1972 - A Story Like the Wind (57 page)

She made a sound of unbelief because it was odd, if not a little suspicious, that always there appeared to be some animal conveniently at hand to excuse this infuriatingly imperturbable and deliberate boy. ‘Oh come,’ she said, ‘you’re just trying to frighten me. Fa, and he’s seen more of Africa than you have, says there are more crocodiles and snakes in a person’s mind than there are in the whole of Africa.’

The remark did not raise Sir James at all in François’s estimation. If he really was simple enough to believe that, he thought, Africa sooner or later would have an alarming last word to say about it. But at that moment he was too intent on the business in hand to let it trouble him. He merely pointed at a patch of water some twenty feet to their left and, still in a whisper, asked, ‘Look, can’t you see? There’s old Rameses-the-Great himself, trying to decide whether he should have a go at us or our horses.’

Ever since François had read somewhere that crocodiles were sacred in ancient Egypt, Rameses had become his own private name for any of the male old crocodiles who ruled a particular stretch of river. Since the one there now was one of the biggest in his experience, the name came out naturally. It was just another instance of how, in a sense, like old Koba’s people of the early race, the animals of his world were highly personal.

Luciana was too interested in the present to ask any more. The least she could do was look in earnest in the direction in which François was pointing. But, try as she might, she saw only what looked to her like a piece of dead wood in the river. Then she realized, with a twist of alarm, that if it were a dead piece of wood, it certainly would not keep perfect station in one position like that and would long since have drifted in the current past them. She looked closer and, at the tip of the log of wood, wearing ripples of water like a ruff of lace, she saw a pair of very large, exceedingly black and terribly impersonal ice-cold eyes watching them.

‘Oh Heavens!’ she exclaimed with a touch of alarm.

François stooped, picked up a stone in his right hand and said, ‘I don’t want to frighten everyone by shooting. Let’s see what a stone will do to his Egyptian Majesty.’

He threw the stone with an accuracy which surprised even him. It hit the water just under the tip of Rameses’s nose. Instantly there was a tremendous, convulsive swirl in the water, a huge long tail flashed like the lash of a whip in the air and sent Rameses-the-Great vanishing into the deeps of the river.

Luciana watched it all with mixed feelings. She said nothing, realizing François had not done yet with the episode. Almost immediately, as much to himself as to her, he said, ‘When you see a thing like that you have to admit, as my father always said, that it was rather ironical to call this the Amanzim-tetse.’

Luciana fastened on to the word and asked, ‘What does this Amanzim-tetse mean?’

‘It’s the Sindabele for ‘Sweet Water’,’ he answered nonchalantly: ‘But my father could never resist translating it for the benefit of European visitors as Lady Precious Stream.’ Then quickly, as if afraid that yet another recollection of Ouwa could darken what was now an exceedingly happy day for him, he added, ‘I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot. I don’t think that old Pharaoh will trouble us again, and for all that, it
is
a sweet and precious stream.’

Perhaps the whole episode had disturbed Luciana more than she realized, for she reacted quickly: ‘Sweet? With that beast in it?’

This, perhaps, puzzled François most of all, since everything in the world of the bush, provided it kept to its time and place, had always seemed to belong and to add to the richness of their lives.

‘Oh, he’s all right in his way,’ he replied, ‘and he has, as Mopani says, his own right to be here and keep alive. Just look at that spit of sand on the far side over there, and you’ll see how even crocodiles have their domestic moments. D’you see what I see? They’re in the process of having their teeth brushed.’

The notion of anything so ridiculous as a crocodile brushing its teeth made Luciana giggle, so it was a long time before François could get her to concentrate. Then he enabled her unexperienced eyes to penetrate the natural camouflage of the river world and see seven huge crocodiles, stretched out rigid with languor in the sun, eyes ecstatically shut and mouths wide open, while numbers of little birds perched on their lips and darted inside their jaws. They were, François explained wryly in a way that made her laugh, dentists, carefully using their sharp, deft little beaks to remove fragments of decayed meat, lodged in the crevices between the double rows of crocodile teeth.

