to stay awake and watch them. And I did. I moved so close to the flame that it nearly singed my brow. I went to the river, now cold enough to shake bone, and threw water on my face. I stared through the dark, followed the white spots of Kava’s skin. I curled my fingers into a fist so hard that my nails dug into the palm. Whatever those two would do, I was going to see and I was going to shout, or hiss, or curse. So when the Leopard stirred me awake, I jumped, shocked that I had fallen asleep. Kava threw water on the fire, just as I rose.
“We go,” the Leopard said.
“Why?”
“We go,” he said, and turned away from me.
He changed to a cat. Kava wrapped the baby in cloth and slung him on the Leopard’s back. He did not wait. I rubbed my eyes and opened them again. The little man and woman were back on Kava’s shoulder.
“One owl talk to me,” the little woman said. “A day behind in the bush. Them say you read wind? No so? He say you have a nose.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Somebody, they following us,” she said.
“Who?”
“Asani, he saying you have a nose.”
“Who?”
“Asani.”
“No, who is following us?”
“They moving by night, not by day,” Kava said.
“He said I have a nose?”
“He saying you were a tracker.”
Kava was already walking away when he said, We go. Farther off into the darkness, Leopard jumped from tree to tree with a baby strapped on his back. Kava called me over.
“We need to move,” he said.
All around was dark, night blue, green, and gray; even the sky had few stars. But then the bush began to make sense. Trees were hands pushing out of the earth and spreading crooked fingers. The curling snake was a path. The fluttering night wings belonged to owls, not devils.
“Follow the Leopard,” Kava said.
“I don’t know where he went,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
He rubbed his right hand across my nose. The Leopard came to life right in my face. I could see him and his trail, ripe as his skin through the bush. I pointed.
Leopard had gone right, then down fifty paces, crossed the stream by jumping from one tree to the next, then went south. Stopped to piss at four trees to confuse whoever was following us. I knew I had the nose, as Kava said, but I never knew that it could follow. Even as the Leopard got far he was still right under my nose. And Kava, and his smells and the little woman, and the rose she rubbed in her folds, and the man, and the nectar he drank, and the bugs he ate, too much of the bitter when he needed the sweet, and the waterskins, and the water inside that still smelled of buffalo, and the stream. And more, and more than that, and even more, enough to drive me to some kind of madness.
“Breathe everything out,” Kava said.
“Breathe everything out.
“Breathe everything out.”
I exhaled long and slow.
“Now breathe in the Leopard.”
He touched my chest and rubbed around the heart. I wished I could see his eyes in the dark.
“Breathe in the Leopard.”
And then I saw him again with my nose. I knew where he was going. And whoever spooked the Leopard was beginning to spook me. I pointed right.
“We go this way,” I said.
We ran all night. Beyond the stream and the branches bent over it, we ran through trees with grand roots, roots that rose above the ground and snaked the lands in tangles and curls. Right before dawn I mistook one for a sleeping python. Trees taller than fifty men standing on shoulders, and as soon as the sky changed, the leaves turned into birds that flew away. We came up the grasslands, with shrubs and weeds that reached above our knees, but no trees. We came upon salt lands in a low valley with white dirt that blinded us with light and crunched under our feet, with no animals as far as one could see, which meant those following us could see us. I said nothing. The grasslands stretched from last of the night to first of the day, where everything was gray. That Leopard scent in front like a line, or a road. Twice we came close to see him, running on all fours with the baby tied to his back. Once, three Leopards ran alongside him, and left us alone. We passed elephants and lions and scared a few