1972 - A Story Like the Wind (5 page)

As he did so, he had the relevant inspiration. With Hintza once more still and calm, he put the record on the gramophone again. Hintza immediately recognized the whistling tune, placed himself in a strategic sitting position hard by the wide open mouth of the trumpet, and waited with an air of agonized expectation for the applause of the invisible dog at the end. But just as the last whistle died away, François lifted the arm of the gramophone from the record…

At that moment Hintza was already poised to pounce into the air and let out his greetings to his invisible companion. When no sound came out and the music ended, he stared in utter bewilderment at François.

François immediately told him in Bushman that unless he stopped his own barking on this occasion he would not hear the other dog again. To illustrate the point he put on the record all over again but on this occasion allowed the whistler’s dog to begin its barking. Instantly Hintza bounded into the air and started to bark in reply. As instantly François immediately lifted the arm and stopped the record.

Disconcerted, Hintza too went silent, and started prowling about the machine to search for the dog which had barked from within. He not only snuffed the machine all over, nudged it, licked it pleadingly and in the end, profoundly frustrated, was about to lift his leg and treat it as a gate-post, when François pulled him away by force and reproved him with the Bushman’s most resounding, ‘No, Hintza! Don’t you dare!’ A command which, uttered with all its many Bushman clicks, crackled like lightning in the room.

Dismayed and feeling trapped, Hintza had stopped, turned on François two large blue eyes full of reproach and tragic with a longing for elucidation.

‘Now
that
’ François told him with clear, firm deliberation, ‘is going to happen to you every time you interrupt anything with your barking. No music, see?’

It took François only half-a-dozen rehearsals that night to get his meaning through to Hintza. From then on Hintza knew that if he were to remain in touch with his invisible friend concealed at the end of that enormous funnel, he himself would have to keep silent. François followed this up with at least one daily rehearsal for three weeks. At the end of that period he was convinced that Hintza was beginning to have a firm concept of how and when it was in his own interests not to bark.

From this experiment, it seemed to follow naturally for François to take Hintza, the moment he found himself compelled to begin barking at the next full moon, immediately inside to his father’s study and there to play the record to him. He followed this the following night by exposing Hintza to the moon and when he barked by putting him straight to bed without his daily dose of The Whistler and his Dog’. In this way he rapidly established in Hintza’s mind a realization of the connections between cause and effect. In particular he concluded that if he ceased to bark at the moon, he would be rewarded with a session of his favourite whistler and dog on the gramophone. And soon, other records were introduced to extend Hintza’s repertoire. It was astonishing how he developed and responded, and it seemed that this phase of his education was complete.

Then there came a night that held so full and provocative a moon that even the lions on the far side of the river were moved to roar at it in their most imperial manner. The night plovers too filled the gaps between their roarings with wind-rush outpourings of their flute-like voices always so charged with nostalgia for the night.

François, feeling that such a magnificent display of light was an unfair temptation to Hintza’s self-restraint, gathered him up quickly and rushed inside to his father’s study. It happened to be an evening when his father was sitting there at his desk writing.

Knowing instantly why François had burst in on him, he had remarked in his teasing way: ‘You don’t mean you’ve come to show me that already, on such a night as this, this lunatic, moonstruck hound of yours has graduated for a session with the Moonlight Sonata?’

Francis, who was hyper-sensitive about all matters concerning Hintza, was trapped into a reckless display of bravado by what he took to be the sarcasm in his father’s voice.

‘And why not?’ he said, with the coldness that comes to boys only in hot moments of anger, ‘I’m certain that’ll be kindergarten stuff for him by now.’

He immediately took out the record of the Moonlight Sonata with a silent prayer to Providence to help Hintza succeed. To his delight when the first slow ripple of notes came rolling out of the bass to be followed by the first deep authoritative, transfiguring chords, he saw Hintza sink to his knees and then, stretching his front legs out in front as far as they would go, place his chin on the rug between them. At the same time he pushed out his hind legs as far as they would go until he lay there stretched, almost like a martyr in a state of religious ecstasy, about to achieve ultimate transfiguration. From that evening on, there was no more trouble. Hintza was moon-proof for good. ‘The Whistler and his Dog’ and the Moonlight Sonata together seemed to have provided Hintza with the perfect alchemical method of sublimating his musical aspirations.

