1972 - A Story Like the Wind (19 page)

Suddenly a great shadow fell over the hole. An elephant, long suspicious of Mantis’s doings, and with a tooth as sweet if not sweeter than any other animal in the bush, had come down on the place determined to have the honey for himself. So greedy was this great bull elephant that he swallowed not only the honey lying on the grass outside but the little klipspringer as well.

The moment Mantis became aware of the shadow, he called back alarmed: ‘You are eating and growing well, honey-child?’

Instead of a sweet call of gratitude the elephant, in vain trying to imitate a klipspringer call, replied gruffly and ungraciously: ‘How can I grow, when you give me so little to eat!’

Instantly Mantis knew evil was about. In the fiery manner characteristic of him, he jumped out of the hole and, tiny as he was, snatched up a porcupine quill lying near at hand, jumped into the mouth of the elephant and forced it to swallow him. Once well inside the elephant’s stomach, he proceeded to prick and tickle him so violently and regularly with the sharp porcupine quill that the elephant, overcome by cramp and nausea, was compelled to vomit up both the klipspringer and Mantis before any harm could come to them. Disgusted, he then went walking away from the place.

A similar little klipspringer François now saw was standing on the hill opposite him, its neat little black hooves delicately lacquered and above them the long slim legs, covered with short golden hair. Above the legs was a well-proportioned little body, also covered with golden hair which at this moment was so charged with the light of the early morning sun that it seemed to flicker with fire, up and along an erect neck to a proud little head, crowned with a pa, ir of neat horns, black and polished, and flashing like mirrors in the clear morning light.

François thought he had never seen this little animal look so beautiful, nor so innocent and unafraid. Though aware of François and Hintza, it just looked, fascinated, in their direction. But, knowing itself safe on the peak on which it stood it spared them only a passing glance before it looked again straight across the river and over the bush as if it were indeed the prince of all that immense shimmering world, stretched out below it, its yellow and green cover resounding with birdsong, and scarlet, blue and vermilion with the multi-coloured multitudes of the birds of Hunter’s Drift, taking wing above it. Seeing it there at that moment and in that still attitude, François found it a singularly good omen. However they could not stay there all day long admiring it. Calling both himself and Hintza back to their immediate senses, François went on until at last they came to the final boulder, crawled over it, went on their stomachs underneath the bushes, found the narrow hole to the cave and, side by side, crawled through it.

Xhabbo must have heard them coming from a long way oft and though he must also have been reasonably certain who was coming, had taken no chances. Nor had François for that matter, because the moment his head was through the entrance, while still flat on the ground on his stomach he had called out Xhabbo’s name and the customary greeting. As he called out the greeting, he raised his chin to look about him. The cave appeared to be empty. Then from the far corner a Bushman voice replied and hard on the voice Xhabbo appeared, limping out of the shadows to stand in the centre of the cave, caught in a shaft of slanted sunlight. There he paused for a moment, the bow with an arrow already fixed in it in his left hand, the spear used as a crutch in his right.

François immediately leapt up and ran forward to meet him. But Hintza beat him to it. Recognizing Xhabbo instantly he gave a great bound forward, sat down on his haunches in front of Xhabbo and held out a paw in greeting. Xhabbo immediately dropped his bow and arrow, took Hintza’s paw in his hand, while a wide smile broke over his Mongolian face and illuminated his delicate features. That shaft of the sun was enough to show François a face restored fully to its bright, natural apricot colour and a great surge of reassurance went through him. He went forward to put a hand of welcome on Xhabbo’s shoulder and found that the skin he touched was as dry and cool as his own.

‘You come again as you did yesterday, Foot of the Day,’ Xhabbo greeted him.

‘Foot of the Day?’ François repeated, puzzled by the phrase.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Xhabbo answered, his voice now solemn and grave with emotion. ‘All the morning Xhabbo has been feeling utterly that when he was caught between the teeth of the monster in the bush the night before and was lying and struggling in the darkness, feeling that there was no escape or end to the night for him, you came, like Foot of the Day, carrying the morning to him. Therefore you are for Xhabbo utterly also ‘Foot of the Day’.’

