1972 - A Story Like the Wind (4 page)

With this proof from the universe itself of the effectiveness of Bushman in communicating with natural things, François had used no other language between Hintza and himself. Soon he was convinced that there was almost nothing spoken in Bushman which Hintza, or Hin as he was now called, did not follow.

Within three months, Hintza knew the Bushman names of all the most important animals, reptiles, and birds in the bush and the words of command that François was likely to use in their connection. For instance, François had only to say ‘snake’ in Bushman and it was quite unnecessary for him to add the command ‘stand and watch’, because Hintza knew already that it was absolutely forbidden for him to tackle any snakes, much as he would have liked to. This too was an inexorable law at Hunter’s Drift because the bush was full of poisonous snakes of all kinds and many dogs, even the mongrel dogs, had been lost through snake-bite because out of a natural aversion for them they would insist on challenging every snake they saw. The result was that they invariably got bitten in the head and even though they might kill the snake they would die themselves of the poison from the fangs of the serpents.

From an early age, therefore, like his father and mother, François was made to carry in a leather pouch attached to the leopard skin belt which he wore round his tough green whipcord bush jackets, a complete anti-snake-bite outfit that consisted of a small scalpel, a hypodermic syringe, and an antidote of serum specially prepared in the capital and renewed every six months. This serum was most effective against snake poison and if immediately injected just above a bite into the blood stream of a snake’s victim, counteracted the poison so effectively that within a day, the person or animal bitten could continue their lives as if nothing had happened.

In fact François himself had saved !#grave;Bamuthi’s life thus on one occasion when they had been out in the bush looking for a lost cow and calf. !#grave;Bamuthi had been bitten on the ankle of his bare foot by a black mamba, the most poisonous of all the snakes in the bush. Unfortunately, !#grave;Bamuthi, wise and experienced as he was, like all Matabele and Zulus, was extremely superstitious about snakes, particularly black mambas, because they all regarded them as reincarnations of their ancestors which had either come to warn, comfort or punish them for some neglect of tribal ethics. !#grave;Bamuthi accordingly had immediately assumed that he had been punished thus by the spirit of his ancestors for some unwitting transgression of the Matabele code and was quite prepared to sit down on the track, there and then, and die.

However, François had immediately produced his snake-bite outfit, tied his handkerchief tightly above the spot where !#grave;Bamuthi had been bitten, put a stout piece of wood through it and twisted it as tightly into the version of a surgical tourniquet as his father had taught him, to prevent the poison from speeding up along the arteries to !#grave;Bamuthi’s heart where it would immediately be fatal. He had then injected the serum thrice into !#grave;Bamuthi’s leg at different places, one above the other.

While doing this he tried to comfort !#grave;Bamuthi by saying: ‘Please don’t worry, Old Father, this is powerful medicine, far more powerful than that of any snake. Soon you will be well, I promise you.’

But old !#grave;Bamuthi had just shaken his head sadly and replied: ‘Little Feather, when the spirits call as this great black spirit has called me now, no medicine of man can stop me from having to follow and lose my shadow.’ This last phrase was a Sinda-bele image of dying.

François had gone on doing all he could to comfort !#grave;Bamuthi but !#grave;Bamuthi had just said: ‘Thank you, Little Feather, but please say no more because I must now sit here and prepare myself for the long journey.’

From that moment until nearly two hours later he had refused to speak, and just sat there, still as black marble, his wide dark eyes so sad and remote that they almost made François cry. He did not even seem to notice that François, every few minutes, was unwinding his improvised tourniquet so that the blood could flow again and then tightening it up again to control the circulation for a while longer. This François was doing, as he had been taught, in order to prevent gangrene.

When finally he had removed the tourniquet and noticed that apart from !#grave;Bamuthi’s state of mind, there was nothing seriously wrong with him he had urged. ‘Come, Old Father, you see the medicine has worked. There is nothing wrong. Let us leave the cow and calf and go home to rest.’

But it had taken some hours more before !#grave;Bamuthi was convinced. Then he had allowed François to lead him home, walking more like a somnambulist than a person fully awake. But this episode had created an even greater bond between them.

