At daybreak, the boy saved a few burning logs from the fire before he splashed dirty water on it, steam hissed, and smoke rose. After returning in the dark from going to summon the herbalist, he spent most of that morning trying to break the old man's fever with a rag and a calabash of water.
When the rusted zinc door to the shack was kicked open, the boy threw out the rest of the dirty water in the calabash. He looked upon the farmland that had been washed clean by the unexpected rain. He looked around as he made his way down to the stream, watching the snails dragging themselves under the leaves and birds fighting in the whitely blue sky.
The old man's fever had finally broken, and his sweat glands were now functioning.
It took a great deal of using the rag to wipe him down before he finally understood that he was wiping because the old man was not sweating. The venom kept raising his body temperature, the shack had been warmed due to the fire, and the old man had had no way of keeping cool, the heat sickness.
The boy reached the stream and walked upstream to where the water ran over a bed of smooth rocks, he saw small fishes shaking their tails and going downstream with the current. He removed the rag from within the calabash and washed it in the river.
He then removed his clothes and waded into the stream. It reached to his waist and he began to wash himself.
He thought he had forgotten to do something important. He stood upright and thought hard for some time. He did not remember. He shook it off and finished his bath in the stream, stepping on smooth stones, and curling his toes amongst them.
His head wound had scabbed over by that time. He picked at the scab and ran his finger on the newly grown flesh. He used his hands to scrub his thick mat of hair vigorously, washing out all the sand and burrs from the previous day. He stepped out of the stream when he was clean and put on his clothes.
On his way back to the shack he started looking for snails to pick. He closed his fingers around one with a whorly shell. He pulled it off the tree and its body shrank into the shell. The boy dropped it into the calabash and continued picking the snails until he had a full calabash. Then he went around to gather peppers.
The pot of snails and wild peppers was on the new fire, outside the shack, and was almost done before the herbalist arrived to treat the old man.
The herbalist was heralded by squawking pigeons, the rattle of beaded anklets, bangles, necklaces, and an iron staff —all of which had gone unnoticed in the dark before dawn and now seemed impossible to ignore.
The boy stood up from tending the pot of peppered snails beside the shack. He went inside to wake the old man, but he was already awake. He was still sitting against the wall. His bad foot no longer had the blue color and had returned to the normal cracked calloused skin color. The old man was rubbing the toes gently as if he expected sharp fangs of pain whenever he touched a new one.
The beaded ruckus grew closer until the shape of the herbalist stopped in the door frame. A strong medicinal scent followed him. The boy's head began to swim in the shade of the shack. The herbalist, by way of saying the snails needed tending, asked him to excuse them. As the boy went through the door the herbalist told him he had done very well and that all would be well.
The pot of peppered snails was done cooking, but he did not plan to eat until the herbalist finished with the old man in the secrecy of the shack. He could not even overhear the conversations even though he was barely three paces away from the walls. All he heard was the endless rattle of beads and the banging of the iron staff on the face of the rain-washed earth.
There could be no more clearing of the farmland, he knew. And he started to think about mending the fence himself, where the oxen had trampled it some time ago. He felt so different from the boy he had been around this time yesterday and saw that he had grown. He had killed a snake and had kept his father from the jaws of death.
He was crouched in front of the cooking fire, the pot itself on a tripod of hard stones. The fire ate the logs of wood beneath, and smoke poured into his eyes, which started stinging. He moved away, rising to his feet suddenly, squeezing his eyes shut until they watered. He opened them, and he could see fantastic shapes of light dancing about the place for a short time.
He finished cooking and removed burning firewood from beneath the pot so that the flame only kept the food hot until the herbalist finished inside.
Bored of waiting around he went to the palm tree where they had found the snake, and he remembered he was supposed to have buried it in a hole. The rain had put a stop to that. He looked around for the cutlasses, inside the bushes and all over. He also looked for the snake's carcass, even though he suspected it had been washed away.
He found one of the cutlasses inside a bush, and he found the other one where it was buried under a pile of fallen branches. He clapped them together, banging them until the wet sand came off them. He had spent a long time searching for them. It was such a long time that when he returned to the shack with the cutlasses the herbalist and the old man had opened the door and were conversing with one another.
'Where did you go?'
'I went looking for the cutlasses?'
'This your soup is done and has been entering our noses. Serve us, let us eat.'
The boy smiled and they all started laughing. He went inside and brought out some fired clay bowls to eat with. He served the snails in them, but he ate his own portion straight out of the pot.
It was now noon.
The sun hung in the sky and poured its fury on the earth, turning the puddles of water into steam that made the atmosphere hazy like waves of heat were rising. The herbalist after finishing his plate of food thanked the boy and his ancestors for the kindness of peppered snails.
The old man promised to visit the herbalist once he was fully recovered. The herbalist went away in a rattle of beads and the banging of his staff on the hot sands of the earth that had been washed anew and was now being dried.
'We'll go home once the sun goes down. I have some concoctions I must take, but first, you will have to cut me a walking staff from that araba tree.' The old man instructed the boy before dozing off in the afternoon heat.
The anthill of the sand ants came under siege by a lunarbear when night fell upon the hot earth. It was drawn to the anthill by the maddening scent of the pieces of the snake the sand ants carted into their stronghold during the day.
It stood on its hindlegs swiped off the top of the anthill with its paws and dipped one paw into the hill. The arm came away with a moving carpet of sand ants. It looked like the bear's paw had been buried in the sand by the river.
They were chomping on the lunarbear in hordes, but its furry skin was enough, on its own, to repel their best efforts. The bear put the paw into its mouth and sucked the ants off and repeated the act until the anthill lay in shambles and their stockpile of food was exposed to him. The bear feasted upon this too and enjoyed it more than the feast of sand ants due to the grainy bits of the bluetongue snake scattered amongst the horde of food collected by the ants over the last season.
When it left the site, there was only a devastation of the anthill and the colony of ants. It sauntered off into the forest, swaying drunkenly, in search of its cave. It seemed not to know the way anymore and it got confused and it wandered about.
It lumbered on a pit that formerly looked just like the forest floor. The branches that had been hoisting up the dead leaves snapped under the lunarbear's great weight. The pit was deep and at the bottom was lined with sharp wooden spikes. The weight of the lunarbear and the depth of the pit were the two killing blows. The great beast smashed into the spikes and was skewered clean through by all three of them.
The corpse of the great beast was there in the pit for the hunter to find the very next morning. It took the hunter and his helpers all of their strength and all morning to haul the lunarbear out of the pit that had killed it.
They stood there, panting, and felt a tiny bit sorry that such a great beast had died in such a gruesome way. The three spikes had made a mess of its body, intestines looped around the jutting spikes, a great mass of flies gathered, and it stank.
They felt sorry but then the lunarbear roared from the dead, a roar so loud that the hunter and his helpers stood paralyzed as the great, now necrotic and insane, beast pounced upon them, with its innards flailing all about as it massacred them.