First published in 2018

Copyright © Sarah Myles 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

The epigraph is a two-line excerpt from the poem ‘Feared Drowned’ from
Satan Says by Sharon Olds, © 1980. Reprinted by permission of the University
of Pittsburgh Press.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia


ISBN 978 1 76063 251 9

Set in 13/17.5 pt Adobe Garamond Pro by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
management of the world’s forests.
Once you lose someone it is never exactly
the same person who comes back.
—Sharon Olds, ‘Feared Drowned’
 1

Northern Uganda
8 March 2008—Morning

Tessa stood with the men, women and children who had
gathered in the centre of the compound—some forty villagers,
jostling, talking. There was dust in her throat and her heat-
swollen feet were tight in her hiking boots. The braids she had
plaited that morning hung like weights. She watched the boy’s
family approach him; among them was a lean man in a yellow
shirt followed by a woman whose lips had been cut—punish-
ment by the rebels for accused treachery and in accordance with
their reading of Psalm 12:3, May the Lord cut off their flattering
lips and silence their boastful tongues. The man was the boy’s
father, and he carried a basin of water in one hand and a broad-
bladed panga in the other, his face solemn, his eyes fixed. This
was ritual, a tribal affair. There was none of the glossy exoticism
of tourist guides, no drums or dancing, or women in bark skirts
with jingling gara on their legs. This was village business.
Dominic Oculi stood nearby. He wore an open-necked shirt,
which revealed the gold chain and crucifix that hung around
his neck. He touched the tiny gold body of Christ then lifted

1
 SARAH MYLES

his head. Tessa caught his eye, and he nodded, but without his
usual calmness. His eyes darted from one person to the next in a
way that suggested he was unsure how this ceremony would go.
They had brought Oraako, a twelve-year-old boy from the
rehabilitation centre, here. Driving for more than an hour
through grasslands dotted with kigelia trees, their odd sausage-
shaped fruits hanging like Christmas decorations, the jeep had
bumped over the powdery red road while Oraako nursed his
festering foot and pressed his face to the window with the same
vacant look he’d had since returning from the bush.
Tessa watched him now. He was small for his age, with
brambly hair and a stalk-like neck, but above his top lip there
was a fine nimbus of hair. He looked into the distance as though
he would rather be somewhere else and, balancing his weight
on his good foot, Tessa could see tension in the way he held his
shoulders, the way he listened. People here wanted to know:
had he turned into a bedo lee lee, a wild thing, after so many
years in the bush, or was he still a dano adana, a human person?
As his father shuffled forward, the crowd pressed closer.
Behind him was the boy’s mother, whose scarred lips formed
an ugly inward pucker. They had healed, but they were lumpy,
a keloid reminder of what should or should not have been
said. All the while she kept up a soft mournful moaning which
seemed to come without any movement from her distorted
mouth. In her left hand she carried a chicken whose feet were
bound, although its wings were free and it flapped wildly,
making a frantic bawking sound as it struggled. The crowd
talked loudly, but as soon as Oraako’s parents came to a halt
they fell silent.

2
 THE WOLF HOUR

The boy’s father nodded and Oraako sat down on the

branch-swept earth. Placing the bowl at his son’s feet, the
man dipped his gnarled hand into it and sprinkled water on
Oraako’s wounded foot, then took the chicken from his wife
and with one deft spin broke its neck. Tessa watched. She
would record the details later, noting the way the boy’s father
laid the bird on the ground, how he used the panga to cleave
it in two, then wiped its blood and faeces onto Oraako’s hands
and infected foot.
The boy flinched and straightened. Tessa felt the sting too.
Would such a ritual make his infection worse? She thought of
the antiseptics her mother, a doctor, had insisted on using for
the smallest cut. Tessa tightened her arms against her chest and
looked on in silence. Faith is one thing, she told herself, science
another—or perhaps they are the same; you just need one to
rule the other out.
The crowd formed a close semicircle around the boy and
began a rapid chant in Acholi as the suppurating wound was
caked in chicken shit. The panga, which the boy’s father placed
on the ground, shone in the sun. The blade was sticky with
blood and had already begun to attract a swarm of tiny black
flies that congregated in a dark line along the sharp edge.
Again, Tessa recalled the way her mother tended wounds,
whether a deep knife-cut or a jagged laceration; how her brow
would gently furrow with concentration, and how she had
once removed a fishhook from Stephen’s forefinger. Stephen
had howled that day, his blood dripping into the bait bucket.
The sound of her older brother’s gulping cries had made Tessa
bold. You’re such a wimp, she had said daringly, although she

