shallow water, Max saw exactly where they should head for—the boulder was a slab of rock that stuck out like a massive diving board above the river. Within a couple of minutes they were clambering onto its broad back. Max looked behind him; where he had stood moments earlier, the water was now knee deep. Before he clambered any higher it was waist deep, and it surged around the bend, hitting the far bank, where boulders pushed it back directly towards him and !Koga. Max could see immediately what was going to happen. The water was already higher than a man, and the surge at the bend gave it a turbulent power that formed a wall of water that would strike their side of the bank, engulf the flat-bedded boulder and sweep them off.
He yelled at !Koga to run for it, but he was downwind and could not hear him. !Koga was already trying to stand on the boulder, his knees bent, a hand touching the rock face for support. The water roared and, combined with the increasing velocity of the wind, it became a maelstrom of swirling rain, competing with the wind and the river as to which would destroy them first.
Max surged up the rock face, desperation fueling his legs. He reached !Koga in time to see what was happening in the gully that channeled the water down from the mountain, above the rock they stood on. The ever-increasing volume of water churned mud and boulders in a helter-skelter ride. The bottleneck at the foot of the mountain, where it swirled around the corner to the opposite bank, increased its own resistance. As the water buffeted the bank below them, the water from that gully would take the line of least resistance. It would smash mercilessly across where they stood.
Max grabbed !Koga’s arm and pulled him, but the boy resisted. “We have to get higher!” Max yelled.
This was the first time Max had seen !Koga scared. The boy’s eyes were wide and his breath came in short, gulping sounds. He was frozen with fear, looking down at the water. They would be at least waist deep when they jumped for safety, trying to reach dry land less than ten meters away. But if they didn’t jump now, that distance would treble in less than a minute. !Koga shook his head. “No water!”
“Come on!” Max was stronger than his friend and he yanked him firmly towards the edge—he could see a muddy, froth-flecked wave rising up, ready to strike.
“I can’t swim!” !Koga shouted.
Max did not hesitate. “You won’t have to!” he shouted and dragged !Koga with him. They were in midair for a few seconds, then splashed into what, a minute earlier, had been the dry riverbank but which was now chest-deep water. Max kept a tight grip on !Koga’s wrist, surprised by his own strength. As they splashed into the confused undercurrent, it snatched them this way and that, but Max pushed his knees against it, ignored the bruising boulders that banged his shins, and hauled !Koga with him. As they clawed their way up onto dry ground, the wave broke behind them across the flat rock and drenched them in a curtain of water. They were wet, but now they were safe. The surging water would dissipate its own energy, the further away it traveled.
Max did not stop pulling !Koga after him until they were beyond the heaving water. Breathless, they stood and watched the water as it rolled by, now a steady stream. The rain stopped, the grumbling clouds quietened and, other than the gurgle of the water, it was quiet.
“The Mountain God,” !Koga said quietly.
Max nodded. There was no point arguing the case. !Koga had his beliefs and, after what seemed to be an intrusion on their part that caused the storm, Max wasn’t so sure !Koga was wrong.
“Well, he’s quiet now. Maybe he doesn’t like visitors. If someone climbed over my back garden fence and trampled on the flower bed, I’d turn the hose on them as well.” Max smiled but !Koga still seemed cautious, glancing nervously towards the darkened summit.
“It was a flash flood. Look.” He pointed to the riverbed. The water was lower now; somewhere downstream the ground had swallowed the river. Mud and debris scarred its path. “And we’re not going up there, so don’t worry.” He put an arm on !Koga’s shoulder. “Let sleeping gods lie.”
Once they had skirted the mountain slopes, Max saw the place he instinctively knew to be their destination: a flattened area between the high grass and the tree line. The savannah grass was high enough to hide a man, but a narrow strip had been pummeled by generations of elephants as they shuffled on their endless journeys, foraging for food and water. Max scanned the area. Animals probably moved from this flash-flood area to the wetlands further north. Somewhere down there was the captured dove he had seen in his mind’s eye; he didn’t like to call it a vision, it was still something he could not explain to himself. What he did know for certain was that
this was where those images in his head had brought him.
An eagle’s screech snatched him from his reverie. He looked up at the circling bird that had swooped from the mountain’s sheer face. Gazing up at the eagle, he felt a chill squirm from his chest to his stomach—it seemed the eagle was calling to him, like one eagle to another. Or perhaps it was a warning? The bird was lifted away by an updraft and a sudden flurry of wind swirled dust, forcing them to turn their faces, hands covering their eyes against the stinging sand. As the wind dropped, Max found himself facing away from the trampled grass. His peripheral vision gave him another angle, which allowed him to see a shape in the trees. It was a slightly different shade of green from the others, and a smaller shadow skirted the fringe of scrubland.
For a moment, Max thought he saw a jackal. What was it he failed to remember about one of the constant clues in this whole thing: that wraithlike figure of the jackal? His father’s Egyptian stories came back to him—as well as being the God of the Dead, the jackal was the guide between the two worlds. It would show the way. That made sense. Even in the cave drawings, it was the jackal’s figure that had led him to the images of himself and his father on the wall.
Eagle, dust swirls and a specter—all directed him to that one place.
The flattened grass felt like straw beneath their feet. With the high grass to one side and the low trees to the other, Max sensed a mixture of dread and expectation. The place was comforting, like a secret den he’d had when he was younger—a place where you could hide and not be seen; one of those special places no one knows about—but it also felt like a baited trap. The further they went along that elephant track, the higher the grass, the more dense the shrubs and trees.
Max stopped. !Koga had moved ahead and went down on one knee. Max looked around him. A small flock of chattering birds scattered across the treetops. Was that a warning, or were they simply irritated by Max and !Koga’s presence? Max joined !Koga and stared into the undergrowth—there was something in there—it brooded in the shadows. Something fluttered, rasping, like leaves on a beech tree.