She reached the point at which the public road, untarred and dusty, a track really, entered the confines of the dam area. Now the road turned to the east and followed the base of the dam wall until it swung round in the direction of the Notwane River and Otse beyond. It was a rough road, scraped flat now and then by the Water Department grader but given to potholes and corrugated ridges. She did not push the tiny white van on such roads, and stuck to a steady fifteen miles per hour, which would give her time to stop should she see too deep a hole in the road or should some wild animal dash out of cover and run across her path. And there were many animals here; she spotted a large kudu bull standing under an acacia tree, its horns spiralling up a good four feet. She saw duiker too, and a family of warthogs scuttling off into the inadequate cover of the sparse thorn bush. There were dassies, rock hyrax, surprised in the open and running frantically for the shelter of their familiar rocks; as a girl, she had possessed a kaross made of the skins of these small creatures sewn together end to end, little patches of silky-smooth fur that had been draped across her sleeping mat and into which she had snuggled on cold nights. She wondered where that kaross was now; worn to the very leather, perhaps, abandoned, surviving as a few scraps of something, traces of a childhood which was so long ago.

Halfway along the dam, the road opened out onto a large clearing where somebody, a few years earlier, had tried to set up a public picnic ground. The attempt had been abandoned, but the signs of the effort were still there—a small breeze-block structure with Ladies painted on one end and Gentlemen on the other, the lettering still just discernible; now, with the roof off and half the walls down, the two sexes were jumbled up together in democratic ruin. And beyond that, over a token wall, now toppling over in places and never more than a couple of feet high, was a children’s playground. The ants had eaten the wooden support posts of the swings and these had fallen and been encased in crumbling termite casts; a piece of flat metal, which could have been the surface of a slide, lay rusted in a clump of blackjack weeds; there was an old braaivleis site, now just a pile of broken bricks, picked clean by human scavengers of anything that could be used to make a shack somewhere.