Of Beasts and Beings by Ian Holding

Author:Ian Holding [Holding, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847378248
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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All the while the provisions are whittling down. When they stop and tip the water container, the meniscus lowers ever more, and the angle at which they have to tilt it becomes more acute. It’s almost painful to watch. The lip of the Coke bottle is too narrow and the prospect of losing even a drop of water is so grave that they make a funnel with an empty bean can that they squash and hammer into the shape of a cone. Their path has not taken them to any active river or stream. Coming down off a low knoll one afternoon they drew parallel to a riverbed, a bare grassless basin, the pale loam hard and dry. There where the bones of some beast had fallen into the sand as if its airy shell were still kneeling and burrowing its neck into the trough. The man stood and glassed over the dryness and a visible dejection took hold of him. A boy promised a toy he will never have. He had been expecting to come across water. He had been measuring out their stores bit by bit. They had little left in reserve.

The food must be running low too. Every time they dip a hand into the sacks they bring out less and less. But each time they do something is produced that is more than nothing, more than the empty held-out palm. Their stores seem bottomless, blessed by some proverb or watched over by some atavistic numen. Or else they are simply thrifty in the extreme, pilgrim-like in their consumption and they know well the parable of division: a little broken into many many parts. Sometimes when they aren’t so tired the man will remember a word of thanksgiving before the mealie cakes or the mashed dried fish or the thin cobs are eaten. Sometimes he will hold out his upturned palms and raise them to the level of his face and, closing his eyes, mutter something which may be a prayer or an offering to the ancestors. At other times he forgets and they all sit hunched and drawn and melancholic, rolling the food in their fingers, pressing it into small balls in their hands and bringing it forlornly to their mouths. They take nothing for granted.

The boys’ free time is set aside for the chore of scouring beyond the threadbare glades for trees they may pick and plunder. Once they came across a tree with crisp white petals, calyces covered in rust-coloured hairs. Its thick pods had fallen flush to the ground. The boys went forth with an empty sack and brought back a whole load to the campsite. They sat about chewing the ripe pods and discarding the others. They slipped the edge of the machete blade between the crevice and cranked them open, splitting them like oyster or mussel shells. There were plenty to go round. They came over and dropped so many before him his eyes could not digest the mound piled at his feet.

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