3
 SARAH MYLES

winced now as Oraako held his foot. The boy’s nose oozed
with snot; he stared at the blood that soaked into the earth in
a dark irregular shape then looked back at his father’s hands. A
flicker of alarm crossed his father’s face, but at last he nodded
and Oraako bowed his head before limping back into the
crowd, where he seemed to dissolve into the shadows of those
who surrounded him.
All around, women’s voices lifted in high-pitched ulula-
tions—discordant at first, like instruments tuning in an
orchestra pit, until together they found their fast pulsing
rhythm and the crowd moved together and began to clap.
When Dominic closed his eyes, Tessa was unsure if he
­actually swayed or it just seemed that way. Of course, this
kind of thing helped to heal. The Acholi people were deeply
superstitious. How else could the Lord’s Resistance Army have
gained such a stronghold in this country if not for a willing-
ness to believe? ‘People want to be led, and for many Joseph
Kony is a god,’ Dominic had told her. ‘His followers say he is
invested with the power of the Holy Spirit, that bullets do not
harm his soldiers.’
Tessa had heard the stories, and pursued them. She wanted to
understand the mess that nightly news reports claimed brought
children back without a childhood. There were so many questions,
they nagged, they burnt. She stepped closer to Oraako’s mother,
who wore a loose-fitting gomesi in a swirling pattern of blue and
green. It was faded and frayed, except for the patch of plaid on
the sleeve that had been carefully sewn on with red thread. As
the clapping quickened, Oraako’s mother lifted her arms as if to
pull the strength of the sky towards her son. She was not old,

4
 THE WOLF HOUR

although she looked it. Her mouth like melted wax, her body
stooped. She moved towards Oraako, who stepped back into
the crowd, and her eyes filled with tears, then suddenly—in a
gesture that seemed part lunge, part dance—she held out her
arms to her son. Oraako’s grave expression did not change;
instead it suggested that he had no idea who she was. But then
without warning he dropped to the ground and another woman
took him by the arm and urged him to stand again, her loud
wailing like metal scraping over metal.
A warm breeze had picked up and Tessa could feel the sweat
evaporate from her skin. Her own tangy scent filled the air.
She had tried several times to interview Oraako—once on
her own, and twice through an interpreter. He answered in
Acholi with a smattering of English, but for the most part
he did not want to speak to her about what had happened
to him. All she knew were the accounts others, particularly
Beatrice, the social worker, had given—that when the rebels
abducted him they cut his mother’s lips and forced him to
watch, that he had been gone for more than three years,
raiding and killing across the border, but had escaped several
weeks ago, his feet shredded and ulcerated from the long
distance he had walked.
Two months earlier, when Tessa arrived in this part of
northern Uganda to overwhelming hospitality and constant
questions, huts of mud and thatch, red earth under cloudy
skies and low hills, it smelt like nowhere else she’d ever
been—sour cassava, dusty cow manure, frank sewage, burning
rubbish. There were things that unnerved her: the raw stump
of an amputee, the blind eyes of a child—smoky white orbs,

