1972 - A Story Like the Wind (29 page)

Mopani’s appearance, as he sat at the breakfast table, was typical. He was meticulously dressed. One would have thought that he was going not on a long journey through the great bush, but to a wedding in some community of pioneers. Ousie-Johanna had seen to it that one of her helpers had washed and ironed his green whip-cord uniform so that the cloth was un-crumpled and the trousers properly creased. His long bush jacket, with its ample pockets, fitted his tall shape as if made to measure. The wide-brimmed khaki-green bush hat had been brushed and dusted and the band of lion skin around the crown smouldered like gold. In the centre of the band shone-, a small cluster of blue down from one of his favourite birds, the swift Abyssinian roller that censors the indiscreet shadows of the bush with the long, decisive, blue pencil strokes of its quick flight. The sleeves of the shirt, always turned down against mosquitoes at night, were now neatly rolled back above the elbows in a manner which François always envied for, try as he might, he could never manage his own half as well. The ankle boots of calf’s skin, which Mopani made for himself, were brushed and cleaned until they harmonized with the lion skin band around his hat and his pointed, Louis-Napoleon beard was freshly trimmed. Every detail of his appearance demonstrated a fastidiousness that had nothing to do with conforming to the world without but was the product solely of the abiding fashion of his exacting spirit.

As François carried the deep saddle-bags from the guest-room to dump them on the stoep outside, he found Mopani checking his 9-9 mm. Mauser, working the bolt backwards and forwards firmly but rhythmically, ensuring that its action was unimpeded. He even extracted the bolt, unplugged the barrel and held the rifle up to the sky to be quite certain that no dust had infiltrated it in the night—all precautions one might have thought superfluous since Mopani never went to bed without cleaning his gun.

Striking a match, he held the front sight of the barrel in the flame for a moment, so that the wood smoke could remove some hint of a shine on the metal which even François had not detected.

At the same time Mopani could not resist reiterating lessons he had given François in the past, wisely speaking to himself as if for his own and not for François’s benefit. For instance, re-blacking the sight of the gun with the match, he would say, ‘Yes-no, you look innocent enough but I have seen that pinpoint of a glint on the tip of your small nose make many a man miss because once the sun finds you, you make him take too large an aim and overshoot his target. So there, my little one!’

Finally he made certain once more that the magazine of the rifle was full of bullets and had one last look into the breech to be certain that no bullet had escaped into the barrel, saying, ‘Mopani is too old and has seen too much ever to believe that there is such a thing as an empty gun. The Devil likes nothing more than slipping bullets up the spout of empty guns when an old hunter’s back is turned.’ He said this again as if he were quoting from his own private and personal Bible. François could not help wondering how many times he had been reminded of that text from the moment far back in his own beginning when Mopani, finding him pointing an air-gun at a chicken, had immediately rebuked him with those very words. François had tried to excuse himself, ‘But there is no pellet in the gun, uncle!’

Mopani had answered with something akin to anger, threatening in that slow, patient but somehow irrefutable voice of his, ‘A man; Little Cousin, never, never points a gun at anything or anybody except in need, unless he is at target practice. Don’t let me ever see you do that again.’

Close beside that recollection was the memory of how angry Mopani had been with him also long ago when he found him at the end of their garden without his first gun and scolded him severely: ‘A man’s gun in this world, Little Cousin, is always within reach of his hand.’

Then, although Mopani had done his own packing, he unstrapped his saddle bags and checked through every detail to see that nothing had been forgotten. That done, he and François went to the stables to fetch his horse. Although there were stable-hands to spare, Mopani insisted as always on caring for his horse himself. The horse, or perhaps one should say pony, as those small, hardy, inexhaustible little horses bred in the mountains of Basutoland in the far south, are called, was one of seven kept at Mopani’s base. He set extraordinarily high store by them because they were all ‘salted’, the adjective used for horses who had survived the mysterious and almost fatal mosquito-borne disease of horse-sickness. There were artificial vaccinations available to protect the few horses about so far north in the interior, but Mopani had no faith in those. He believed only in horses which had acquired immunity against the mysterious disease by having conquered it with their own hardy constitutions.

