Cut Loose

The bridge was made of mopane logs and wire, and it had held vehicles heavier than theirs for years. But the termites had been at the pilings since the last dry season, hollowing them the way termites do — from inside, invisibly, so that the wood kept its shape while losing everything that made it wood. The Land Cruiser was halfway across when the left piling gave. The sound was not a crack but a sigh, the exhalation of something that had been holding its breath for months, and then the deck tilted and the vehicle slid sideways into the channel.

Ruan went through the windscreen. He did not remember choosing to move — his arms were over his face and then he was on the bank, breathing sand, and the vehicle was on its side in the channel with its wheels still turning. The channel was dry. That was the first thing he registered. The second was Pieter’s voice.

“My leg. Ruan. My leg.”

Pieter was in the cab, pinned from the thigh down by the dashboard, which had buckled inward when the Cruiser struck the channel bed. His face was very white and his hands were flat against the roof — which was now a wall — and he was breathing in short, controlled puffs, the way a man breathes when he is managing pain and has not yet considered whether the pain can be managed.

Ruan went back in through the broken windscreen. He got his hands under the dashboard and pulled. The metal did not move. He braced his feet against the seat frame and pulled harder, and something in his lower back lit up like a struck match, but the metal did not move. He tried to lever it with the jack handle from the cargo area but the angle was wrong — the channel walls were too close, the Cruiser too far on its side. The jack handle slipped twice and the second time it struck Pieter’s shin and Pieter made a sound that was not a scream but something below a scream, a frequency that Ruan could feel in his own teeth.

“The water,” Pieter said.

Ruan looked at the channel floor. It was dry sand, pale as bone. But there was a darkness at the edges, a line of wet advancing from the north, and he understood. The flood pulse. It came down from Angola every year, travelling the Okavango system like a slow tide, filling the dry channels and pans over days and weeks. It was February. The pulse was due. The darkness on the sand was the leading edge.

He tried the dashboard again. He tried using a rock from the channel bank as a fulcrum. He tried cutting through the dashboard with the multi-tool from his belt, sawing at the steel where it had crimped around Pieter’s thigh, but the blade was meant for rope and wire, not for the pressed steel of a Toyota dashboard, and within three minutes the blade was blunt and his palms were bleeding.

The water reached them while he was still cutting. It came in around his boots, warm, the colour of strong tea. It smelled of earth and rot and somewhere upstream of papyrus and hippopotamus dung. It rose with no hurry. It had all the time in the Caprivi.

“Go,” Pieter said.

“I’m not done.”

“You’re done. The water’s at my waist. Go.”

Ruan looked at the water. It was at his knees. It was rising perhaps two centimetres a minute, which meant he had — his mind did the arithmetic against his will — twenty minutes before it reached Pieter’s chest. Thirty before it covered Pieter’s face. And there was nothing in the channel or the vehicle or on his person that could move the dashboard in thirty minutes.

That was the fact of it. There were no other facts.

He put his hand on Pieter’s shoulder. Pieter’s eyes were open and focused and dry. He was not crying. He was doing the same arithmetic.

“Tell Lise it was quick,” Pieter said.

Ruan climbed out of the channel. He stood on the bank and the sun hit him like a flat hand and the bush around him was green and gold and full of birds and he could hear Pieter breathing in the channel behind him and the water moving and he walked. He walked north.

He had no food. He had no water that he trusted. He had the clothes he was wearing, the multi-tool with its ruined blade, a cigarette lighter with perhaps twenty strikes left in it, and a shard of the windscreen, curved and sharp, that he had picked up without thinking as he climbed the bank.

The Caprivi Strip is a narrow tongue of Namibian territory that extends eastward between Botswana and Angola, and the land there is neither desert nor jungle but something between — dry woodland and savanna that floods seasonally, so that the same place can be sand in October and waist-deep water in March. The trees are mopane and sicklebush and Kalahari apple-leaf, and between them the grass grows to the height of a man’s chest, and in the grass there are things that will kill you if you stop paying attention.

