1972 - A Story Like the Wind (20 page)

He had, he admitted, set out perhaps not as well prepared as he should have been. The heavy nature of his mission and the possible consequences of his father’s death were weighing too heavily on his heart so that his eyes ‘were feeling themselves to be full of the things within and were not empty and open enough to be filled with the things from without’. If not he would never have stumbled into the jaws of that beast which had caught him in the early hours of the morning. But perhaps that again was the wise and cunning Mantis’s doing. Had not his misfortune brought him and Foot of the Day together? It was only this and nothing else, Xhabbo made clear, which reconciled him to his accident. Nevertheless, he explained with a certain melancholy to François, he must start on his journey back as soon as he could.

And how long did he think that would be? François asked him. Xhabbo did not answer at once. He stood up and tested his leg by walking round and round the cave. He did so much more easily than the day before. Part of this François knew was due to the pain-killers; part to the fact that Xhabbo had recovered from the profound sense of shock that the accident had inflicted on him and also to the sense of reassurance brought to him by François’s friendship, and by the knowledge that he would not lack food and water. It seemed to François that twenty-four hours’ rest and European medicine had set Xhabbo on the road to recovery much faster than he would have thought possible for himself or, for that matter, the toughest of Matabele boys. It was such striking evidence of the quality, resilience and spirit of the Bushman people, exceeding even the highest expectations raised in him by old Koba’s reminiscences at her nostalgic best, that François warmed to Xhabbo all the more.

Even so, he went cold all over when Xhabbo, after a short round on his feet, sat down beside him again and said, ‘Xhabbo feels that his leg will be able to walk properly beside its brother in three, if not two days’ time. When that moment comes, would not Foot of the Day come too, for that would be utterly pleasant to Xhabbo and pleasant to his people in the desert as well.’

François took the invitation as a great compliment and was surprised how keenly the longing to be able to say yes flared up in him. It was almost as if the longing was presenting itself to him not for the first time but had been secretly at work in his imagination ever since Koba first spoke to him of her people and their ways.

Of course he knew that there could be no question of his going. Quickly his dismay was increased by despair at the thought that Xhabbo might vanish in three, if not two days’ time, perhaps for ever. So he immediately protested. He said that judging by the nature of the wound, it would take at least a week if not ten days before Xhabbo could think of undertaking such a journey on his own, since François could not come with him and help him on his way. He explained that his own parents were not dead, but had gone on a journey leaving him alone to take care of Hunter’s Drift. He could not dream of going until they came back and gave him their permission and blessing for such a journey which he longed to do more than anything he could possibly imagine.

The thought that it might take his leg as long as a week, or ten days, to recover struck Xhabbo as so outrageous that he laughed and laughed as if he had never heard anything so funny before. François had never heard or seen such wonderful abandoned laughter. It was as if the whole of Xhabbo had been taken over by laughter. From outer skin to the inmost and most secret place of his body he seemed possessed by nothing but laughter of flame and had no room in him for anything else. Indeed, it was so wonderful a laugh that although François did not feel at all like laughing he was infected by it and a smile came to his face.

Even Hintza, lying there on the yellow sand beside him, looking attentively from François to Xhabbo and Xhabbo to François all the while they talked, with the electric consonants he knew so well travelling forth between the two of them like a do-it-yourself lightning, seemed to be gripped by a powerful desire to laugh himself. He was already grinning at François; the corners of his mouth quivering and his long pink tongue suddenly darting out to lick the quick trembling corners of his long black lips as if they had suddenly gone dry with emotion. But after a while he exhausted all his powers of grinning and there came a moment when his tongue disappeared, and a violent sneeze burst from him which François knew of old was Hintza’s way of getting rid of an excess of inexpressible feeling in himself. When that happened, Hintza leapt up and started racing round Xhabbo and himself at top speed, until the shafts of sunlight were so dim with yellow dust that François had to call him to order and make him lie down once more beside him. He was reduced to grinning and baring his teeth rather clown-ishly as a substitute for that glitter of laughter which was flashing from Xhabbo.

