Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Kava washed his hands of clay and started to mark a pattern on my legs.

“He will leave with me, and forget this woman and her cursed children. It was his idea to save them, and lead them here, not mine. Whether they lived or died was the gods’ business. Who lives at the top?” he asked.

“I don’t—”

“She takes food up there every day. Now she takes you.”

“Jealous.”

“Of you? My blood is the blood of chiefs!”

“It was not a question.”

He laughed. “You want to play with her dark arts, do as you wish. But the Leopard comes with me. We are going back to the village. Between us we kill the people responsible for the death of my mother.”

“You said wind killed your kin. You said—”

“I know what I said, I was there when I said it. The Leopard said he will set out once you two find the boy. Tell him that you will not go.”

“And then?”

“I will make him see,” Kava said.

“There is no future in your form.”

“What?”

“Somebody told me that a few days ago,” I said.

“Who? Nobody passes this place. You’re growing as mad as that bitch. I’ve seen you, on the roof of that hut, holding up air and playing with it like a child. She infects this place. What news have you of the boy? That he fled because he was ungrateful? Did she call him a thief? Maybe a killer?”

He stood up and looked at me.

“So she did. Do you think as a man, or does she rule all your thoughts? The boy escaped,” he said.

“This is no prison.”

“Then why he run off?”

“He thinks his mother cries for him at night. That he is not mingi.”

“And who says he lies? Sangoma? No child here knows any different. Sangoma living in the trees for years and years, so where are the children who come of age? You and the animal hunt him down to bring him back. What will you do when he says no, I will not come back?”

“I hear you now. You think the Leopard is a fool for her too.”

“Leopard is no fool. He does not care. She says go east, he goes east, as long as there is fish and the warthogs are fat. Nothing is in that heart.”

“What blazes in yours.”

“You two fucked in the forest,” he said.

I looked at him.

“He said he taught you archery. The fucking beast was feeding me verse.”

I thought about leaving him with the mystery of it, or telling him we did not and never would to give him ease, but also thinking fuck the gods and his need for ease.

“He will never love you,” Kava said.

“Nobody loves no one,” I said.

He punched me in the face—right on the cheek—and knocked me down in the mud. He jumped me before I got up. Knees on my arms pinning me down, he punched me in the face again. I kneed him in the ribs. He yelled and fell off. But I was coughing, gasping, crying like a boy, and he jumped me again. We rolled and my head hit a rock and the sky went gray and black and the mud was sinking and his spit was hitting my eye but I could not hear him, only see the back of his throat. We rolled into the river and his hands grabbed my neck, pushing me underwater, pulling me up, pushing me under, water rushing into my nose. The Leopard leapt on his back and bit him in the neck. The force knocked them both in the river. I pulled myself up to see the Leopard still on Kava’s neck, about to toss him like a doll, and I yelled. The Leopard dropped him but growled. Kava staggered backways into the river and touched his neck. His hand came away with blood. He looked at me, then at the Leopard, who was still walking in circles in the river, still marking that this is where you shall not pass. Kava turned, ran up the banks and into the bush. The noise brought out the Sangoma, who came down with Giraffe Boy and Smoke Girl, who appeared in front of my eyes and vanished again. The Leopard was back to a man and he walked past the Sangoma, back to the hut.

“Don’t forget why I sent for you,” she said to me.

She threw me a thick cloth when I stepped out of the river. I thought it was to dry myself, but the boy’s scent was all over it.

“That boy could be in my nose for moons.”

“Then you better make haste and find him,” she said.

We took one bow, many arrows, two daggers, two hatchets, a gourd tied to my hip with a piece of the cloth inside, and set out before first light.

“Are we finding the boy or killing him?” I said to the Leopard.

“He’s seven days ahead. These are if someone finds him first,” he said behind me, trusting my nose, even though I did not. The boy’s smell was too strong in one spot, too weak in the other, even if his path was set right before me. Two nights later his trail was still ahead of us.

“Why didn’t he go north, back to the village? Why go west?” I asked.

I stopped and the Leopard walked past me, turned south, and stopped after ten paces. He stooped down to sniff the grass.

“Who said he was from your village?” he asked.

“He did not go south, if you’re trying to pick up the boy.”

“He’s your charge, not mine. I was sniffing out dinner.”