5
 SARAH MYLES

like the eyes of a baked fish. For all her travel and education,
a privileged world had filtered the details of the lives she was
only beginning to witness now. She half listened to the advice
her parents gave her and nodded at the cautionary tales from
her colleagues and friends, but mostly she wanted to under-
stand more. She was trying to find a way into her work and
wanted to make her research count. In the early 2000s, when
images of thousands of children taking refuge in the town of
Gulu first hit mainstream television, she had watched from a
distance. Now her research in post-traumatic stress in children
had brought her to these former child soldiers. It was estimated
that upwards of twenty thousand children had been abducted
in the last two decades of civil conflict. These children had been
indoctrinated and damaged, yet some were less likely to develop
post-traumatic stress than others.
Why? Because they had family support or were naturally
resilient or, as some argued, they were predisposed to violence?
She was collating data and wrote her observations in the
academic language she’d learnt, drafted and redrafted to shape
the material she felt was required of her. It was slow work, invis-
ible work, and she had to check her impatience. Sometimes,
when it was going badly, she wondered if she was pushing
too hard, looking for conclusions that didn’t exist. What she
wanted was to be authentic. There was pressure to be original,
to do more fieldwork, and she had been advised that in order to
get a postdoc position, she would need to publish at least one
substantial paper. Something groundbreaking. She was unsure
and anxious, but she had been lucky enough to get a small
university grant and had self-funded the rest. Her networking

6
 THE WOLF HOUR

had brought her here, and then there had been a generous offer
by Dominic to stay as long as she needed.
As the chanting continued, Oraako’s father smeared blood
on his son’s chest, his long finger moving in an arc just above
the heart. For some time he let his fingertip rest there—a light,
almost tender touch—then slowly he took his finger away and
washed his hands in the basin of water. Afterwards, he spilt
what water was left onto the ground and immediately the earth
changed colour, the dry soil becoming a deep fertile crimson.
The sky was overcast. Long grey clouds marbled the west.
The day’s heat was building. Soon the wet season would come
and the weeks of billowing red dust would turn to a dark
sticky mud. People had been making offerings for good rains
too. In the middle of the night food was left in certain trees
where it was believed their ancestors’ spirits were most active.
Ceremony, ritual, seasonal shifts—Tessa was increasingly
drawn to such markers. The passing of time was becoming
a drumbeat: What are you going to do with your life? Perhaps
it had always affected her in this onrushing way, but it was
stronger now, brewing—a heart-in-the-throat feeling that
came with a wave of panic in the knowledge that today was
her birthday and already she was thirty.
Then, as if a stage direction had been given, the clapping
slowed and the women’s tongue-trilling cries crescendoed
before softening again. Oraako’s mother carefully scooped
up the slaughtered chicken’s liver and its stringy intestines
and placed them in an empty bowl while the other villagers
watched and continued to stamp their feet. When Oraako’s
mother walked away with the bowl of entrails balanced on her

7
 SARAH MYLES

head, a large man in a shirt with an elaborately embroidered

collar lifted his hand and the crowd began to break up into
smaller groups. They dispersed, and Dominic moved through
the crowd to join her. He looked in the boy’s direction. ‘You
saw that this boy, Oraako, was not getting better?’
Tessa nodded and Dominic continued. ‘We have to be open
to the beliefs of the child and those of his family when they
trust that this will cure him.’ He spoke in the soft manner of
his people, his English strangely formal. He reminded her of
an old-fashioned teacher, someone who believed in politeness.
She liked him—he had acted as her guide and taken time with
her. He was kind, but possibly a bit damaged too. He said his
dreams plagued him.
‘They are worried he has cen,’ Dominic added. ‘That evil
spirits are in his head. The intention is to cleanse him of any
demons that will cripple him in the future.’
Tessa looked at Oraako, who remained with his father and the
man in the embroidered shirt. ‘Will he go back to the hospital
and get them to care for his foot there?’ she asked tentatively.
Dominic shook his head. ‘That is not possible; the hospital
is overrun. Besides, he has already had a course of antibiotics.’
Tessa tried not to sound argumentative although it probably
came out that way. ‘True, but those drugs were more than four
years out-of-date—and what’s to say it’s not a fungal infection
or that it hasn’t got into the bone?’
‘I thought you were a doctor of psychology?’
She allowed herself to smile. ‘Yes,’ she said sheepishly, ‘I am.’
‘Well then, you know that this is not just about tribal medi-
cine, it’s about the boy being accepted back by his family. His

