It was surprize that had made him step back, not yet twenty-four hours ago, when he had the woman under the tree. He had heard babies cry before, but remotely and without attention, hearing them as an off-key undertone in the bigger, bloodier sounds of life. But this one, coming then, the thin discordancies of it drifting up like stale smoke from the holes punched in the lid of the shoebox, those were so unexpected, so alien to his purpose and the meaning of that moment, that it had startled him. A lot was in the balance. The conspiracy of that night was almost hatched. The woman had brought it a step nearer fulfilment when she forced the box into his hands. The baby had taken it further still crying, because if it had stopped he would have surely heard the frightened footsteps receding in the night and that sound would have quickened him like a cat at play. But instead he held the box, heard only the baby, and felt it squirm inside, and inside himself a strange, nameless fear. The last detail in the plot was the lid falling off, because then he saw it, the hands adrift in the small boxed world like anemones in a dead sea, the head rolling from side to side, the mouth open like a black hole in its hideous grimace at life, the legs furtive and quick in their kicks as if it still felt the confines of its mother’s womb. That moment the night was beyond repeal.

Suddenly, very sharply, and with more pain than he had ever felt before in his life, light stabbed his darkness and he remembered.

The memory was of a dog, a bitch, a yellow bitch, and he knew definitely that it came crawling towards him, he thought possibly in great pain, but certainly crawling. There was at times even the sound of a whimper as she came crawling slowly, and as he thought, in great pain, crawling almost to him, very close, so that he could see her eyes, and in them the thought he had of pain. Then, just when it was certain that something was going to happen, the image blurred and faded and his darkness rolled in.

A yellow bitch crawling in pain…that much he could remember, and with a clarity that even the innumerable times he had called it up since the trees had not faded by the slightest detail. A yellow bitch, crawling, in pain…nothing had ever been as sharp in its effect on him, no pain, no pleasure, no event in the years since that certain moment when he had found himself alive and inwardly a darkness, keeping it that way until the bluegum trees when out of the past he knew nothing about, and had wanted to know nothing about, had come a yellow bitch, crawling, in great pain…

Tsotsi looked up from his memory to find himself on his knees and before him, on the ground, where it must have slipped out of his hands, the baby still in the shoebox. It was much later then. The moon had risen overhead and was out of sight behind his back. The trees were silent because the wind had died away, and even the crickets threw out their triple syllables at intermittent wide intervals. It was still later when he left, because Tsotsi first of all had sat back to formulate. Something had happened that he had guarded against a long time. He had remembered. It was a strange memory. It was also ancient—going back further than he had even thought time itself went. The baby had brought it. That was also obvious and easy. The moment he had looked down, almost the exact moment of seeing it, he had remembered. The two were tied up together, somehow, the baby and the dog.