An Afternoon at the River.

I stick my head out of the water to find out the cause of the commotion. It is a dust devil. Our village has lots of these miniature twisters dancing across the landscape, dusting everything in their way. This one is sizeable; it piles a lot of litter as it spins through the river, spraying water all round. The cows briefly stampede and then resume drinking. I resume swimming.

I take the cows to the river twice a day, mid morning and late afternoon. I don’t keep the exact time; I don’t have to. They come mooing around my crib for their trusted guide... that’s me all right… and today, they jarred me out of a siesta. I took the opportunity to take a dip, and clear my head.

I’m not what you might call a professional swimmer. I’ve got none of the backstrokes, breaststrokes, butterfly’s or sidestroke skills that the fine athletes possess. Rivers don’t produce that sort of breed. There are far too many rocks hidden beneath the murky water to make a leisurely attempt worthwhile, and that’s if you can hold back the surging mass, or the weeds that wrap themselves around you every so often. I’m … sort of…what you might call a swimwrestler. It involves making short back and forth crawls. I make a dozen or so back and forth crawls and momentarily cling to a tree root to avoid being swept downstream. I check on the cows. They are almost done. I look around and in a shocking split second, the water drains out of me as if it had never been.

I’m glad it is the afternoon shift so I decide to stay in the river a while longer. The cows are on me again with long stares and moos. Time to go. I swim some more. From the look of things, they may have to make it back home under their own steam. They give up and troop of one by one, stopping at a neighbouring fence to stick their noses through and snap off at maize leaves.

Its getting cold so I seat on an outcrop to catch the last rays of the sun. I think about life, and how it must have been back in the days of Adam and Eve. I hadn’t read much about them but I remember the pictures from the storybooks, they always had leaves conveniently covering…... I slip behind the rock and swim further up as a villager brings in his cows… Another soon follows; she’s here to fetch water. She wades through the shallow edge upstream, away from the cows muddle. She would have seen me if she wasn’t so lost in telling the man about some loose cows wreaking havoc up the road. They leave together and I detached myself and wade back to my rock. It now hosts a toad. I was going to use some company. I didn’t dare leave the river until nightfall, for part of the debris the twister had spun into space were my clothes.