No money could have bought the least among his little horse herd. Not only were they salted but they had come to know both the life of the bush and Mopani’s voice and mind, and were a kind of radar to him. Often at night, in black storms or mist, they gave him his direction and brought him intelligence of things far beyond the range of his own senses. François knew many exciting examples of how these horses had come to Mopani’s rescue in moments of crisis, how often in unknown country in the dark Mopani had just dropped the reins of his bridle on the saddle and allowed his horses to lead him safely home to his camp. So much was this known that these horses’ reputation among the Matabele was formidable. !#grave;Bamuthi himself had assured François they possessed second sight and that if one looked between their ears ahead in the dark, one could often see ghosts.

The horse at Hunter’s Drift on this particular morning was Mopani’s favourite. It had suitably been called Dapper. It was significant that, when François and Mopani were half-way across the courtyard which separated the homestead from the stables, Dapper recognized Mopani’s long, measured tread and immediately greeted him with a silver chain of nickering.

Mopani immediately answered, ‘Good morning Dapper boy, I hope you’ve had as good a night as I’ve had, for we’ve a long, hard way to go today.’

In the stable, they found Dapper’s head already turned round at the door to greet Mopani. He rubbed his head with pleasure against Mopani’s shoulder. From that moment on while Mopani quickly brushed him down and combed out his beautiful long black tail, Dapper, pleased that his lonely stand at the stable was over, responded accordingly. When led out into the courtyard to be saddled he was so clean and tidy that his black mane and dark brown coat shone like Oriental silk in the sun. The fringe of black hair, which he wore over his forehead between his quickly pointed ears was more like a medieval twist than just the hair of an hardy African animal.

Although Mopani must have saddled up horses numberless times in his life he put the saffron saddle-cloth on Dapper as if he were doing it for the first time. That was another of his favourite texts: ‘No matter how great one’s experience, always do everything as if for the first time.’ So he adjusted and readjusted the saddle-cloth before he finally put the saddle on top of it, commenting that he had never caused a horse to blister yet and was not going to do so now. The saddle’s position too was examined and re-examined until Mopani was satisfied he had found just the place where it would cause no discomfort to Dapper. He did all this as if he had all the time in the world, knowing it to be quicker than riding a quarter of a mile or so and then having to dismount and make readjustments to girth and saddle. There was, Mopani always emphasized, nothing more tiring, nor more likely to spoil the rhythm so necessary between a horseman and his horse than interruptions and re-adaptations on the way.

While all this was going on Nandi and !#grave;Swayo were present to watch the final preparations for the journey with growing excitement. They too had hurried out to greet Dapper, who appeared as pleased to see them as they were to see him. They leapt up to his head to salute him at the peak of their jump, and then sat down on their haunches in front of Dapper, their eyes going constantly from his face to Mopani, who was there, tall and devout as a priest, in his preparations at Dapper’s side.

So absorbed were they in all this that Hintza was quite resentful at being left out of their reckoning. At one moment he felt his exclusion so keenly that he tried to ingratiate himself with Dapper in the way that Nandi and !#grave;Swayo had done, but he was pushed aside with a brusque movement of Dapper’s head. Being the sensitive dog he was, he took the hint and returned to François’s side, looking as proudly forlorn and abandoned as François himself was beginning to feel, the nearer the moment for Mopani’s departure came.

Leaving the reins of the bridle hanging down in front of Dapper, who had been trained to take that as a sign that he was to stand in that position until his master returned to him, no matter how desperate the noise or other commotion around him, Mopani slung an old·fashioned bandolier full of ammunition across one shoulder and his rifle over the other. He then went up to François, embraced him and said only, ‘God willing, Little Cousin, I shall be seeing you again soon.’

That was another of the many things François loved about Mopani, he never patronized him with any sort of proverbial admonition to be good, or to take care. He always concentrated on a straight-forward goodbye that did more for François’s morale than any proprietary advice could have done. He then turned about as lightly as an agile boy, gave Nandi and !#grave;Swayo a warm, authoritative look out of his own blue eyes, and ordered, ‘Nandi, front! !#grave;Swayo heel!’ At once Nandi took up position in front of Dapper and !#grave;Swayo did the same behind. This arrangement, François knew, was the result of another conviction Mopani had derived from his own experience. Had he not told François often enough, ‘Animal or human, it makes no difference: the female is far better at telling the unseen ahead, the male, despite Lot’s wife, is better at looking over his shoulder and spotting the danger from behind.’ And when François at first had asked why, Mopani had given him one of his rare smiles and said wryly, half in jest, half in earnest, ‘Because all males always have a bad conscience.’