There was, he added, a story from old Koba about it all. The first great Grandmother Mother Ostrich (the highest Bushman title of authority, their equivalent of Empress) was dismayed by the extent to which the crocodiles were devouring the birds who depended on the pools and rivers of Africa for their living. She had appealed to Mantis, who gave her the idea of making a pact with the original Rameses-the-Great who, in his turn, was greatly worried by the growing number of toothless crocodiles. Crocodiles, as everyone knew, lived so long that finally they were practically toothless. The pact was simple. All the birds with the finest beaks would be appointed royal toothpicks-in-waiting to the crocodiles, in return for a pledge from them to leave all the other birds unmolested.

Such a clear gush of laughter burst from Luciana at this Alice-in-Wonderland vision with which François had just presented her, that all the birds in their vicinity went silent. The thought that she had spoilt the concert among the reeds and rushes made her put her hand quickly to her mouth to stifle her merriment. Soon the world round about them once more recovered its rhythm and both sounded and looked more beautiful than ever. Indeed for some moments neither of them spoke. François, still in as watchful attitude as ever, was so pleased that old Koba’s story appeared to have drawn them closer together, that he now risked glancing sideways at her from time to time.

Whenever he did so, she was squatting beside her horse, looking deep into the water immediately in front of her as if into a clairvoyant’s crystal. Then an extraordinary thing happened to him. The water there was as smooth and still as a mirror, and in that mirror there lay the trembling reflection of his horse, and beside his horse, the face of the girl caught up in thoughts without name, and for once all her lively, yet delicate features were at one and still. In some odd way the reflection looked more real, permanent and convincing than even the orginal posed above in bright sunlight. It was an intense dream reflection, yet something which seemed to have been always intact and unchanging in the depths of his imagination. So startlingly convincing was it that it was easy to look on the reflection as the lasting reality, and the horse and girl above as merely transient. Moreover, as he stared, the impression grew that as long as such a dream carried him on like a river, the reflection would keep him company as a point of direction. The only troubling thing was that it had taken so many long days and years to find the right place and right river to provide such a magic mirror to make visible the essential compass image of themselves.

François became so hypnotized by the reflection that he was in danger of forgetting his sentinel duties, and may even have been guilty of negligence if suddenly there had not been thrown into the centre of the magnetic reflection a blaze of colour as if from some Arabian jewel.

It was the reflection of one of the loveliest of all river birds, the one the English call a malachite kingfisher. It had obviously seen a chance of some food in the river near by and was fearlessly hovering in the air in front of them, its wings moving so fast that, quivering and trembling, they appeared always in the same position. The head, a bright feather in its peaked cap and with a scarlet beak, was staring down into the depths of the river. The blazing tail also was trembling as it worked to steady the burning little body in between.

François and the girl looked up simultaneously. François thought the expression on her face then about the most beautiful he had ever seen as she called out, ‘Oh, how beautiful! How perfectly stunning!’

The expression of wonder instantly changed to astonishment, for the little bird folded its wings, fell like a stone into the river with barely a splash and almost at once rose easily out of it, a gleaming little silver fish in its beak. Astonishment changed to horror on her face as they watched the bird leave a rainbow trail in the platinum air, on its way to the branch of a dead tree just a few yards away. It perched there for a moment or two, holding the fish bright and gleaming in the light. When presumably it had recovered its breath, it deftly beat the little fish to death against the branch on which it was sitting and then swallowed it whole.

‘Oh dear,’ Luciana sounded distressed to the point of tears.

‘Why must it spoil everything like that? Why was it made so beautifully if it has to do such things? You can expect it of those ugly black old crows and those awful old vultures we saw on our way up here, but not from such a lovely little thing as that.’

François did not reply, because just then another and greater kingfisher appeared, which was not as bright and jewelled as its malachite colleague. It was bigger, more functional and not nearly so selective or tentative in its behaviour, for its mind seemed made up well in advance. It just plunged headlong into the river and came out with a much bigger fish in its beak, and flew, sagging with the weight, low over the reeds and rushes to the far bank and out of their sight.

