Love in the Driest Season

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BY NOON, the ants found the girl-child.

Left to die on the day she was born, she had been placed in the tall brown grass that covers the highlands of Zimbabwe in the dry season, when the sun burns for days on end and rain is a rumor that will not come true for many months. She had been abandoned in the thin shade of an acacia tree, according to the only theory of events police ever put forth. There were no clues as to exactly when she was left there, or why, or how, or by whom. She just appeared one day, like Moses in the bulrushes.

Patches of dried blood and placenta streaked her body. Her umbilical cord was still attached, a bloody stump dangling from the navel. A colorful yank of fabric, such as might be found in a store that sold such things by the yard, was wrapped around her torso.

Dozens of miles from any paved motorway, and nearly a mile from the nearest village of mud-and-thatch huts, she lay hidden in chest-high grass. The ragged clumps of acacia reached overhead. In the first glow of day, when night was fading but the sun had yet to climb above the horizon, it was a place of shadows and limited vision.

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