That night I am supposed to be on guard duty. Instead I am sharing a small fire with a
Bushman tracker. He's a member of my platoon. I watch him roll a Cuban cigar-sized
joint with a page from a battered Gideon's Bible.
We smoke in silence, pass it to-and-fro between us like ideas in a conversation.
Dagga seeds pop and crackle.
He folds the night, the fire, us inside a song about the Moon
and the Holy Mantis. It is a hymn in a prehistoric tongue of insects clicks and meandering hums.
His language is old as stone.
His Language is the First Language, a language borrowed
from plants and animals and insects, plucked from the ether at the dawn of history. It is
The Mother Tongue. I want to cry because I am stoned, because of the way his tiny frame seems to drown inside his brown combat uniform , because I know he'd rather carry a bow and a quiver of poisoned arrows than a R-4 assault riffle.
He'd rather run down a wounded Impala over two full days than track an invisible enemy not of his own making.
I know he'd rather walk away from this war in bare feet, drink water from the buried shells of ostrich eggs.
His song is the song of a soul that longs for the earth as it was before it was cut up, fenced in and flogged from under his father's father's feet.
The song stops. I look up from the fire.
There is no sign of the moon anywhere. Just a cloud covered in stars.
When I look back down, he too is gone.
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