White Dog Fell from the Sky

37



Near the Kuke veterinary fence on the boundary of Ngamiland and the Ghanzi District, an old woman from the /Xai/Xai community was out alone digging hu’uru tubers from the ground. It was early morning, just after sunrise. Over her shoulder was slung a rough bag, made from the hide of a duiker. The bag held two small tubers and a hollow shell of an ostrich egg. In her left hand was a digging stick. Her feet were bare, her belly wrinkled with age. As she dug, her small breasts swung in rhythm with her stick. Her skin was deep bronze, her hair a rusty black, shot through with gray. If she’d been with her family at night sitting around a fire, she would have smiled easily. Now, her face was without expression except for a taut intensity around the mouth.

It was February, and no rain had fallen. Perhaps there would be none this year. Food would soon become scarce, and water more hidden. Next to a shrub she began to dig with her stick until she was crouched next to a hole as deep as the length of her arm. At the end of a reed, she wrapped grass and placed it upright in the hole. She pushed the sand back into the hole and pressed it down around the edges of the standing reed. She sat patiently. When she sucked the reed, a vacuum was created, and the water was forced up into her mouth. She swallowed a small amount and dribbled the rest into the ostrich egg shell. When there was no more water coming up the reed, she plugged the hole of the ostrich egg with grass and placed it back in her traveling sack. The wind was coming up. She moved to another shrub and repeated the process, although this time she took no water for herself.

Nearby, but out of sight and earshot, Ian worked. The day had not yet heated up. Wisps of mist rose from the earth. A dove called from a tree with its mournful, repetitive song. He’d walked about half a kilometer from his vehicle and was making his way back, cutting cable as he went. It went faster than it had at the beginning, but he was also seeing fewer live animals. As he wielded the huge wire cutter in the heat, he thought that rarely in his life had he been able to answer what exactly he was doing or why. In spite of what Alice had said, it often felt to him that his life’s purpose was unsteady. You could easily spend your whole life scattering your energies across the landscape. “Keep your eye on the ball,” his father used to say, not meaning cricket or rugby. But which ball was the question.

Snap, went another cable.

The rock paintings waited. He was aware of falling into what one of his anthropology professors warned against—mistaking social action for research. Still, unless you had a heart of gunmetal, how could you come to know a people without also coming to know their needs and desperations? A small group of buffalo rummaged in the brush behind him. One rubbed on an anthill, trying to rid itself of parasites. An oxpecker bird sat on its back. There were no young ones among them.

He moved along the fence meditatively, snapping wire as he went. He thought of Alice, her anger, her body, her blue gray eyes like the sea on an overcast day. Was it so terrible to spend one night with a former wife? Well, technically still a wife. She was right—he was sloppy, untidy. He couldn’t really blame her for flipping out. But if she’d known his heart, she would have seen Morning Star and Lynx clear enough.

He snapped another cable, which twisted back and nearly struck him in the face.

He hadn’t told Alice the whole story of their night in Francistown. Gwyneth had said she still loved him, that her life would never be right again. He’d replied that she’d forgotten all their troubles. She’d sat in bed, not speaking, shaking her head, her short hair sticking up in spikes. She looked like a patient in Bedlam. He hadn’t meant to say it: “You chopped off all your beautiful hair.”

“I was done with it,” she said. Once upon a time she’d said the same about him. He wished he’d never met her, that he’d had the sense to run. But she’d intrigued him with her wintry aspect, her dark hair falling over her white face like a shelf. She frightened him too, and in that fright lay some dark, sexual energy that he couldn’t put his arms around. He knew now what a sitting duck he’d been. He knew nothing about depression, had never felt that hopeless, subbasement mildew of spirit. She reminded him of a child whose knees are drawn up to her chin, who thinks there will be no end to it. How do you walk away from that kind of despair without feeling like a complete bastard?

Snap, went another cable, and another.

In the rhythm of destruction, he felt a confirmation of purpose. But thirst was catching up with him. He had only a small amount of water left in his plastic bottle, and he was a long way from his vehicle.

Xixae dug again for water and placed her reed upright. This time, only a few drops came to her lips.

Long ago, when she was a young woman, she had taken her eyes off her young daughter and walked behind her shelter to talk with a friend. Her little girl had taken a burning stick from the fire and thrown it onto the dry bedding grass. There had been no rain. The shelter exploded in flames. By the time they were able to get to her, her skin was flayed, her hair smelled like a veldt fire. A powerful healer had done his best, but after two days, the ancestors came for her.

