Back in Mozambique, Simon laced his new boots as the truck jounced through his small town in the miombo woodland. Plastic and paper trash lined the road.

The workers passed around a loaf of white bread and a two-liter bottle of Fanta. Simon politely declined when they came his way. The men were skinny, with jaundiced eyes. Simon suspected that like many of the adults in the region, they had contracted Henry the Fourth, or the “slow puncture,” as HIV was now called.

They stopped at a small thatched hut about two kilometers outside the village. The driver waited in the truck as the two men in the back got out. Simon elected to stay in the truck, fearing what lay inside the eerie hovel. The two men told him to get out and follow them into the hut. Simon had passed the hut before but had never gone inside. It was the home of Inyanga, the local sangoma, or traditional healer.

Inside, the hut smelled strongly of marijuana from a large joint that was smoldering in a tray. On the wall, a leopard skin hung next to a crucifix. The shelves were filled with muti, traditional medicines, stored in repurposed plastic bottles and glass jars. The hut brimmed with an indiscriminate hodgepodge of Christian, Muslim, and African religious paraphernalia that had found their way into the sangoma’s practice.

Inyanga sat cross-legged on the dirt in the center of the room. Her face was caked in some sort of magical brown powder, or perhaps it was simply dirt—Simon couldn’t tell. Her large bare breasts hung pendulously at her waist, and her torso was crisscrossed by white and red strings and long beaded necklaces. In her hand, she held a staff decorated with paint and some long hair of unknown provenance. She reignited the marijuana as the leader of Simon’s group told her of their plans and requested her protection.

When he had finished, Inyanga emptied a jar into her hands, revealing a mix of bone fragments, bolts, bottle caps, half a domino, and a red die. She cupped the odd collection in her hands then tossed it all on the mat before her.

Inyanga read the bones and sighed deeply at what they revealed. She informed the men that their journey could be fruitful, but they would need help from the spirits. “You will need to be invisible,” she said, or they would surely perish.

She told the men that she needed to perform a ceremony and give them special strings that would cloak them on their journey so that they would go unnoticed by anti-poaching units. She assured the men that the particular strings she would provide had made numerous trips over the border and had always returned without incident. The power of invisibility would cost them the small fee of two hundred meticals up front, and when they returned, they would owe her 10 percent of their profits, as well as the tail of whatever creature they killed.