1972 - A Story Like the Wind (52 page)

It was a scene that stood out because there was something singularly moving in its impression of complete communion, between dogs and horse, age and youth, experience and innocence. The evening light of Africa, as always at that hour, was a Biblical one, the scene was illuminated to present itself as a parable not in word but deed, implying that perhaps the one unpardonable error of men is to withdraw from communion with one another, no matter how good the reason for withdrawal. If dogs and horses, young and old, could be so lovingly and utterly at one as that little group, the occasion was explosive with the question of whether life would not cease from inflicting disaster upon disaster, could men only use their great gift of words not for dividing, but for confirming and enriching an act of communion for which they were born.

No wonder those dogs in that light looked to be dogs of gold, and Noble, long-maned, long-tailed, black all over except for a white star on his forehead, one white forefoot and one white hind-hock, looked not just a horse but the plenipotentiary of all horses in the life of men, as he walked with all the delicacy of fatigue beside man and boy, the evening wrapped like Indian silk about him, its tone all the brighter for the sense of communion between them.

For François, the fact that Mopani was there and had accomplished the long journey in one day just in order to see him said more than any words could conceive. He was utterly content just to pace back and forwards listening to the odd comments Mopani had to make about his journey because, no matter how often Mopani had done it, he always appeared to have accomplished it as if it were for the first time. His comments were always new, strange and rewarding.

Moreover, at that hour of the day for him, too, there was an extra dimension. It was a dimension into which access was made easy by the hour of the day. People who are born, grow up and die in the metropolitan context of our time have, perhaps, lost awareness of what this hour can do to human perception. Out there in the natural world of the bush around Hunter’s Drift, this moment was always like a magic mirror on the walls of François’s mind, making things visible that had not been visible before. It produced subjects of conversation, observation and a kind of interchange of mind and heart almost as if that moment were an immense junction for the reality of life, where all the traffic from the past, the immediate present and the most distant future, met. It was a moment of perception lifted all the higher by reason of the fact that the whole of nature seemed to participate actively within it. Night and day joined to produce a kind of beauty that was an expression of both, and all living creatures were marshalled to take part in the scene, as in a theatre of fate.

It was, for instance, the one moment when the great baboons of the day in their keeps on the cliffs by the river, barked at the same time as the lions roared. The jackals janked, the hyenas howled and the leopards coughed before they set out on their nightly prowl. The bats of the night too were already on their zigzag wing, the night plovers sounding their bosun’s pipes and the great ghost owls hooting, while all the millions of birds of day would still be illuminating the silence, each with its own brilliant cry, to set the conflagration of evening song aflame. Geese, duck, goliath herons, fish hawks and the great portentous hammerheads, the messengers of tidings of death for the Bushmen simultaneously would all be still in flight. It is, perhaps, the most imposing natural moment of resolution of which life on earth is capable because, within its still centre, the earth forgives the sun for the heat of the day. All death, which the fight for survival has inflicted, is understood, and a brief state of innocence for all is poignantly established, before another battle for survival under cover of darkness comes into being. It is a moment so naturally transcendental that for people like Mopani and François, it never bred contempt through familiarity, but with repetition actually gained in force of impact.

Something of all this was apparent in the first remark that Mopani made to bring to an end the long silence which had followed their first greeting. The remark came at a moment when the noises of night and day, especially the song of the birds by the river, had achieved their summit.

Mopani, stopping, declared almost as much to himself as to François, ‘Have you ever known a more beautiful evening? I’ve heard it said somewhere that human beings should look on all things lovely as though for the last time. But this is the kind of evening which makes me want to look on it as if for the first time. Just listen to those birds,
Coiske
! Have you ever heard them quite like that? I certainly never have.’

François listened carefully, responding as he always did spontaneously when exhorted by Mopani to do anything, because of the lack of any inclination ever to criticize him, something which had not passed unnoticed in the grown-up world around him and had been a cause of envy in many otherwise ungrudging hearts. Yes, Mopani was right. He had never heard birds make quite that kind of noise. Lovely as it was, however, something about the noise made him uncomfortable, almost as if the birds (to use what Ouwa had once described to him as one of the most ominous phrases in English) were protesting too much. There was an element of frenzy and desperation in the singing, as if the birds might be afraid that they were saluting such loveliness for the last time.

Just for a moment François himself was frightened. He shivered as if cold and unconsciously held on more firmly to Mopani before he managed to reply, ‘You’re right, Uncle. I’ve never heard the birds sing like that before. It’s lovely, but isn’t there something unhappy about it all? It frightens me rather.’

‘Why frightened?’ Mopani, returning François’s grip, asked the question not because he had not understood its meaning at once, but because already in his intuitive way, his imagination was dealing with the meaning to which François’s question was inevitably leading, and he wanted time to find the exact words for shaping his response.

‘It sounds as if they were feeling themselves that it was the last time ever that they would be able to sing just like that,’ François replied in a whisper as if the words he had just used had increased his fear.

Mopani might have refused to discuss so vast and intangible a subject with most other people, but not with François. The world outside he knew tended to be too busy to live, confusing being with having, and would have been impervious to anything so light and strange as the thing pleading for admission at a back door of François’s mind. The world, as he had learned, rarely recognized any new reality in its beginnings. Reality seemed to have to grow great and terrible, like an angry giant hammering on the doors of closed minds, before people would take notice and then, alas, it was almost invariably too late.

But Mopani was troubled because François’s response and question showed that he, too, was already on the frontier of some new aspect of reality. And he had never been tempted to give anything but a true and full answer to François’s questions, however much the conventions governing the behaviour of old and young might have argued against him.

