1972 - A Story Like the Wind (7 page)

Spears and clubs, he said reverently, were living things, and unless properly named, would not know how to come when called and do their duty; just as they themselves had to know the name of him who called them, otherwise they could help the wrong person. So he, !#grave;Bamuthi, in this regard, had a special name. He was called
u-Nothloba-Mazibuka
, which means ‘He-Who-Watches-the-Fords’. This was his hereditary title and function because his family had originally been placed on the river just there by the great ‘Mzilikatze to do precisely that, as the name Hunter’s Drift implies. ‘Drift’ is the southern African name for a ford, and the ranch had been called thus because it’ stood opposite the place where for thousands of years the vanished legions of Africa and perhaps even of Sheba and Babylon had crossed the powerful stream in their fateful comings and goings between north and south.

‘Now, mark well, Little Feather,’

!#grave;Bamuthi had told him as he held up a spear with a long silver-white blade. This assegai is
u-Simsela-Banta-Bami
[He-Digs-Up-For-My-Children], since it was made for my great-great-great-grandfather by a magic maker of spears who forged it beyond the forests of the night on the far side of the great waters and the Mountains of Smoke and Fire in the north. It has been the best hunting spear of my people and kept many hungry generations in food. ‘This one,’ he went on, holding up a shorter spear with a much stronger and thicker shaft and a broader blade ending in a long, narrow and gleaming point, ‘is
Imbubuzi
[The Groan-Causer], because when it goes into action many groans are heard far and wide. This club,’ he held up an enormous knobkerrie made of dark red ironwood, so heavy that when thrown into the water it sank, ‘is
Igumgehle
[The Greedy-One], because when he is used in fighting he destroys the enemy as quickly as a glutton swallows food.’ Then he held up the longest and most slender spear of all, obviously for use as’, a throwing lance. ‘This assegai is
u-Silo-Si-Lambile
[The Hungry Leopard] because it will throw itself at the enemy, as does a hungry leopard at a baboon, and at once kill.’

Finally he held up a knobkerrie so big and heavy that Fran-fois could hardly lift it at the time. ‘And this one is
u-Dhl’–Ibusuku
[The Eater-In-The-Dark], because it is used best for things of evil that come at human beings by stealth at night.’

All of this François had absorbed and had not been astonished because it drew his beloved !#grave;Bamuthi’s people into the ranks of all that he had read of the heroic past from Hector and Achilles to the story of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table and the sword Excalibur. But what had puzzled him even then was that so intelligent a people as the Matabele made no mention, and showed no signs, of using bows and arrows.

Caught up as he was in !#grave;Bamuthi’s story, he had interrupted and exclaimed: ‘But Old Father, surely you used bows and arrows too, to kill at greater distance than even you could throw a spear or club?’

!#grave;Bamuthi had looked at him in pity that he should be so ignorant of the fact that a man’s honour decided such matters, and answered scornfully: ‘Little Feather, such things are only for cowards and cattle thieves, like the Massarwa.’

Massarwa was the Matabele word of scorn for the Bushman who, in the far past, they had hunted down like wild beasts. Franpois’s own ancestors had committed similar crimes as François knew only too well from Koba and his history lessons.

All this went through François’s mind like lightning because of the danger which now confronted him. Then the thought hit him: ‘Dear God, could there be a Bushman hiding behind the trees ready to shoot with bows and arrows at anybody who comes near him?’

But even as he thought it he dismissed the idea as highly improbable if not impossible. All the great hunters, travellers and explorers who had been passing through Hunter’s Drift ever since he could remember, had assured him that the Bushmen all over Africa had been exterminated by both black and white races. Only a tiny fragment of Koba’s gallant little people had survived, deep in the heart of the desert which started on the far silver edge of the bush, many miles beyond the river, trembling there with light and heat like a tuning fork with sound.

Even old Koba, before she died, had often told him sadly how, since the age of fifteen, she had never set eyes on any other member of her kind except a few tame ones like herself. The word tame was used to describe those few Bushmen who had sadly accepted the fate of living as helpless domestics attached to European or Bantu overlords. Most of these were survivors of massacres, or children kidnapped by hunters and raiders on excursions into the desert, beside a few decadent ones, corrupted by mixing with the less reputable Bantu clans who lived on the better-watered fringes of the great desert.

