‘Tondi.’

‘They took her, brother.’

‘I saw her without a dress.’

‘Tondi! I’m come back’, receding in the distance and then heard no more; hearing now instead the bitch, which in a way was worse.

He had to open his eyes, and when he did he wished he hadn’t, because for all his tears and prayers he could not close them again until it was over. He had kicked her and she was walking around in circles, biting at her own back legs and rolling over and over in the sand. She stopped and tried to stand up but she could only do so on the front ones. Her eyes were red, and her muzzle blind with pain and knowing what was coming she turned her head to the hok and started that way. She took an eternity, dragging her hindquarters which were useless in the great labour of her effort, and she was whining all the time with foam at her mouth. David shrank back, jabbering to himself, feeling for stones but finding only feathers and dry droppings and not even being able to hold these because he couldn’t flex his hands.

On she came, until a foot or so away the chain stopped her, and although she pulled at this with her teeth until her breathing was tense and rattled she could go no further, so she lay down there, twisting her body so that the hindquarters fell apart and, like that, fighting all the time, her ribs heaving, she gave birth to the stillborn litter, and then died beside them.

It wasn’t long before the first fly came, lit with a green sheen to his body, and a buzz that called all the others. They settled and lifted in a small black cloud, and before the day was through there were thousands and a loathsome stench, and he sat through it all, his eyes transfixed, not moving.

He runs away, tearing his hand as he breaks open the wire mesh on the side, and he runs like a little animal being hunted, very fast and very far.

It was night-time and getting cold again. It might have been the same day, or the next one. He didn’t know. There was no sense of time or of anything past, just the present and being somewhere he had never been before, being cold and hungry. Then he saw them trotting towards him in the darkness, keeping together like a ragged pack of mongrel beings. They stopped and watched him for a few seconds from a safe distance, and when he made no move they came up and crowded around, pulling at his clothes, pushing him provocatively from one to the other. ‘Who are you?’ they asked.

He looked at them blankly.

‘Where do you come from?’

He had no answers.

‘He one too,’ someone exclaimed. ‘He’s like us.’

They crowded even closer and had a good look at him.

‘You got a mother?’ they asked.

‘You got a father?’