The Devil's breath

than he ever remembered. The Bushmen watched him and he gazed back, seeking out every face, looking into their eyes. He was saying a silent thank-you to them all, and they seemed to understand, nodding at first and then breaking into smiles and laughter. The shaman, BaKoko, gestured him towards the tree’s shade.

“BaKoko stopped the poison,”!Koga told him as they walked across the compound. “He gave you medicine, only he can do this. It was he who brought the blood from inside you.”

“I think he may have given me some kind of hallucinogenic weed; they can lock you up at home for taking that stuff,” said Max.

!Koga showed no sign of understanding, so Max smiled and put his arm around his friend. No need for that to be explained.

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 survived 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