1972 - A Story Like the Wind (18 page)

From there he went on at great length, hiding himself and his feelings in the smokescreen of discourse, to enlarge on one of the most beloved of his many theories which argued that since Bantu man had slowly come over the millenniums out of the far and mysterious north of Africa, he may at some Mediterranean moment of his history have had contact with the earliest Romans and acquired some of their vocabulary.
Vale
indeed was not the only evidence for such a theory. There were other words, like the
ene, bene
, the one, two, which began the Bantu system of counting. Even more imposing, there were great sonorous words like
innunadata
, the Zulu indication of a flood, to suggest a suspicion of influence from the Latin.

He argued all this eloquently and long, with many examples from ‘Xhosa, Zulu and Sindabele, but François was not deceived. He went to bed that night firmly convinced that there was more to that farewell than just a classically appropriate salute to another great sunset. So convinced was he of this that he might not have gone to sleep had he not been in possession of an antidote to his disquiet ever since !#grave;Bamuthi had ruled that they had an alternative method of dealing with his father’s sickness. They had uLangalibalela whose name, significantly enough, was also connected with their great sun.

François was awake at four in the morning to see Ouwa and Lammie prepare to get in the lightest, fastest and best sprung of their mule wagons, which was to take them to Hunter’s Drift Siding to catch the early morning express train from Livingstone and the Victoria Falls to the capital. Ouwa had already ruled a week before that François was on no account to come with them. Life, he said, consisted of a process of turning pages and when they had to be turned, they were best turned quickly and firmly. François had protested but in vain. Ouwa would not give in and one wonders whether in doing so he was not consulting his own emotional conveniences more than those of his son, for one cannot disguise from oneself the suspicion that it might have been easier for François to adapt himself to his first separation from both Ouwa and Lammie simultaneously if he had had the journey to and from the station with all its excitement, novelty and minor exigencies to occupy his imagination.

However, all François could do was to be in the dining-room in his place at the table, with a rejuvenated and wide-awake Hintza sitting beside him. Lammie and Ouwa joined him. François swallowed his coffee and rusks eagerly, Lammie did her duty by her own portion but no more.

What Ouwa would have done to his portion one shall never know because he was not given the chance. Ousie-Johanna was in no mood to give him the benefit of the doubt. She had her own ideas of what was most fitting, and the person who thought she could be denied in what she regarded as a moment of crisis in her duty and responsibility, would have underestimated the formidable queen of the Hunter’s Drift kitchen. As Ouwa sat down, she appeared with a great blue china jug out of which the steam was rising and a smell of the utmost power emanating, until the atmosphere was so charged with it that the sensitive Hintza was forced to sneeze violently. François was not at all surprised because it was not his favourite smell either. It was the aroma of the dreadful herb
buchu
—a sort of Bushman panacea for all the ills of the flesh and blood and one in which not only Ousie-Johanna but all Matabele and even Lammie believed. In Lammie’s case it was confined to believing in it as a cure for colds and influenza in the winter. But Ousie-Johanna set no such limits to its powers. She produced the jug like some female Merlin with a magic brew, stood it firmly on the table, placed a large white mug beside it and announced uncompromisingly: ‘You blerrie-well drink some of this
buchu
, Ouwa, or Ousie-Johanna will never speak to you again. I may go on cooking for you and my Lammie for as long as I live but the Ousie-Johanna who had always looked after you, well, she just will not speak to you again.’

Somewhat astonished by Ousie-Johanna’s behaviour and yet moved by the solicitude which ran like a thread of gold through her turbulent manner, Ouwa smiled his wry ironic smile, dutifully filled the mug and slowly raised it to his lips. But before touching it the powerful smell seemed to make even his experienced self shrink back.

‘Come on Ouwa, you blerrie-well drink that down!’ Ousie-Johanna, feeling he was about to fail her, exhorted him, ‘you know that there’s nothing in the world like
buchu
for protecting a man about to go on a journey in the cold hours of morning. You know how many times I have cured the three of you from serious illnesses with my
buchu
that I make better than anybody. There was my sister at death’s door and I…’

‘My dear Ousie,’ François’s father replied, the mug at his lips: ‘Would you please stop lying to me? I already believe you!’ With that he put the mug to his mouth and drank down the
buchu
as fast as possible.

