David Gilman - The Devil's breath

“There were two vehicles.”!Koga nodded to one side of the clearing. “Those who came first went from here towards the rain mountains.”

Max followed him to the other side of the clearing. He could not see any signs as to who might have been in the clearing before them. There were no animal tracks, no scratches from hoofs or claws, but!Koga had spotted the faintest of indentations.

“The others,” he said, “they went towards the salt pan.” That meant searing unwelcome heat, but a vehicle would leave tracks.

Max walked across the same ground. It took some time, but then he too saw the marks. Flat stones had been moved slightly, they no longer nestled comfortably in the hardened earth. He felt fairly pleased with himself for having at least spotted that much. He walked a few hundred meters away from the clearing, where damp lines etched the soil. These whiskers of moisture seeped up from below ground, lacing the area, and, because of the red dust, they took on the appearance of blood trails.

Max searched his memory. There was something his father had said in his field notes when he read them in Angelo Farentino’s office. Evidence of borehole machinery, his father had written, which was not supposed to be in whatever area his father had been when he wrote about them. There was no evidence of excavations or tunnel digging here. But the Bushmen had taken Max’s father’s notes from him, and then Tom Gordon left. Where? Which direction? The natural conclusion was that he knew of a watercourse, an aquifer that seeped deep into this area; then it seemed likely he would have headed that way. But!Koga had said that there were two directions the vehicles had taken.

Confusion tangled his thoughts. He was finally getting closer to his father, so taking the wrong direction would be unbearable. It suddenly seemed faintly ridiculous to him. A western boy, without a compass, using a wristwatch for a bearing, caked in dried mud, with a primitive bow across his shoulder, standing in the middle of nowhere, without sign or sound of another living creature except a Bushman boy who squatted in the shade, waiting for him to make a decision. His father was missing, bodies had been dug up, he was lost, had survived attack, lived through deadly poison, seen images he could not describe, yet forty thousand feet above his head an airliner made its ragged white incision across the sky. Four hundred people were sitting up there while he stood in this dust bowl with a useless cell phone in the pocket of his tattered shorts. He waved at the disappearing silver bullet. “Hello! Have a nice holiday! Don’t forget to send a card!”

He laughed at his own foolishness but quickly sobered when he saw!Koga looking at him with uncertainty.

“I’m sorry. It’s just too crazy for words. You understand?”

The boy shook his head.

“No, of course you don’t,” Max said. He felt slightly ashamed of his outburst and didn’t know whether he should make some effort at reverence for the desecrated graves, but he couldn’t think what form that might take.

Clearing his thoughts, Max suddenly knew what to do. He turned and headed for the dark mountains scarring the horizon.

“We go this way?”!Koga asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do,” Max answered. Something was pulling him, he did not know what, but it was that same deep instinct that had brought him this far. And there was something else that comforted him.!Koga was more than a guide and companion. He and Max had straddled cultural barriers, and this friendship was forged out of dangers faced and hardships endured together. Other than finding his father, there was nothing more Max wanted to do when this was all over than to help the Bushmen. He would make sure the world heard about their plight.

!Koga had told him how they were prohibited from the land they had always known and hunted; vast tracts of national parks protected animals that the Bushmen needed for food and clothing, and cattle farmers were taking most of the land that remained.!Koga’s people were being squeezed into ever smaller pockets. It just wasn’t right. Their way of life was almost extinct. He caught the thought and mentally chastised himself-he was making himself sound too important. There was no prophecy in those cave paintings, nothing that suggested he was going to help the Bushmen. That was a fantasy created by the Bushmen from his father’s drawings.

He was simply determined to succeed but, perhaps because of those cave drawings, the Bushmen had nursed him and given him some kind of power. The same memory now flashed before his eyes. The eagle in his mind had soared and found the hidden dove. He knew he was going the right way.

Max was totally unprepared for the sudden onslaught when it came.

They had traveled all that day, rested through the night and set off again before dawn.!Koga kept checking the ground, and every few hours he told Max that the vehicle tracks definitely went towards the mountains. They reached the furthermost edge of the rising ground while it was still light. A dry riverbed gave them easy access to the foothills. Max could see the sparse forest of trees in the distance but!Koga kept warning him about the cloud that suffocated the mountaintop. It was now so black, it growled like a bear and the first few stinging raindrops raked them. A bitterly cold storm suddenly roared down the mountainside, as if angered by their presence. The wind hit them first, buffeting them so hard they almost fell, then a line of water, not deep enough even to cover their ankles, trickled towards them across the breadth of the riverbed.

“Let’s make for those rocks, in case this is a flash flood,” Max yelled, because now the wind howled venomously. Splashing through the shallow water, Max saw exactly where they should head for-the boulder was a slab of rock that stuck out like a massive diving board above the river. Within a couple of minutes they were clambering onto its broad back. Max looked behind him; where he had stood moments earlier, the water was now knee deep. Before he clambered any higher it was waist deep, and it surged around the bend, hitting the far bank, where boulders pushed it back directly towards him and!Koga. Max could see immediately what was going to happen. The water was already higher than a man, and the surge at the bend gave it a turbulent power that formed a wall of water that would strike their side of the bank, engulf the flat-bedded boulder and sweep them off.

He yelled at!Koga to run for it, but he was downwind and could not hear him.!Koga was already trying to stand on the boulder, his knees bent, a hand touching the rock face for support. The water roared and, combined with the increasing velocity of the wind, it became a maelstrom of swirling rain, competing with the wind and the river as to which would destroy them first.

Max surged up the rock face, desperation fueling his legs. He reached!Koga in time to see what was happening in the gully that channeled the water down from the mountain, above the rock they stood on. The ever-increasing volume of water churned mud and boulders in a helter-skelter ride. The bottleneck at the foot of the mountain, where it swirled around the corner to the opposite bank, increased its own resistance. As the water buffeted the bank below them, the water from that gully would take the line of least resistance. It would smash mercilessly across where they stood.

Max grabbed!Koga’s arm and pulled him, but the boy resisted. “We have to get higher!” Max yelled.

This was the first time Max had seen!Koga scared. The boy’s eyes were wide and his breath came in short, gulping sounds. He was frozen with fear, looking down at the water. They would be at least waist deep when they jumped for safety, trying to reach dry land less than ten meters away. But if they didn’t jump now, that distance would treble in less than a minute.!Koga shook his head. “No water!”