The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  Kocha was waiting on the porch at dawn the next morning with a small backpack and an ancient Lee-Enfield rifle. He was under five feet tall and dressed in a tattered khaki shirt and pants that hung in folds from his birdlike frame. He had a haze of gray hair and a face like a weathered walnut into which his eyes all but disappeared when he smiled. He shook Connor’s hand and looked into his eyes for a long time, nodding as if he understood something. Inside, while Connor bought provisions, the storekeeper told him that Kocha was a Bushman who many years ago had worked as a tracker for wealthy white hunters. His English was good, the man said, and nobody knew the land better.

  The storekeeper drove them out into the desert in his own truck and left them on the brink of a lush green valley many feet below. He wished them luck and went and they stood awhile and watched the red cloud of his wake catch the climbing sun and slowly drift and dissolve until he was gone and a silence deeper than any Connor had ever known settled upon them.

  The chill of the dawn was gone now and as the sun rose higher the immense plain of red gravel that stretched to every horizon began to liquefy with mirage. Below them in the valley, however, the mist still curled among the trees and they shouldered their packs and Kocha his rifle with its sling of frayed webbing and began their descent.

  The valley snaked east to west in a broad green band as far as the eye could see. Kocha told him that it marked the course of an underground river which rose in the highlands many miles to the east but soon grew shy and hid beneath the gypsum crust and lichen-covered gravel. Now and then, as if to check that it was headed in the right direction, it would boldly bubble up among the trees and shrubs and for a few hundred yards run clear and cool and confident over shelves of russet rock and then vanish once more into the sand.

  Many animals lived in the valley of the invisible river. Over the days and nights that followed they saw kudu and gemsbok and giraffe and zebra. On their third evening while they were making camp, Kocha heard something and told Connor quietly to come and they stole among the trees and, sheltering downwind behind some rocks, watched a small herd of elephant drinking and drenching each other at a water hole.

  Sometimes, sitting by their campfire after dark, they would see hyena slinking in the shadows, their eyes glinting pale and ghostly in the firelight. And once they heard the rasping cough of a leopard and in the morning found its tracks circling not twenty yards from where they had slept. Kocha, who slept - if indeed he slept at all - with his rifle beside him, said he had seen the animal and met its eyes and knew that it meant them no harm.

  The old man knew the name of every beast and bird and insect and plant, though some he knew only by the names the Bushmen gave them. The language of his people was unlike any Connor had heard, with strange clicking sounds that he tried to imitate but always failed, reducing Kocha to fits of helpless laughter. Kocha taught him many things about how the creatures that lived here survived the unforgiving heat and drought. How sandgrouse would douse their feathers with water and then fly many miles to give it to their young and how the dune beetle would stand for hours to let the mist condense upon its back, then dance to make the droplets slide into its mouth. He showed Connor how a man could survive by finding water in the tubers of plants and in secret wells that you sipped through long and hollow grasses from beneath the parched earth.

  At night, sitting by the fire, Connor would ask him to tell some of his people’s stories. How Kaang the Creator, who often took the form of a praying mantis, made the moon by tossing an old shoe into the sky and how the Milky Way was made by the ash of a fire tossed there to light the way home for hunters and how once all animals were friends with man and spoke his language until he frightened them with fire and they were stricken dumb and fled.

  And Connor sensed that, more than the sum of all the things he learned, a lesson far greater was being disclosed, though what it was he was unable yet to say.

  He had been traveling now for many months. When he fled New York, he had been closer to madness than he had ever been or hoped to be again. He left with no plan, simply with an overwhelming urge to escape, though from what he still wasn’t sure, except that it was connected in some way with what the woman Beatrice had said to him that night at the gallery and the vision of himself that she had made him see in his photographs. For no other reason than that it was pretty much the farthest he could go, he had flown first to Australia. From there he had traveled in a slow curve north and west, through Southeast Asia and India and finally back to the continent that now seemed forever lodged within him, by ship across the Indian Ocean, to Africa.

  He lived simply, sleeping under the stars whenever he could and traveling as the whim took him, though always to places that he had never before visited. He neither sought company nor shunned it, except that of those with loud opinions. And uncannily, again and again, he had found himself with people such as Kocha, who were linked in some ancient way to the land that they inhabited and who seemed to know time and space and man’s place within both as if by some extra sense.

  In what precise way these encounters and indeed his whole journey had changed him, Connor could not say. But he knew they had. It showed in his face. On those rare occasions that he bothered to shave, he was startled by the sight of himself in the mirror. He had grown thin and bony and his hair was long and tousled and bleached white by the sun. His sunburnt skin stretched tightly over his cheekbones and his pale eyes above them peered back at him like a stranger’s. Perhaps it should have disturbed him, but it didn’t. For it matched the inner change, the feeling that he was being slowly purged of some dark organic need that had lain curled and feeding within him for years. Where once it had been, now there was clear space. And although the scar tissue was raw and tender, he knew it was healing. Still, of course, there were times when the horrors he had seen returned to haunt him and other times when he felt the ache of losing those he loved. But he knew that these feelings were but clouds that passed and that the vessel of what, for want of a better word, he could only call his soul, though scoured and almost empty, was sound.

