![]() By the sound of the man's voice, he could not be more than two dozen yards away, but he might as well have been in Timbuktu. In fact, Paul noted, one of its residents was dying very slowly indeed. Red fog, gray earth, sky the color of old bones: Paul Jonas was in hell-but it was a very special hell. The torn earth, the skeletal trees, and Paul himself had all been abundantly spattered by the slow-falling mist that followed hundreds of pounds of red-hot metal exploding in a crowd of human beings. He had lost Finch and Mullet and the rest of the platoon somewhere in the chaos of retreat-he hoped they'd made it safely into some other part of the trenches, but it was hard to think about anything much beyond his own few cubits of misery. Private Jonas did not feel much like eating, anyway.Įxcept for a brief moment of terrified retreat across a patch of muddy ground cratered and desolate as the moon, Paul Jonas had spent all of this twenty-fourth day of March, 1918, as he had spent the three days before, and most of the past several months-crouched shivering in cold, stinking slime somewhere between Ypres and St Quentin, deafened by the skull-rattling thunder of the German heavy guns, praying reflexively to Something in which he no longer believed. In a normal world, it would have been time for breakfast, but apparently breakfast was not served in hell the bombardment that had begun before dawn showed no signs of letting up. ![]() My intent is primarily to tell a story, but if the story leads some readers to learn more about the Bushmen, and about a way of life that none of us can afford to ignore, I will be very happy. If I have offended or exploited, I have failed. However I have trimmed the truth, I have done my best to make the spirit of my portrayal accurate. One of my most dubious bits of truth-manipulation may turn out to be the simple assertion that there will be anyone left pursuing the hunter-gatherer life in the bush by the middle of the twenty-first century. Fiction has its own demands.īut the Bushmen's old ways are indeed disappearing fast. I have simplified and sometimes transposed Bushman thoughts and songs and stories. ![]() The Bushmen do not have a monolithic folklore-each area and sometimes each extended family can sustain its own quite vibrant myths-or a single culture. I freely admit that I have taken great liberties in my portrayal of Bushman life and beliefs in this novel. The aboriginal people of Southern Africa are known by many names-San, Basarwa, Remote Area Dwellers (in current government-speak), and, more commonly, Bushmen. ![]()
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