Never had François heard anything to suggest that in the vicinity of Hunter’s Drift there were any wild Bushmen—as the few surviving and truly independent ones were called. And if, indeed, a Bushman had been responsible for shooting the arrow which had lifted his hat from his head, he would have to be very wild indeed.

The thought made François’s blood go cold. He realized that a Bushman arrow would merely have had to scrape his skin to prove fatal because, as everybody knew from history, the heads to such arrows were always dipped in deadly poison.

He had just reached this conclusion when, from close by in the direction of the marula trees, he heard a low moaning, and a pitiful sound as of a human being in unbearable pain. Hintza heard it too because all signs of bristling vanished from his coat, an indication that he no longer felt any sense of danger. He was still lying crouched beside François, ready to attack but with ears erect and cocked in the direction of the sound, as if already aware of its meaning.

François, therefore, immediately turned over on his stomach, signalled with his hand to Hintza to stay still and started with the utmost care to crawl towards the sound. Crawling, he took the precaution of first moving the gun silently in front of him and placing it on the ground within reach of his right hand so that he could pick it up at the first indication of danger.

They did not have far to go but so well had François been trained in these things by Mopani Theron and !#grave;Bamuthi that he took the greatest and most patient care over the last stage of his stalking. He remembered in particular one of !#grave;Bamuthi’s favourite sayings, so often directed at him in the past: ‘The buck sometimes gets out even from the pot,’ the Sindabele way of warning that there was many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.

In this slowest of slow-motion fashions he came to a twist in the track close to the marula trees where he could see through the brush and look on the thrashed and trampled grass at their base. There he saw a small yellow man, his leg held fast in the heavy lion trap, making desperate efforts to free himself. He obviously had been struggling for hours, for the grass everywhere was not only flattened by the trap and chain as he had dragged them back and forth and about with him in a wide circle, but it was also stained with his blood.

It was not at all surprising to François that the little man was groaning. He would not have been astonished if he had been screaming in agony. But he knew from Koba how brave and stoical a true Bushman had to be. As well as compassion for the little man’s plight, relief came to François when he saw a bow and quiver full of arrows lying in the dust beside the man, who must have assumed that the arrow shot at François had found its mark. His spear too lay there but within reach of hands now tugging so desperately at the iron of the giant trap.

François knew that if he showed himself without warning, there could be great trouble. In great pain, and on the point of fainting with loss of blood and exhaustion, the trapped man would be compelled by the terrible history of his kind, at the worst to seize his spear and hurl it at François and Hintza, probably with fatal effect, for now they were so close to him.

Yet, despite the obvious danger ahead, François had no feeling either of fear or resentment. He felt only pity for the little yellow figure caught in a trap which, in the past, had held seventeen great lions throughout long nights until the moment came when they would be shot. Moreover, the little man personified, physically, all the many characteristics of the people old Koba had described to him in such loving detail that they had become, for François, almost dream people, and he grew up heart-broken that these little Bushmen hunters with their child-man shapes and bows and arrows had vanished for ever. As a result, his first astonished glimpse of the man in the trap evoked deep preconditioned sympathies to add flame to the fire of pity.

His only instinct now, therefore was to rush out and try to rescue the trapped Bushman without delay from his terrible, if not already fatal, predicament. But how?

Suddenly he remembered how Koba had always impressed upon him that if her people were greeted in the correct manner they would always respond in the friendliest fashion, no matter how unpredictable the situation. The most important point of this greeting was for it to make the Bushman feel big and strong. They were, according to Koba, extraordinarily sensitive about the fact that they were so small, seldom more than four foot ten inches in height and they resented the fact that fate had made black and white both taller and bigger and consequently more powerful.

So by way of some sort of compensation for this injustice of biology, the soothing thing to do when one met a wild Bushman, Koba had told him, was to call out: ‘Good day, I saw you looming up from afar and I am dying of hunger.’

