White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,103

Those people who’ve been dead and come back talk nonstop about love, something large and interconnected and overarching. He could sense it in the tiny dried bit of grass moving back and forth in the dust in front of his nose. He had once loved the sound of wind. He had loved the wide feet of the women in the market and their dark-eyed children hiding behind them.

When he came to again, a voice inside him said, You’re fucked, mate. The sun blazed. The day was young, still tender, but already beyond hot. His flesh was iron in the forge. He squinted at his water bottle on the ground several yards away. No sense trying to reach it; the beasts had flattened it. He figured his vehicle was somewhere between a quarter and a half kilometer away. He tried moving his body over the ground, lying on his back, bending the good leg and pushing with one foot until the leg straightened. Three pushes, and he drifted out of consciousness. When he opened his eyes, he’d hardly moved. If he worked all day, he might make ten feet.

When there was nothing more to be done, when they sent his mother home from the hospital for the last time, she’d said to him, “Never mind. We all die sometime, Nummy.” Damn it, Mum, he’d wanted to say, where’s the fight in you? Now in blinding sun, he saw black wings. His mother had loved crows, dusky wings whistling after her crusts of bread and bacon rind.

The sun caused spectral rays to shine around objects, as though each blade of grass, shrub, post had become a miniature sun animated with its own source of radiance. He closed his eyes and opened them. It took the rays a moment to appear again. He felt nauseated. His breathing was fast, shallow, like a young bird.

Keep your head, he thought, shutting his eyes. Once an old Bushman had told him of a time he’d wandered too far after game and misjudged the distance back to camp. It was the dry season. He sat on the ground, dying of thirst. But before lying down for the last time, he threw dirt into the air. The dust flying upward said, Help me. Back where his people were, they saw the plume of dust and came for him.

With his right hand, he reached out for a handful of dirt and cast it upward. And again.

38

Xixae and her niece, Nxuka, were out early, searching for mongongos. The young woman was pregnant with her first child. Occasionally, she touched her belly as she walked. The morning was fresh, and mist rose from the dried grasses as the sun climbed away from the horizon. As they walked, Nxuka told a story. The old woman’s laughter floated through the air. They were not in a hurry. Their bags were empty, but they had all day.

They stopped to dig a Herero cucumber, taking part and leaving a portion to bear fruit for the next season. They walked on, and Xixae led them to a place where she remembered a few berries of n/ang might still be hanging, but the bush was empty. The sky was deep blue and the air still. They saw three duiker in the distance. Across the sky was a thin blue cloud, high up, like someone had run a stick across the sky. It was the sort of odd, unnatural cloud that the great flashing birds leave when they fly high. Xixae wondered how these birds had come into the world. A person who often smoked dagga told her that men flew inside the glittering birds, but she thought the man’s brain had grown confused. She too liked dagga every now and then, but lately, her chest was filled with coughing and she did not feel like smoking.

The old woman took note of a small puff of dust in the direction of the fence, thinking it strange that there should be this disturbance without wind. She imagined it might have been caused by a bush squirrel, or a guinea fowl. She watched, and there it was again. Perhaps it was an animal or bird that could be taken easily. Nxuka had not eaten meat in many days, and the baby would be crying for it. She pointed, but Nxuka had not seen what she’d seen.

As they walked toward the fence, there was no further sign of anything. In the dust at their feet were the tracks of many buffalo.