The Devil's breath

A small pride of lions, three females, two cubs and a male, had their sanctuary on a small outcrop of rock beneath acacia trees that clawed their way out of the ground. The lions were three kilometers downwind, and though the air barely moved, they had caught the scent of the distressed animal, and another smell-human beings. Only once before had they killed a man but the taste had stayed with them-as sweet as warthog and much easier to kill. They were unafraid of the man-scent that stirred them from their slumber. This was their territory and there were intruders. In addition to the wounded animal there was now the bonus of human flesh. If there was a kill to be had and they failed to hurry, hyenas and vultures would get the best pickings. Leaving one female to care for the cubs and the male to saunter down at his leisure, the two other females began a slow, loping run. The pride would eat that night.

* * *

The slow-acting poison finally weakened the young springbok and it lay, helpless, on the ground. Max, grunting with effort, arrived in time to see!Koga slit its throat. The poor beast gave a single spasm and died.!Koga offered his knife to Max.

“Can you skin?” It seemed less of a question and more of a challenge and Max felt it keenly. The Bushman boy was going to keep them alive by his hunting skills. What exactly could Max contribute? He nodded, ignoring the homemade knife!Koga offered, and pulled out his own fifteen-centimeter bush knife.

!Koga expertly made a small incision into the springbok’s belly; then, using his thumb, he eased the skin aside, being careful not to contaminate the meat by piercing the stomach.!Koga’s deft movements allowed him to ease out the animal’s gut, which slithered and slopped onto the sand. He reached into the cavity and cut away the heart and liver; this was his by right: the hunter who made the kill chose the best pieces for himself. It was not a selfish act, but one of practicality. The hunter needed endurance for stalking and the strength to run for many kilometers after wounded game; heart, liver and tongue were rich in fat and protein.

Max was struggling to do what was expected of him. The groundsman at Dartmoor High used to shoot rabbits, and Max had seen him skin those. It seemed a fairly straightforward process, but Max did not know where the entry point for his knife should be on an animal this size.!Koga took his hand and good-naturedly guided it, showing him where to place the point of the blade. But then the Bushman stiffened.

“What’s wrong?” Max asked.

!Koga was looking back along the valley, his eyes squinting in the glare, his head turned a little as he listened. A sudden flurry of air, a small dust devil no taller than the boys themselves, scurried and died.!Koga waited and Max, deferring to his bushcraft, stayed silent. He couldn’t see or hear anything that might be a cause for alarm.!Koga whispered, “We must go quickly now.”

Fear sharpened Max’s senses. He scanned the valley again, but there was nothing to indicate impending danger. By the time he looked back!Koga had cut a strip of skin from the springbok’s leg and fashioned a pocket to carry the heart and liver. Max obediently took the meat thrust into his hands as!Koga tied it fast with strips of sinew, as a butcher would tie a joint of pork. Creating a sling, he pulled it over his shoulder like a bag. Then he grabbed Max’s arm. “You run hard?”

“What?”

“There.” He pointed to rising ground, beleaguered with boulders fallen from the higher peaks. “We run, we cannot stop. You run that far? That hard?”

Max gauged the distance; that had to be at least a kilometer. The sandy ground would make it heavy going, and there would be an almighty scramble to get up among those boulders, to shield them from whatever it was that had spooked!Koga. “Piece of cake,” he lied. The boy did not understand. “OK. Yes,” Max told him.

“Do not make noise. No shouting. You fall down, you do not cry out. You must be quiet. Yes? Understand?”

“I understand,” Max replied. He did not know why!Koga was giving him such precise instructions, but his instincts told him not to question them.

!Koga grabbed one of the springbok’s horns. Max grabbed the remaining back leg and hoped!Koga wasn’t planning to drag it all the way. They carried it for a couple of hundred meters, straining in the heat and stumbling with their unwieldy burden, leaving a clear blood trail. When they reached a clearing,!Koga nodded. “Here. Drop it.” Without waiting for Max to ask any questions, he turned and ran. Max was going to struggle to keep up.!Koga darted and jumped like a gazelle, running flat out across the broken floor of the valley towards the boulders. The ground, shattered from millennia of the earth’s pressures and contortions, now had gaping cracks in it, anything from a few centimeters to more than a meter wide. Max’s leg muscles ached-it was impossible to find any rhythm in this crazy race against time. A sprint, a jump, then a weaving run, suddenly another small chasm to get across. He did not have!Koga’s agility, but he had a grim determination to reach their objective. Just don’t trip and tumble into one of those crevices, he kept telling himself-that would be a one-way ticket to hell. He jumped. Sweat stung his eyes and the heat sapped his energy, but he stayed focused on the receding figure of the Bushman boy. Bloody hell! He was leaving him well and truly behind. He urged himself to put more effort into it, but his mind was a bigger challenge than the hard going. It badgered him, taunting his efforts. You’re too tired for this. You’ll cripple yourself if you fall, then what good will you be to anyone? Just stop for a breather and a drink. For a moment.

* * *

The lions had picked up the pace; blood scent from the kill filled their nostrils, but the dead springbok was not their primary target. It was the shuffling, ungainly gait of the humans that attracted them. And one of the humans had stopped, flapping his hat to cool his face. To them he was an animal in distress, weakened by heat and exhaustion. Vulnerable. The perfect target. The lionesses were in attack position; one of them moved to block any chance of escape while the other hurtled forward in a timeless display of killing efficiency. The human had his back to her; her gaze never faltered. She charged and leaped. Her huge claws raked his back, her jaws clamped on his neck, crunching through his skull and spinal column.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

7

The twin-engined Beechcraft Baron lifted off smoothly from the runway. The fog had cleared and Ferdie van Reenen was a happy man again. The sun was shining, he was flying his plane and there were paying guests aboard. He waggled the wings in farewell to Kallie, who waved from the airstrip. The only unsettled feeling he had as the plane banked and one of the passengers gulped aloud in anxiety was that his daughter would disobey him. “Listen, you get even a whiff of trouble, or you see any dodgy characters lurking around, you get hold of Mike Kapuo. He’s a good bloke and he won’t stand for any nonsense on his patch.” She had agreed, of course. Kapuo was a good cop, but his “patch” was, in truth, hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Kapuo had shut down a lot of wild-game smuggling and he policed the Walvis Bay docklands with a tough, personally trained crew. His police force had to deal with rough customers from all over the world but, as good a cop as he was, Mike Kapuo was four hundred kilometers south of where Kallie stood, watching her father fly into the blue.

She had promised her father she would fly straight home, but that malfunctioning fuel line was still causing trouble, so he had reversed his decision and insisted that she stay until the mechanics had given her old Cessna a clean bill of health. Kallie wasn’t too frustrated. At least that bought her a few hours to try and contact Max by radio again and to speak to this Sayid in England. Maybe Mike Kapuo was worth a call as well. Any major accident would eventually be reported to the police, though of course bodies tended to be eaten by animals or birds if left undiscovered for very long. Why wasn’t Max answering the radio?

Inside the small building that served as a stopover for some of the flying safaris, Kallie ordered a cold drink and pulled the old-fashioned plastic phone towards her. The single landline ran all the way up from the coast, so this would give her a chance to phone England. Tobias, the barman, always seemed to be smiling, a smile as cheerful as the luridly colored T-shirts he wore. He subscribed to the African philosophy of ubuntu: that there was enough for everyone, that sharing was the civilized way to live. But free phone calls to England did not qualify under that category. He gently pulled the phone back across the bar counter.

“Tobias, come on, man. One phone call.”