All in all, the power and the beauty in Xhabbo’s laugh, despite all the other complicated reactions of the moment, shone so brightly in François’s imagination that he had time to know he was rather envious of it and to feel that there was almost nothing he would not give in exchange for being able to laugh like that himself.

When Xhabbo’s laughter began to show signs of ending and he was able to pick himself up from the floor of the cave on to which he had fallen, helpless and wriggling, as if mortally wounded with laughing, so that he could sit upright again, and though still giggling from time to time, François was able to protest: ‘Xhabbo, it is too serious a matter for laughing. You will not be ready to travel for many days.’

For a moment it looked as if Xhabbo would be provoked into a fresh outburst of laughter, but he contained himself, became serious at last and said, ‘Foot of the Day, the wounds that fill the eyes of Bushmen are never difficult to cure. The wounds that Mantis has taught the Bushman to fear are the wounds that do not fill his eyes or those of his people.’

François however continued to argue and plead with him, until he got Xhabbo to agree that they would review the state of his leg each morning before deciding when precisely he would leave on his journey back to the desert. Above all, François made him promise that he would not suddenly decide the issue for himself and leave without seeing François first.

The other matter of immediate concern to François was to get Xhabbo to promise that he would not show himself at any time outside the cave. There was always a chance that a Mata-bele might catch a glimpse of him. No matter where one went in the bush, there was, as François stressed, always some eye fixed upon one. Had not Mopani Theron always warned him that such an eye, no matter whether animal or human, usually started a chain reaction in the natural life of the land, robbing it of its routine manifestations to proclaim to all and sundry that some abnormal ingredient had come to disturb the abiding rhythm of the bush? Once such a chain reaction started, Mopani had stressed, one could never know to what it might not lead.

All this made sense to Xhabbo and he readily gave his promise. By this time François was horrified to see, from the angle of the shafts of sunlight streaking into the cave that he had already been over-long on his visit. He felt compelled now to say a hurried goodbye to Xhabbo and to promise to return with more food and powerful medicine the following afternoon.

François had no watch of his own. He had been accustomed, like everybody else at Hunter’s Drift, except his parents, to make the sun both watch and compass. As he emerged from the mellow cave he saw that it was already past his lunch hour and knew that he would have to face a grim Ousie-Johanna whose sense of authority, heightened by his parents’ absence, would have been made sterner still by anxiety. For it was not at all like him to be late for food. Worse still, he had done nothing at all yet about the ostensible purpose of his excursion so early in the day into the bush. He had shot neither guinea nor gum bustard, which he had promised to Ousie-Johanna. He could not, therefore, hurry back to Hunter’s Drift to lessen the crime of his unpunctuality. He would have to shoot something for the kitchen first.

Unfortunately, as everybody knew, those hours between noon and three in the afternoon were the dead hours of the day in the bush. All animals, birds and even serpents went into a deep dream of sleep at that inert time. It was as if the whole of life contracted out of the business of living, to such an extent that both Matabele and Bushmen spoke of the period as the hours of death, and implicitly took it to be the time when ghosts emerged from the graves to brush one pale shadow after another as with black crows’ wings, on missions of vengeance and reproach.

Yet François had to do something to redeem his promise to old Johanna. At that moment, to his amazement, he heard the sound of some bustards calling to one another from the foot of the hill. This call happened to be one of his favourite sounds, because it was rare, round and full of a glowing passion, and the concern of all that is maternal in life. A bustard was soliciting the help of an aloof male to control the behaviour of their young.

Hintza too had heard the lovely call floating like an iridescent bubble on the graveyard silence of the day. He had to repress his musical self from responding in kind by reminding himself of the depressing socially realistic reasons for his presence there with François. So he merely drew François’s attention to the sounds with his high-pitched whimper, while promptly aligning his tail, spine and nose like a compass needle on the sound. So unusual was this lovely sound of life at that hour that François, quite unbidden, had the most supernatural of promptings. The hair at the back of his head became absurdly sensitive. Fresh as he was from his meeting with Xhabbo and all this talk about Mantis and Mantis’s proprietary right over hill and cave he had an acute feeling that the Bushman god himself might have come to help him in his predicament.