His hesitation, therefore, was brief before he said, ‘I don’t mind telling you, Coiske, that I’m a little bit frightened myself.’

This admission, from one of the bravest men François had ever met, raised Mopani immeasurably in his estimation. Nothing feeds fear so much as the pretence that it has no valid cause to exist. Mopani’s admission not only confirmed the validity of François’s own fear but also by abolishing all pretence between them, made them partners in fear, removing the greatest dread of all: that one would be left to deal with fear on one’s own. What so many people would have regarded as a confession of grown-up failure François took as an immense compliment to himself. He experienced such an inrush of reassurance and affection that all he could manage to say was, ‘You frightened too, Uncle? Why?’

Mopani’s answer was typically indirect because, as always when confronted with anything important, he obeyed his favourite maxim that ‘the longest way round was the shortest way there’. He began by telling François how this occasion and the nature of the hour reminded him of something that had happened to him when he was little more than François’s age. He described in great detail how, at just such an hour, he was in camp with his father deep in the bush farther north. His father, too, had exhorted him then to listen to the birds and, after they had listened attentively, he had asked Mopani the same question that he had just asked François. His own response had been very much like François’s.

From then on, both he and his father studied the sounds of the birds in the bush with the greatest attention. Their premonitions of the night before, that they had been listening to the final chorale in a great cycle of birdsong, was confirmed. They never again heard birds sing quite as on that night. Theme and tune of their song at evening had subtly changed and the annunciation of change become progressively more elaborate and emphatic. Even by day the noises sounded different. Until that moment, diverse as they were, they had followed a certain common pattern which he and his father had taken so much for granted that they had never really noticed it. Only then, when it appeared to have vanished for good and was replaced by a series of unrelated sounds and expressions of irrevocable discord, did they miss the rhythm.

Some time after that, Mopani went on, the news reached them there in the bush that the first World War had broken out. It might seem very fanciful but neither he nor his father were surprised because, in some strange way that he, Mopani, could not pretend to understand, they were both convinced that it was this event which had forced the birds to change their tune. By changing their tune they could perhaps have prepared the hearts and minds of those who had ears to listen. More specifically, it had prepared Mopani for the fact that, when he saw his father ride off to war, he knew it was for the last time, because he was riding to his death in battle. But that was not all.

In the manner of our time, Mopani went on, he might have perhaps come to the point where he would have dismissed this apparent change of tune by the birds of Africa as ‘pure coincidence’ for what, he asked, could be more characteristic of our time than its obstinate refusal to admit the reality of the singular? Fortunately his life in the reserve and his life as a hunter had called him back to his natural senses and to his natural belief. Namely, that in some mysterious way there was some profound inter-relationship existing with the life of the great world beyond, and that nothing so unnatural and monstrous as war could be growing great in the calculations of men without disrupting the natural rhythm of the universe, and so communicating discord also to the natural life of the bush.

Mopani went on that he had read somewhere that one of the church fathers had once said that the soul of man was naturally religious. He would add to that that the birds and animals, indeed, all the flora and fauna of Africa, were naturally devout because no other living things obeyed so implicitly the laws of their own creation. As François knew, the war had taken him. to many different places in the world and he had come back from them all convinced that Africa was the last continent in the world that still had a soul of its own. François could understand, therefore, how troubled he had been during the last year when he began to notice in the sounds of the bush the same elements of disruption which had invaded it on that other occasion. He had said nothing about it before because he was not sure that he was not perhaps inflicting his own apprehensions on the natural noises of the land.

François, who had been listening with such attention that he had completely forgotten his own troubles, nodded his head and said, ‘I know what you mean, Uncle. I’m afraid that’s what Ouwa would have said had you told him. I remember once when I told him I thought the land there on the edge of the desert looked sad, he pulled me up rather sharply saying, ‘The sadness is never in the landscape, but only in oneself.’’

That, Mopani said, was precisely the reservation that he had had in mind and which had made him keep his fears secret. Yet, just recently, he had grown convinced that something strange and terrible for the life of Africa, if not the world, was akeady throwing its shadow before it to darken the singing of the birds. He was glad that he was there to share this with François. He was getting old and might not be with him much longer and he would like François to know the truth in these respects. François might need not only the knowledge but also the time for preparation. There would be many people who would try to prove to François that this kind of thinking was nonsense. Their condemnation would be all the more convincing because the world was full of know-alls who knew only what they knew and no longer what they did not know. To them, that there could be proof of any relationship between the mind and spirit of civilized man and the mind of the natural world, would be ridiculous. But this, Mopani said, was in his view the sickness in so-called civilized people. In the final analysis one had to stand by one’s own experience of life and refuse to allow any one-sided specialist to discredit it.

He himself would not hesitate to stand by his own experience of these things. He would like François, therefore, to remember that in his opinion there was the most delicate relationship between what went on in their own minds and the awareness of the animal world of Africa. He had found, for instance, that when he and his father had gone out into the bush to kill, the behaviour of birds and animals was totally different from those occasions when they rode out without any intention of killing. He had been indiscreet enough to mention this once to an eminent zoologist whom the Government had asked him to conduct on an expedition into the bush. The zoologist had laughed, and claimed that the explanation could only be that observant animals would have learned to be suspicious of man when they went forth with guns on their shoulders. But he and his father had proved repeatedly that this was just not true. As François knew, they never travelled anywhere without guns. Yet riding fully armed, for instance, towards a herd of buck with no intention of shooting, the animals would make little attempt to get out of their way. The next day, perhaps, they would be compelled to ride out towards the same group of buck intending to shoot one for the pot, and the moment they appeared the animals immediately scattered.