Xhabbo was speaking slowly and deliberately, seeking his meaning like a hunter following a difficult spoor and giving François time to understand what he was saying.

François remembered how old Koba had taught him that there were two great stars in the sky, both legendary hunters. The two were called, in order of importance, Dawn’s Heart and Foot of the Day. Dawn’s Heart and Foot of the Day took turns in being morning and evening stars. When Dawn’s Heart, as its name implies, was morning star, Foot of the Day was the evening star and was then known as Heel of the Night. When Foot of the Day was morning star, the Dawn’s Heart became the Eye of the Evening. It came to him then in a rush that in calling him Foot of the Day, Xhabbo was bestowing upon him one of the greatest praise-names of which Bushmen were capable. He felt so unworthy of his promotion to stardom that he blushed and tried to explain to Xhabbo that at home, far from being so exalted a person, he was known to the Matabele and even old Koba as the smallest of little feathers.

But at the word Matabele, Xhabbo became quite angry. Those dark, wide, archaic eyes of his flashed with ancient light. He made a gesture as if that were just the sort of thing one could expect from people so unimaginative, overbearing and full of brute strength as the Matabele, and hastened to add at great length that as far as he and his people were concerned, François would be known from then on as Foot of the Day. François thought it best to let the matter rest there, but remained secretly determined that no one around Hunter’s Drift should ever know the exalted title which had just been bestowed upon him because if that happened he would never hear the end of it. The ‘Little Feather’, although sanctioned by long years—that is, long to him—of love and care was already smarting quite enough in a self closing in on its young manhood, for him to want any other name, however flattering. It would embarrass him with his elders and betters who, as one has seen, were only too prepared to tease and correct him.

So there and then he asked Xhabbo to sit down with him in the biggest shaft of the sun, because it was rather cool inside. He had noticed that Xhabbo’s naked skin was like goose-flesh and he thought the sun there would warm him through. He immediately took the big thermos flask out of his haversack and poured out some of the hot, sweet coffee for Xhabbo to drink with a couple more of the pain killers he had brought. That done, he undid the dressings of the day before. He warned Xhabbo in the process that in unwinding the last of the bandages and particularly the field dressing which had become firmly stuck to the leg with congealed blood, he would hurt Xhabbo a great deal. Xhabbo, however, just laughed at the thought that he could regard what he was doing as inflicting pain, since he clearly had far higher standards of what constituted pain for a man than François had. Once the wound was exposed, François, although still horrified by the extent and depth of it, was delighted to see that it was quite clean.

He only wished that Lammie was there to help him put some stitches in the wound because the mouth of the gash seemed to him still to be yawning wide and dangerously. Lammie had become forced, by circumstance, to specialize in that sort of thing at Hunter’s Drift. However, since that was out of the question, all he could do was to re-bandage the leg tighter so that the pressure would hold the two sides of the wound more closely together.

He was about to do this when Xhabbo asked, rather pleadingly, if he could not have some more of that powerful medicine François had poured into the wound the day before. He was obviously referring to the iodine, which he judged, by its power to inflict burning pain, to be powerful medicine. But François, knowing iodine should only be used sparingly, felt compelled to disappoint him. He dressed and bandaged the wound as quickly as he could. By the time he had finished the pain-killer had made Xhabbo wonderfully relaxed and he could sit down to enjoy the food which François now spread out in front of him.

To Xhabbo it appeared like a great treasure trove. He greeted the appearance of everything with sounds of great appreciation. The greatest explosion of wonder was for the biltong which had been packed at the bottom of the haversack. The Bushmen, too, François knew made a kind of biltong themselves and therefore had a standard of comparison for their own for the chunks of beef biltong produced at Hunter’s Drift.

‘That,’ Xhabbo exclaimed, pointing at the biltong, ‘will make Xhabbo utterly strong and well before the day is ended.’

Perhaps the remark had not to be taken literally. But it did suggest to Franpois the danger that Xhabbo might be in too great a hurry to get away. Involuntarily he found himself protesting because he was afraid that unless his leg were properly healed, great harm could come to Xhabbo should he set out alone for his long desert journey back to his people.