  On leaving New York he had packed only one small bag of camera gear but despite all the extraordinary sights he had seen, he had rarely opened it. He had taken a few pictures of landscapes and temples, the kind of pictures tourists took. But never once had he photographed the face of another human being.

  How much of this inner journey Kocha sensed in him, Connor didn’t know. Their days had been spent very much in the moment and they had hardly talked of the past or of the facts of their personal lives. Kocha had told him about a wife, long dead, and their many children who lived somewhere far away to the east. Connor had shown him his little laminated photos of Julia and Amy but hadn’t gone into any detail, nor had Kocha asked for any. Yet he suspected that the old man knew many truths without needing to be told.

  Two days ago, Kocha had woken him before dawn and led him up and out of the valley. He gave no reason and Connor didn’t ask for one. They walked in the cold unfolding light across the gravel plain toward a great tower of jagged rock that rose from the desert like some ancient rusting citadel. It took them an hour to reach it and by then the rising sun had set its flanks aflame. And standing at its foot and gazing up at it and at the pair of black eagles that soared silently across its battlements, Connor somehow knew that there was a secret here to be divulged.

  They climbed for almost an hour, more through narrow twists and gullies with lizards skittering before them and watching with unblinking eyes from the shadows as they passed. The last gully was steep and treacherous and then suddenly the mountain opened like a flower and they were standing in a circular chamber of rock, one half shadowed and the other aglow like molten iron in the sun’s slant glare.

  The walls were ten or twelve feet tall and the floor was littered with rock. Connor figured that the place had once been a cave whose roof had since collapsed. The air was still and hot and the only sound was his own labored breathing. Kocha lifted an arm and
gestured toward the walls and for a moment, Connor didn’t understand why. He shielded his eyes from the sun and stepped closer.

  Then he saw. The walls were covered in paintings in black and red and white. There were animals of many kinds, elephant and giraffe and zebra, and lion and cheetah and leopard chasing them and men with spears and bows and arrows. And interlaced among them were patterns and symbols, some clearly inspired by the tracks of the various creatures but others more difficult to decipher. He asked Kocha what these others meant and the old man smiled and said that they were ancient maps of the desert, many centuries old, and that they depicted places where certain animals and plants were to be found and the rivers and water holes and landmarks, some long swallowed by the sand.

  Connor walked the circle of the walls with a mounting sense of wonder. The sun was at his back and his shadow moved slowly before him across the painted rock like a curtain of constant revelation. Then, at the exact point where the sunlit rock gave way to shadow, he saw an image that made him suddenly stop and his heart lurch and a shiver prickle the back of his neck.

  It was a painting of fire. There was a grove of burning trees and bushes, and standing before them, as if he had just emerged, was a horned animal. It was no doubt meant to be some kind of large antelope, a gemsbok perhaps, or a kudu. But it might as well have been an elk, for its horns and its coat were alive with flames.

  Connor stared at it in disbelief. He wanted to ask Kocha about it but it took some time before he could trust himself to speak.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ he said at last.

  Kocha replied in his own tongue, a single word with the clicking sound. But this time Connor didn’t attempt to repeat it. Kocha went on.

  ‘Maybe you would call it the Flame Spirit.’

  ‘Is it a good spirit or an evil one?’

  ‘It is neither good nor evil. Like fire itself. My people have a story which I will tell you. But now the day grows hot and we must go back to the shade of the valley.’

  Kocha didn’t tell him the story that night, as Connor had expected. Nor the next. And he began to wonder if the old man had forgotten. But he didn’t remind him, for in his heart there was a trace of fear that the story might turn out to be one that he would regret having heard.

  But now they had reached the ocean and their journey was all but done. And with the mantis shoe moon curving high across it and the chill air filled with the rhythmic thunder and draw of the waves, Kocha leaned forward and the glow of the fire glinted in his black eyes and unprompted he began.

  ‘Long ago, after Kaang made the world and every creature that lived there, he gave to men the gift of fire. But men grew greedy and disobedient and fought among themselves. So, to punish them, Kaang decided to take back his gift and he sent the Flame Spirit in the shape of a great kudu to run around and scoop all their fires onto his horns and bring them to him.

  ‘Tchue, who was a great hunter and leader of his people, saw Kudu doing this and shot him in the heart with his bow and arrow. Kaang was very angry and demanded that Tchue make amends by giving to Kudu his own heart. “But how am I to live without a heart?” Tchue asked. Kaang plucked a stone from the ground and said, “This shall be your heart.” So Tchue delivered up his heart and put the stone in its place and returned to his people.

  ‘But because the stone was so heavy, he could no longer hunt and feed his people and they turned against him and banished him. For many years he wandered alone, eating only flies and what the crows and the jackals left. One day Kaang spied him drinking from a river and, still angry with him, hurled a bolt of lightning at him. The bush all around Tchue caught fire and the only escape was across the river. The river flowed fast and dangerously. There were some stepping stones but the nearest one had been swept away. Tchue thought that if he used every last bit of his strength he might just be able to leap to the next one.

