Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [86]
K handed me the water bottle. I drank thirstily. I handed it back to him. He took a sip, swished out his mouth, and spat.
“Well?” he said.
There was nothing to say.
“This is what it was,” he said. “This and wondering if you were about to snuff it and become bits of biltong.” He put the butt of an imaginary gun on his hip. “Waka-waka.” He licked his lips. “Three weeks, sixty pounds of gear, bored to death, and shit scared. That’s what war is. Until you’re dead.”
“Ja.” Mapenga found a thin tug of tree that had somehow found a roothold in a thin crevice. He grabbed one of its branches and swung down until he hung over the edge of the mountain, dangling from the tenacious plant that, in turn, clung impossibly into the shallow scrub of earth. Then Mapenga pumped his legs to and fro until his toes caught a grip on the edge of the cliff and he came to rest next to me, like a bird alighting and folding its wings. The sun blistered us against the chalky cliffs. Heat rose and spiraled off the flat expanse of earth below us, kicking up whirls of sand and dead leaves. A Christmas beetle started screaming. Mapenga crumpled clods of chalky earth between his thumb and forefinger and showered the resulting dirt on my feet. K sat down, legs out in front of him. He put his head back against the cliff and shut his eyes. I crouched next to him. We waited. A bateleur eagle rocked above the woodland below us, swinging back and forth silently, watchfully, on the hot air.
“I nicked an ou’s water once,” said Mapenga softly, throwing a lump of earth off the mountain, so that it sent up little explosions as it fell.
K opened his eyes. “You did what?”
“Worst fucking thing I ever did.” Mapenga shook his head. He edged away from us until he was on a very thin slice of ledge, below which the mountain dissolved into a narrow chute. “I was so fucking thirsty I couldn’t think about anything else. We had been two nights without water. Now it was the third night. And”—Mapenga took a shallow, shaky breath and started to talk very quickly—“I can still see where the ou was sleeping. I can see everything about that camp to this day. Everyone was asleep, except me. I couldn’t fucking sleep. I was so thirsty I couldn’t even piss, or I would have drunk my own pee. I was hallucinating water, man. So I crawled out of my wank-sack and fuck . . . I fucking crawled over to an anthill where this ou had left his kit, and I took two sips out of his water bottle. One mouthful I used just to get the cake out of my mouth, that white crap that builds up like fucking cement in your mouth. The next sip, I swallowed.”
“Lucky you weren’t shot,” said K, “I’d have shot you.”
“Ja, well.”
“That’s how I went from troopie to lance-jack,” said K.
“How?”
K pointed toward the horizon, away from the lake, where land became an indistinct blue haze and fused into the pale sky. “I had been in for about nine months and we were out there. Dry season. We were tracking gooks and the sarge had a bee up his arse so we kept going after them and it was drier and drier and I kept telling the sarg, ‘We’re going to cook out here, sir. We need to hug the hills.’
“And I knew the gooks weren’t stupid. They must have had plenty of water with them. We had . . . hardly any. And a munt can go twice the distance on half the water. They’re like camels, man.
“I said, ‘They know we’re tracking them, sir. And they’re saving bullets. They’re going to just keep walking and we’ll just keep walking after them and eventually we’ll die of thirst and then they’ll come and rumba on our bodies.’
“Anyway, we must have been—I shit you not—at least three days’ walk from the last water and the ous run out, the sarge included.” K paused. “But I always carried three, four times