The boy woke up and was strongly aware of the absence of the storm and a deeper silence permeating the world. There was a faint smell of burning wood in his nose, and the air was cool, and the earth was, too. His head was heavy; it ached from a weight hidden inside.
He opened his eyes to see the darkness of the rafters of the plywood shack. He was lying on the floor, back to the floor, facing the ceiling. He did not get up.
He turned his head to the side and saw the remains of the bonfire and the smoke wisping out in long curls that scattered before reaching the rafters. He remembered, with a start that made him spring up, that the old man had been bitten by a snake.
He whipped his head around and found the old man on the other side of the diminished bonfire. The old man was sitting up against the plywood wall and was looking at the small window that was still open. They made eye contact. A great relief poured out of the boy, and he felt the world righting along its skewed axis.
'Baba, good morning.'
'Good morning. Did you sleep well?' The old man asked, his voice was deeper and faint as if pulled to breaking point by exhaustion.
The boy's gaze drifted down the old man's body and stopped at the poisoned leg. The leg was no longer tied above the ankle and the swelling had reduced and the darkly brown skin was losing the bluish tint that had been on it.
'Did you sleep well?' The old man asked.
'I did not get much sleep.'
'Me too. I kept waking up after every thunderbolt.'
'I tried to stay awake, but I don't know how I fell asleep. I was scared your injury was killing you.'
'You were right to be afraid.'
'How is the leg?'
'Is there anything to eat?'
The boy also felt the weakness in him and he told the old man that he would check. He got up and then remembered they had eaten the last of the yams they had in the shack before clearing the farm yesterday. He still went to the bags hung up on the wall and checked them for anything edible. He found three strips of beef jerky and a bottle of damp snuff in the old man's knapsack. His own bag had nothing edible.
He offered what he found to the old man who took the snuff bottle and a strip of beef jerky.
'Eat the rest. And when the sun comes up you will have to go and bring the herbalist.'
'What is wrong with your leg?'
'It is fine but I still need some herbs.'
'Okay.'
'What happened to your head?'
'What happened to my head?' The boy said.
'Don't ask me foolish questions.'
The boy put a hand to his head and rubbed all over his thick hair until he came upon a sticky patch that made him wince when he put pressure on it. He remembered how he had dashed his head against the cutlass and had lain his own head open. The opening had closed and he was now on the mend. He explained that he had taken a fall and the old man nodded and attended to his snuff bottle.
The boy approached the smoldering logs and roused up the flame, adding a few damp logs to the pile. He then went to the door, unlocked it, and opened it. Water droplets fell on him from beneath the doorframe where it had been trapped overnight. Goosebumps appeared on his arms. There was nothing moving under the dark, the sky had gone light blue only on the horizon. Everything smelled like damp earth after a rain. A cold draft ran into the shack and he closed the door gently.
The day was yet to break when the boy was walking hastily on the road to the home of the herbalist.
The old man had started talking in his sleep. The boy woke up and he touched the old man's forehead with the back of his palm. It was burning so hot that he snatched his hand away. He did not know what to do but he remembered what was important. He wore his clothes that were no longer damp from spending time near the fire and he set off. He did not see where he was going but he did not need light to find his way across the village. He grew up roaming the paths and the roads and the markets.
He walked fast.
He was near the herbalist's compound when he saw a light moving away from the compound, in another direction. He now used the energy he had saved up from those strips of jerky and ran while calling out to the herbalist.
'Show yourself if you dare!' The herbalist issued a challenge reserved for demons and spirits as he swung his lantern above his head. The boy stopped running and started talking loudly. 'I am not a spirit! It is me.'
'Who are you and who did they name me?'
'Elder, I am not a spirit.'
'Come close I cannot see your face.'
'Babajiya is my father.'
'I know Babajiya but I don't know you.'
The boy was now only a few meters away from the herbalist. An ancient reedy man who seemed like he stood on borrowed legs. The lantern bobbed over the herbalist's head and then it moved forward, and the boy had to squeeze his eyes shut.
'You are not a spirit. I remember you. Tell me what the matter is.'
The boy told the herbalist what had happened but what he was expecting, that the herbalist should come immediately and put things right, did not happen. The herbalist had a few questions of his own.
'What time of the day did it happen?
'Around noon.'
'How large was the snake?'
'I don't know but I think about this long.' He spread his arms apart to show the herbalist and the herbalist looked at him askance.
'Are you sure it was that long?'
'I think so.'
'And your father is still … only his skin is burning?'
'Yes, he is.'
'Go back to the farm and stay with him. Use a cold rag to rub off the fever until I arrive.'
'But Elder, my father needs you, where are you going?'
'It is not only your roof that is on fire boy! Go now and tend to your father. Be very careful on your way back to the farm. Mischievous spirits are up and about today.'
Detritus was scattered along the banks of a river that had overflown and was now returning to its normal boundaries.
A scouting sand ant moved its tiny hairy legs along the cool wetness of the bank, leading with its head and bumping every object along the way. It touched rocks and leaves and branches and unripe fruits but none of them gave off the scent it had caught so it kept searching.
It went all around the river bank, dashing up and down the deformations in the soil that were like hills to it. It was distracted once by the corpse of a crab and it spent a while marking the region. The initial maddening scent returned when the river spat out a dead log of wood on the river bank. A small shower landed on the ant but it scampered out of the puddle.
The sand ant continued its search and it knew it was on the trail. It raised its sandwhite head towards the river and to the sky, lowered it, and continued its crawl across the small dunes of sand.
It collided head-first with a scaly leathery object that it knew was the source of the maddening scent. Endocrine fluids seeped out of the sand ant's chitinous shell and it could not help itself. It ran circles around the carcass and rubbed its legs on it and chomped on a tiny bit.
What the ant found was the water-washed, beheaded bluetongue snake where the river had abandoned it. The ant bit off a portion of the gum supporting the venomous fangs and it crawled away back to the anthill where an army of ants were waiting to hear from their hardworking scout.
It took the colony of sand ants the whole morning to gather a host and find their way back to the bounty, with the excited scout in the lead. A thousand thousand tiny hairy feet marched weightless over the sands and soon they were at the riverbank and they all picked up on the maddening scent of the bluetongue snake's corpse.
They surrounded the carcass but it was too heavy to be moved all at once to the anthill.
The commander ordered the carcass stripped down to the bone and they swarmed the scaly corpse. A bite at a time, they cleaned the snake's head of its meat and flesh and what remained was a blue bone skull that the heavies of the sand ant host brought their massive chompers down on, chipping off the bone one small powerful bite at a time.
The sand ants carted off most of the skull and were set to work on the rest of the body when birds of prey swooped down on them and started picking them off one at a time. One snatched up the rest of the snake after it flew so low to the sand that its wings generated gales that blew grains of sand and ants out of the way.
There were sand ants on the body of the snake dangling high in the air above trees, rising towards the clouds. They bit the bird on its hard-scaled legs and it felt nothing until one of them chomped down on its flesh and it let go of the bounty. Most of the ants were thrown off as the carcass tumbled down from hundreds of meters in the air only for another bird of prey to snatch it out of freefall with its wide-open beak.
Not too long after that, the first bird slammed into the second bird at breakneck speeds that wound up breaking the neck of the second bird, then the dive-bombing bird grappled with the snake carcass and the bird with the snapped neck. It then climbed to great heights and vanished beyond the clouds.