Ruan had been guiding in this country for eleven years. He knew the trees. He knew the grasses. He knew where to find water in a dry pan — you looked for the dark, heavy-leafed trees whose roots reached the water table, and you dug at their base. He knew that the flood pulse carried El Tor cholera in its silt, that the sweet brown water spreading across the flats was a medium for vibrio as much as for fish, and that drinking it unboiled was a bet you’d lose within the week. He knew which roots you could chew for moisture when there was no water at all, and which would blister your mouth and swell your tongue shut.

Because if he could read the land this well — if he could find water where a tourist would find dust, if he could build a fire from nothing, if he could navigate by the angle of termite mounds and the lean of wind-shaped trees — then he could have done more at the channel. He could have built a dam from brush and mud to slow the water. He could have dug around the vehicle, undermined the sand, shifted the angle. He could have tried for another hour, two hours, working in water up to his chest, up to his neck.

He could have tried until it killed him.

That was the other option, and he had not taken it.

The first fire was the hardest thing. He had the lighter, but the grass was damp from the flood margins and the wood was green, and the lighter’s flame was small and apologetic, a town flame, out of its depth. He shaved bark with the windscreen shard — thin, papery curls of mopane bark that caught and held the flame for two seconds, three, before going out. He tried again. He found a dead branch of leadwood, dry as chalk, and shaved it finer, and built a nest of bark shavings and leadwood dust and held the lighter to it and blew, gently, the way you blow on an ember that is your only ember, and the nest caught. He fed it. Strips of bark. Twigs. A handful of dry elephant dung, which burned slow and steady and smelled like a village fire, like home, like something he did not deserve to be comforted by.

He sat by the fire as the dark came down, and the dark in the Caprivi comes fast — not a dimming but a closing, like a door. The stars opened above him in their millions. A pearl-spotted owlet called from a sicklebush, the descending notes that always sounded to him like a question being asked with decreasing hope of an answer. Something large moved through the grass to the east — buffalo, probably, or eland — and he fed the fire and watched the sparks climb into the dark and did not sleep for a long time.

He found water on the second morning. Not flood water — a seep, rising through white sand at the base of a rain tree, collecting in a shallow depression thick with aquatic plants. The plants were dense and dark-leaved, growing in a mat so thick that fallen branches lay on top of it without sinking, and the body of a young duiker was caught in the weave, half-submerged, already beginning to dissolve into the dark water beneath. The vegetation held everything — organic matter, sediment, the small dead — and incorporated it slowly, drawing it down into the muck. The water that filtered through this living sieve was clear. He could see it seeping from the edges of the mat, beading on the sand like sweat.

He drank. He cupped his hands and drank and the water was cool and tasted of iron and earth and he drank until his stomach cramped and then he sat back on his heels and breathed and the sun was on his face and the relief in his body was so complete, so animal, that for a moment he was nothing but the act of having drunk. There was no channel and no Pieter and no arithmetic. There was only the water in his throat and the sun on his closed eyelids and the sound of a fiscal shrike somewhere in the canopy, singing its broken, hiccupping song.

The moment lasted three breaths. Then Pieter was back — not a thought but a pressure on his ribs, like a hand laid flat.

Pieter would never drink again. Pieter’s body was in the channel, under three feet of flood water, the dashboard still pinning his thigh, his face tilted back against the roof of the cab. The fish would find him first. Then the crabs. The vegetation would catch him, hold him, draw him into the substrate the way it had drawn the duiker. The Caprivi would sequester him.

Ruan stood and wiped his mouth and walked south-east, toward where the villages should be.

On the third day he began to see Pieter.

Not clearly. Not as a man. A shape at the wrong distance — too close when he turned his head, too far when he looked directly. It appeared at the edge of the mopane woodland where the trees thinned into grassland, and it appeared at the rim of a clay pan where the heat haze thickened the air into something nearly solid, and it appeared behind him, just out of sight, a presence he could feel the way you feel someone standing in a doorway.

He had been in the bush long enough to know what dehydration did to the brain — the brain being, as a doctor in Maun had once told him, a meat organ, and meat does not perform well when it dries out. The hallucination was neurological. It was not Pieter.

