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“Jessie is not allowed to own a goat because she is not here to look after it when she’s away at boarding school,” Amy explained, “but the other children each get one to look after. If they do it responsibly, they are allowed to have another. Some of the bigger girls have three or four.”
 

“Are these the farm labourers’ children?” Ethan said. He was sure his mom would have something to say to her brother about child labour.
 

“No, it’s sort of a farmers’ club. Most of them come from Tjalotjo, the village across the river.” She leaned her elbows on the rickety pole-and-grass fence and sighed happily. “There’s nothing quite like a whiff of manure to remind you that you’re really home for the holidays.”

Ethan noticed the entire floor of the enclosure the girls were happily sitting in was made up of dried goat dung. Aunt Cheryl didn’t seem to mind the dirt either.

“Morning, Ethan,” she waved from where she was mucking out a nearby pigsty. The horizontal bars running across the front of the sty ended about two feet off the ground, allowing a litter of piglets to escape and snuffle with happy grunts all over the yard, while their enormous mother busied herself with the running water hose and the slop bucket from inside her enclosure.
 

“Think quick!” Tariro yelled from behind Ethan. The dreaded rugby ball sailed past Ethan’s head and landed in amongst the little girls, scattering goat droppings and giggling girls everywhere.

“What the hell?” Ethan said angrily, but Amy stepped back with an amused smile.

Tariro flashed a smug grin at her. “It was your catch, Ethan, you’ll have to go in and fetch the ball.”
 

The boy had homed in on his germ phobia like a heat-seeking missile, Ethan thought with sullen resentment. He backed away from the fence, stretched deliberately and then strolled with elaborate nonchalance towards the kitchen. “Get your own ball,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m going in for a shower.” Once he had rounded the corner, he turned back to watch how Tariro would react.

Amy punched Tariro hard in the arm. “Leave him alone, you great lout,” she laughed. “Ethan just hates getting dirty – he’s super sweet when you get to know him.”

“Amy, do you have any idea how hard it was to get my dad to agree to let me come out to the farm these holidays?” Tariro said. “I was really looking forward to having Joe to myself. We were going to do all sorts of crazy stuff with the local kids. For once I wouldn’t have to be looking over my shoulder for my dad’s minders because the kids here don’t know who I am. Bloody Ethan is going to spoil all that. I mean, look at him! Even his pyjamas are flashy, and God knows what would happen if he actually got himself dirty. As rich and as picky as he is, I bet he hasn’t done a day’s work in his life.”

“Well, neither have you.” She gave him a friendly shove.