It is true that, at times, at the end of ‘The Whistler and his Dog’ he would prowl sensitively, snuffing and soliciting the gramophone as if hoping still to induce his invisible companion to step out of it and play with him. When his quest failed he would look so wistfully at François that he would hasten to comfort him and talk sympathetically to him in Bushman, saying what !#grave;Bamuthi in another tongue had often said to François when he himself was bitterly disappointed: ‘Remember, a man could not value the cattle he owns so much if it were not for the cattle he could never possess.’

More of the developments which enabled Hintza to become a singularly mature and wise hunting dog will emerge as Fran-?ois’s story progresses. This is enough to show what an ally he was that eventful early morning some eighteen months after his coming. It explains also why he used such a subtle manner of informing François that something strange was happening—or about to happen, in the world without.

François, for all his youth and its capacity to sleep profoundly, had long since learned the frontiersman’s secret of sleeping like an animal that has to be perpetually on guard. He had acquired the habit of waking up at frequent intervals of his own volition and, just briefly, but with all his senses alert, would listen to the noises of the bush for any news of the life of the night that might be important and, if all were normal, would instantly relax into sleep again.

Therefore, he was wide awake immediately the moment Hintza stirred. Putting out his hand he stroked him, both as a sign of approval and of communication. As his fingers moved gently along Hintza’s back, he was startled to find that all the normally soft tawny hairs along the ridge were erect and stiff. This ridge of hair, which in the beginning had been to François one of the most attractive features of Hintza’s appearance, had long since become for him a means of judging the importance of the unseen realities of the bush which Hintza’s acute senses had apprehended. The golden hair on Hintza’s back responded to the urgent life within the young dog as if it were a magnet which drew the hair into a meaningful pattern. Now the hair along the dog’s spine stood stiff and erect, quivering to attention. Indeed, only on the night when a lion and lioness had leapt over the walls of the cattle kraal beyond the garden and killed several of their best cows had François felt such a crackle of electricity beneath his fingers.

Immediately François jumped out of bed to bend down with his mouth close to Hintza’s head.

‘Quick Hin, quick,’ he whispered. ‘What is it? Show me quick.’

But Hintza, instead of making for the door or window as he had done on other occasions, had merely made a noise which seemed to say: ‘I don’t know what it is but something strange and desperately important is happening outside.’

As François lit his bedside candle, propped on the wide-open pages of
The Gorilla Hunters
where he had left off reading it the night before, he noticed Hintza making for the old Dutch tall-boy in which he hung his clothes at night, to reach up and place his paws against the knob of the door, which he could only just reach. He pawed at the knob again and again as if to say: ‘Come on, hurry and put on your clothes. We’d better get outside as soon as possible.’

François lost no time. It did not take him two minutes to put on his green whipcord bush jacket and long whipcord trousers. For years now, ever since he had been allowed to go into the bush, he had been made to stop wearing shorts and always to dress himself in tough whipcord clothes as some protection against the thorns, insects like scorpions and bushflies with stings like wasps, and, of course, s’nakes.

On this occasion he only varied his normal routine by slipping on a woollen pullover, because the mornings could be cold and he did not want to spoil his aim by shivering, if it came to shooting, as well it might, judging by Hintza’s behaviour.

