1972 - A Story Like the Wind (2 page)

He knew at once that something unusual was happening and went up the narrow path to his home at the double, carrying his ·22 rifle like a light-infantryman at the trail. He arrived at the edge of the vast clearing on which the homestead stood near the banks of the river, to see his father already dismounted from his horse, the bridle over the crook of his right arm and his left round his wife who had rushed out to greet him.

His father, he learned, when his own excited greeting was over, had come home not on the normal road from the railway, a distance of some ten miles, but on a back trail through the bush leading past Mopani Theron’s base camp, fifty miles further away.

And what had he been doing at Mopani’s camp? He asked the question of François with a mysterious air and the note of teasing which he always seemed to use towards his only son when he needed a counter for the uprush of feeling that came to him when his affections were deeply engaged. François remembered this aspect of their meeting particularly, because it seemed to him at the time that never had he known this paradoxical trait in his father’s character as lively and pronounced. So much so that it made him oddly uneasy, almost as if it had another purpose, that red sunset evening, than its normal one of preserving the proportions of male restraint and deep-felt emotion at any given moment in his father’s Spartan state of being. Anxious as he was to know what lay behind it all, he was to remember that he instinctively connected his reaction with the fact that he had never seen his father looking so tired after a journey, nor suddenly so thin and so much older.

However, all trace of unease vanished when his father explained why he had come the long, round-about way just to spend a night with Mopani Theron. He said that all the while he had been away he had been thinking that although François had a gun of his own (he had on his tenth birthday been presented with a new ·22 repeating rifle and two hundred rounds of ammunition), he still needed something more before his equipment as a hunter was complete. Could François guess what that was?

François had a very good idea, not of what it was but of what he would like it to be. Yet so much beyond all reasonable expectation was it that he quickly pushed all thought of it aside, because, young as he was, he already knew what agonies of disappointment over-expectation could produce in people and, as a result, had determined that the beginning of wisdom in any young person in the power of unpredictable grown-ups, was to take every possible precaution against excess of hope and anticipation.

Couldn’t he guess? His father went on in that new, rather tired voice which he seemed to have developed on the journey just behind him. What was it that François secretly Wanted and yet was so small that it could be concealed on his person? Yes, let François look at him. He had something on him for François at that very moment.

The emphasis convinced François that it could not be what he longed for, and made him glad in a sad way that he had not indulged his expectation. He could not imagine how what he would have liked as a present could be concealed on his father’s person. Examining his father as he stood there, tall in front of François, his arm about his wife, who seemed to be, in the unfair way of grown-ups, already in the conspiracy, and the brilliant dying light of the winter’s day like a halo round them, François could detect no bulge in his clothes, nor any other evidence that his father might have brought him anything of importance. He tried not to give any sign of the involuntary inrush of disappointment, but he found himself silently imploring Providence with a quick, strong wish: ‘Dear Lord, please not another hunting knife.’

Both parents seemed to have realized that teasing had gone far enough because, at a nudge from François’s mother, his father lifted the flap of the wide, deep pocket of his old military great-coat, put his right hand inside and when he pulled it out again joined it with his left. With both hands cupped together he held out to François something of a deep golden colour.

Although it took him some time to believe it, so great was his surprise, it was of course exactly what he had secretly wanted; perhaps somewhat smaller than he would have liked but none the less a puppy and a dog of his own. It could not have been more than a fortnight old and was fast asleep, no doubt exhausted by its journey and from the shock of suddenly being alone. Its eyes, fringed with unusually long lashes for any dog, however well-bred, were tightly shut and creased at the corners, like the lines round eyes that have looked far too intently and far too long at the African sun.