When he had finished he made a face at François and said: ‘No greater love of woman has a man ever shown than in this…I will give you three good reasons why I should not have touched the stuff. One, I detest the taste. Two, I believe it is utterly useless. Three, in so far as I have room left in my contracted stomach, I would much rather have given it over to some hot sweet coffee.’

But nothing that he could say, even in jest, could possibly dim the light of triumph and contentment that he brought to Ousie-Johanna’s face; a light which perhaps warmed him more than the hot
buchu
had done. Ousie-Johanna’s intervention too, had helped to introduce a certain element of comedy into the occasion, making the parting from his parents that followed soon afterwards easier than it might otherwise have been.

François now had to give his mind to Xhabbo. Dark as it still was, he would have liked to set out for the cave in which he had left the little Bushman as soon as the sound of the wagon wheels and the clip-clop of the hooves of the mules had faded away into the bush. But that was not possible without arousing Ousie-Johanna’s suspicions. All he could do was to beg her to let him have his breakfast as soon as possible, saying that he intended to go off into the bush and see if he could not get some nice fat gum bustards, the wild peacock of his people, and birds that Ousie-Johanna always coveted. Ousie-Johanna obviously thought that François had the right sort of priorities in giving first thought to her larder in this manner, so she set about preparing one of his favourite breakfasts. She had, in any case, decided in the night to do this because she secretly feared what this first separation from Lammie and Ouwa might do to François.

While she was busy François was free to go to the great storeroom on the other side of the courtyard, unlock it as he was now the official keeper of the keys at Hunter’s Drift, go in and select three of the largest and best pieces of beef biltong, the sun-cured meat of his people, which were suspended in row upon row from the rafter. Biltong, in pioneering households such as theirs, played the same role as tinned meats in a modern home. It was the traditional stock against shortage of fresh food, since it kept almost indefinitely and was an essential element of provisions for journeys and expeditions into the bush. More important even on this occasion, biltong was considered to be meat in one of its most digestible and nourishing forms. Thinly sliced or grated it was always given as a tonic to invalids in convalescence.

At the same time François helped himself to a generous amount of raisins and dried peaches, which they received regularly from their cousins in the south and which were a first-rate substitute for fresh fruit when their brief season at Hunter’s Drift was over.

He carried all this back to his room unseen by an Ousie-Johanna who was in high spirits, humming her favourite hymn, ‘Abide with Me’, not sadly and solemnly but quite gaily, with a natural syncopated rhythm and urgency, as if it were some ‘Xhosa song of innocence and joy. She did this so loudly that she could be heard all over the house. François quickly wrapped his supplies in paper, spread them at the bottom of the haversack that he always used when out in the bush for a day and prepared the old muzzle-loader which had served him so well the day before, by ramming not a solid lead bullet but a great handful of lead pellets down the barrel, transforming it into a shot gun. None the less he also took a supply of solid lead bullets with him just in case, though he thought it extremely unlikely he would need them at an hour of the day when the bush was, as everybody knew, exceptionally free of menace. Then, fully armed, he arrived in the kitchen and, despite his impatience to be off, ate the kind of huge breakfast which could not fail to please Ousie-Johanna and helped him to persuade her to make an extra large round of ham and cheese sandwiches and fill the largest thermos flask they had with hot sweet coffee. She saw him out of the kitchen with undisguised approval of the way he had reacted to her scheme for mitigating his parents’ departure. Pausing only to equip himself with more medicine for Xhabbo, slinging an extra flask of water over his left shoulder, with Hintza at his side, he made off for the bush just after sunrise.

He had already decided in the night that he must avoid approaching the cave where Xhabbo was hidden always from the same direction. If he did so, he was certain he⁄would arouse the suspicion of !#grave;Bamuthi and the Matabele community, since he had never observed a regular pattern before, in his many excursions to the bush. Instead of going the short way past the Matabele kraal, he went off in the opposite direction as if he were going to look at one of the other traps set in the tracks to the west of the homestead. But once well hidden in the bush, he took an appropriate game track—there was not a track within a dozen miles of Hunter’s Drift that François did not know by heart—and in a round-about way came to the horn of hills on top of which Xhabbo was sheltering in his cave. He also took great care to see that he and Hintza left no spoor in any of the main tracks they crossed and climbed the hills from stone to stone, avoiding breaking any of the branches and twigs or shrubs or trampling the long, yellow tasselled grasses.

