Did You Really Shoot the Television? (20 page)

Their chief problem now was time. In just a fortnight the rains were due. When these came, movement in the wilderness would be impossible. If Mac was to find his bushmen, he needed to do it quickly. As with all such media assignments, adventures must be telescoped to fit time and budgets. They set about buying equipment to replace all the stuff smashed on the drive from Francistown. John Currye
laboured beneath the Chevy, fearful that its clutch was stripped. There was doubt whether the broken bridge at Toteng, the only place where they could cross the river to get to the south-west, was repaired for traffic. Their boys, Wilson and Habana, were surrendered to the Maun DC as instructed. Replacements were needed. Father quizzed the DC’s wife, Mrs Allison, about three lions she had shot. He experienced a spasm of envy, since he yearned for a chance at one himself.

Things started to look better for the expedition. John Currye reported that he had mended the clutch. News came that the bridge at Toteng was passable, though no vehicle had tried it yet. The DC found them a new boy, named Malenga. They bought a lot of leaf tobacco, Transvaal Special No.1, to offer the bushmen if they found them. They set off again into the bush. Conditions were worse, though they had not thought it possible, than those they had met earlier. Within a few hours, Mac at the wheel – never a skilful driver – almost ditched the truck. It careered headlong down a steep decline, apparently bent on overturning. The whole load, including the big petrol drum, broke loose and crashed about inside, creating a mad cacophony. At last, to their surprise, the Chevy lurched to a halt, hot metal ticking, in the midst of a thorn bush. They repeated that experience half a dozen times before reaching the bridge at Toteng, where they made the inaugural passage past a sign warning: ‘ALL TRAFFIC CROSSES ENTIRELY AT OWNER’S RISK’.

Once over the river, they refilled the water tanks and headed for their next camp, in a huge soured saltpan still marked on their map as Lake N’Gami, though it was almost dry. To Mac’s weary irritation, a crowd of local villagers squatted round the truck, begging tobacco and declining bribes and threats to make them go away. Bushmen were the only people the visitors wanted to meet just then. No other Africans would do. They heard a leopard as they ate their guinea-fowl stew, but felt too weary to become excited.

At the next waterhole, Tswai, about a hundred miles from Maun, they found a lonely white trader’s store, remote as that which John Buchan invented for Prester John. Its owner, whose name was Gower, said that it was months since he had seen a visitor. Would they like
a cup of tea? They told him about their quest. ‘There’s a bushman here now in the camp,’ he said. ‘The boys call him Big Guts. His family are out there somewhere in the
bundu
about twenty miles from here. Do you want to see him?’

Big Guts proved to be a little man with a swollen belly lined with deep creases, clad in a ragged pair of oversized shorts which clung precariously to his narrow loins. He was one among a sad host of his people who had abandoned bush life to attach themselves to the coat-tails of white man’s life, without discovering much comfort or satisfaction. He chattered volubly in his clicking tongue, which the explorers were thrilled to hear for the first time. His family were out there sure enough, he said: ‘
Kwa! Kwa!
’ Gower said: ‘I think he can lead you to them.’ The ramshackle expedition ‘welcomed Big Guts as if he were Father Christmas’.

There was no track where they were going, the trader warned. It was virgin bush. At the first sign of rain they should turn back fast, or they would never get out at all. Father unloaded all their spare rations and the extra fuel drum, replacing it with a further fifty gallons of water. Then they set off westwards, Big Guts at intervals pointing convincingly. Hour after hour the truck battered a path through the scrub. Mac shot a gazelle, which they skinned and ate round the fire that night. His bowels were still in revolt, so the hunter himself abstained, watching in disbelief as Big Guts ate two entire legs of meat, laughing manically in a fashion which he sustained through the days that followed.

They awoke to find a giraffe a few yards away, peering curiously down at them. Big Guts, still convulsed with mirth as well he might be, ate several more pounds of meat while the others made do with mealie porridge. That day the going got much worse. Again and again they foundered in the sand and were obliged to reverse, make a rush, and smash a passage through the vegetation blocking their course. Father noted with alarm that they were using a gallon of petrol every two miles. At that rate they could not long pursue their search. ‘
Kwa!
’ urged Big Guts merrily, gesturing them on. ‘
Kwa!
’ They were approaching a huge kopje, which he promised was their destination,
when the truck lurched into soft sand and bogged. Mac took his guide, a waterbag and rifle, and prepared to complete the distance on foot. Leaving Malenga and John digging, he trudged away into the bush. He covered barely a mile before admitting defeat. It was far too hot to walk. He suffered a moment of panic at the discovery that he had once again lost the truck. Then, mercifully, he glimpsed Chris Ware standing like a fingerpost on its roof, pointing the way back.

