From Waiting For Bones

“Wait here,” the guide said.

Then he stepped down from the Land Cruiser and set off on a path so sketchy it might not have been a path at all. The four passengers, seated two-by-two in ascending rows behind the front seat, watched puffs of dust explode behind his boots as he stalked away. Bones, the guide, had never left them alone out there—not for a minute.

They were parked beneath a colossal baobab tree that thrust itself up from parched sub-Saharan earth. The sun had only moments before breached the horizon and begun its assault on the cold morning air. Sitting in the roofless, wide-open vehicle in zipped up jackeds they would soon fling away, the travelers stared at their leader’s rapidly receding back, alert for any clue to his unexplained departure.

The land around them appeared spare and endless. Random clusters of flat-topped vegetation measured a foot in height—or twenty—and stood a few yards away—or a mile—perspective being the first casualty of a vast, alien wilderness. To gaze into the distant dawn was to feel as small as an insect. Yet a short drive in any direction could change the landscape entirely, from wide open bushveld to dense, riverine woodland or muddy, croc-infested delta.

“He’s going for a smoke,” Todd said, squinting into the middle range. He was leaning forward with his kneecaps hard against the back of the vacated driver’s seat. “Bones smokes, you know.”