January Twenty-Ninth

I WALKED away from our campfire one night to go to the camp of the Bushmen . . . . Halfway between I saw against the star-sheen the figure of something. It was a woman, holding a child up to the stars and saying something.
I whispered to my interpreter, "What's going on ?"
He said to me, "Well, that woman, she's asking the stars up there to take away from this child the heart of a child and give him the heart of a star."
"Why the heart of a star?"
"Because the stars are great hunters and she wants her little boy to have the heart of a hunter."

-- LAURENS VAN DER POST, "Patterns of Renewal"