Many hours of digging later, together with more hours of grinding at a bare walking pace through the bush, they reached the kopje. They found only the tattered remains of two grass huts – skerms, as they are known. The bushmen were gone. Big Guts sniffed the blackened remains of a fire and gestured onwards. They asked him: how far? ‘Three days.’ John Currye shrugged: ‘We haven’t the fuel.’ Father said they would push on as far as they dared. Some hours later, Chris Ware drew attention to Big Guts’s behaviour. He pointed first left, then right, then laid a skinny arm across his mouth and giggled. Chris said, ‘I think he’s taking us for a joy ride.’ John said, ‘I’m bloody sure he is.’ Malenga and the bushman chattered to each other. Big Guts eventually climbed down from the truck, sniffed the air and laughed again. Mac remembered someone telling him that bushmen laugh when they are frightened.

They abandoned the quest, turned the truck in its tracks, and set off on the gloomy path back to trader Gower’s. There was little talking in the camp that night, only more laughter from Big Guts. Chris Ware was stung by a bee swarm. A tyre punctured. One of the big, heavy wheels had to be changed. The radiator boiled every half-hour. John blocked an oil leak in the engine with a splinter of wood. There was a rainstorm, which they knew was the harbinger of more, much more, to come. Back at Gower’s, after drinking a mug of tea they were thankful to offload Big Guts. The bushman was still laughing as they drove away. The morale of the little expedition was at rock bottom.

Two days later they reached Ghanzi. This was a wired compound in the midst of the bush which housed a small police detachment and Ernest Midgeley, the DC who administered the surrounding 69,000 square miles of nothingness. Sitting on the verandah of
Midgeley’s quarters, Mac, weary and unshaven, listened as the DC quizzed one of his policemen about the nearest bushmen. Ba’phuti, the constable, stood at attention as he reported that he knew where to find a family of Makokas.

‘Can you lead this
marena
to the Makokas?’ demanded Midgeley.

‘I think so.’

‘Are you quite sure, Ba’phuti?’

‘Quite sure,
marena
.’

First, however, they had to repair their transport. A front spring of the truck was gone. There were no spares within a hundred miles, except a few designed for a Ford. John Currye asked: was there a welding kit anywhere? Yes, indeed, a mere twenty-six miles away. The tough, infinitely resourceful young man set off immediately in the police inspector’s truck, to weld a Ford leafspring into something that might fit a Chevrolet. Late, very late that night, there was a tap on the wire mesh of the rest hut where Mac, sleepless, was writing his notes by the light of an oil lamp. ‘It’s John, Mr Hastings. We’ve done the job. It was pretty rough. I had to drive there and back without lights – the circuit on the truck had gone. But I can fit the new spring in a couple of hours tomorrow morning.’ ‘Good boy.’

At dawn, as Currye worked on the spring Ba’phuti arrived, trailed by womenfolk carrying his bedroll and pack with suitable dignity. Midgeley had ordered the constable to travel in plain shorts rather than uniform, to avoid alarming the bushmen. Soon after, they headed once more into the heat haze. They stopped at a ranch, Ramsden’s, to drink tea. The two English farmers, Frank and Bert, said they had plenty of tame bushmen about the place, but were more doubtful about finding the wild ones, the Makokas. ‘You might find them, you might not. One day they’re about the place; the next you hear they’re eighty miles away.’ They warned Father to carry his rifle if he met them: ‘They know what it is, and that way they’re less likely to stick a poisoned arrow into you. They’ll tell you they haven’t got any bows and arrows. You needn’t believe them. You can be sure they’ve got them hidden somewhere about. But they don’t like producing them because they’re afraid the white man will take them away.’

‘I’ll remember.’

On and on they drove.