The real point of the experience, François was soon to learn, was that the snake-bite antidote worked well only when applied against bites inflicted on the extremities of human beings and of the bigger animals like cattle and horses. But when the bites were inflicted as they invariably were, on the heads of the dogs it was impossible to put a tourniquet round the head of a dog and, although one could inject any amount of serum above the snake bite itself, the wound usually was too near the vital nerve centres of the brain for the antidote to disperse the poison in time.

Thanks to Hintza’s grasp of Bushman and his confidence in François, this lesson was quickly and absolutely learned. It became the cornerstone, as it were, for the whole complicated edifice of Hintza’s education in all the many matters of life and death in the bush. He learned to stand still, silent at Francis’s side, pointing with nose and tail in the direction in which his keen senses had located the enemy, until commanded otherwise. Moreover Hintza had been skilfully helped by François to cultivate a kind of urgent, almost supersonic whisper to be used in moments of acute crisis for communication with François.

This was perhaps the greatest triumph in François’s relationship with Hintza because Hintza was, even for a dog, a prodigious and most inspired barker. Indeed in the beginning his gift and love of barking had been highly troublesome because at one time even François had begun to despair whether he—I say he from now on because by now Hintza had ceased to be an ‘it’ at Hunter’s Drift and was very much a ‘he’—could be taught to restrain it. Barking at Hunter’s Drift was something only encountered in the mongrel watch-dogs. Dogs kept inside like Hintza were supposed to be above such crude methods of communication. They were, one could say, the intelligence officers of the night, who had to monitor all the sounds outside, particularly the barking of the watch-dogs, interpret their meaning, and only when certain that the meaning was most immediate wake up superior officers like François or his parents, and communicate it to them in sounds not audible beyond the walls of the room in which they were sleeping. It took François months to get Hintza to behave accordingly.

The trouble was that for Hintza, barking was a form of singing. François was convinced that he was the most musical dog the world had ever seen, and this gift had been revealed to François within a month of Hintza’s arrival.

He had been giving Hintza a last run-around in the twilight before taking him inside to put him to bed. Hintza by now had grown so fast and was so much stronger that he bounded easily up the broad steps on to the stoep to join François who was holding the great stinkwood door open for him. But instead of dashing inside as he normally did, Hintza suddenly turned about and faced the east, standing very still and silent.

François immediately thought that Hintza had noticed something unusual stirring in the deepening brown of the evening in the bush beyond the homestead. Curious, he followed the tense puppy’s example but could detect nothing at all unusual in their surroundings except that the rising moon, although itself still invisible, was beginning to fill the dark air over the bush with a yellow mist of light. Against this light he could occasionally see the black zigzag streaks of the flight of the great bats who were emerging from their homes in the holes and caves in the hills down by the river. He was inclined to think that the bats were responsible for Hintza’s attitude of intense concentration for the puppy was, from the start, obsessed with creatures on the wing, as if jealous of their capacity for flight. But as the lightning graph of the bats’ flight became clearer and blacker against the rapidly spreading light of the moon, and still Hintza showed no sign of relaxing, nor of launching himself into the air as he normally did whenever he saw anything on the wing, and when even the first bark of a jackal setting out on the prowl for food, and a sarcastic retort from a laughing hyena bound on a similar mission did nothing to rob him of his concentration, François knew that there must be another explanation. But what?

Inwardly proud that Hintza even in this way was unique and so different in his reactions from other dogs, François was more than content to watch and wait for the answer. It soon came when the moon, heavy and sullen with gold, full, swollen and overflowing with light as only a moon in the clear bushveld air could be, lifted itself ponderously above the last ink-stains of leaves and scribbles of branches of the fever trees on the fringe of the bush to show itself at last, round, perfect and immaculate in the sky.

