his father, mother, two brothers, and a younger sister. He’d survived because he was some distance from the village, in a cattle camp. His camp-mates, numbering about a dozen boys and young men, had also lost their entire families. Being the oldest, and with his military experience, Matthew became their leader. They trekked to another village, seeking refuge, but it too had been annihilated. Picking up several more orphaned boys, they wandered for over a month, scavenging on the carcasses of dead livestock, of warthogs killed by lions. Sometimes they lived on nothing more than roots and leaves. Along the way they were joined by still more youths, until they numbered nearly three hundred.
Eventually they arrived at an SPLA camp, where they were given food and shelter and some military training, except, of course, for Matthew. They remained there for about two months, when a group of hawaga—Matthew recalled that they arrived in a plane bearing a Red Cross—arrived and made a fuss. They accused the SPLA of recruiting child soldiers. The hawaga made such a big fuss that the SPLA was forced to expel the boys from the camp.
Journeying mostly at night to avoid government troops and slavers and hostile tribes like the Nuer, they crossed swamps and great marshes where some died of disease, crossed rivers where some drowned or were devoured by crocodiles, savannahs where the weak and the sick who fell behind were taken by lions, deserts where some perished from thirst. They were bombed by government planes. They continued on, and still more died of malaria or thirst or hunger, still more were taken by crocs and lions, and once Matthew and his two spearmen deliberately fell behind and killed a lioness that was stalking the column.
“This is all that is left of us,” Matthew said. “We are going to Kenya. The SPLA told us there is a camp in Kenya, at a place called Kakuma, where we will be fed and sleep in houses. I was to Kenya one time a long time ago. It is where I was given this white leg. Tell me, mister, how far is it to Kenya?”
“I’d reckon two hundred kilometers,” Dare said, understanding the look in Matthew’s eyes: it was the ruthlessness not of cruelty but of survival; and he also understood that Matthew would kill him if he had to. “Kakuma’s got to be another hundred from the border.”
“Okay,” Matthew said, as though three hundred kilometers were a day hike. “Tell me, mister, what are you doing here?”
“Waiting for a plane. I’m waiting for an aeroplane to come from Kenya and pick me up.”
“When does this aeroplane come?”
“It’s never gonna come.”
Matthew contemplated this statement for a minute. “Then you should come with us.”
The offer astonished Dare. “I’d never make it. My ribs are broken, and I’m old. I’d only slow you down. Y’all are gonna have a hard enough time makin’ it as it is.”
“But we are going to take what is left of your food and water, all of it, and your shoes also,” Matthew said, without apology or malice but as a declaration of fact.
Dare said nothing. This kid had tramped a thousand miles on an artificial leg, he’d led a band of orphaned boys on a march that would have turned U.S. Marines into a mob of blubbering babies, he’d killed a lion, and for what? To get to an overcrowded refugee camp, where they would have a grass roof over their heads and maybe two bowls of porridge a day. And then what? An indefinite stay with no homes or families to return to if and when they got out. To go through so much for so little required either complete stupidity or a powerful belief that the future would somehow be better. That any African, even a kid, could have faith in the future baffled him. His own future, without Mary in it, was no future at all. The human capacity for hope when no hope was visible, the human will to live, to blindly, dumbly go on, were riddles that he would never solve—and didn’t want to solve. Yet there was one last thing he could do.
“I could stop you from takin’ the rest of my food and water,” he said, surprising Matthew when he pulled the Beretta from his back pocket and pointed it at his belly. “Before you could get that AK off your shoulder or one of those boys could chuck his spear, I’d have a bullet in