“Then watch me feed those goats.” Tariro vaulted effortlessly over the gate and pushed his way into the circle of girls who, Ethan was surprised to note, immediately made room for him despite his fancy board-shorts and designer shirt, which were every bit as flashy as anything Ethan wore. Ethan shook his head as he watched Tariro help himself to a little girl’s bottle, grab a kid confidently by the hind leg, pull it onto his lap and settle to feeding it as if he had been doing it all his life. Ethan had to hand it to the boy. He could certainly be charming when he wanted to be.

~~~

Ethan had a cold shower but at least he felt clean. He hadn’t realised that he would have had to light a fire under the boiler before he could have hot water. He was just in time to help Joe with breakfast.

“Tariro is so mean,” he grumbled at Joe, snatching the pan off the heat of the cast-iron stove before his pancake burned. “I don’t understand why you have to be friends with him.”
 

“I like him,” Joe said. “If you went to boarding school you would understand. He looks after me and I look after him.” He ducked under Ethan’s outstretched arm with a hot pan and plopped a misshapen, thick pancake down on the serving plate, on top of Ethan’s wafer-thin one. “Here you don’t have to be so fussy,” he added. “No one really cares how perfect the pancakes are. Put enough honey on them and everyone will just wolf them down.”

Ethan jumped back in case he got burned by the pan Joe was waving about. “Couldn’t you find someone a little more pleasant to hang out with at boarding school?”

“No,” Joe said. “We’re in the same rugby team and cricket team. He’s actually a really nice guy, usually. He’s just a bit pissed off because he wasn’t expecting you to come along.”

The rest of the family ambled into the kitchen, cutting off the private conversation – first Alan, then the girls with Tariro, and lastly, Cheryl, fresh from the shower. She still bore the faint whiff of pigsty.

Tariro sat down and helped himself to a stack of pancakes. He squeezed plenty of honey on top of them. Joe had been right; he didn’t seem to care if they were fat or thin. He rolled up three or four together and took a huge bite. Ethan wrinkled his nose as he watched Tariro wipe honey off his chin with his fingers and lick them. He couldn’t help wondering if Tariro had washed all the goat cooties off his hands.

“The girls at the goat pen tell me Jimoh is camping down by Crystal Pools for the week,” Tariro said, wiping his hand on his shirt. “Is there any chance we could go and camp with them?” He looked imploringly at Alan. “The last time I was here Jimoh promised to take me hunting tribal style.”
 

Alan looked quite sorry. Ethan wasn’t sure if he had been looking forward to taking the boys on safari, or if he was anxious for Ethan’s sake. “That would depend... Ethan, are you up for it? It will be pretty rough and ready. Either way, I have to take the good equipment with me. I have clients from a German wildlife magazine coming in tomorrow.”

Ethan was furious. He turned towards the stove to give himself time to think. Lifting the fire pit cover, he fed a split log into the fire, and then took his time replacing the cover. There was an art to doing it without burning your fingers. What could he say? He was sure Tariro had put him on the spot deliberately. If he insisted on the safari with the deluxe camping equipment he would validate Tariro’s opinion of him as a spoiled rich brat. If he went hunting, tribal style, whatever that entailed, he would be removing himself from Alan’s protection, which was exactly what he feared Tariro wanted. Instinct told him to go with his uncle and to hell with what Tariro thought. Now, to add to his dilemma, he desperately needed a puff from his asthma pump, but he knew everyone would misinterpret this as an excuse to duck out of the trip and spoil their fun, just to get his own way.

“No, that’s okay,” he heard himself say to Alan. “I’m sure I can manage tribal style. With a bit of luck we won’t shoot anything,” he added under his breath. He slumped down at the table and helped himself to the top pancake. It was one of the thick ones. He lightly dusted it with cinnamon sugar, meticulously squirted a quarter of a lemon over it and rolled it up, all the while breathing carefully and deeply so as not to cave in to the asthma attack. He was right. The pancake didn’t taste anything like a nice thin one.

“That's my boy!” Alan said.

“Wait till you meet Jimoh,” Joe said, his green eyes glinting now that his fun was secured. “He is by far the greatest tracker in the district. He can shoot a rabbit on the run from twenty paces with a sling shot.”

“What about lions at night?” Ethan said, hoping to scare them into having second thoughts.

“Don’t be silly, my boy,” Cheryl reassured him. “Lions won’t come anywhere near a fire. All the local kids camp at those pools. No one’s been attacked by wild animals for years.” She looked up suddenly from her pancake. “You have been taking a malaria prophylactic, haven’t you?”

“No.” Ethan bit his lip. He hadn’t expected to come to the bush at all, let alone camp at a river. Besides, whilst the prophylactic might stop him getting malaria, it was sure to clash with his asthma medication.

The greatest tracker in the district was a bit of a shock. Ethan had expected someone bigger – a grown-up perhaps. When they got to the pools, a thin, barefoot boy came bouncing up the path to meet them. He adjusted his faded red shirt, which had lost all its buttons, spat on the palm of his hand, wiped it off on a pair of ancient khaki shorts, and stuck it out towards Ethan. Ethan hesitated for barely five seconds before he heard Tariro’s sharp intake of breath. Was the boy taking it as a racial slight? He could not believe Tariro’s audacity after deliberately failing to shake his hand the first time they’d met, and Tariro knew the spit would pose a problem for Ethan. Jimoh just stood there, grinning cheerfully from underneath his filthy felt hat, till Ethan shook his hand. He looked about twelve years old.

A string of hunters trailed along behind him, smelling strongly of sweat and wood smoke. They varied in weight and height, but all except one of them had extremely short-cropped, curly hair and beetle brown eyes. The odd one out wore his hair long. It stuck out all over the place in a cross between an Afro and random starbursts. Ethan guessed the khaki shorts that they all wore had once been part of their school uniform, grown too ragged to wear to school. Each boy’s pockets were weighed down with pebbles. Two guys had on belts made out of rope, and another had a pair of suspenders, but the rest just kept hiking their pants up whenever the pebbles pulled them down too low. Besides Jimoh, only two of them wore shirts.
 

The two biggest – the one with the starburst afro, and one with a small scar above his eyebrow – carried lethal-looking machetes hanging from the ropes tied around their waists. Everyone, including Jimoh, wore slingshots around their necks as if they were jewels. The beautifully carved Y-shaped frames dangled from rubber strips, cut from the inner tube of a car tyre. The leather projectile-grips nestled comfortably behind their necks.
 

Ethan stood back as the group greeted one another like long-lost friends with hugs and complicated tribal handshakes. They spoke in a local dialect that he couldn’t understand; even Tariro and Joe. Ethan strained to catch the slightest similarity to the Xhosa he learned at school, but couldn’t pick up a word. Cape Town was two-and-a-half-thousand kilometers away, he reminded himself; there was too much distance between the two tribes to share a common tongue.

“This is my cousin, Ethan,” Joe introduced him eventually, in English, and then surprised Ethan by knowing and rattling off each kid’s name. They lined up and, one by one, shook hands with him. Ethan’s face set into an expression of frantic geniality as each one spat on the palm of his hand and then took the time to guide Ethan’s hand through the complicated tribal handshake. His composure only faltered slightly when one of them sniffed, and wiped the back of his hand across his nose before shaking.

Crystal pools were well named. The pool itself, roughly half the size of a football field, was as deep and clear as any swimming pool. It was separated from the dense jungle on the west side by a narrow sandy beach. Tall, jagged cliffs towered over the water on the village side.

Ethan cleaned his hands with waterless hand sanitiser from his backpack while the gang chose a place for their camp. A couple of boys wedged a long tent pole between two enormous msasa trees, and then threw the largest, and less tatty, of the tarpaulins over it. Using old ropes, they stretched the ends of the tarpaulin up into the nearby trees to make a shelter. Joe and the one with the afro rolled out the second tarpaulin as a groundsheet below. Jimoh and another boy attached a row of eight mosquito nets to the central tent pole and knotted them up out of the way. Ethan quietly chose one of the middle nets – just in case lions came in the night – and stashed his sleeping bag and rucksack below it. It seemed the whole gang would be spending the night.

