David Gilman - The Devil's breath

Max’s senses had been sharpened by enduring the wilderness. He now noticed small things, like a change in the breeze, where shadows offered some concealment and where there might be a sipping hole for water. Animal smells would carry on the faintest movement of air and he had learned to distinguish the different trails of antelope, hyena, mongoose and wild dogs. At every opportunity!Koga had shown him the tracks and scratch marks the animals made, though Max knew that, no matter how hard he scoured the ground, he was never going to be an expert like!Koga, who could recognize different species of birds from imprints in the sand. The Bushmen hunters could identify everything, from an ant’s track upwards. And it was no textbook learning.!Koga knew things because he had seen them, touched them, tasted and smelled them, just as Max had learned to climb mountains and kayak the white water. As he had come to understand the lethal danger and dizzying fear of a rockfall and the smashing, intolerant water that held him under when it flipped his kayak, so had!Koga spent every day of his young life in touch with this wilderness.

Now, like!Koga, Max faced each waking hour in survival mode. No one else in the world existed except for the two of them. Thoughts of his father were like heat-haze mirages, an illusion. They would become reality only when Max saw and held his father. “Live for today” took on a completely new meaning when life was so precariously balanced every hour.

“!Koga!”

Max heard the stampede start out of nowhere. Panic. Beasts in turmoil. Then he smelled the dusky odor of the animals and was momentarily uncertain where they were coming from because the deceptive light obscured their direction.!Koga knew instantly. The small herd of buffalo, maybe twenty or thirty of them, was confused, first charging in one direction and seconds later churning the dirt in another.

“Lions!”!Koga yelled and pulled Max away, running on a parallel course to the charging mass. “They split herd!”

It was like a kind of madness. The grunting, heaving buffalo, themselves deadly and now terrified, and the boys running in the choking dust. Buffalo crossed their path, almost trampling them. They dodged and weaved,!Koga’s voice being drowned by the thunder of hoofs. Max lost sight of!Koga, then saw him again, over on the right now, skirting the heaving mass. Max tried to reach him; the other boy had turned, still running, looking back for him. Max raised a hand but doubted whether!Koga could see it. “I’m here, keep going! Keep going!” His voice impotent, his throat dry.

A buffalo was suddenly alongside and barged against Max, its tough hide rubbing his arm for only a fraction of a second. It was going so fast that it was past him before he could evade the shove. He twisted, falling into the sand, but rolled instinctively, praying that he wasn’t in the path of another beast. Disorientated, he searched desperately in the darkness. The moonlight now sat on top of the mini dust storm, an eerie half-light that drew a line between earth and sky. No more than fifteen meters away, a lioness seemed to surf the silver wave as she rode the haunches of her victim and then sank below the surface again as she pulled it down. The herd came together again, moving on in another direction. The sounds of the kill faded and the stench of offal that had momentarily filled Max’s nostrils was behind him somewhere in the darkness, and the yelping hyenas took their place in the hierarchy.

Max ran as best he could between the low-hanging branches and then he saw!Koga. The boy sat, nursing the back of an injured leg, looking as though he had been spilled out of a cement mixer.

“You all right?” Max asked when he got to him.

“I fell.”

“Me too. Is your leg broken?”

!Koga shook his head. “A buffalo stood on me.”

“That was bloody clumsy of you,” Max said as he hauled!Koga to his feet. The boy carefully tested his weight. Nothing was broken, but it was very painful-several hundred kilograms of buffalo using you as a doormat, even if it pressed you into deep sand, was going to hurt for a while. What caused!Koga more distress was his broken bow. His pouch, the quiver, all had been smashed. Only the spear remained and!Koga used it to help balance himself.

Max put his friend’s arm over his own shoulder and supported him as he hobbled along. His eyes scanned around them, watching for any shadow that might change into something more tangibly dangerous than his imagination. “I hope your family haven’t gone on their hols or anything, I could do with a bacon sarnie, or some beans on toast, even a Big Mac wouldn’t be a bad idea….”

“Why are you talking stupid things?”!Koga smiled.

“Because I’m fed up of being scared to death and eating lizards.”

!Koga said nothing. They kept going, putting the lions’ bone-crunching sounds far behind them.

Max had survived another day. One day at a time. Each footstep. Each thought. Closer to finding his father and his secret. He was confident he would win through. If all was fair in the world, he would have a decent crack at pulling it off. But nature did not understand fairness any more than!Koga comprehended a Big Mac.

No matter how skilled or lucky Max had become in his survival, nature always struck when least expected. It would not be a crushing buffalo or the steel-like claws of a lion that would plunge Max into death.

Nature was sneakier than that.

As daylight came!Koga seemed to be moving more easily, and although their pace had slowed, they made good progress, leaving the mountains shimmering in a heat haze.

“There is a water hole-small, enough for us. I know where. We must go there. We must drink.”

They had filled the small canteen at Baboon Hill, as Max now thought of it, but they had already drunk most of the water.!Koga was right, they must find water wherever they could.

A couple of dozen meerkats stood watching their progress from a safe distance, uncertain about the two upright apes that scuffed through the dust. Deciding to play it safe, the meerkat whose job it was to warn of danger squeaked his alarm and they all turned tail, showed their backsides to the intruders, and ran for safety to their sand burrows. Max had been mooned before, but never by so many at once. He couldn’t help feeling it was one for the record books and a story the boys at Dartmoor High would enjoy. It was hard to imagine life back home right now. He could not allow his mind to drift either, wondering if Sayid was trying to contact him, or whether the triathlon team had been chosen, or whether Mr. Peterson was still at the school or had done a runner, once Max had evaded him and his people. He had to stay focused on where he was. Lack of concentration could have serious consequences.

After a few hours!Koga muttered something and gestured towards the horizon. Max searched the distance but whatever!Koga had seen eluded him. “I don’t see anything,!Koga.”

“Behind those trees, by the boulders. You see?”

Max scrunched up his eyes once more against the glare. Once, when his father had taken him on a trek through a German forest into the hills, he had taught him to find the way forward by looking at something in the near distance, then to find another further on, and further on still, then the eye identified distant objects more easily. Max let his eyes settle on a gully about three hundred meters away, then a clump of thorn trees at five hundred where the ground rose, and finally settled on a ravine marked by an untidy rock formation.

Vultures.

They hunched on the boulders, barely moving. Waiting.

Another two hundred meters beyond that, he saw a movement. Two long, pointed, symmetrical horns were swaying towards him, an animal’s distinctive black-and-white face beneath them. “Gemsbok,”!Koga said.