It was country in which I would have said that a jackal couldn’t find cover. I was overwhelmed by a sense of utter helplessness at the sheer enormity of the search that I had set myself so lightly by the fireside of a London club. Then Ba’phuti pointed. Slinging my rifle on my shoulder and dropping out of the truck, I stumbled over the hot, soft sand and threaded my way through the maze of tangled scrub. Loping towards me, raising his knees with a springing lift like an antelope, was a wizened little man with a distended belly and hair that grew in pepperpot tufts. Where he had sprung from I couldn’t guess. The landscape seemed quite empty. All I cared was that he was nothing like any of the Africans I had ever seen. He wasn’t black; his skin was yellow. The only clothing he wore was a loincloth made of antelope hide. My long quest was ended. I had crossed the Kalahari Desert to within twenty-five miles of the South-West border. I had bashed the stuffing out of a truck. I had pretty well bashed the stuffing out of myself and my faithful companions. But we’d done it. By all the black mambas in Africa, we’d done it. I had found the Stone Age Man.

A cynic might say that what Mac had achieved was not very remarkable. In Bechuanaland in those days, white men not infrequently encountered bushmen. His own astonishment and wonder was that of a tourist, seeing for the first time something familiar to those who made their lives in south-west Africa. His principal feat was to have overcome the hazards created by the inadequacy of his own crazy little expedition. But Mac possessed a gift, which lay at the heart of my own devotion to him, of imbuing with romance even a journey to the Highlands of Scotland. He loved to create melodrama in his life, to cast himself in the role of a character out of Buchan or Rider Haggard. His innocent, breathless delight in the adventures he devised for himself was infectious, and he conveyed it brilliantly to a generation of schoolboy readers, who thrilled to his exploits because he
was so sincerely thrilled by them himself. A journey across a few hundred miles of wilderness which would have been commonplace to an old Africa hand became an epic when performed by a novice who, until three weeks earlier, had never donned a bush jacket. Mac cast himself as the gentleman amateur explorer, a pose which would have invited derision from the Royal Geographical Society. Some mirth must indeed have trailed in his wake across Rhodesia and Bechuanaland, at the notion of a journalist straight out from Britain renting a truck and setting forth to conquer the Kalahari in the service of a boys’ comic. But to a million young readers of
Eagle
, and to his son now as then, the performance was irresistible.

Not surprisingly his new acquaintance, barely four feet tall, looked nervous. Mac offered a cigarette, which was eagerly received. The little man pointed to a clump of marula trees, took his guest by the hand, and led him away towards them, Chris Ware and his clicking cameras scurrying close behind. Mac had told the rest of the party to stay in the truck, to avoid overwhelming the bushman. He got as far as asking his name, which sounded like Xa-ou, but then needed Ba’phuti to interpret. The constable came up just as they approached Xa-ou’s family, squatting in a circle in the scrub. There were nineteen of them there – nine women, six children and four men. Another nine men, they said, were away hunting. Their five skerms were shaped like molehills, with low entrances which even the bushmen had to crawl into. Only the sick and the old, Father knew, used the skerms. Fit adults slept in a circle around the fire. Their bodies often bore burn-marks, where they had rolled into the embers on a cold night.

The atmosphere among the group was tense. Xa-ou seemed friendly enough, but others trembled when Mac spoke to them. Some slipped away to hide. Like so many others of Africa’s wild species, they had suffered such appalling persecution at the hands of man, who had hunted and harassed them to the verge of extinction, that their wariness represented common prudence. Things improved when Father proffered tobacco. They all began to smoke, some using pipes carved from antelope bones. Bert Ramsden had told Mac that the bushmen were always baffled by white men’s carelessness about throwing away
the tins in which their meat came. To these people tins were priceless, for they had learned to forge arrowheads from them.

Mac groped presumptuously in a skerm. ‘It seemed inconceivable that a family of human beings could exist with so little property. They had one or two bone knives, an animal skin with some liquid (probably milk) in it, a few ostrich-egg shells.’ Everything else they owned hung in little antelope-hide dilly bags which hung on their hips. Possessions would imply permanence. These bushmen were still nomadic hunters, each family cherishing its traditional territory into which others ventured at their peril. Their only valuables were their weapons – the bows and arrows on which they depended for existence. At last Mac found a quiver, two feet long, made from a hollowed length of tree branch, capped with hide. He examined the arrows, each in two pieces. The shaft was a reed, bound with animal sinew. The head was made of sharpened bone, to which was attached a tiny barb, hammered out of tinplate. There were no feathers to steady its flight. Mac reckoned that, to be effective, it would need to be fired at a range of no more than ten or twenty yards.