On her heel, the black scythe of the hallux. On her right calf, she bore the tattooed scales of an eagle’s claw, the triple talons inked over the bones of her foot. Malaya made nearly no sound, willing herself into something light-footed, predatory, a creature elided into the bush. The shed limbs could burn nightlong, warding off creatures of the dark. Here was the tree that some called the great ancestor of all beasts and men. They stepped lightly through the sun-yellowed brush, into the shadow of a leadwood tree. The squad of rangers had stepped down from the Land Cruiser and entered the bush on foot, following Big John in his oversized green fatigues, a long blade of grass hanging from his teeth like an unlit cigarette.īig John rose and waved them onward now, toward the squeals, spitting out the blade of grass. A hole had been cut in the wire, the snipped ends snarled outward where men-three of them, said Big John-had slithered into the reserve. Malaya’s team had found a break in the fence just before sunrise, the dawn light puddled in bootprints that crossed the road. Such a moon drew men like worms from the earth, and they came with guns and knives and saws. The moon was still visible, fat as a spotlamp, hovering low over the green canopies of the acacias. The spikelets rocked back and forth beneath his free hand, tickling his palm. He was bent to the red grass- rooigras-reading the way it had been canted, the passage of beasts and men. It was an old revolver, patinaed like a grandfather’s hand-me-down, overlarge in his small dark fist. In front of her, the tracker, Big John, had his pistol out.

Only her nostrils moved, flaring like little wings. Her gloves were fingerless, the knuckles padded to protect her fists.Īnother squeal, heart-sharp against the white rising sun. Malaya pushed the bridge of her sunglasses higher beneath her camouflage ball cap. It sang across the acacia trees, the veld of bunchgrass and thorny bushes. The first squeal split the air like a fault line, a fracture in the world.

Pride of eden by taylor brown