White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,70
hoped was remorse, but perhaps that was too much to ask for.
Ralph suddenly took off into the undergrowth. “Ralph!” she called.
“Ralph! Come here, damn it.”
She heard him crashing around, breaking twigs. For a small animal, he made a huge racket. And then the sound of his high-pitched terror. She beat her way down a narrow footpath and found a pack of feral dogs surrounding him. “Get away!” she yelled running toward the pack, waving her arms. She picked up a couple of stones and hurled them. One of them found its mark on the flank of a dog that looked more like a hyena. It slunk off, but it turned and began creeping back.
Ralph whimpered and snarled. Alice hurled several more stones, picked up a stick and brandished it. The pack didn’t seem to realize how puny she was, and they turned tail and ran.
Ralph held up a quivering paw. She picked him up and felt his heart beating in the tiny cave of his ribs. He shook all over and buried his nose in her neck. She felt something like love for him then, her disdain swept away by the force of his desire to just be happy and safe. She walked back up the road, imagining Ralph’s fleas climbing into her hair, roistering about under her shirt, and delivered him back to Estelle, the owner of the hotel.
She headed back out to the veranda and descended the steps to the river where she’d intended to go in the first place. She imagined Ian standing on the veranda looking out, but when she turned to look, it was empty. And then something odd stirred in her, unbidden, a feeling like what a river might experience if it were a sentient being: the willingness to erase what’s gone before, to find a channel through.
They were to leave at seven, but Shakespeare and Sam hadn’t turned up, not by seven, not by seven thirty.
They were down to two vehicles. One Land Rover would stay in Maun to get its radiator repaired, and they’d cram into the other two. They were all there waiting, except Alice.
“I’ll be down by the river,” Ian told Will. He went inside and got a cup of coffee, really wanting a shot of whiskey, and went out the door to the porch and stood near where he’d seen her last night. She wasn’t there, of course. The coffee was bad. Probably warmed over from yesterday.
A pair of fish eagles called back and forth to each other: weeeee-ah, shrill, repetitive. He felt a sense of doom, and of his own shoddiness. He had another sip of coffee and watched a turquoise kingfisher. He should have left Maun last night. He thought about what he’d do when he reached Nata. Find or borrow some heavy-duty bolt cutters. Outfit himself for two or three weeks away, spend a night in Nata, and be off the next day. He’d drive to the Kuke fence, see if he could cut through that blasted wire, and head for Sepopa and the Tsodilo Hills a few days later. He wanted to get a paper out, which meant finishing the mapping in the hills he’d contracted to do through the grant. The plan gave him little pleasure this morning, and he tossed the remains of the coffee off the porch.
It occurred to him that double-decker buses were roaring down roads in London at this moment, people crowded on streets, greengrocers arranging apples, lions in repose at Trafalgar Square, the Tube with its arteries and veins underneath it all. It might as well be the moon. He suddenly longed for it: life whizzing by, none of it anything to do with him. Too many people knew him here, knew his business. Where do you go to get away? The Gaborone mall? The Tip Top Bazaar, the South Ring Butchery? A movie theater with its films run through the gristmill of South Africa’s enlightened censors? He felt constricted, wanted to shout and pound his chest like a mountain gorilla.
His heart sped even before he saw her come around the corner. “Morning,” he croaked. “There’s a malachite kingfisher out there.”
“I don’t care if it’s a flying moose,” she said, turning on her heel.
“Please don’t go. I’m sorry about last night.”
Her eyes flashed. “You might have been describing a cow heading for the Meat Commission. I thought you were a different sort of man. If I’d known that’s how you felt, I wouldn’t have wasted a minute with you.”