Quickly he cocked his muzzle-loader, knowing that the click of sound later would certainly disturb birds with such fine and alert senses as bustards.

He bent down and whispered in Bushman in Hintza’s ear: ‘Show me Hin, show me quick. But careful, this is our only chance.’

Hintza clearly understood. He led off at his most careful pace. Indeed he took such elaborate precautions not to brush against the bush or tread on any dead wood or leaves that he gave the appearance of a somnambulist stepping high over nightmare obstacles. François, who knew of old that it was far better for him to let Hintza be his eyes and ears and just follow with his own eyes concentrated for news on Hintza’s movements and reactions, could not help smiling affectionately at the exaggerated lift of Hintza’s legs. They had not gone far down the hill when the birds suddenly went silent. François immediately feared they must have overheard in spite of all the care they were taking, simply because he and Hintza, apart from their quarry, must be the only living things on the move just then.

But Hintza appeared untroubled by doubts of any kind. His whole attitude was one of the utmost certainty. A bare five minutes from setting out he came to a stop in the shade of an enormous red boulder, his tail straight out behind him, rigid and glowing like one of the Amanzim-tetse’s finest yellow reeds, tip quivering like a tuning fork with vital apprehension and his shiny black silk nose wrinkled with the subtle impact of the scent of some living thing ahead.

François went forward slowly to join him, knelt down in the shade beside him, taking, great care to see that his old muzzle-loader was out of the sun and not mirroring any of its light to signal a warning of their intent. Aligning his own vision on Hintza’s quivering tail and nose, creasing and uncreasing with the excitement of this new smell, Fran$ois looked through a screen of skeleton white thorn bush and long yellow grass, tied in tassels of burnished seed. For a moment he thought the earth in front of him was empty of life. But suddenly there came again that round, full call of proud concern of a bustard mother, and hard on the call the movement of a dark blue head and crest of bright feathers burning in the pallid shade not twenty yards away.

Taking great care to see that he remained well within the shadow thrown by the boulder, François slowly rose up to his full height. Down in a small clearing two large female bustards and one enormous plump bustard cock, feathers all glittering in the sun, swollen with pride and desire to shine in front of his women and children, were all three concentrating on teaching three little bustard chicks to set about the business of feeding themselves. It was a touching, innocent sight. François, in spite of Hintza’s impatience would have given anything not to have to shoot. But he realized that this was probably his only chance of getting anything for Ousie-Johanna’s pot, and that if he failed to do so, his behaviour could become fatally suspect at Hunter’s Drift and thus jeopardize all his plans to help Xhabbo.

So, perhaps more reluctant than he had ever been, he brought the old muzzle-loader carefully to his shoulders, waited until the three grown-up birds were within the zone of the spread of his shot and pressed the trigger. As always, a blue cloud of gunpowder hid the result of his shooting from François; but he knew he could rely on Hintza to do whatever was necessary. Indeed, as the shot thundered out with unusual violence in that dead, hypnotic silence, Hintza leapt forward and vanished into the grass and the blue drift of smoke.

François, obedient to Mopani’s training, stood there for a while longer, reloading his muzzle-loader, putting in an extra heavy charge of gunpowder and ramming a round ball of lead on top, in case something more dangerous than bustards lay ahead. Only then, with the gun fully primed and the hammer cocked, and stock at the ready in his elbow, did he follow Hintza. All three bustards were dead but to his amazement Hintza, with one baby bustard in his mouth, was prowling round and round two other chicks like a collie dog trying to pen in some recalcitrant sheep. He immediately went up to Hintza and, so sensitive was Hintza’s use of his mouth that he released the little bustard chick completely uninjured into François’s hand. The moment he had delivered it safely he went after the other two, caught another, brought it back also unhurt so he could whisk around and do the same for the last terrified little bird.