8
 THE WOLF HOUR

father and his uncle here believe that because his wound will
not heal, it is a sign of his wrongdoing. They are ashamed by
the killing he has done. Most important now is reconciliation.
That is true healing.’
The men’s voices rose then sank again to a murmur. Oraako
looked on. His arms were thin, although his hands were large
and callused. He had picked up a stick and was using it to
spread the blood that had spilt on the ground.
‘You know we are desperate for peace,’ Dominic continued.
‘After more than twenty years we would try anything to close
this chapter of hatred—I would try anything.’ As he spoke,
he made a gesture of insistence, tapping his own chest so
that the thin fabric of his shirt stretched and the crucifix was
knocked aside.
He was an Acholi man, he had grown up in the township of
Gulu, and although only ten years older than her, it seemed as
though he had been dealt a terrible blow and absorbed it. She’d
heard a rumour that he was a returned soldier himself. For a
while she wasn’t sure whether he’d been with the government
forces or the rebels until one of the staff members at the centre
mentioned that he had been with both. Apparently it was not
that uncommon.
‘I like to read,’ he told her when she first arrived. ‘Reading
is my passion. In Kampala, I bought myself the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, and now I’m reading it little by little. I cannot eat
without reading. When I eat, I like to have a book lying open
in front of me.’
She had seen him do this and admired his self-taught educa-
tion, his patience. There were books in his office to rival those

9
 SARAH MYLES

in her father’s study: The Rape of the Nile, the Bible, Dante’s
The Divine Comedy. In pride of place he kept a tattered blue
board edition of the Acoli Macon which, he told her, was a
record of his people’s tribal history. It contained myths and
stories compiled by some missionary or other. He invited her to
borrow his books, which she did, drawn to the Acoli Macon but
also to The Divine Comedy, so gruesomely realised by Gustave
Doré’s detailed illustrations. She had leafed through each page,
followed each canto, a witness to so many terrifying punish-
ments that she had yearned for the end and the place where the
two tiny pilgrims could once more walk beneath the stars. The
Christian idea of legge del contrappasso—the law of retribution
or equal suffering in retaliation for a crime committed—seemed
at odds with any notion of reconciliation or forgiveness.
When Oraako’s uncle walked off, the boy’s father picked up
the bloodstained panga, wiped it carefully across a stone then
slung it into his belt. He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and
Oraako raised his head and moved forward, hopping on one
leg with a skill that adjusted itself to his injury.
‘Timokeca,’ Dominic said, bowing as they walked past. ‘Now
you begin again.’
Oraako’s father nodded, but the boy showed no sign that he
had heard Dominic.
Tessa watched them walk across the compound. ‘Timokeca?’
she asked.
Dominic turned to her. ‘You have heard this word before? It
means to pardon.’
Tessa studied Dominic’s face, for here was his belief in reha-
bilitation—as an arbitrator he had given advice at the peace

10
 THE WOLF HOUR

negotiations a month earlier: if not forgiveness, then reconcilia­

tion, restorative justice.
‘As in mato oput,’ he said now. ‘The ceremony where both
sides drink the bitter solution from the root of the oput tree.
They taste it upon their tongues and take it into their stomach.
By so doing it allows those offenders to get back their senses.
Then they can accept responsibility for their wrongdoings, and
those who were once enemies can live in peace.’
Tessa pressed him. ‘Yet some people in the ICC say that mato
oput is not enough to absolve the rebels. That proper justice is
not done. They are not punished.’
‘I have heard that,’ replied Dominic. ‘But who can say what is
best? Can you? Can I? The International Criminal Court should
not be a stumbling block. We do not need cosmetic justice—
what we need is real peace.’
‘You want to bury the hatchet?’
‘That is another way of putting it.’ Dominic shrugged. ‘The
war between the government and the rebels has been one of
attrition. For twenty years each side trying to wear the other
down; a voodoo war, a brutal civil war, and for the past eighteen
months, the peace talks have been stalling, marred by many
walkouts. But we cannot stop, we must keep trying.’
The breeze had dropped. Tessa could feel the sun’s heat on
her back and as Dominic moved away, she followed him. She
felt whiter, more a muzungu today—a tourist at the ceremony
she had just witnessed, not the academic she strove to be. It
worried her that she was just one more spectator gawping at
these people, at their rituals and their mud huts with floors of
pressed cow dung. What could she really know of these children

