1972 - A Story Like the Wind (32 page)

‘But if so, Old Father,’ François asked, not out of unbelief but merely out of wonder, ‘why did you pull us off the track at such speed as if we were in great danger?’

‘Because I mistook the first sound of the crackling,’

!#grave;Bamuthi replied. ‘I thought it could be a rhinoceros coming straight at us and that would not only have been dangerous but the worst of all possible signs for our journey.’

More bemused than ever, François asked simply, ‘Why?’

‘Because like all things evil, the rhinoceros is always in a hurry and it always charges in straight lines, crashing over everything, even the innocent. You must know that evil is hot in action and travels always in a straight line. Only the good and wise, such as our lord the elephant, go slowly in and out, round and about, making their way through the bush as the wise among men go through life, like a river seeking that Great Water which !#grave;Bamuthi has never seen.’

He paused for a moment with a strange, nostalgic look on his face. Then exclaimed, ‘But do not let us stand here gossiping like old women. We have a long way to go before night and we can do no better than follow closely behind the elephants who will clear the way ahead of evil for us.’

So in a moment the little procession was back on the track, following the elephant spoor. François expected that they would soon catch up with the elephants, so leisurely had the progress of the animals appeared to him to be. Of course, he did not realize as !#grave;Bamuthi did that even at their most leisurely pace, elephants with their long strides travel at incredible speeds, walking at a pace that a man can hardly match even by running. They caught no glimpse of the elephant group again that afternoon although their satin foot-prints lay in the track. Then, just about an hour before sundown, !#grave;Bamuthi announced that the place he had in mind for making camp for the night was only a mile or so ahead.

At that point they were amazed to notice that the elephant spoor had vanished from the track. !#grave;Bamuthi did not like this at all. He stood there for a long time studying the signs before he whispered: The signs clearly show our elephants were frightened from going their chosen way and, when the Lords of the forest are frightened, it would be foolhardy for us not to take notice. We must not speak from now on but go as silently as we can because soon we shall reach the end of the bush and look down on the great open place of grass and water of which I have told you.

François, though he tried not to show it, was perturbed by !#grave;Bamuthi’s words. He, too, knew that only something exceptional could have made a large, well-organized group of elephants swerve away so abruptly from a course they had obviously been following for days. Elephants normally were not impulsive creatures. Compared with other animals, they never did things without good reason, and what reason could have sent them off in such a hurry to seek shelter in the bush? The elephants feared no other animals, no matter how powerful or fierce. The answer, obviously, could only be man. But what sort of a man would not give way to a cavalcade of elephants and take good care not to offend or disturb them in any way?

!#grave;Bamuthi obviously had come to the same conclusion. He studied the track and bush around him carefully for any signs that might indicate the cause of the elephants’ evasive action but found none. Finally the bush came to an end and right on its edge, !#grave;Bamuthi stood still in its shadow, which was now dark and long from the sinking sun behind them, and raised his hand for François to join him.

Ordering Hintza to sit and watch the track, François hastened forward. He stood by Bamuthi’s side and looked out on one of the most beautiful savannahs he had ever seen in his young life. The country in front of them was open and covered with long green-gold grass, all aglow in the evening sunlight and falling away steeply to a flashing river winding slowly in and out between banks covered with tall, copper bulrushes. The air above them was dark with a tornado of wings of weaver-birds, with a vortex of bee-eaters, starlings, finches, and Abyssinian rollers, seeking a home for the night among them. On the far side of the river, the grass slope again rose to meet the other arm of the forest some two miles from where they were standing. In between was a vast, glittering assembly of practically all the vivid’j animal life of the land, all that is except the elephants.

The scene was so beautiful that François speechless could have watched it for hours. The colour and freshness of it had all the quality of a dream. The animals themselves looked brilliant in the precise light of the African evening.

Then !#grave;Bamuthi broke his silence with a forcible exclamation in Sindabele: ‘
Mawu!
Now we know why the elephants in their wisdom swerved away.’

