"The Puff Adder (Bitis arietans) is, despite its considerable reputation, a creature of sluggish disposition and ungainly movement, relying upon camouflage rather than speed for its survival. The careful observer who watches his path, wears appropriate footwear, and maintains a reasonable vigilance will find that the animal presents a manageable risk. The author has encountered the species previously and has formed a clear assessment of its capabilities."
The morning was cold by the standards of the bush, which are not the same as the standards of other places. The sun had not yet reached the path. The red earth held the night's chill and the grass on either side stood pale and still.
The Colonel had his boots. He had watched his path. He had formed, during an encounter some years previously in which a puff adder had moved across a clearing with the ponderous deliberation of something that had given up on urgency, a clear assessment of the animal's capabilities. Slow. Heavy. Reliant on camouflage rather than speed. Manageable, for a prepared man.
Cetshwayo led. The Colonel followed, watching the path ahead with the vigilance of a prepared man.
The path curved through dry acacia scrub and wound between patches of leaf litter where the night's fallen material lay undisturbed. The Colonel watched for movement, for the crossing shape, for the thing that would announce itself by being somewhere it had not been a moment before. This was how you found a snake. You watched for what moved.
The puff adder was not moving.
It lay across the near edge of the path where the leaf litter met the bare earth, in a loose curve that the eye read as a root, or a shadow, or the particular way dry grass falls when the wind has arranged it overnight. Its patterning — dark chevrons on buff and brown, precise and ancient — did not resemble a snake in the way that a person looking for a snake would expect a snake to look. It resembled the ground. It was very good at this. It had been very good at this for longer than the path had existed.
The morning was cold. The path was warmer than the surrounding earth, which was why the snake was on it. This was the whole of the snake's reasoning, and it was sufficient. It wanted warmth, and the undisturbed peace of being invisible, and nothing else from the morning.
It did not want anything from the Colonel.
The Colonel's boot and the snake's body could not, by the laws that govern such things, occupy the same space. Everything that would have followed from that single fact was not, in the snake's view, anything it had sought.
Cetshwayo saw it.
Not by looking for it. By looking at it — which is a different operation, available to people who have learned to see what is there rather than what they expect to find. The shape on the path resolved, in the way that these shapes do when the eye is not insisting on something else, into exactly what it was.
He did not call out. He did not stop. He did not reach back for the Colonel's arm.
He took one step to the left and walked a slightly different line through the scrub at the path's edge. His pace did not change. His expression did not change.
The Colonel, three paces behind on a bush path, followed the line in the easy unthinking way of someone walking in another man's footsteps — which is, in the bush, precisely what you do.