Natasha Illum Berg

"Already during that same day, when I had been out hunting a young topi which we had promised the nearest village long ago, Sedu kept on saying to me, I should hurry up and shoot one so we could get it back to the camp before nightfall. “I don´t feel very well, Mama. I think I´d better get to bed early.” But his furtive eyes and his low voice endowed the words with a mysterious, secretive quality. The secret was his fear that a hungry lion should come visiting while he was left alone in the trophy shed, busy skinning the topi by the light of a single hurricane lamp. For the others would quite certainly not come to help him, not now, not for all the world. After I had finished my supper, I intended to have a cup of tea. I couldn´t reach the thermos from my chair, so I got up and stretched for it where it was standing to the right of my plate. As I lifted it from the table and was about to sit down again, I suddenly felt the skin on the back of my neck contract and the hairs stand on end. I turned round in the direction my sixth sense bade me, but I could only see darkness outside the door where the patch of tall grass was. I sat down again, cautiously, my body slightly more tense, and drank my tea with my side turned to the opening. I know she was there, I know it just as surely as if I had seen her. I could almost feel her half inquisitive, half opportunistic yellow eyes following my least movement, almost hear her carnivorous breath fall heavily in the lightness of the night.“It is one of the most important things you have to learn as a hunter,” The Old Dog said to me some years later, “you have to learn to trust your instincts. We all have them, but modern society teaches us that we can´t rely on them. Forget what they are, and what the kind of people who believe in them remind us of, and just follow them, trust them.”

- Excerpt from Floder of Rød Jord, translated from Danish