11
 SARAH MYLES

who had been abducted by the rebels? Of the terrible things they
had been made to do? This was only the second village she had
visited outside the rehabilitation centre. In the first, there had been
a massacre by the rebels twelve months earlier. Eighteen children
abducted. She had seen the charms hung in doorways to appease
the spirits—brown and green snail shells as large as her hand that
had rattled against the bleached bones or swirled in the breeze
like spinning tops.
‘Does anyone know where Kony is now?’ she ventured. It
was a question asked constantly by everyone, from the myth-
making media to the army.
Dominic laughed flatly. ‘Ah, you know, that is the problem!
Joseph Kony is always moving. The word is that he has crossed
from Sudan into the Congo. There are hopes he will meet with
us, but we are afraid that everything might go quiet again.’
‘You have met him before?’
‘Yes, I have met him. A long time ago. Some say he is a
shapeshifter, others say he is a spiritual leader, a true Christian,
that he is one of the chosen ones. But there are still others who
believe he is a devil who devours his own people. You have read
of Ugolino in Dante’s Inferno, the one who gnawed on the
bones of his own children?’
She nodded.
‘That is what some people say about Kony, except the door
has never been nailed shut on him. He has never been impris-
oned; he has never been left to starve. Nor has he been granted
amnesty. No timokeca.’
A UN truck with its blue logo arrived, raising in its wake
a cloud of dust. The villagers now reappeared and rushed to

12
 THE WOLF HOUR

meet it. Tessa watched as the vehicle idled in front of a window-

less schoolhouse its half-finished roof covered in a tarp of black
polythene.
‘So you will go with the delegation?’ she asked.
‘I have been invited,’ he said proudly, ‘and it is my hope that
this time we may get somewhere.’
She wanted to ask him how a veteran combatant, now the
director of the rehabilitation centre, became a respected medi-
ator. Did he sympathise with the rebels? Did that bring him
closer? She watched him run his hand over his scalp. His hair was
cropped close and tiny droplets of sweat beaded his forehead.
He smiled. ‘I am not on anyone’s side, if that is what you are
thinking. I am on the side of resolution. My father was a rwodi,
a traditional chief. I am part of that lineage.’
They walked back through the village to the jeep. Somewhere
nearby a hammer fell with a steady repetitive bang. A purple
heron flew across their path, and to either side of the red earth
road, sunlight shone through the grass. High and green, it looked
like a vast swaying seabed. About twenty cattle moved ahead of
a herdsman, some of them lowing or turning their heavy heads,
dark brown, speckled, all with impossibly long horns. A calf
trotted on spindly legs. Tessa watched it skitter and breathed in
the scent of the earth it stirred up. She had encouraged Africa’s
seduction—even before she came to Uganda she had allowed it
to begin its work on her. There were the nature documentaries
her father produced—Gondwanaland, Pangaea, the vast super-
continent that once united Africa and Australia. She thought
of their family holidays—camping safaris and mountain treks
on which she observed her mother’s resourcefulness and was

13
 SARAH MYLES

challenged by her father, who teased her mercilessly for being

afraid of the dark, for failing to light a campfire with damp
wood. The year she finished high school they travelled to the
South African savannah to witness the huge elephant herds
trudging in blind family faith. Afterwards, she went to univer-
sity and filled up on study—abstract theories, statistics—but
her thoughts were already shaped by the dream of coming
back. She had said to her parents, ‘I just want to go to the
furthest place I can. I want to go beyond what I know. I want
to do something with my life.’ That was what drove her now,
yet at the same time she feared she would fail in some way and
that what she hoped to do might disappear out from under her.
When they reached the jeep, her mobile phone pinged with
a message from her mother. She was grateful to her parents;
they would do anything for her—too much, she realised. She
loved them, but for now she craved distance and independence.
She hesitated then flicked her phone onto silent before quickly
returning it to her pocket. They would want to speak to her on
her birthday. Home and family would flood back. Not yet, she
thought, as she climbed into the passenger seat. She would call
later, she promised herself. Maybe tomorrow.

14