Without looking back, Mopani then swung easily into the saddle, his long legs, in that long, natural stirrup he used for long-distance riding, almost reaching to the ground. He did not tug unnecessarily at the bit in Dapper’s mouth. He just spoke a quiet, ‘Off we go, Dapper boy’ and at once the little convoy was on its way to the footpath which, as the Matabele riddle would have it, wriggled like a long snake through the bush, on this occasion, in Francis’s imagination like a gigantic version of the copper cobras so common at Hunter’s Drift.

François and Hintza watched them until they disappeared into the bush. Though Mopani did not once look back he must have known in his intuitive way that François and Hintza were there, because just before he vanished from sight he raised his hand high above his head, as a final salute.

The Gates of Distance

F
rançois may have liked to pretend to himself that this separation from Mopani, which after all was only another in a long series of important separations, was no worse than any of its predecessors. Yet he had an uneasy feeling in his heart that a great storm was on its way and that this separation was unique, marking perhaps not the end of an era for him so much as the end of the beginning of another. Considering that he had lost Xhabbo, Lammie, Ouwa and Mopani in the matter of only a few days, it would perhaps have been too much for him to accept, had he not remembered that, painful as the separations were, they did possess this one great advantage; they made him free now to set about preventing Ouwa from dying.

So the moment Mopani and his escort vanished from sight, he went round to the kitchen. Ousie-Johanna rebuked him for rushing in so abruptly, telling him that he was making such a commotion that the bread, which was rising under its blanket beside the great kitchen range, would collapse and be utterly spoilt if he behaved in that inconsiderate manner. But for once he took no notice. He just drew out a chair very gently, quietly sat down by the table, rested his chin on his hands, gave her a keen look out of his wide, blue eyes, dark with concern, and said pleadingly, ‘Ousie-Johanna, I need your help and advice. The time has come when we must do something about Ouwa or it will be much too late.’

At this, Ousie-Johanna forgot all about her cherished bread and waddled towards François with such energy that the broad wooden kitchen boards shook under her massive steps, endangering the bread far more than François’s abrupt entry had done, all because the look on his face and his announcement had made her anxious to the point of anger.

‘I might have known that wily old Mopani didn’t come all this way to see us,’ she declared vehemently. ‘A proper skelm he is, that one. The older they get, the more cunning they become.’
They
, for her, of course, were always the breed of men. ‘I should have known only bad news could have brought him here although I would have thought you would have told me before now. It was not right to keep a poor old woman who is thinking about all of you all the time, so much in the dark here alone in her kitchen.’

Knowing from personal experience what a formidable combination anxiety, a feeling of having been slighted and a tendency to be sorry for herself could be in that grand old lady, François immediately set about mollifying her. He explained at length how impossible it had been for him to do anything until Mopani had gone, since he was not at all certain that Mopani would have approved of what he had in mind. Even if Mopani had approved, he might have wanted to take part. That, François thought, would have been risky since !#grave;Bamuthi had warned him often enough that the sort of plan they had in mind could only work if everyone concerned believed in it completely. And he was not certain to what extent Mopani could have believed as they did, though he would not have stopped them.

François had a great deal more to say, but Ousie-Johanna interrupted. It was almost as if there and then she was going to give him proof of Mopani’s distinction between male and female minds and already knew what the future had in store for them. Her expression brightened, her eyes shone with the delicate quality induced by the sweetest of smiles, and she exclaimed, ‘Ah! You cannot fool this child of a baptized ‘Xhosa father. You are going to uLangalibalela at last as you should have gone months ago, had you and that Lammie of yours listened to poor old Johanna instead of thinking that she is good only for cooking and nothing else at all. But what has that Mopani man told you to bring you to your senses?’