As for shooting, that was perhaps the gravest problem of all facing François at that moment. He had no idea what sort of trouble might be awaiting him in the bush except that, judging by Hintza, it could be the most critical he had ever had to meet in his young life. If it were, for instance, a lion or a leopard, his own ·22 rifle was going to be much too light to be effective, even if he shot as straight as he normally did. Unfortunately, he had only one other alternative in his room at the time. This was a heavy muzzle-loader which had been given to him some years before by his father. This muzzle-loader had belonged to his great-grandfather who had used it on the journey by ox-wagon on the trek he led into the interior some hundred and thirty years previously. It had been used in many a desperate battle against Zulus and Matabele, as well as for the protection of his cattle and sheep against wild animals. It was a superbly made gun with a long octagonal barrel, engraved with a Paisley pattern on the sides, and equipped with delicately made ivory sights. Indeed, François thought it one of the most beautiful weapons he had ever seen. He had had his first instructions in shooting with it from no less a person than Mopani Theron, who said that no man who wanted to be a good shot could start young enough. François had been so young at the time that because the gun was so heavy he had had always to find a stone, ant-heap or branch of wood on which to rest the barrel; otherwise it shook from the sheer effort of holding the long heavy weapon to his shoulder.

However, as he had grown stronger the gun had become easier to handle and he had used it quite successfully to hunt for food in the bush round about Hunter’s Drift. One of the attractions of this gun was that by pouring a lot of lead pellets down the barrel it could be used as a shot-gun or, by ramming down the barrel an extra charge of gunpowder as well as a large solid ball of lead on top of it, it could be used as a formidable big game weapon.

Loaded with solid ball ammunition François knew that his grandfather had shot many a rogue elephant and man-eating lion and so had the fullest confidence in it as an ultimate weapon of defence. Above all, François always enjoyed the fact that with the gun he had a beautiful powder-horn which he wore over his shoulder on a sling of soft red impala leather. Also, with the gun there went a workmanlike kit for melting down lead and casting it into round bullets of the exact calibre of the gun, something which François did with great relish, feeling there to be an almost magical quality in the process. He always kept his gunpowder dry, the horn full, and a supply of a hundred balls of lead in his room.

So, the decision now facing him was whether he should take his ·22 rifle which had the advantage of being a repeater, with fifteen cartridges in the magazine; or the lethal octagonal muzzle-loader, which, although it carried a deadlier bullet in the spout had the disadvantage that if he missed his target, it would take him at least a minute to reload it with gunpowder, ram down the wad to keep the powder in and force a new lead bullet after it. All that might be much too long for his own and Hintza’s safety.

For a moment he was tempted to go and wake his father, but he was not well and needed all the sleep and peace of mind he could get. So much had this fact recently been impressed upon François by his mother that he even rejected the temptation of going to the hall where his father’s guns stood in a rack and extracting a more suitable repeating rifle of heavier calibre. He was afraid that even with the utmost care, the boards in the long passage between his room and the hall which creaked so easily might well protest enough to wake his parents.

Just for a moment François had an inkling of what life must be for a ‘grown-up’ like his father, who must be continually faced with the responsibility of taking vital decisions without anybody to consult. He had a clear but fleeting glimpse of what it meant to be on his own with nothing but such judgement and skill as he possessed for meeting an unknown reckoning with fate. A sense of such acute loneliness assailed him that even his heart beat faster. His courage seemed to be about to fail. His feelings at that moment were clearly beyond his power to understand. All he could sense was that since the arrival of Hintza time had seemed to accelerate so fast that it was pushing him into circumstances for which he was still far from ready.

Happily it was Hintza who now came to his rescue. While these tumultuous and confused feelings were going through him, Hintza was becoming more and more agitated. At the depth of this dark ebb in François’s spirit Hintza began worrying him at the back of his knees as he often did when impatient for action. Clearly Hintza had neither doubt nor fear and the realization helped François into a decision.

More by instinct than by reason François chose the heavy old muzzle-loader which had never failed his ancestors and had the experience that both he and his repeater lacked. He quickly rammed an exceptionally heavy charge of gunpowder down the barrel, plugged the gunpowder securely into position, followed it up with a heavy round bullet which he plugged firmly down so that no amount of vibration or shock could dislodge it. Quickly he tested the trigger and hammer to see that they moved easily and noiselessly, which they did, since François spent a lot of his spare time keeping his own guns oiled and clean. Slinging the powder horn round his shoulder, and putting a handful of lead bullets in his pocket, he quietly opened the door leading on to the stoep and stepped outside with Hintza, quivering with excitement, at his side.