Her small band of people buried her daughter near the campsite and moved to another site. Xixae thought that she too would die. But they didn’t want her yet in the realm of Kauha. Her womb went as dry as the earth around her. Her husband would no longer lie with her. He told her that she had become an old woman overnight. Time passed. She could laugh again now, but the laughter was wrapped around tears.

A puff of dust spread out over the dry savannah and then a distant rumble, softer and longer lived than thunder, floated into the air. Ian thought little of it, until he saw them at a distance, running, closing the distance between him and them.

The buffalo he’d seen rummaging behind him were the advance guard of a large herd. Had they felt in some part of their beast brains the uncoiling of the wire? They were coming this way in a fast-kindled, heedless frenzy. Closer now, he made out their small, cranky eyes, low ears, and shelf of horn laid flat across their foreheads, parted down the middle, and swept up like a handlebar mustache.

The front beasts were close now. Impossible to outrun them along the fence. The herd stretched too wide. The big ones, he knew, weighed close to a ton. He had no gun with him. Nothing to scare them but his wildly waving arms and puny man voice.

Dumb as hell, they seemed to be following a large male that ran in zigzag fashion, as though dodging bullets. F*ck OFF! he heard his tiny voice yell. BUGGER OFF! And then he knew he’d die. He’d watched buffalo charge lions, elephants even. They’d run him over without even seeing him. The dust was in his nostrils now. All thought ceased. He was aware of the sky, the socks riding down his ankles into his shoes, the heavy tool in his hand. Fifteen meters from him, the wrinkled forehead of the lead buffalo bulged. It was coming straight for him. At the last moment, Ian lunged sideways as the brute swerved in the other direction. It rammed his left side with its shoulder, not intent on injuring him, just oblivious to everything but its own urgency. Ian was thrown backward toward the fence. He scrambled from the ground toward a fence post, and hung on.

The pain running through him was dark and hot. He was engulfed in dust. His mind said, smoke. He thought he heard the grinding gears of large trucks laboring up hills. He tried to let the wooden post protect him, but it was thin and the beasts struck him clumsily as they went past on both sides. With each blow, he was knocked off his feet and tried to scramble away but there was no protection. Their breath was grassy and overripe, their hides raked with nicks and scars. He had not hated them before, but he did now, their witless thundering, their low, ragged ears and hard skulls. They would have trampled their own young. They were that blind, their necessity that great.

It was a dumb way to die. He protected his head with his arms and curled up tight. The ground under him shook. He crawled toward the post and tried to pull himself partway up, but too much was broken. He clung to it with his right arm, like a child around the leg of its mother. At last, the noise around him dimmed. In time, the herd thinned out. A few stragglers followed at a distance, but finally, they too were gone, blundering across the savannah.

The fence cutting tool lay near the opening, broken by their trampling.

He slipped all the way to the ground and lay still. His breathing was rough, his tongue and brain could not form words. His legs were big silent rooms, without feeling. His mind was a shrug, his body a tiny village without water or hope.

He saw everything clearly now. It was a shame he’d only learned now. You were going to save the world. He wanted to laugh but he hurt too much. The world does not wish to be saved. It carries us a short distance and drops us when it’s done with us.

The sun went down. Deep purple swept over blue, followed by purple charcoal, then black. The night grew cold. The Southern Cross hung in the sky, and near it Alpha Centauri and Omega Centauri, containing more than a million stars, the coal sack, a dark nebula in the Milky Way. He lost consciousness; his dreams were black and muddled. Off and on, he woke to searing pain and went under again.

Day broke with a new ferocity, as though the sun had burst raging from the dark night. He opened one crusty eye. He had a memory of wet nostrils sniffing him in the night. Was it a dream? It occurred to him that he was alive. He felt neither disappointment nor relief, only a dull feeling that he ought to move. He tested one leg. It had no feeling. His mind bumped toward Alice. He called to her. His throat made a rasping sound, sand against sand.

He realized he hadn’t been able to imagine their future. Numbly, he thought he’d been too slow, too stupid. Love, that’s what they say matters—those with near misses whose bodies stop and start back up again, people who’ve seen that white light, who’ve turned around and found their way back to Earth. Without love, there’s nothing. 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 f*cked, 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.