The Power of One Read Online Free Page B

thundering falls.
    â€œYou must take a deep breath and say the number three to yourself as you leap. Then, when you surface, you must take another breath and say the number two as you are washed across the rim of the second waterfall, then again a deep breath as you rise and are carried over the third. Now you must swim to the first stone, counting backwards from ten to one. Then count each stone as you leap from it to the next to cross the rushing river.” The old medicine man paused long enough for me to work out the sequence he had given me. “You must jump now, little warrior of the king.”
    I took a deep breath and launched myself into the night. The cool air mixed with spray rushed past my face and then I hit the water below, sank briefly, rose to the surface, and expelled the deep breath I had taken. With scarcely enough time to take a second breath, I was swept over the second waterfall and then again I fell down the third roaring cascade to be plunged into a deep pool at the base of the third waterfall. I swam strongly and with great confidence to the first of the great stones glistening black and wet in the moonlight. Jumping from stone to stone I crossed the river, counting down from ten to one, then leaping to the pebbly beach on the far side.
    Clear as an echo, his voice cut through the roar of the falls. “We have crossed the night water to the other side and it is done, you must open your eyes now, little warrior.” Inkosi-Inkosikazi brought me back from the dreamtime and L looked about me, a little surprised to see the familiar farmyard. “When you need me you may come to the night country and I will be waiting. I will always be there. You can find me if you go to the place of the three waterfalls and the ten stones across the river.” Pointing to what appeared to be an empty mealie meal sack, he said, “Bring me that chicken and I will show you the trick of the chicken sleep.”
    I got up, walked over to the sack, and opened it. Inside, the sharp, beady red eye of the chicken that looked like Granpa blinked up at me. I dragged the sack over to where the previous circles Inkosi-Inkosikazi had made in the dust had been and the old man rose and called to me to draw a new circle in the dirt. Then he showed me how to hold the old rooster. This is done by securing the main body of the chicken under your armpit like a set of bagpipes and grabbing high up on the chicken’s neck with your left hand so that its featherless head is held between forefinger and thumb. Getting a good hold of its feet with your free hand, you dip the chicken toward the ground at an angle of forty-five degrees while squatting on the ground with the chicken’s beak not quite touching the rim of the circle. The beak is then traced around the perimeter three times, whereupon the bird is laid inside the circle.
    The old man made me practice it three times. To my amazement and his amusement, the old rooster lay within the circle docile as a sow in warm mud. To bring the chicken back from wherever chickens go in such trying circumstances, all I needed to do was touch it and say in a gruff voice, “Chicken sleep, chicken wake, if chicken not wake then chicken be ate!” Which is, I suppose, a pretty grim warning to a chicken.
    I did not ask Inkosi-Inkosikazi how a Shangaan chicken could understand Zulu, because you simply do not ask such questions of the greatest medicine man in all of Africa.
    I was as yet unaware that this chicken was pretty exceptional, that the ability to understand a couple of African languages was probably not beyond him.
    â€œThe chicken trick is our bond. We are now brothers bound in this common knowledge and also the knowledge of the place of the waterfalls in the dreamtime. Only you and I can do this trick or come to that place.”
    I’m telling you something, it was pretty solemn stuff.
    With a yell across the farmyard the old man called for his driver, who was