But François also had an all-compelling reason of his own. He just could not bear the thought of parting so soon with the little Bushman. There was for him something magical about this unexpected appearance of a member of his beloved Koba’s people. He had thought them vanished, with their child-man shapes and bows and arrows and paint-brushes, for ever from the world of Africa. He had many good and true friends at Hunter’s Drift, but they were not of his own choosing. They seemed to have been provided for him by Ouwa, Lammie, !#grave;Bamuthi and others. Whereas he felt deeply, beyond any words accessible to him, that Xhabbo had come to him and to him alone. At the very moment when he most needed someone of his own free choosing he—no, he and Hintza had discovered Xhabbo. With all the awe of coincidence which he fully shared with !#grave;Bamuthi, Ousie-Johanna and the others, the coming of Xhabbo, just at the moment when he was separated from his parents, was by far the most important thing that had ever happened to him.

A happy confirmation of this lay in the fact that there appeared to be no lack of ease between Xhabbo and himself. They talked as if they had known each other all their lives. Nor did Xhabbo find it a breach of good manners at times to correct François’s pronunciation. Koba’s Bushman, which François spoke, came from another part of the country some thousands of miles away. The remarkable thing was not that it differed from Xhabbo’s but that on the whole the differences were so slight.

It happened for instance, when François was telling Xhabbo about the klipspringer ram, standing so calmly and confidently I on the roof of his dwelling. He referred to it as ‘Mantis’s own’, that is, ‘Kaggen’s own’, just as old Koba had always done.

Xhabbo looked perplexed for a moment. Then a smile of pure delight broke over his face and he exclaimed: ‘Ah, you mean Koeggen-A’s own creature.’

Xhabbo went straight on to elaborate how he agreed with François that they could not possibly have had a better omen. He explained that the cave in which he sat was also Mantis’s Place. Indeed, it was the place of Mantis before it had been the place of Xhabbo’s ancestors. He stopped eating and to François’s alarm stood up and hobbled without the help of a spear, to the smooth, honey-coloured wall of the cave. There the reflection of the yellow shafts of sunlight lapped like the water at the painting of Mantis, his son-in-law, the rainbow, and his grandson, the mongoose, facing an enormous serpent. Xhabbo indicated it with the tip of his first finger folded back, so that he should not be guilty of the rudeness of pointing straight at so sacred an object. It was an illustration, he told François, of how Mantis had gone into battle against the great serpent at the beginning, destroying it in order to make the cave his own both for him and for the people of the early race. Xhabbo then hobbled back, speaking with increased animation of how convinced he was too that the little antelope was a clear indication that Mantis still regarded the cave as ‘his place and the place of his heart’s own’. Xhabbo thought it proof that it was still under Koeggen-A’s protection, and that there François and his coming together was not an accident but something which he, the Old Fire Thief (Mantis’s greatest praise name) had engineered in his infinitely cunning way.

From then on Xhabbo, encouraged by François, talked a great deal about himself and his own people. He told François how his father had died some thirty-five days before. Since his grandfather was already dead, had ‘gone the way of the hyena’ as he put it, Xhabbo had become the head of the family. It was therefore immediately necessary for him to hasten and report the matter to the cave so that at once it would know the new person who was to be responsible for it. Xhabbo stressed that, although it was a time of crisis out there in the desert because of a great drought, a scarcity of game and practically the last of the desert melons used up, he had been forced to leave at once. The urgency of the matter had been stressed by an unmistakable sign.

This sign had been the appearance in the sky the very night his father died, of the biggest, longest, slowest and reddest shooting star they had ever seen. He had of course expected a shooting star. That is something that always came to announce the death of one Bushman to another. The stars saw and knew all. Shoot ing stars came, as Xhabbo put it, to show them that one of their members ‘who had been upright until then, had utterly fallen down as that star was falling down and was about to lie utterly upon his side in the dark, until the Dawn’s Heart came to show him the way’.

But no one, not even Xhabbo, had expected so red and great a shooting star to signify this event. Judging by its magnitude and colour, it could have been a grave portent of the shedding of blood. Everybody had agreed he should hurry to the cave as soon as possible; and then hasten back to his people.