He looked down at the ground and began his examination. There were prints which he could rule out at the outset: his own, to begin with; the marks of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni’s veldschoens—a flat footprint reflecting soft rubber soles; then there were Mma Ramotswe’s footprints, one set more recent than the other, because she had walked around the van the night before, immediately after it had broken down. Then there were other prints—a pair of boots that had walked along a path that joined the track from the right. The boots had been accompanied by a set of bare feet, small in size and therefore the feet of a child, perhaps, or of a small woman. That pair of boots had walked round and round in a circle and had then stopped and done something near the oil stain. After that, the boots had gone off and, yes, they had come back with another set of prints. Mr Polopetsi bent down and looked at the confusion of spoor: boots, tyres (small tyre prints—the prints of the tiny white van itself), and then, quite unmistakably, the prints of donkey hoofs. Yes! thought Mr Polopetsi. And then, yes! again.

He stood up and stretched. It was uncomfortable bending down like that, but it was the only thing to do when one was tracking. One had to get down to that level, to see the world from the point of view of the grains of sand and the blades of grass. It was another world down there, a world of ants and tiny crusts of earth, like miniature mountain ridges, but it was a world that could tell you a great deal about the world of a few feet up; all you had to do was ask it.

He stooped down again and began to move off, following the donkey spoor. This went up the road a short way and then turned off to the right, in the same direction as the path down which the pair of boots had walked. Now, in the ground between the shrubs, the picture was becoming much clearer. There had been much activity on the track itself; now the donkeys, inspanned to the tiny white van, had pulled their burden across undisturbed ground and the tracks were tell-tale. The donkeys—and there had been four of them, concluded Mr Polopetsi—had been led, whipped no doubt, by the man in boots and behind them, moving over at least some of the donkey tracks and obliterating them—had come the tiny white van itself. There must have been somebody else sitting at the wheel and steering the van as it was pulled along. Of course that was the pair of bare feet—a boy no doubt. Yes, the boy had steered while his father drove the donkeys. That is what had happened.