He was amazed how much more difficult the climb was than he remembered from the previous day. He wondered more and more as they climbed how someone so severely hurt as Xhabbo was, could ever have made the ascent successfully. His admiration for Xhabbo increased the higher he went. When he was right at the top and could see the Amanzim-tetse’s brown water churning at the base of the dark blue cliff, he thought for some minutes that he was not going to find the way to the cave again. Disconcerted, he looked around him to find that he had no clear idea how to proceed. It was a great blow to his pride, because he would have thought that by now his bushcraft was as good as anybody else’s at Hunter’s Drift and that said a lot, with so many experienced Matabele trackers about, and yet, good as it was it appeared to have failed him. He would have liked to excuse himself, pleading that he had been so concerned over Xhabbo’s plight the day before that his mind had not been free to observe the way as closely as he should have done, except that he knew the plea was not good enough.

Had not his chief instructors in these things, !#grave;Bamuthi and Mopani Theron, impressed upon him over and over again, that the most elementary lesson of security in the bush was always to make absolutely certain that one knew all the signs one would need to bring one back the way one had come. In his perplexity he turned to Hintza. Hintza was beginning to be impatient again and had started nudging him in the leg as he always did when he thought it was time that François both took notice of him and really got a move on when there was urgent work to be done.

François bent down, scratched Hintza fondly on the back of his ears and along the magnetic ridge on his back. Hintza raised his head appreciatively to François, and at the same time wrinkled and rewrinkled his beautiful shining black nose as it focused and refocused by reflex on some scent of meaning to him, clearly indicating to François: ‘Can’t you smell what I am smelling and do the necessary?’

François got the message at once. ‘Lead on Hin,’ he whispered to him in Bushman. ‘Lead on. But not too fast! See that you keep close to me.’

Hintza at once led off carefully, stopping whenever he was in danger of losing contact with François; looking over his shoulder to see that François was keeping station close behind him. Soon they were back among the boulders and wild raisin bushes François thought he recognized from the day before. Still he was not absolutely certain, until he came to a particularly large and smooth boulder. Then he recognized it instantly as the one over which he had had to help Xhabbo climb the day before. But his recognition was due, he realized, not to the shape of the boulder, but because there was an unmistakable streak of blood across its shiny surface, obviously from the terrible wound in Xhabbo’s leg.

Before climbing over the boulder, he unslung his flask of water, poured some of the precious liquid on his khaki bush handkerchief, and carefully removed all traces of blood from the stone. Then he scrambled up the boulder himself.

He was about to jump down the other side when he saw on the top of one of the highest points of the hill, directly opposite him, one of his favourite animals. It was a rare and a privileged glimpse of the smallest antelope of the bush, a little klipspringer ram. The klipspringer (literally, boulder-jumper), so called because of the prodigious chamois jumps of which it was capable was, both to the Matabele and the Bushman a beloved creature, gentle and beneficent. It was the hero of many an African fairy tale, a kind of princely and graceful Tom Thumb who always intervened in the stories told around the evening fire in the beehive huts all over the land, to enable good to triumph over evil, beauty over ugliness, and to save the unprotected and the weak from destruction by giants and other tyrants of the bush. François knew many of these stories and remembered one, above all, told to him by old Koba.

In her story the klipspringer was the favourite among all the creatures created by the Bushman god, Mantis. It told how Mantis himself had fed the little antelope and made it strong and beautiful with the sweetest wild honey: another way of saying that Mantis had devoted to the little animal all the sweetness of disposition of which he was capable. There was a particularly touching episode when Mantis once had to rescue the klipspringer from an elephant. The elephant in the Bushman world (unlike that of the Matabele) played the same role as one-eyed giants in François’s Greek legends or wicked giants in his European fairy tales. It was always threatening the life of the innocent and small to which the little Bushman people attached such overwhelming importance. In this episode Mantis was deep down a hole in the side of the hills where some wild bees had made their nest. He was extracting one translucent comb after another of the sweetest honey for his beloved klipspringer, and throwing them up to it, singing out as he did so: ‘Eat, my honey-child, eat and grow and tell me you are happy!’ Whereupon the klipspringer would thank him in a lovely soft, reed-like voice.