The Elephant's Tale by Lauren St. John

to the top, they paused for breath. The sunset did not have the exotic hues of those Martine saw regularly at Sawubona, but the colors of the desert made up for it. Bathed in the pure light of evening, the great rippled dunes turned every shade of brick red, burnt orange, and chestnut brown.
    It was a sight so lovely, so lonely, and so ancient that Martine momentarily forgot their plight and felt lucky to be witnessing it. According to the guidebook, the Namib Desert was an estimated eight hundred million years old. In terms of evolution, she was about as insignificant as an amoeba. She lingered on the slope even after Ben began to climb again, only emerging from her reverie when he let out an agonized yell.
    Martine did the last few yards in double time. Ben was lying on the summit of the dune holding his foot, his face contorted with pain. Nearby was the cause of his distress—a thorn bush with vicious, curving thorns.
    “Typical,” he said through gritted teeth. “We walk for hours without seeing a single tree or blade of grass and the first bit of vegetation we come to is a thorn bush.”
    He let go of his foot and Martine saw five bleeding punctures on the sole. Before he could object, she’d unzipped her survival kit and was cleaning the tiny wounds with an antiseptic wipe. She followed it up with a dot or two of Grace’s wound-healing potion, and wrapped his foot in gauze bandage to keep it sand-free while the muti did its work.
    It was only when she’d finished and Ben was sitting up again and smiling that she noticed two things. The first was that there was a valley on the other side of the dune, spread with blond grass and a few trees. The other was that the thorn bush had yellow-green melons on it.
    “Is that a mirage?” she said croakily.
    “Is what a mirage?” Ben was examining Martine’s handiwork, impressed at how professionally she’d patched him up. The potion she’d applied had reduced the pain to almost nothing.
    Martine was examining the thorn bush. She tapped the forbidding cluster of thorns with her Swiss Army knife and several melons tumbled to the ground. She sliced one open. Inside it looked like a cucumber. She scooped out some of the yellow fruit and popped it into her mouth, grimacing slightly at its sour, burning taste. Next, she removed the shell from a couple of the seeds and ate the soft pellet inside.
    “Martine, has the sun fried your brain?” demanded Ben. “Have you any idea how dangerous it is to eat unidentified plants? What if the fruit is poisonous? What if you get sick out here when we’re miles from a doctor?”
    Martine popped another few seeds into her mouth. “These are yummy. They’re almost like almonds.”
    She cut open another melon and handed it to him. “This is a Nara bush. I’d recognize it anywhere. Grace is always going on about them. She says the San Bushmen love the Nara because it’s the plant with a hundred uses. The oil from the seeds moisturizes the skin and protects it from sunburn; the root cures stomach pains, nausea, chest pains, and kidney problems; and the flesh can be rubbed on wounds to help heal them or eaten to rehydrate you.”
    Ben took a bit of convincing, but he was so starving and thirsty that he couldn’t hold out for long, especially since Martine had dramatically revived since eating the first melon and was already tucking into the seeds of the second. Soon he was guzzling the seeds with equal enthusiasm.
    At a certain point, they looked at each other, juice running down their chins, clothes and bodies filthy, hair sticking up on end from a night on the floor of the plane and a day in the baking desert, and burst out laughing.
    It was almost dark by then, so they built a small fire with the dry twigs and foliage beneath the thorn bush and spread the thin blanket from the pilot’s first aid box on top of the high narrow ridge of the dune. They covered themselves with the space blanket from Martine’s survival kit, which