Tuareg

When his face was no longer in the shadow of the rock and the sun had started to beat down directly on to his face and thick drops of sweat ran down his forehead, he opened his eyes and without moving, looked around him.

He had slept without moving a muscle or even a grain of the sand that covered him, quite indifferent to the heat, the flies and even a lizard that had run across his face. The reptile had then scampered off behind a rock and remained there, watching cautiously, its dark, beady, flitting eyes fixed on the strange creature, with only eyes, a nose and a mouth, that had invaded his territory.

He listened. He could not hear a trace of any human voice in the wind and the sun, now very high, beat down vertically, which meant that it was the gaila hour, a time when few men were able to resist the drowsiness brought on by the heat and the urge to sleep. He turned his head, without moving his body at all and looked around him beyond the rocks. A little more than a kilometre to the south, on the edge of the saltpan, he could make out a vehicle with a canvas tarpaulin stretched out from it, tied with two long bits of rope to some large stones and big enough to provide shelter for a least a dozen men.

He could only make out one sentry, from the back, who was watching the sebkha, but he could not work out how many men were taking a siesta under the tarpaulin.

He knew, having watched them on previous days, that the other vehicles and their crew were far away and he did not have to worry right then about them.

His prey was there, before him, and he would remain there until the afternoon, when the mosquitoes would force them back once again into the erg.

He smiled as he tried to imagine how they would react had they known that he had them all there at the end of his rifle; that he could quite easily slip over to them like a reptile between the rocks, approach the sentry from behind and slit his throat and then do the same to the sleeping men inside, with equal ease.

He did not do it, but just moved one of the rocks an inch, so that it protected him a little more from the sun. The heat was becoming more intense, but the layer of sand protected him and there was a light breeze that made it easier to breath and anyway it was nothing compared to the suffocating and unbearable heat of the saltpan. The erg was part of his world and he had spent an endless amount of time buried like that, near herds of gazelles. He would let them approach slowly, grazing on the grara until he could almost spit on their snouts and when they came within arm’s reach he would grab them and shoot a bullet into their heart. An enormous cheetah that had been eating his goats had met a similar fate. The ferocious and blood thirsty animal, that had seemed to be protected by an evil force, would attack as an unarmed shepherd watched over his flock, and then disappear without trace as soon as Gazel appeared with his rifle. So he hid himself in the sand for three days, until his eldest son arrived, as planned, with his goats and waited patiently for the blood-thirsty beast to appear. He saw him arrive, slithering from bush to bush along the ground, so silently that neither his son nor the animals saw him coming and just as he was about to jump he shot him in the head, cutting him down before its feet had even left the ground. He was proud of the skin from that animal, which inspired admiration from those who visited his jaima and was the reason, once the story had spread, that he became know throughout his region as “the Hunter.”