But the shape kept pace with him. It walked when he walked and stopped when he stopped and when he sat in the shade of a marula tree at midday, unable to move in the worst of the heat, the shape sat too, at a distance he could not quite judge, and he found himself talking to it.

“I tried,” he said. “You saw. I tried the jack handle. I tried the multi-tool. I tried the rock.”

The shape said nothing. The shape was the absence of an answer.

“You told me to go.”

The shape was also the absence of absolution. Pieter had told him to go, yes. But Pieter had been managing a situation, the way Pieter managed situations — calmly, practically, with the priorities ordered. Pieter’s priority had been to not make Ruan watch him drown. Pieter’s generosity in that moment was a thing Ruan could not touch without flinching.

He walked on. The shape followed or preceded or was beside him; he could not establish a consistent spatial relationship. The ground was hard clay, cracked into plates, and each step sent a jolt through his shins into his hips. He was favouring his left leg. He did not know why. Nothing was injured. The body was making its own decisions about how to travel, and the body’s decisions were not available for review.

A kudu cow crashed out of a thicket of Kalahari currant on the morning of the fourth day. She came through the brush in a brown explosion — legs, horns, the whites of her eyes, the heavy body driving forward with a power that shook the ground — and Ruan threw himself sideways and lay in the dirt with his heart slamming and the cow already gone, already fifty metres away and accelerating, her hooves throwing up red dust.

He lay there. He thought: I am alive. Then: I am quick enough. Then: I was always quick enough.

The thought settled into him like a blade. He was quick. He was resourceful. He had built fire from nothing, found water in a dry pan, navigated by termite mounds. He had been in the bush for three days and he was still moving, still coherent, still capable of throwing himself clear of a kudu at short range. His body worked. His instincts worked. His eleven years in this country had given him everything he needed to survive.

And at the channel, with the water rising, he had stopped trying after twelve minutes. He had not meant to count, but some part of his brain had counted. Twelve minutes of effort, and then up the bank and gone.

He stood up and brushed the dirt from his trousers and walked east. The shape of Pieter was ahead of him now, where the track bent through the mopane, and Ruan walked toward it without slowing.

He reached the village at dusk on the fifth day. It was a cluster of cinder-block houses with zinc roofs, set along a dirt road that ran south toward the B8 highway. There were goats. There was a water tank on a steel tower. A woman in a blue dress was carrying a plastic basin on her head, and she saw him and stopped and set the basin down and called out in Lozi, and then in English when she saw his face.

He drank from the tank. The water was warm and tasted of plastic and chlorine and it was the cleanest water on earth. He drank and drank and a man brought him bread and he ate it and his body took the food and the water and used them with the mechanical efficiency of a machine that has been running on empty and does not care about the source.

They gave him a blanket and a place on a bench under a corrugated awning. They asked him questions in Lozi and English and he answered them — the bridge, the vehicle, the channel, the water. He told them where the channel was. He told them Pieter was still in the vehicle. He told them the water would have covered the cab by now. They made phone calls. Somewhere, the machinery of rescue and recovery was starting, too late for rescue.

He lay on the bench as the dark came down. The stars again, the same millions. The owlet again, or another owlet, asking its diminishing question. He could hear a radio somewhere in the village, playing Zambian pop, the bass tinny and insistent through a bad speaker.

He thought about Pieter telling him to go. He thought about his own hands opening — not letting go, but opening, the way hands open when the strength in them has been overridden by something that is not weakness exactly but is not strength either.

The shape of Pieter was not in the village. The shape had stopped at the tree line, at the edge of the bush, where the dirt road began and the wilderness ended. It would not follow him into the world of people and water tanks and zinc roofs. It belonged to the country between, to the five days of walking, to the version of Ruan who had been alone with what he’d done.

The sun came up. The floodplain to the north was silver in the early light. The water was still rising out there, filling the channels, covering the sand, reaching into the bush with its slow brown fingers. Somewhere under that water was a Land Cruiser with a man in it, and the man’s name was Pieter, and Pieter had told him to go, and he had gone.

Ruan sat on the bench and watched the water shine.