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“Maybe they died here.”

Suddenly Thompson was upon us. “What is it?” He was frowning into the gloom of our narrow cave.

“Look!” I showed him two pieces of pottery, which put together made up part of a zigzag pattern. “It’s an old pot.”

“Leave that stuff!” said Thompson. He had almost shouted, raised one prohibiting hand.

I looked at him with astonishment. I had never been spoken to—ordered around—by an African before. My nannies had never dared speak to me so sharply. But Thompson was stumbling back, out of the cave, as if he had seen a snake’s hole.

“I want to take it home to show Mum.”

“You must not touch the things of the dead!”

I had my head to one side and my mouth drawn up, to show I was skeptical, but still, I came out of the cave, as slow-casual as I could, holding the piece of pottery, and I said, “How do you know they are dead people’s things?”

“Anyone can see these are graves,” said Thompson. “Don’t touch! You mustn’t touch.”

I laughed. “It’s a bit late for that, Thompson.”

“Please picanin madam.” Thompson looked as if he were about to fling himself backward off the bald head of the kopje.

“Well, if the people are dead, they won’t mind.”

“No, they will mind. They will think of you most terrible things.”

“Thompson, don’t be so superstitious.” In an effort to rid myself of the tainted pottery and to still maintain my superiority, I tossed the pottery carelessly back into the cave and dusted my hands on my shorts. “There. Happy?” And then casually, “I didn’t really want it, anyway.”

Thompson looked as if I had struck him, as if I’d thrown the pottery in his face. He said, “Oh, you should not have done that, picanin madam. You shouldn’t have thrown it like that.”

Vanessa was ducking out of the cave behind me. Her face had changed, the way a shadow comes when a thin cloud scuds across the sun. She said, “Come on, Bobo, let’s go home.”

“But we haven’t even eaten our picnic yet.”

Thompson, his shoulders poking and bony out of the back of his thin cotton uniform, was already scuffling down the face of the boulder that made up the top of the kopje. He had the string bag of uneaten food over his shoulder.

“Come on, you guys, I’m hungry. Let’s eat first.”

Thompson didn’t even turn around, much less slow down.

“Why are you frightened?” I had to quickly scuffle down on the seat of my shorts to keep up with Thompson and Vanessa.

“You touched the things of the dead,” said Thompson. And I saw then that he was beyond scared, he was angry too.

I remember the soft, silty, gritty feel of the grave pottery when I see Thompson, his eye split open like that. And then I think of Richard dead, and Mum gone crazy. And I think that if I hadn’t touched the things of the dead we wouldn’t be having all this bad, bad luck.

And then Oscar, our Rhodesian ridgeback, is found lying on the road outside our house and he has been sliced up and down with a panga. Mum is screaming at the front door, holding his body in her arms. He is so weak from lack of blood he doesn’t even struggle. “Those bastards! Those bloody, bloody bastards.” I open the door and Mum staggers in, barely able to hold herself up with the dog pressed against her chest.

“Is he still breathing?”

Mum lays him down and covers him with blankets. “We need to get fluids into him.” She feeds him whole milk, with the cream, dry-season thin and pale, floating on the top. Oscar gags and the milk dribbles back out of his mouth. “He can’t even swallow,” says Mum, her hands slippery with the milk. She finds a vein in his back leg and punctures it with a needle, letting a bag of intravenous fluid seep into his body. She stays like that, crouched over the dog with the plastic bag of saline solution held up over her head, until Oscar begins to struggle. Then she pulls the needle out of his leg and sits back on her haunches, wiping sweat off her forehead.

“Who did this?” I ask.

Mum says in a hoarse whisper, “They did,” and lifts her eyes toward the ranch manager’s house.

“Oh. The ranch managers did this?”

Mum nods.

I let this sink in for a moment. “Why?”

Mum