As François’s eyes came out of their trance of unbelief, they saw the cold evening air send a shiver through the glistening coat of the tiny yellow bundle in his father’s hands. He reached out and took it carefully into his own. He felt with a great flush of pleasure that it was as warm as his breakfast toast. As he thought this, the puppy suddenly opened its eyes and looked up into his own. He was startled to find that they were a deep dark blue. He had never seen so charged and human a colour in any animal’s eyes, particularly an animal so small, tired and bewildered as the little puppy between his hands. Looking into them, his sense of wonder grew because all bewilderment was vanishing from the puppy’s eyes. They seemed to be recognizing in François their destined home. A quick whimper of greeting broke from the puppy; it began to wriggle in his hands and the little yellow tail started to vibrate against the palm which held it, in an effort to wag. At the same time it tried to heave itself nearer to François, so that he had to clasp it against his chest or it might have fallen. François put his face down to make a noise of welcome to the puppy and at once the cold, wet black nose, the incontrovertible sign of good health in any dog, came up to meet him and a tongue, pink and smooth as the petal of one of the finest of his mother’s bright cannas, which grew in the flower garden in front of the house, glistened in the evening light and reached out to lick François’s cheek.

‘What’s his name?’ François asked his father, his voice almost incoherent with pleasure, gratitude and surprise, all churned up together.

‘He has no name yet,’ his father replied in that studied, meticulous way of speaking that years of work as an educationalist had inflicted on him. ‘As he is yours, you must name him and I am certain you will name him well and accurately. But before deciding just remember what distinguished stock he comes from and that he has a mother called Nandi and a father named Dingiswayo—great names both, as you no doubt know.’

François’s father had been born in the far south of Africa among the great Amaxosa people and spoke their language as he did English and Afrikaans. François had been brought up knowing Amaxosa fairy-tales, myths, legends and history perhaps better than those of the remote Europe from which his people had come some three hundred years before; and almost, though not quite as well, as those of the Bushman people to which his old nurse, Koba, who had died a few months before, had belonged.

Everything his father had told him about the Amaxosa had made them, second only to old Koba’s Bushmen, a favourite people. He had been particularly impressed in their history, as his father taught it to him, by one of the Amaxosa paramount chiefs, a dashing, spirited person called Hintza, who had figured in the long War of the Axe, and as his father spoke, François knew suddenly what he would call the puppy. Without doubt or hesitation now, in a clear voice which surprised even himself with its firmness, he announced as if it were a self-evident fact, ‘His name please is Hintza.’

At the sound of the name Hintza the puppy against his chest became surprisingly alert, for a reason that was to become clearer much later. It wriggled all over and pressed closer against François, and a small noise of contentment broke from it like a sign of confirmation that it had known well in advance what its name was. Then it once more relaxed, shut its eyes, sighed profoundly and resumed its sleep.

‘Now I wonder,’ François’s father was teasing him again, ‘did he put the idea into your head? Or did you really think of it yourself?’

But François felt there were more important things to do then than to engage in a bout of teasing with his father. There was the question of arranging proper accommodation for Hintza in his own room, as well as the problem of seeing that it had food and drink after so long a journey, both matters the urgency of which grown-ups, with their slack attitude to time, were inclined to overlook when dealing with the immediacy of the young. Without answering he turned about and once more at the double, dashed to the house, straight up the wide steps of the broad stoep and vanished inside, hastening for his own room. There he took an old winter coat from the cupboard, arranged it rather like a big bird’s nest on the foot of his bed and placed Hintza gently in the middle before covering him over with the end of one of his own woollen blankets. Clearly all this was very much to Hintza’s liking because not once did he flicker so much as an eyelid and appeared to be sinking deeper than ever into his sleep.

That done, François hurried out to the big kitchen at the back of the house, snatched a small milking can from a shelf and ran out to the milking sheds a quarter of a mile away at the end of the great vegetable garden and orchard, which stood on the fertile black soil between his home and the hills. The Matabele herdsmen there were just finishing off the evening’s milking and already there were a dozen large gleaming metal pails filled to the brim with milk, standing on the stone floors against the wall near the entrance. As always there was something magical about the milk for François because not only did it glow white as snow in the twilight air, but was topped with a mound of foam caused by the vigour with which the skilful Matabele drew it in quick jets from the cows, making a sound like rain in the shed. This foam, glowing gardenia-white in the brown air, rose high over the silver rims like a Muslim dome.

