try reaching Dad. If he was hiding from the poachers, then my voice could give his location away. I’d wait a few hours and maybe try then.
I didn’t sleep. I sat cross-legged on my bed all through the night, cowering as a thousand different scenarios ran through my thoughts like a herd of stampeding wildebeests. The words I didn’t dare say aloud pounded against my skull:
Dad could be dead. Theo could be dead. What if I’ve already lost them? What if it’s already too late?
I tried reaching them every hour but got only silence in reply. Never had I felt so alone.
When the first pale hint of dawn gleamed on the horizon, I was already moving, preparing for the hike into the bush. The first thing I grabbed when I went to pack was my mom’s pump-action shotgun. She’d never used it and had refused to carry it with her. Sometimes I wondered if things would have turned out differently if she’d taken the gun with her on that final day. I hated the thing, but I did know how to use it, and out there in the bush, on foot, there was just no telling what we’d find—or what would find us. And if we did run into the poachers, I didn’t want to be totally defenseless.
I tied my hair back into a low ponytail and checked my gear. I had on a beige cargo shirt beneath a dark green jacket, and I grabbed a kaffiyeh to tie around my neck. It would come in handy if the wind picked up and gusted the sand around. I had on a pair of loafers and changed these for my sturdy brown hiking boots, which I laced over my cargo pants. Then I tossed a few muesli bars, some bottled water, and a flashlight into my backpack. After a moment, I added the multipurpose knife my parents had given me on my thirteenth birthday, and a few other survival essentials: parachute cord, a map of central Botswana, a box of matches plus a flint and steel, spare batteries, some glow sticks, and a notebook (this last out of habit; I never went anywhere without some means to record what I saw). As I dug through the food crates in the front of my tent, I realized with a plummeting heart that our supplies were even lower than I’d thought. We had enough muesli bars and kudu jerky to last us a day or two out in the bush, but the rest of what we’d unpacked of the new shipment had to be kept cool in the icebox. It did us little good unless we stayed at the camp. This trek would have to be fast—or we’d be stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat or drink. We wouldn’t last long.
I roused the others and urged them to pack. Their eyes widened at the sight of the shotgun, but they said nothing. Miranda whined a little, but she seemed more stable. She must have reconciled with Kase, because she was pressed against his chest with her hands gripping his arm so tightly I wondered if his fingers would turn purple.
After checking to be sure they all had water and food and sleeping bags, I tightened the straps on my backpack and looked them each in the eye, trying to measure their resolve. What we were about to do was no easy thing, and these five were, as Dad would have said, “babes in the wood.” Well, maybe we’d locate Dad quickly. Maybe we’d never have to find their limits, because it could all be over soon. At least I hoped so, because I didn’t think we’d last long as a group. We were already falling apart, and we hadn’t even started.
FIVE
F or a while we walked only to the sound of grass crunching beneath our feet, but as the sun rose higher, the birdsong swelled around us. Shrikes and sparrows twittered in the low brush, while hunting goshawks, their pale bellies flashing in the sunlight, cut the sky above. We came across the tracks of aardvarks, honey badgers, antelope, and a lone leopard, but whatever creatures lay ahead of us, they must have heard us coming and disappeared. I was used to walking silently in order to get close to the wildlife, but the five behind me walked with all the stealth of an elephant herd. Not that I minded. The