  ‘As he was about to jump he heard a terrible wailing and he looked down and there was a praying mantis sitting at the water’s edge. “Help me, help me!” he cried. “Or I will drown or perish in the fire!” Tchue offered to carry him, but warned him that even with the little extra weight, he might not be able to make the jump. “Then find another stone, you fool!” shouted the ungrateful mantis (who, of course, was really Kaang).

  ‘Tchue looked around but there were no stones to be seen and the fire was burning closer and closer. Then he remembered the stone that was his heart. And he took it from his chest and tossed it into the water to make the first stepping stone. Without so much as a thank-you, the mantis hopped onto it and scampered across all the other stones to the far side where he disappeared into the bush.

  ‘Tchue tried to follow, but because he now had no heart at all, he had not even the strength to make it to the first stone, his own heart. And he sank to his knees and prepared to die in the fire. Then, behind him, in the burning bushes, he heard a sound and he looked up and saw the Flame Spirit, with his blazing horns, standing over him. He had been sent by Kaang and he gathered Tchue up and put him on his back and carried him over the river to safety.

  ‘And because Tchue had shown such great courage and generosity, Kaang forgave him and broke off a piece of Kudu’s fiery horn and placed it in his chest for a heart. And Tchue went home to his people and they welcomed him as a great hero. And, with Kaang’s blessing, he lit their fires again with his heart.

  ‘And that is why when you see a kudu, you will notice how his horns have been twisted by the heat and that he bears the mark of the flames upon his sides.’

  He paused awhile and smiled and looked deep into Connor’s eyes.

  ‘I think maybe you know this story.’

  Connor shook his head.

  ‘Not until now. Thank you.’

  They sat for a long time staring into the embers of the fire and spoke no more. Before they turned in, they stacked the fire with the rest of the driftwood. The wind had dropped and the flames rose without waver into the night and the two men stood back and watched. Just as the fire was settling, Kocha gently touched him on the elbow and made a little gesture with his chin and Connor turned and looked where he was bade. It took a while for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. But then he saw it. Some thirty yards along the shore, beyond the moonlit cage of the whale’s bones, a lion stood staring back at them with mirrored eyes.

  He was an old male and even by the modest light of moon and fire, Connor could see that his coat and mane were past their prime. But his manner more than made up for it and he studied them both with a regal disdain, swishing his tail from side to side. How long they stayed like that, Connor couldn’t say, for time seemed suspended. Then, with a final flourish of his tail, the lion turned and made his stately way up the shore and into the dunes.

  At the edge of darkness he stopped and stared back at them one last time over his shoulder. And then he turned away and was gone.

  25

  Julia put on the leather gauntlets, lowered the visor of her hardhat and picked up the chainsaw.

  ‘Okay, buddy. Keep that rope taut, do you hear?’

  Amy nodded. She was standing about twelve feet away, holding onto the other end of the rope that was attached to the post that Julia was about to cut down. She leaned back and took the strain and grinned.

  ‘What are you smirking at?’ Julia said.

  ‘You. You look so funny.’

  ‘I think I look pretty darned cool.’

  ‘You look hot. You’re all sweaty and yucky.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Missy Prissy. Okay, get ready.’

  She yanked the cord and the chainsaw spluttered and roared into life. It was a hot August afternoon and she was indeed all sweaty and yucky. A job that she had expected to take a couple of hours had taken almost the whole day. They were removing the posts of the old rope rail that Ed had always used to find his way to the river. But they had found them so securely rooted in cement that each one required a major excavation. Amy had suggested they simply cut the posts as cl
ose to the ground as possible and leave the cement footings in the ground. But Julia wanted to dig them out. Otherwise they would forever be tripping over the stumps.

  Starting down by the river, they had worked their way up toward the house, refining their teamwork and technique as they went. The post through which Julia was sawing now was the last. The symbolic significance of the job wasn’t lost on either of them.

  People were full of wise advice about the big issues that surrounded the death of a loved one. There were books galore about the importance of proper mourning and about the open resolution of grief and guilt and anger. But it was the little things, the trivial details, that Julia found so perplexing. When was the right time to remove Ed’s coats from the pegs by the door? And his muddy boots and his cane from the corner? And should she discuss it with Amy or do it furtively so that they could both pretend not to have noticed? Perhaps time alone was the judge of these things.

  The first six months had been a matter of plain survival for both of them. When the shock wave of Ed’s death subsided, it left Julia feeling oddly separate from everyone and everything but Amy. They clove to each other like abandoned creatures in a nest and when Julia peeped out at the world it was as if she saw it through a cold haze. She had always known, of course, that Ed’s life hung by thinner strings than most, that with his diabetes there was always the chance of some perverse and potentially fatal new glitch. But she realized now that deep down she had always thought of the likelihood as remote, almost academic, like the chance of life being discovered on another planet. Perhaps she had done this to protect herself and Amy. Or perhaps it was because Ed’s lust for life, his energy and optimism were simply so great that they masked the reality, for how could a man so vividly alive be at any real risk?