‘Oh no, not another, please. It’s really too much,’ the girl cried.

But François still did not answer. She had barely finished speaking when an enormous fish eagle appeared, and, as if inflamed by the lesser examples they had just seen, hurled his black and white body like a harpoon into the stream, to rise from it with the biggest catch of all, a gold and silver mullet, held firmly, squirming in vain, between the eagle’s crampon talons. The fish indeed was so heavy that the eagle had the greatest difficulty in lifting it clear of the water and carrying it off, straining every gleaming feather in its broad, vibrating wings to make its distant nest.

‘Does it go on all day long like this?’ Luciana demanded. ‘Is there nothing but killing and eating, eating and killing from sunrise to sunset?’ To François’s dismay, she now appeared thoroughly disenchanted with his world.

‘Only until they’ve had enough to keep themselves and their youngsters alive,’ François replied in his best peace-making tone, learned from !#grave;Bamuthi who was an artist at it. Yet he could not resist adding, in defence of the paradox of living beauty and ugly death in the bush, ‘None of them ever fishes just for fun, like human beings.’

It was on the tip of his tongue to add ‘as your father does’ but he was still so much in love and at one with their surroundings that there was no room in his mind for discord. He eagerly anwered, when she had asked him the names of the three birds, ‘The first one was what your people call a malachite crested kingfisher, but what Mopani and I call ‘Little-Joseph-feather-in-cap’.’

She looked at him with such incomprehension that he added, ‘Little Joseph’ because it has a coat of many colours, and besides the Bushmen say he is a great dreamer, as the Bible says Joseph was. The biggest one of all was a fish eagle. If you listen carefully you can hear it bark with pleasure after delivering some much-needed food to its nest. Then the in-between one is the giant kingfisher. We all think it the most expert fisherman of the lot. Even the Matabele, who don’t think much of fish anyway, can’t help admiring it. You should just hear the rumble of admiration in their voices when they call him by his Sinda-bele name:
isi-Vubu…
It’s because of that that they’ve given your father the praise name,
isi-Vuba
’

This last bit of secret Matabele information escaped him before he realized that he might have chosen a more suitable time and place for telling her. He went scarlet with annoyance at himself, but fortunately the girl was not looking at him.

‘They call Fa after such a bird? Why, I wonder?’ Then, remembering her father’s love of fishing she added, as if in defence of him, ‘I can’t believe that all the birds and animals in this world don’t also kill just because they like killing, or else they wouldn’t be at it all day and night.’

This was such a remote view of nature that if he had heard it from anybody else François would have dismissed it with scorn. But coming from a person whose feelings he feared he had hurt, he answered her at great length. He explained that it seemed to be a law of the bush that no bird, animal, insect or reptile was killed for any reason other than for food or in self-defence. It was true that jackals, hyenas and wild dogs, given the chance, sometimes killed more than they needed, but they did so because they were in many ways the most insecure of all animals, and more than any other had to endure such long periods of hunger that when they had a chance of killing they tended to do so unnecessarily as a kind of insurance against the long periods of hunger that experience had taught them could be ahead.

Even so, the significant thing was that, however understandable their bouts of over-killing might be, the rest of the animal world despised them for it. It was noticeable, he remarked, how the other animals avoided even looking at them as they did at one another. He could tell her many Bushman stories of how the despised creatures resented the scorn of the respectable, middle·class society of the bush.

To François’s delight Luciana laughed so much at the thought of ‘middle·class animals’ that he had to quieten her. He went on to say that he hoped one day he would be able to show her an example of what he meant, a hyena coming home in the half-light of morning, limping sideways as if ashamed and constantly looking fearfully over its shoulder. At that hour of the day he himself, from behind some bush, had often looked straight into the eyes of a hyena and the expression induced in them by the feeling of being an outcast from the wonderfully rich, law-abiding animal world of Africa was so intense that they blinked with anguish at the growing light of the day that they shunned. It had made him feel almost equally stricken. That is why, François added, he always thought of the hyena as Ishmael.