A wild yell rose, on a different note, not rage or excitement, but pain. Those in the water rushed ashore. Two of them dragged a third. Blood streamed down his side. His left arm was missing, almost to the shoulder. The shark had attacked. Hunter and hunted had changed places again.
Sharks can smell blood a long way off. They race towards its source. The odour drives them mad.
All its terror forgotten, the killer threshed round the bay. It sensed the male on the rock and circled below him. It drove its snout into the air almost to his feet. Then it broke off and dashed towards the place where the water reeked most strongly. Though they were safe on shore, the tribe scattered before it.
Quietly, the child watched. There was no answer, she saw, until either the shark died, or escaped. For it to escape there must be a big tide and no wind. But the tribe were also trapped until the wind dropped. And now they couldn’t even forage for the scant pickings in the bay. Unless they could kill the shark they would starve before it did.
Out of nowhere the answer came into her mind.
The shark’s mad rushes had a pattern. It surged towards the patch of blood-tainted water, found nothing there, sensed the live meat on the shore and slid along beside it, then remembered in its slow brain about the other meat, trapped on the rock, almost in reach, and hurtled out there, circling for a while until a waft of blood-smell drew it on another frenzied rush towards the shore.
It had found its victim below and to the left of where the child was sitting. Here a ridge of rock sloped down into the water and became the bar at the mouth of the bay, with a wide shelf running beside it for some distance below the surface. It had caught its prey in the corner between the shelf and the shore. This was the place it made for each time.
Unnoticed, the child made her way down to the water’s edge and waited, watching the fin circle the rock. The snout nuzzled up towards her uncle. The toothed mouth gaped. Then the fin came slicing through the water towards her. She ran down on to the submerged shelf to meet it.
The tribe screamed. The shark saw her. The fin curved from its path, heading straight at her. At the last instant she flung herself aside.
All her life, since she could paddle, she’d played catch-as-catch-can in and out of the water. She knew what she could do, but hadn’t realized the shark’s speed and power. If its charge hadn’t been slowed by the slope of the rock, it would have caught her. As it was, she was knocked flat by the rush of its attack, which carried the streamlined body on up the slope right to the water’s edge where it lay stranded, its gills in the air, its tail thrashing at the shallows behind it.
Gabbling and calling, the tribe gathered to watch it die. The child’s uncle came swimming across to stand with one foot on the still twitching body, shouting triumph and punching his fists into the air, as if it had been he who’d steered it on to the rock and killed it. The tribe shouted Praise. Gulls gathered above, joining their screams to the racket.
Without tools, apart from the stones they used to break crabs and shellfish open, it took time for the tribe to gnaw and claw their way through the tough skin of the belly, but they did it in the end. Their leader wanted to organize the sharing-out of meat, but the child’s uncle outfaced him and drove him back, taking the honour himself, allotting big pieces of liver to senior males and the mothers of new-born young. Then the families squabbled around the carcase, but without anger because they could see there was enough for everyone. Even the children slept that night with crammed stomachs.
The child who had watched from the rock got her share. Her mother had cuffed her for her stupidity and she had whimpered Sorry because that was expected of her, but as she lay among the crowded bodies in one of the caves, unable to sleep because of the mass of meat inside her, she relived the adventure. She knew what she had done, and why. She understood that it had not been an accident. She realized, too, that the others would not understand.
She had no words for this knowledge. Thought and understanding for her were a kind of seeing. She showed herself things in her mind – the rock-shelf, the shallow water, the need to lure the shark full-tilt on to the slope so that it would force itself out too far, and strand, and die; then her uncle triumphing and her mother scolding and herself cringing while she hugged her knowledge inside her.
Now she seemed to herself to be standing apart in the cave, seeing by the moonlight reflected from the bay one small body curled among the mass of sleepers. A thought which had neither words nor pictures made itself in her mind.
Different.
She’s different. Yes, I’m different.
NOW: SUNDAY MORNING
THE TRUCK WALLOWED along the gravelly road, if you could call it a road. Often there was nothing to mark it off from the rest of the brown, enormous plain, but Dad knew where he was because then there’d be tyre-ruts making the truck wallow worse than ever. Vinny clutched the handgrip on the dash to stop herself being thrown around. They’d done two hours from the airport, though it seemed longer, when Dad stopped by a flat-topped tree with a lot of grassy bundles hanging among the branches. Weaver-birds, Vinny guessed. She’d seen them on TV.
‘Ready for lunch?’ he said.
‘I’m starving. How much further?’
‘We’re a bit over half-way. But look.’
He pointed and Vinny stared through the shimmer of heat. Far off there were blue hills. Much nearer something moved, changed shape, vanished as the wavering air distorted the distance, and then was there again, steady for a moment – three long, slightly arching necks with small heads. She’d known them since she was tiny, from the Noah’s Ark frieze round her room.
‘Giraffes,’ she said.
‘Right.’
‘Are there any lions?’
‘They’ll be resting till it gets a bit cooler. Take a good look. We don’t get much wildlife round the camp, because we’re on the edge of the badlands.’
‘Why’s it all so flat?’
‘Because it was sea until a few million years ago. Those hills used to be the shoreline. In fact the section the camp’s on seems to have been an island. Seen enough?’
He drove into the shade of the tree and fetched crates from the back of the truck for them to sit on while Vinny unpacked the lunch. Crisps, Coke, chicken sandwiches, mangoes and a Mars Bar.
‘I hope that’s the sort of thing you like,’ he said.
‘I like anything.’
She sensed that he was as nervous as she was. They hadn’t seen each other for over a year, and never before like this. It had always been London hotels, visits to the zoo or the planetarium, jerky talk about school and her friends and what she liked doing, both of them jumpy with having to watch what they said because of the anger between him and Mum, still there, still no better, eight years after the split.
He ate in silence. Vinny was ready for this. That was one of the things Mum couldn’t cope with, his silences. Whole days sometimes, she’d said. A complete skiing holiday once. The obvious thing was to be silent too, but Mum wouldn’t have known how.
The cooling engine clicked. The weaver-birds accepted their presence and began to move and chatter. An ant the size of a button came and dragged away a crumb of bread.
‘You’re not tired?’ he said for about the fifth time.
‘I’m fine. But listen, Dad. It’s going to be all right. And if it isn’t, then it’s my fault. It was all my idea.’
‘So I gathered. Your mother . . .’
He didn’t try to keep the sourness out of his laugh.
‘Colin talked her round,’ she said. ‘It makes going to Grasse a lot easier for them, you see – they don’t have to bother about what I want, only them and the boys. You know, Mum was still trying to make me join an Outward Bound course or something till you said we couldn’t go on a safari after all because you’d got to go on working, and you thought I’d be bored. That made it all right.’