David Gilman - The Devil's breath

Max built the fire: kindling, small twigs, then heavier wood. It was so dry it flared the moment he put the flame to it from a cheap plastic lighter. His dad had taught him the benefit of carrying a small emergency pack when heading out into the wilds: waterproof matches, a fishing line, hooks, a beta light-bits and pieces that could mean the difference between life and death. But Max had left Dartmoor High in a hurry and had not expected events to turn so quickly. The fluid-filled plastic lighter was a substitute bought at Windhoek Airport, along with a toothbrush and a tube of sunblock. He would need to protect himself in the severe heat, and if the English cricket team smeared sunblock across their faces when they played, then he felt no qualms about the warpaint effect. But brushing his teeth might have to wait.

They surrounded the fire with rocks. They would need the warmth these generated during the night, but Max was careful to use only heavy, solid stones. Softer rocks such as shale could explode when exposed to heat.

The evening meal was not a great success. They picked at the food, despite their hunger. Maybe the tins were old or perhaps it was the lack of salt but, whatever the reason, it tasted and smelled like dog food. Max decided they needed to cheer themselves up. A hot drink would combat the cold night air and ease the stress of the past few hours-it would also help wash down whatever it was they had just eaten. Using some of the precious water, he made instant coffee, squeezing in half a tube of condensed milk that had miraculously separated itself from the missing box of provisions. He let!Koga drink first and watched his smile of satisfaction as he sipped the hot, sweet liquid.!Koga passed the mug back.

“Tomorrow we hunt. We must eat real food,” he said.

Max nodded. His survival depended on!Koga now. He hated feeling helpless but knew he had to stand back and let the Bushman boy lead them to safety. He watched as!Koga carefully laid out his handful of arrows.

From a small wooden tube!Koga spilled out cocoons he must have collected some time before Max had met him. After carefully selecting two larvae and returning the others for safekeeping, he picked the grubs from their cocoons, rolled them between his fingers until they cracked, then smeared the liquid just below the arrow’s metal point. Each arrowhead had a small, torpedo-shaped joint made of bone that connected to a reed collar which held the tip to the shaft. When the Bushmen shot an animal, the impact allowed the joint to separate arrowhead from shaft, leaving the poisoned point in the animal and the reusable shaft on the ground. Then they tracked the animal until the poison weakened it sufficiently for them to kill it.

Max held one of the arrows close to his face. He felt a fascination with the small metal point. It made him want to run his finger across the tip, testing its sharpness.!Koga snatched his wrist and, with what Max took to be a gentle admonition, took the shaft back. The boy clucked helplessly at Max’s ignorance.

Don’t touch!Koga’s arrowheads, whatever you do . Kallie’s warning came back to Max. The poison is lethal, it’ll kill you.

The Bushmen, experts at using venom on the arrows, chose certain plants to extract their poison, as well as scorpion and snake venom, but they preferred the larvae of the chrysomelid beetle, something that looked like a ladybird and whose larvae could be found buried beneath dead trees. There is no known antidote to this poison. Nosy, adventurous schoolboys from England would be dead in minutes if they so much as scratched a finger on an arrowhead.

Tomorrow, they would hunt and begin their most serious test of survival. They would enter a hostile world on foot, with no weapons other than the knife Max carried and!Koga’s lightweight spear, bow and arrows. Max gazed into the fire, the flames shapeshifting, mesmerizing him as they snared his thoughts and gave life to the shadows-a macabre dance of imagined creatures.

Tomorrow seemed frighteningly close.

Far to the northwest of the Valley of Bones, beyond the hundreds of kilometers of red sand dunes that lay, scalloplike, towards the coastline, Atlantic fog sucked in by the intense temperature inland shut down any flying Kallie’s father had planned for the next few hours.

Ferdie van Reenen was a big man, with a wild beard and a battered face from being a boxer in his youth. He had survived war, flood and famine on his farm, but it would be his daughter Kallie who would break his heart one day, when she grew older and left home. But until that happened she could also raise his blood pressure. He was due to fly his clients further north, to the Kunene River on the Angolan border. His twin-engined Beechcraft Baron could do the trip comfortably with its fifteen-hundred-kilometer range, and he was all set, now that Kallie had delivered the additional supplies he needed. She had also delivered the news about Max and!Koga.

Van Reenen secured the luggage net in the back of the plane. His voice was as rough as old desert boots, and distinctive: a mixture between a Dutch and a German accent.

“That was a stupid thing to do, my girl. Helping that boy will bring trouble down on our heads, you see if it doesn’t!”

Kallie ticked off the final item on the supply manifest; she always kept accurate records for the farm’s accounts. Legend had it that when her father served in the South African Air Force, he could fly a Hercules C130 transport plane through the eye of a needle at three hundred knots, upside down and with a full cargo; but money and income taxes presented a bigger challenge. And so, at times, did his daughter.

“Pa, don’t start.”

“Start? You fly to Windhoek, you send him off with my old Land Rover, my favorite Land Rover …”

“Pa, it’s the only Land Rover.”

“Exactly. I cherish that thing. That’s not the point. He’s just a boy!”

“He’s fifteen,” she interrupted.

“A boy!” he insisted.

“When you were fifteen, you spent three months in the bush hunting, you rounded up five hundred cattle for your father …”

“It was a thousand head of cattle. Never mind me! He’s an English schoolboy who has probably never even seen the sun, and he’ll fry out here. And now he’s gone off on a scatterbrained expedition to try and find his father, who is nowhere to be seen or heard of!” Ferdie van Reenen angrily wrenched the securing rope tight. Kallie stayed quiet; there was little point in going head to head with her dad. “Do you have any idea what this would mean if anything happened to him? We helped him. We sent him out there-probably to die!” her father spluttered.

“I sent him out there. Me. I made the decision.”

“Wrong one to make!”

“He’s got diesel, water, food-he can reach any of the game lodges by radio if he gets lost or if the Land Rover has any problems,” she replied.

“The Land Rover is in perfect running order. That’s not the point! We will be the ones dragged into court. Accessory to stupidity will be the charge, as well as accessory to careless abandonment, or accessory to manslaughter, or accessory to something! Father missing. Son missing. My daughter’s brain missing!”

Kallie took a deep breath. Her father’s life was stressful enough, trying to keep two planes, a farm and a struggling safari business going. The Beechcraft had been bought with a big loan from the bank, and any mishaps or drop in business could push her father into bankruptcy. “Pa …” She touched his arm. “You taught me to fly when I was twelve; I’ve been able to look after myself for a while now…. Believe me, this boy would have gone off on his own if I hadn’t helped him. And I think he’s capable of handling things. He’s a tough kid. The man from London called, asking if I could help. I picked him up, I did the best I could for him. He thinks his father is in trouble.!Koga thinks he’s been sent by the Great God to be with his people….” She stopped; she could hear herself making matters worse.