As he spoke he pointed out what François, in his general absorption in the beauty of the scene, had not noticed a steep mound of high rock between them and river. From the centre of the mound rose smoke, standing almost still in the air.

Why this sight should have disturbed !#grave;Bamuthi mystified François. Normally other people camping on the way were a welcome sight for tired European travellers, and there was no doubt that the whole of the group, not excluding Hintza, were exceedingly tired by the long march of some ten hours.

François questioned !#grave;Bamuthi accordingly but he would not say much remarking in general that what induced fear in elephants, should induce even greater fear in humans. But without any doubt it was the smell of that palm of smoke and those who made it that had turned the elephants away. Until he, !#grave;Bamuthi, knew more about it, he was not going to allow them nearer the place. All of which François thought a pity, since that steep, high mound was to have been their fortress against the night. Now they would have to hurry and find another since the night was hastening to fall.

François, partly because he was tired, partly because he thought that !#grave;Bamuthi was giving way to the long inbred suspicion of strangers which Africans have had to cultivate over the turbulent, unpredictable and tragic millennia of their history, tried to argue against the decision. But !#grave;Bamuthi was unusually abrupt with him, remarking with a cut to his voice, ‘Two heads in charge of a party only provide food for lions and hyenas’. He there and then turned back into the bush for a quarter of a mile, leaving François with the two heifers and Hintza.

Some minutes later he was back, and ordered François to follow him. About two hundred yards from the track, he brought them to a small open space between the trees which even François, inclined as he was by now to be critical of !#grave;Bamuthi out of sheer fatigue, had to admit was well chosen because, except for the one opening which had led into it, the space was surrounded by the most formidable thorn bushes of all the hundreds of militant thorns in that part of Africa. It was the thorn the Matabele call
Ipi-Hamba?
, literally the ‘Where-are-you-going?’ thorn. This thorn, tough as steel and hooked with a point as fine and sharp as a hypodermic needle, had an unfailing knack of catching in the skin and clothes of anyone who brushed against it, forcing him to stand still for quite a long time to disentangle himself. It was just as if the thorn were a tough Botanical immigration officer, officiously asking strangers, ‘
Ipi-Hamba?
’

No animal would attempt to break through this dense cover of hundreds of thorn bushes. Indeed, it was an established fact that antelope, when pursued by the wild dogs of which there were hundreds in the bush, would seek out just such a bush of thorn, retreat with their backs against it (so that no attack from behind was possible), and then would lower their horns to fight back on one front only. Francis recognized that !#grave;Bamuthi had found a place where they ought to be nearly as safe from attack by lion and leopard as they would have been in any of the kraals at home.

He was not left any time, however, to admire the site of their camp. !#grave;Bamuthi immediately ordered him to get busy collecting dry wood for the fire that they would need as an additional protection that night. It took both François and !#grave;Bamuthi until sunset before !#grave;Bamuthi was satisfied that they had enough wood. He had barely come to this conclusion when from the direction of the mound of rock where they had seen the smoke there came the shattering, stuttering sound of gunfire.

François could tell at once that there were not only a number; of men shooting, but that it was the wild, uncontrolled shooting of inexperienced men. In fact so sustained and savage was the sound of shooting that it sounded as if a war had broken out down there in that beautiful and peaceful savannah.

!#grave;Bamuthi looked as if he had fore-suffered it all. He just straightened himself over the pile of wood he had laid for a fire, listened with his head turned in the direction of the shooting for a second or two, and exclaimed: ‘Perhaps now you will know why this old !#grave;Bamuthi did not want to join such men. I tell you, Little Feather, we shall have to know more about the kind of men they are before we go farther. Use what light there is left to get grass enough to keep Night and Day and Little Finger quiet for the night. Start the fire here, where I have laid it, because all its light and smoke will be lost in the leaves of the trees. I am going at once to look, before it is too dark, to find out what kind of men they can be. I fear that something tells me they are men whose hearts are black.’