Accordingly without showing himself and keeping flat on the ground to make himself as difficult a target as possible François called out, in Bushman, trying in vain to prevent excitement and apprehension from adding a tremble to his clear voice: ‘Good day, I saw you looming up from afar and I am dying of hunger.’

At the sound of a voice addressing him in his own language, the Bushman stopped struggling, sat up rigid with apprehension. He looked wildly around him as if he could not believe what he had heard. Indeed he seemed almost immediately convinced that the pain and anguish of his situation had made him delirious and he was hearing voices from within himself.

He started again to wrestle with the trap more desperately than ever, groaning to himself as if groaning helped to relieve the pain. François at once called out the greeting a second time, louder and more confidently. This time the little man seemed to be convinced. He looked in Francis’s direction. François could hardly bear to look in the little man’s eyes, so dark were they with suffering. Yet he gave François slowly, in a voice hoarse with pain, which came out of him not consciously so much as if by a kind of reflex of history, the proper response that Bushmen had for this kind of greeting throughout their thousands of years in Africa:

‘I was dying, but now that you have come I live again.’

At that, François stood up, ran forward quickly. Half ashamed of himself, he first snatched up the bows and arrows as if still afraid the Bushman might try to use them when he saw a red stranger, even a young one, confronting him, before saying, ‘Please do not be alarmed, we want to help you all we can.’

Murmuring words of gratitude so blurred and low with pain that François could hardly hear him, the little man’s wide dark slanted eyes suddenly seemed to lose their light, the eyelids to close over them and his body to relax, before he fell back in a faint to the ground. François somehow had a hunch that this reaction of the trapped man might be a vote of confidence in him and Hintza. Only a feeling of certainty that he was about to be rescued from fatal peril could have allowed him the luxury now of giving in so completely to pain and exhaustion.

Nothing could have suited François better. He could now tackle the trap without the twisting and jerking of the man’s body to hamper him. He knew from past experience how difficult it was going to be to get the tough giant spring of the trap
I
suppressed sufficiently for its jaws to open, since it normally took two grown men to do so comfortably. He had often tried it before in calmer circumstances by standing on the spring or pushing it down with his hands with all his weight behind them. But he had always failed. His only hope now he knew, was to get a long, stout piece of wood and use it as some kind of lever I to suppress the spring. Luckily, there was plenty of such wood ( near at hand in the bush.

Ordering Hintza to mount guard over the unconscious man, he quickly found the stout, straight dead branch of an assegai wood tree. He hurried back to look among the stones, which there, so close to the hills, were abundant. He selected two very large ones and carried them back to the trap. He wedged the jaws of the trap securely between them so that they could not shift when he started his levering and so further injure the mangled leg. Placing the end of the wood firmly underneath a jagged ledge of rock which protruded over the track just where the trap had been set, he pressed down on the spring with all his thirteen-year-old strength and weight. The spring flattened out far more easily than he had expected and in the midst of his relief he had time for a fleeting feeling of gratitude that his father had insisted on teaching him the science of Archimedes which had been his least favourite subject of study. More, he found that once the spring was suppressed he could keep it down by holding the wooden lever firmly in position with his right hand alone. Doing this, and as an extra precaution adding his own weight to the pressure on the spring by sitting sideways on the lever, he gently lifted the leg clear of the spring.

He had hardly done so when the wooden lever, tough as it was, snapped with the strain like a pistol shot. He had to leap clear to escape being caught himself in the jaws of the trap. They shut with a clang so loud that he was afraid it would be heard at the milking sheds a mile or so away.

The leg of the still unconscious man was fearfully gashed; the wound wide open. It looked almost as if it had been caused by a leopard, no doubt because of the- night-long struggle of the Bushman, tugging to get his leg out of the grip of the saw-like teeth. To his dismay the wound, the veins no longer restricted by pressures of the trap, started immediately to bleed badly again. Happily, François knew that a vital artery could not have been cut because if so, the man would have long since bled to death. His greatest fear was that the leg might be broken. He felt it all over as gently as he could and was profoundly relieved that injured as it might be in flesh, sinew and muscle, the bones themselves miraculously had not been fractured.