Snatching the burning copper dipper which hung from a rail above the pail in the company of other dairy utensils, he began filling the little milking-can with such haste that he spilt some of the milk. He was solemnly reproved for it by the chief herdsman, a tall, broad, grey-haired old Matabele gentleman (old that is by François’s standards), of whom François was very fond. His name was !#grave;Bamuthi, which meant ‘He of the Tree’. He was said to have been born unexpectedly under a sacred tree while his mother was hiding from their hereditary Mashona enemies. The latter had attacked their kraal while the men were away on a hunting expedition. He had been at Hunter’s Drift
I
ever since François could remember.

‘
Gashle!
Slowly, Little Feather,’ he said in his deep bass voice. ‘
Gashle!
He who wastes food will bring famine upon himself. And what has happened that you should want to spoil your appetite when the evening food is nearly cooked?’

‘Little Feather’ was the Matabele nickname for François. Like so many of the African peoples, European names had no meaning for them and they insisted on giving all white people with whom they came into contact, special African names that symbolized for them their main characteristics. So widespread was this practice that Europeans were only remembered and referred to among the Africans by these special names and, from the beginning, their name for François had been Little Feather.

They had called him this simply because they called his father (although never to his face and they thought it was a deep secret), The Great Bird. François, who was in the secret from the start because his old nurse had told him of it, knew that this was a name full of instinctive respect. Birds, for the people of this great bush country, had many magical properties. For example, they were thought to know the secret of all living things, to have great foresight and to fill with wisdom the hearts of those who took the trouble to learn their language and listen. That was why African chiefs in the old days had always worn a long black and white tail feather of the
um-Xwangbe
(sacred ibis) stuck in the metal bands around their heads, as a sign for all their people to see that their heads were full of natural wisdom and inspired thought.

Now François’s father had been the chief inspector of African education in that vast territory before he so unexpectedly turned to farming. His reputation as a man of great wisdom and learning had spread so widely through the territory that it was even known on the remote frontier where he had carved Hunter’s Drift out of the virgin bush. From the moment he appeared among them, both the reputation and manner of his coming seemed to make it inevitable that only the image of a great rare new bird, suddenly alighting from the sky, could serve the impression he made on the indigenous peoples. In this, for once, they had the full approval of old Koba. She resented and hated the Matabele, like all other black African races, for having played so terrible a part in hunting down and destroying without pity the last remnants of her race, which once had been the masters of the whole of southern Africa, if not the entire continent.

Birds, as François knew from the many wonderful stories Koba told him at night before he went to sleep, had even greater magic for the Bushman than for the Matabele, the Barotse and the Shangaans. So he had not been surprised when Koba, pledging him to secrecy, told him his father’s Sindabele name and confessed that she thought that the Matabele, in naming him thus had, for once, not done too badly.

It seemed logical, if not utterly natural, therefore, that when François was born, he should have been thought of as a feather of the bird that his father was. He had happily accepted this name for years from the Matabele, particularly because invariably they spoke it in a tone of rare protective affection, as if thereby claiming him as one of their own. Moreover, as Matabele children were supposed to be terrified of feathers, he thought that the name implied a certain courage in his own character.

Yet recently, the ‘Little’ in front of ‘Feather’ had begun to irk, as though something in François was beginning to feel that it was high time the ‘Little’ was dropped and he was promoted at least to a full feather, if not another bird in his own right. On this particular occasion the ‘Little’ smarted more than ever, perhaps because the fact that he had just become the owner of a puppy of his own—and a puppy that would soon be a hunting dog—might have started in him a feeling of crossing a frontier, leaving his childhood for ever behind, and taking the first step towards a new world of full male responsibility.