François didn’t like the prospect of !#grave;Bamuthi venturing out alone on such a mission, in such country, at one of the most dangerous hours of the night, when lion and leopard do much of their killing. He tried to persuade !#grave;Bamuthi to leave it till the morning. But !#grave;Bamuthi thought the morning, when they could easily be discovered by the first light of day, would be far more dangerous than the hour of falling darkness.

François’s fears increased all the more when !#grave;Bamuthi, with only his spear in his hand, said: ‘If I am not back before morning you must not come looking for me. Go back straight home, leaving Night and Day and Little Finger behind so that you can travel fast. Then send a message to warn Chief Mopani. He will know the right thing to do.’

‘Do you think then, Old Father, that they are poachers down there in the valley?’

!#grave;Bamuthi shook his head emphatically and said: ‘Poachers usually go only where the elephant and rhinoceros go. All poachers here know that except for that one great rock on which we saw the smoke, this is a land of death for men. That is why it is uninhabited and all men, even hunters, hurry through it as fast as they can for each midnight a mist rises from the river bringing the sickness of death with it. Many a man has tried to make a home here since the first Matabele came to this land, but all have died or wasted away. For years, no one has tried it, since all men know that only the top of that rock is safe, and who can make a home on a pimple of stone? But look, the sun is going and I, too, must go.’

For the next hour or so, François kept himself as busy as he could, both because it was necessary, and also because it kept his mind off his acute anxiety about !#grave;Bamuthi. He collected more than enough grass to see the heifers through the night; unpacked their provisions; extracted the biltong and a long chain of homemade sausages Ousie-Johanna had provided; prepared spits so that the moment !#grave;Bamuthi returned, they could sit side by side grilling their meat by the fire he had started. He took out the coffee, sugar and powdered milk, in fact all that was necessary to make a perfect supper for tired and hungry travellers at the end of their long day. When all this had been done as effectively as he could, and when there was nothing more to fill in the time, he came to a pause. Still there was no sign of !#grave;Bamuthi. François’s anxiety became the most acute fear.

He checked quite needlessly to see that the old muzzle-loader was ready for use; looked at his ·22 rifle for the tenth time to make certain the magazine was full. He took up his station sitting well away in the shadows dancing on the rim of the fire at the entrance to their natural kraal, with both the muzzle-loader and rifle close at hand, listening for any change in the noise and rhythm of the night to show that !#grave;Bamuthi might be on his way back.

The sound of shooting, of course, had long since died away. He heard nothing but the usual night sounds that he normally loved so much. There was nothing to fill the wide silence round about him except one fearful moment when he heard the peculiar quick snorting sound that lions make when they move in like lightning to strike down their quarry. It could not have come from more than fifty yards off their camp. When after three hours had passed with no sign of !#grave;Bamuthi’s return he was almost on the point of summoning Hint⁄a, and, despite orders, setting out in the dark to look for him.

But, suddenly, there in the flickering light of the fire stood !#grave;Bamuthi himself, a smile on his tired face as he said, with an almost boyish note of triumph in his voice: ‘Old !#grave;Bamuthi is not so old as !#grave;Bamuthi thought when he can come so close to Little Feather without being heard.’

François was so overjoyed to see him that he immediately rushed to the fire, poured out a large enamel mug of coffee, long since ready, mixed it with milk, poured sugar into it in great quantities, knowing how great a treat sugar was to !#grave;Bamuthi, and handed the steaming mug to him. Then he asked him what had happened.

!#grave;Bamuthi at once became very serious. He told François in great detail how, knowing the country of old so well, he had succeeded in crawling right to the top of the outcrop of rock and among the boulders without being detected. There he had, looked long at one of the most extraordinary collection of men he had ever seen. There were about thirty of them, mostly African of many tribes, except that of the Matabele. They were all dressed in uniform, like soldiers, and all possessed guns like the police had used when he was a boy. But there were three men among them of a people he found difficult to describe. They were, he said, not black but yellow people. If it were not for the fact that their hair in the firelight appeared different, he could have thought they were Massarwa (Bushmen), dressed in the clothes of ‘red strangers’.