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me.
    They put down their tea and put their bread over the top of the cup so that flies would not drown in their tea and they frowned at me. But they would not look downthere.
    “Owie, owie.”
    But “Not there,” said Snake, “I can’t look there.” He picked up his bread, wafted the flies off his peels of butter, and began to drink his tea again. But the spell had been broken for him. The moment of peace in the morning was ruined by me and my bitten, burning downthere.
    Violet hid her mouth behind her hand and giggled.

    Bobo and Van
    I would have to wait for my mother to get home from her ride.
    “It was a spider,” said Snake.
    “Or a scorpion,” said Violet, taking a bite of bread and a mouthful of tea.
    “A scorpion?” I screamed louder.
    “Maybe a little snake.” The cook shut his eyes.
    I tugged at Violet. “A snake? A snake!”
    Violet shook me off and quickly swallowed her tea and bread without enjoyment. Glaring at me angrily as if I were giving her a stomachache.
    “Help me! Owie, man!” I wondered if I was going to die.
    I said, “Look in my brookies! Please help me!” But Violet looked disgusted and Snake looked away.
    I lay on the floor in the kitchen and screamed, holding my shorts, writhing and waiting to die from the poison of whatever had bitten me.
    When Mum came back from her ride I ran to her before she could even slip off the horse, stripping down my shorts and crying, “I’ve been bitten! I’m going to die!”
    “What nonsense,” said Mum. She dismounted and handed the reins to the groom.
    “On my downthere. ”
    “Bobo!”
    “A scorp or a snake, I swear, I swear.”
    Mum pressed her lips together. “Oh, fergodsake. ” She pulled at my wrist. “Pull up your shorts,” she hissed.
    “But it’s owie, man.”
    “Not in front of the servants,” she said. She dragged me into the sitting room and shut the door. “Never, ever pull down your shorts in front of an African again.”
    “Owie!”
    “Do you hear me?”
    “ Ja, ja! Oh it hurts!”
    She bent down and tugged at the soft, bitten skin.
    “There,” she said, presenting me with a tiny tick pressed between her forefingers, “all that fuss for a little tick.”
    “What?”
    “See?” The tick waved its legs at me in salute. It still had a mouthful of pink skin, my pink skin, in its jaws. “Nothing to get your knickers in a twist about.”
    I shook my head and wiped my nose on my arm.
    “Now go and find Violet and tell her to wash your face,” said Mum. She pressed the tick between her nails until it popped, my blood bursting out of the tick and staining the tips of Mum’s fingers.
    That’s how I remember Karoi. And the dust-stinging wind blowing through the mealies on a hot, dry September night. And a fold-up and rip-away lawn prickled with paper thorns. And the beginning of the army guys: men in camouflage, breaking like a ribbon out of the back of an army lorry and uncurling onto the road, heads shaved, faces fresh and blank. Men cradling guns. And the beginning of men not in camouflage anymore, looking blank-faced, limbs lost.

Bobo and Van
    THE BURMA VALLEY
    The central vein of Rhodesia rises up into a plateau called the Great Dyke. It is where most of the country’s population have chosen to stay. The edges of the country tend toward extreme heat, flat heartless scrub, droughts, malaria. The central vein is fertile. Rhododendrons will grow here. Horses will gleam with fat, shiny coats. Children look long-limbed, high-browed, intelligent. Vitamin sufficient.
    And then, in the east, beyond Salisbury, there is a thin, strangled hump, a knotted fist of highlands. And there if you look carefully, nestled into the sweet purple-colored swellings, where it is almost always cool, and the air is sharp and wholesome with eucalyptus and pine, and where there are no mosquitoes, is a deep, sudden valley. (The map plunges from purple to pink then orange and yellow to indicate one’s descent into heat and flatness and