Derek was lost in a place of half-light, flailing between the glow of the waking world and the shadows of his dreams. Part of him seemed to recall that he was lying somewhere out in the bush on his hammock, slung between two small trees, but that was all he was certain of. The remaining information seemed blurred and distorted, as if projected through an old stained-glass window. Beyond his eyelids something bright and engorged flared in the darkness. Something that was too alive to be the sun. Forcing himself awake, he felt his eyes burn in the face of a strong and acrid wind. He sat up, coughing, and turned towards the light.
What he saw made utterly no sense to him. Praying it was a stain spilt from his dream, he clambered to his feet.
But it wasn’t. The entire horizon was on fire; church steeples of flame clawed at the night sky. He felt his hands drop to his waist as though dead. The blaze was rushing at them from the south, less than half a mile away. As he watched the runaway inferno devour trees and leap thirty or even forty feet in a single stride, his attention turned to Shawu. To his relief, she was standing only a few yards to his right, her great body outlined in an orange glow. He snatched up the hammock and quickly stuffed it into his bag. A bush fire in hot and dry conditions was dangerous enough, he knew, but one fuelled by a powerful wind was something almost biblical. The sky was awash with panicked birds and bats, darting in every direction. When his eyes returned to the blaze, it had stolen another thirty yards at least. Large ribbons of ash, as if the heavens were peeling from the heat, fell over them like twists of blackened sawdust.
As the fire rushed forward, turning life to death, Derek slowly backed away. ‘Shawu!’ he shouted, unable to disguise the fear in his voice. ‘We’ve got to move … now!’
As they turned away, the fire watched them go.
And then followed.
Together with glimpses of buck and other fleeing shadows, Derek charged through the thick brush, trying to keep up with Shawu’s loping strides. Behind him the fire surged through the trees. He was moving as fast as he could, faster than he thought he was capable of, but still the red wall was gaining on them. Dry branches stabbed at his face and arms and a bitter smoke filled his lungs. Choking, he twice stumbled and fell, but immediately launched back onto his feet. To succumb to injury now would be to die.
As he pumped his arms, chasing over heavy and uneven ground, he knew that unlike the blaze his pace would soon relent. There was simply no way he could sustain the same breakneck speed. He was no match for a runaway bush fire. Nobody was. To survive, they would need a miracle. Nothing short of a violent thunderstorm, an instant deluge, or maybe an open field could spare them now. More out of hope than expectation, he looked up to the heavens but there were no clouds above them, no miraculous salvation. Only black smoke against the unblinking black eye of space.
As the strength seeped from his legs, he could no longer keep pace with Shawu. She eased away from him, her glowing shadow fading away into the night. He glanced over his shoulder and watched as fire spirals, like burning staircases, twisted towards him. Spittle from the inferno, carried like flaming seeds in the wind, gusted overhead and landed on the ground in front of him, spawning new fires. The blaze was surrounding him.
We’re not going to make it, he thought.
As the infant flames suckled at the dry grass, the inferno was now barely two hundred yards away. His eyes darted to Shawu and he realised, to his horror, that she had stopped and was looking back for him.
‘What’re you doing?’ he whispered. ‘Run, Shawu!’ he called out, gesturing wildly with his arms. ‘Run!’
She lifted up her front legs and drove them into the ground.
If she was trying to tell him something, he wasn’t getting it. He cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed again. ‘Get out of here! Go!’
Waving her trunk, she turned to her left and began to pan sideways – parallel to the blaze.
No, Derek thought. What the hell was she thinking? Her only chance was to push ahead, hoping for a section of rock, a thinning of the bush. Unless, it suddenly occurred to him, she was heading for water.
Ignoring his heaving chest and protesting muscles, he took off after her. He could hear tree bark and seedpods popping behind him. The fire was now a hundred yards away. He could feel its hot breath on his neck, feel it sucking at the air around him.
Sixty yards.
‘C’mon … c’mon … c’mon …’
Fifty.
He coughed again and blinked hard as the smoke burnt his eyes. They had to find water now or it was all over. And then, at the critical moment, something almost inconceivable happened: Shawu drew to a halt.
‘What?’ Derek said, his lips parting in disbelief. ‘What?’ He raised his hands to his head and watched, numbly, as the great elephant stood perfectly still, scanning the bush ahead of them.
He spun around. A wave of blue-and-red flame rose up towards them. Mesmerised, terrified, he was waiting for it to topple onto them when Shawu lurched forward. She charged through a patch of thick brush and small trees, her immense body clearing a path for him.
Derek turned and gave one last push. Either way, this was it. As he ran, the grass around his legs lit up like strings of detonator chord. He could feel the flames snapping at his clothes, snatching at his exposed flesh, when he noticed something.
The terrain was thinning out. The trees and tall grass were giving way to shorter brush and … what was that, his mind suddenly registered … mud? He glanced up in time to see Shawu descend down a shallow slope and then – he could hear her splashing through water.
His heart soared. He pushed his body for all it had left and then, somehow, he was splashing through a shallow lake no larger than a modest back yard. The choppy water was now a fractured mirror to the flames behind them. He quickly swam out into its centre, a few yards in front of Shawu, and turned to face the fire. He watched, breathlessly, as it did something impossible. Sailing on the back of the powerful wind, it arched its back over the small lake, reaching for the trees beyond it. For a few dreamlike moments the night was replaced by a spectacular fire sky. A blistering roof of molten flame that forced him to hunker down in the water.
And then, within a few fevered moments, it was over.
Having hurdled the lake, the fire rapidly swept past them. Smoke hissed from scorched trees and charred swathes of stubby grass, but the murderous red-and-yellow jags were rapidly disappearing into the valley beyond them. And just as the water had been a mirror to the flames, now the sky was a reflection of the burnt land left in its wake.
A wasteland of the dead.