There was no greater honour, in the tribe that I was raised in, than to run at the back of the hunt.
Normally it was a position that was only given out to boys. But sometimes there was a girl in the world who was faster, stronger, and more dangerous, and then she might be chosen, if the gods and the fates reached out to her.
Even when I was very young, I was marked out as a runner. My father would let me come out for the start of the long hunt, and then send me home with the old men.
“Only a little,” he said, “until your bones are set.”
From when I was ten, he let me run with them all day, only going back at the very end, while the final four runners went on. More and more, I was still strong at the end of the hunt. I was a runner, and one day soon I would be a great one.
Then one morning, I felt it. I felt it in the wind, and the way the branches moved in it. I felt it in the way my father looked back at me as we walked up onto the ridgeway in the early morning light.
I was dressed in my hunting strips, my small breasts bound down. My feet were bare: we run barefoot in my country. On my back I carried my bow and arrows; on one ankle my skinning knife; over one shoulder my waterskin. I felt strong and good, each toe sure upon the sandy path.
At the top of the ridge, we paused for a moment to scan the grass plains below. There were ten hunters there that morning, and with us four dogs, but we were one creature as we stood there, eyes sharp for distant movement.
My father turned to me and said: “Will you run at the back today, Ninshubar?”
I tipped my head to one side, careful to seem nonchalant.
“I will run at the back,” I said. “If the gods will run with me.”
It was the most glorious moment of my life.
* * *
We dropped down off the ridge onto the savannah as the sky above us lit up pink. The air was cool and sweet upon my face and in my lungs.
I was the first to see the kudu: dark shapes to the south. They like to stay close to bushland, but this group had wandered out onto the plain, greedy for the new grass.
I made a sign at my father and then all of us broke into a slow run, the dogs fanning out to the east and west.
For the first time in my life, I did not try to push to the front. Instead, I was careful to stay well back, running easy, soft and loose upon the earth.
It was my father who picked the animal. We would take the bull. He was magnificent, but in the last season of his life. The dogs carved him out from his herd, and he veered into a stand of acacia.
After that we were in thick bush, and dappled sunlight. We darted between trees and shrubs, thorns underfoot in the sandy earth.
For a long time, I lost sight of the hunting party, only following their tracks.
This was my job today: to stay back, to stay fresh.
When the sun had wheeled up into the sky, the two oldest hunters appeared before me; they were squatting under a tree, in a scrap of true shade. As I ran past, they handed me the last of their water, and small strips of dried meat. “One step and then the next!” they called to me.
One step and then the next.
I drank their water, tying the empty skins to my belt as I ran, and I ate their dried meat. I felt the gods in my belly and my bones, the ancient owners of this sandy path I ran upon, and the low green trees I ran through, and the blue above.
One by one, the men ahead fell out, and I would find them standing on the track before me, holding out to me the last of whatever supplies they had. I handed over the empty waterskins I was carrying, and took what they had, and ran on, never coming to a stop.
As the heat faded from the day, the leader of the dogs, a lean-boned female, dropped back to look at me, one hard eye upon me, and then ran on between the trees and out of my sight.
One step and then the next.
Not long after I saw my father standing ahead in the trees, with the last of the hunters beside him. “It is only you now,” he said. “We will follow on slowly.”
“I am strong,” I said, and ran straight past them without slowing.
* * *
Now it was only the hoof marks of the kudu: no human prints ahead on the path. His steps were shortening; he was slowing. The dogs were exhausted, after running their pincer movement upon the kudu for so many hours, and they began to drop back to run alongside me. Their leader kept her hard eye upon me, which made me smile.
“Have some faith in me!” I called to her.
For the first time, I thought I heard the kudu, a low rumbling sound in the gathering dusk. I slowed to a walk and made the sign to the dogs, to stay where they were. Then I walked on alone.
In a glade, upon spring grass, stood the kudu, his sides heaving.
He was a huge animal: as tall as me at the shoulder. His striped coat, up close, was of a grey that was almost blue, with flashes of deep black and a bright russet.
When he sensed me walking in on him, he lay down, first his forelegs, and then his hind. Finally, he put his snow-white chin down upon the grass.
I walked carefully around him, and kneeled. How huge and black his eyes were, and how brilliantly white the streak below them. We were so close, I could smell his musky scent.
We looked at each other a while, and then I laid down my bow and arrows, and said the death prayers to see him well in the heavens. He breathed very slowly, seeming to settle into the earth.
I stood then, fixing an arrow to my bow, and I shot him in the soft skin that hung from his neck. He seemed not to feel it.
As his blood flowed down into the earth, I said again the death prayers, for a life well lived, and well given. When the light went out of his gorgeous black eyes, I put my hand to his neck and dabbed blood onto my cheeks.
Then I sat there for a while as the light went out of the day, sad to my bones for the end of this beautiful creature’s life.
Only the dogs creeping up broke my meditation. Behind them came my father. He leaned down, and kissed me on the head.
“The runner at the back,” he said.
That was the second most glorious moment of my life.
* * *
There was a great feast the next day, at our dry season camp. My father drank the sacred sap, and afterwards, before all the tribe, he said to me: “Ninshubar, when I am gone, you will be leader here.”
I felt pride at the idea of this, but also sadness, at the idea of my father being gone. But then I caught my mother’s eyes upon me, and felt something else.
I had always been the strongest and most able of her daughters. I was exceptionally tall, which is valued highly in my country. I was clever, and kind. I was a superb linguist. And I was beautiful, too. All the boys liked to put their eyes on me, and then slowly slide them off. There was no girl with whiter teeth, or brighter eyes, or blacker skin, within four days’ walk.
My reward, for my beauty and wide-ranging excellence, had been the unremitting hatred of my mother and my sisters. They spat up feathers of jealousy as I grew more wonderful and powerful with age. But what was that to me? I learned to brush the feathers off me.
Now, by the light of the campfire, I saw something else in my mother’s eyes.
She wanted to hurt me.
There was no mistaking it.
I wondered for the first time what that might mean for me.