The moment it appeared thus, Hintza threw back his head and began to serenade it with a strangely mature sound that François had never heard before. It came not from his tongue and throat so much as from somewhere down near his solar plexus, with a passion that made him quiver all over. It was obviously the most deep-felt howl of which he was capable and although François, interested and somewhat impressed that so small a body could produce so large a volume of sound for so long, was prepared to give Hintza every reasonable opportunity for expressing himself on so poetic a subject, even he knew that in the end he would have to put a stop to Hintza’s
ariabravura
performance, not only out of fear of his parents’ reaction but out of anxiety for Hintza himself. For if, it seemed, he was allowed to continue at this passionate rate much longer he would be in danger of losing both voice and reason.

François had therefore ordered him in his most imperative Bushman first, to stop his serenade, and finally to ‘shut up’. But in vain. He even tried pleading with Hintza in his most eloquent Bushman to desist. But, for once, Hintza seemed utterly indifferent to his words. He was driven in the end to picking up Hintza and carrying him into the house while Hintza, utterly unrepentant, continued to look back at the moon over François’s arms, no longer barking praises because of the restrictions imposed by this ignominious form of carriage, but maintaining a fervent drone in the moon’s direction. He did not break off droning and murmuring until François had him in his own room, closed the heavy shutters against the gold translucent night, and lit his bedside candles to repel the faintest intimation of the magical and magisterial expansion of moonlight that was proceeding outside and might seep through the bars of the shutters.

From then on any glimpse of the moon, whether full, or otherwise, was enough to set Hintza off on his singing. In the process he became such a nuisance and was such a contagious example to the five mongrels that they too considered themselves free to appoint themselves an impromptu Greek chorus to Hintza’s impassioned recitals. Soon the prolonged dog-din was so great that François’s father, !#grave;Bamuthi, the other herdsmen, and all the many servants at Hunter’s Drift were in an open revolt and Hintza, far from being the popular little figure he had been in the beginning, was rapidly falling into extreme disfavour.

François found himself more and more assailed from all sides by advice as to what he should do to put an end to Hintza’s indulgence in moon-music. He was told to lock him up the moment he as much as opened his mouth to the moon. This was something that François was most reluctant to do for it meant depriving Hintza of valuable hours of education in the behaviour required of ridge-backs in the twilight and critical early hours of the night. The most popular school of thought among the opposition went even further and suggested that there was only one thing to do when Hintza refused to listen even to instructions given in Bushman, and that was to beat the habit out of him.

Even old !#grave;Bamuthi, inclined as he was to spoil François in all things, took him aside and exhorted him again and again to take a tough disciplinary line with Hintza, ending with the ominous adage: ‘Remember, Little Feather, soft-hearted witch-doctors do not heal but merely make stinking wounds.’

However, François could not get himself even to contemplate either locking up Hintza, or beating him. To him these alternatives were typical examples of the adult world’s bankrupt imagination that drove them always to look for short-cuts to cure problems—as he knew to his cost. He obstinately clung to the belief that there must be some more constructive answer to the problem. But even he began to despair of holding out indefinitely against the pressures building up to compel him into violent repressive action. Then, quite by chance, a possible alternative presented itself to him.

François’s father had in his large study a very good but old·fashioned gramophone, fitted with an enormous metal trumpet for amplifying its sound, and François had been introduced to the world of music by records played on this redoubtable instrument. The first record that he clearly remembered was one called The Whistler and his Dog’. The whole of the record consisted of a rousing tune whistled most compellingly by a man. When the final nostalgic whistle died away, a dog took over and barked clearly and long his appreciation of the whistler’s performance. Remembering this record, François thought it could do no harm to introduce it to Hintza, who he was now firmly convinced, was highly musical. He could then watch his reactions and see what he himself could learn from them.

Hintza, who already knew quite a bit about whistling, though in a more prosaic fashion, from François’s use of it in his training, was clearly entranced by this poetic extension of the whistler’s idiom. When it came to an end and suddenly a dog’s clear-pitched barks poured out into the room, Hintza’s delight at this evidence of an invisible dog-spirit was almost more than he could bear. He started barking back, running round and round the study as fast as he could and François had to run after him, catch him and gently close his mouth in order to stop this ecstatic display of joy.