~~~

They hunted upstream. Ethan crept slowly along the riverbank. Each step had to be carefully considered and inspected for spiders or scorpions, before he could put his foot down. He was startled once or twice by imaginary snakes. He didn’t know how the other hunters did it. They seemed to be capable of the utmost stealth, without ever looking at their feet. He wondered if they had any idea, without the aid of documentaries on television, of what could be lurking in the undergrowth. Or perhaps it just took more than a bit of venom to scare them.
 

“Ethan, hurry up,” Tariro hissed through clenched teeth. Of course, Tariro hiked up front, next to Jimoh. He carried the only gun, a .22 rifle, broken across the crook of his arm.

“I don’t see why he has to have the first shot,” Ethan grumbled to no one in particular. He would be horrified if they expected him to shoot something himself, but why should Tariro assume that he was entitled to go first? “Anyway, I’m not sure I want to trust my safety to Tariro’s hunting expertise.”

“Don’t be mean, Ethan. All the other kids can protect you with their slingshots.” Joe had dropped back in the ranks to keep pace with Ethan. Probably to keep the peace, Ethan realised a bit guiltily. He noticed the hunters held their slingshots in one hand, a pebble at the ready in their other, in case they stumbled across something to shoot.

“What if we see a lion?” he said, to highlight just how much danger they may be in.

“Well, the lion you see is better than the one you don’t,” a boy on the other side of his cousin said enigmatically. Ethan couldn’t quite read the boy’s face. Was he teasing?
 

Eventually Joe punched Ethan good-naturedly on the arm. “It’s for sure, the one you don’t see is busy sneaking up on you.” He and the other kid laughed.
 

Joe’s skin had turned a dark caramel color, but Ethan’s fair skin went red with sunburn. He tried to avoid the merciless sunlight by ducking into the shade of every tree they passed, furtively scanning the overhead branches in case of leopards. He started to get quite drowsy too, lulled by the song of the cicadas. He was just wishing they could take a rest, well removed from the dust and dirt, preferably right by the river, so they could enjoy whatever breeze blew off it, when Jimoh signalled the hunters to crouch down. They squatted, perfectly still, while Jimoh and Tariro snuck belly down through a gap in the bushes. Ethan did not even try to see the animal as Tariro quietly loaded the rifle, cocked it, took careful aim and discharged it.