Free Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller Page B

triumphant. I wish she would smile and be pleased about shooting the terrorist.
    I say, “Let me have a go, hey. Can I have a go? Look, Van, watch me.”
    But she has turned away and is going inside. A couple of the dogs follow her.

Mum, Dad, and Bobo
    MISSIONARIES,
1975
    My second sister—my mother’s fourth child—was born on 28 August 1976.
    Early in October 1975, when the first rains had already come but were still deciding what sort of season to create (overfull, with floods and swollen, dead cows in our river, or a sparse and teasing drought), a small plague of two missionaries descended upon us.
    They had driven from Salisbury, through Umtali, and down to the valley, to the farthest house they could find with people in it in the whole of Rhodesia, which was Mum and me lying on her bed at two o’clock in the afternoon listening to Sally Donaldson on the radio. Dad is away in the bush, fighting gooks. Vanessa is at boarding school. Mum and I are waiting for Women’s Hour to come on.
    It’s eyeball-burning hot. I lie on my belly and let my legs wag lazily back and forth, my head in the crook of my arms where my forehead is pressing a sweaty band into the skin. Mum is reading to herself. It is so hot that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire. The dogs are splayed on the floor, wherever they can find bare cement, panting and creating wet pools with their dripping tongues. Our throats are papered with the heat; we sip at cups of cold, milky tea just enough to make spit in our mouths. The sky and air are so thick with wildfire smoke that we can’t see the hills, they are distant, gauzy shapes, the same color as the haze, only denser. The color is hot, yellow-gray, a breathless, breath-sucking color. Swollen clouds scrape purple, fat bellies on the tops of the surrounding hills.
    Suddenly, there is the claw-scrabbling alarm of dogs, raised from sodden, deep, two-o’clock-in-the-afternoon heat into full alarm. They rush outside, into the yard, kicking up a cloud of terra-cotta behind them, barking with their thirsty, hoarse summer voices.
    “What now?” says Mum. She slings her Uzi over her shoulder, checks that the safety latch is on (although she keeps her finger against the latch, prepared to change that setting at a moment’s notice), and scuffles her feet into the thick, black sandals, made from strips of used tractor tires, which we both wear. We call them manutellas. They are good farm shoes. There is not a thorn in Africa that can get through their soles, and they are cool in the heat and it doesn’t matter if they get wet, muddy, or covered in oil. Their only fault, as farm shoes, is that they leave our ankles and the tops of our feet exposed, the place where a snake is most likely to bite.
    “Right before Women’s Hour, too,” says Mum.
    The dogs are still barking. Especially Bubbles, who is an unfortunate mix, half Labrador and half Rhodesian ridgeback. He’s the color of a lion, with lion-yellow eyes and a mean, snaky way of walking, like a lion. Bubbles can kill baboons. He’s the only dog I know that can kill a baboon. Baboons are huge, as big as a small man when they stand on their back legs. And they have long, pointy teeth and they work in troops. They flip their prey onto its back and tear its stomach out. Bubbles runs away from us sometimes for a day or two and comes back leg-hanging exhausted and with scratches on his belly, but otherwise very pleased with himself. There are dead baboons in his wake.
    The fox terrier, the dachshund, the German shepherd, the two black Labradors, and the springer spaniels come back into the house to see what is taking us so long. Bubbles alone keeps up a fierce rally of deep-throated barks outside.
    Mum calls, “I’m coming, I’m coming. Who is it?”
    I follow her outside. The dogs scramble for position behind me.
    A vision: two men climbing out of a white station wagon. They are wearing