1972 - A Story Like the Wind (6 page)

He noticed that the morning star, the Dawn’s Heart, as old Koba had always called it, was already high in the sky. A red streak of light was drawn across the dark just above the jagged heads of the hills to the east. As he realized the dawn was just about to break he became aware of another extraordinary fact. The five mongrel watch-dogs up to now had been completely silent and given no indication whatsoever that there was anything unusual going on in the bush.

Indeed, the moment he stepped down from the stoep, all five now came rushing up to François and started to nudge him in a friendly fashion, wagging their tails with pleasure at the thought that his coming showed their night’s work was over and that soon they would be having their food and the human company they so enjoyed. This discrepancy between their behaviour and that of Hintza, struck François as so extraordinary that for the first time in his life he was inclined to distrust Hintza’s judgement.

He stood there himself watching the streak of red widening over the dark hills and listening intently for any kind of unusual sign to explain Hintza’s summons. Hintza, more and more impatient and apparently mystified by François’s reluctance to come along with him, was beginning to give him a couple of highly suggestive, even painful nips just behind his ankles. Oddly at that dawn moment not any tell-tale sound but a strange silence had suddenly fallen over the bush.

At that hour, what François’s father called the ‘Dawn Symphony’ should already have reached its crescendo. The full chorus of baboons, monkeys, little bush apes, and a hundred or more different kinds of birds should be singing Hosanna to the day. The cynical jackals and hyenas, who loved the night and now were in full retreat from the light would normally be raising their voices too in derision until silenced by the authoritative bass of some great old lion soloist who ruled a whole wide valley in the hills nearby. All these should have joined in the dawn music by now. But for once they were all silent. Only down by the river some lesser birds, not renowned for voice, diction or ear, started a hysterical sort of tone-deaf twitter. That, François knew, was not the bush’s way of giving thanks for deliverance from the Bible-black night and uttering gratitude for the relief from fear brought about by the swift, invincible, bushveld day. Only something most unusual could have made so large a hole of silence.

His faith in Hintza completely restored, François bent down, patted him affectionately on the back and whispered: ‘Good Hin, lead on, please. Lead on!’

Hintza immediately went off at a trot and François had to follow suit, not without difficulty because of the weight of the gun he carried. None the less he kept it up until they had gone well beyond the great garden and orchard, past the cattle-kraal and milking sheds where for once cows and calves were as silent as the animals in the bush, and so on to the far side of the round, beehive huts, protected by an enormous high and thick stockade of wood interlaced with deadly branches of sharp white thorns forming the kraal in which !#grave;Bamuthi and the other herdsmen lived. So early was it still that as yet there was no sign of the women stirring to light the fires for the morning porridge with which the Matabele began their day. Even their dogs, no doubt tired from their long guard duty through the night, seemed to be taking a nap, for not a sound came from them as François and Hintza went by. This, François, intent on discovering what lay ahead, did not fail to notice and took as a compliment to Hintza’s bushcraft.

However, when they came to the end of the vast clearing which surrounded the homestead, and Hintza veered away sharply to the entrance of a narrow and complicated track leading through the densest bush at the foot of the hills, where a deep cleft opened up and led for many miles straight on to the great game reserve placed in Mopani Theron’s keeping, François thought the time had come to be more careful.

‘Here, Hin, here!’ he called out softly.

Immediately Hintza turned round and came to stand in front of him, eyes intent but, none the less, impatient on François’s face. By that time the light was just good enough for them to read each other’s expressions.

‘Slowly now Hin, slowly,’ François commanded, ‘if we go on at this pace and have any shooting to do, I shall be so breathless and shaking that I’ll miss, and that won’t do because I’ve only got one shot at a time in this gun. Look, it’s not our normal quick little barker [the Bushman name of the repeater], but this one-shot old-father-of-a-gun. So slowly and carefully please!’

Hintza seemed to understand at once, almost as if he had already reached the same conclusion himself. He led on into the dark, narrow track at a much slower pace, pausing to stand, look, listen and above all lift his nose high to smell the dew-dank air at every twist in the track before pushing on noiselessly ahead.

François had another reason for urging caution on them both at this moment. This track along which they were about to go was one of three tracks used by big game to come out of the vast uninhabited bush to the east, in order to drink water at the river. It was also invariably used by lion and leopard when they raided Hunter’s Drift as they often did, in the hope of catching cows, calves, goats, sheep or even hens and geese, for food.

For years therefore it had been the custom to protect these tracks at night with large steel lion-traps, skilfully concealed and securely held by a thick chain pegged with a long iron spike driven deep into the earth. These traps were constructed exactly on the same principle as mouse-traps, except of course that they were many times bigger and heavier, with the saw-like teeth in their wide jaws both longer and sharper. Also, when a lion or leopard tried to get at the meat which was suspended just above the trap for bait, the great tense spring which released the trap was so powerful that it had been known to snap through the leg of a bull which had trodden upon it, and also to break the necks of powerful striped hyenas. The traps weighed close on twenty pounds each and they were moved into different positions every day and the bait renewed. Immediately after milking, one of !#grave;Bamuthi’s first duties was to set out armed with his great fighting shield and longest assegai in order to inspect each trap. If anything dangerous were caught in them he would hasten back to Hunter’s Drift and summon François’s father to come and shoot it.

François himself did not know the exact location of the trap set in this track the night before. But he was certain it could not be more than a mile from the edge of the clearing. Naturally he did not want Hintza and himself either to tread on it or walk casually into anything which the trap might have caught. And now he began to have an uneasy feeling that in some way the trap was responsible for the strange silence which ruled over this part of the bush.

Luckily the light, as they proceeded, got so much better that soon François could distinguish all the details of the bush and the course of the scarlet track ahead. Consequently he began stepping out more confidently in the wake of Hintza who, obedient to the manner in which he had been trained, whenever he came to a turn in the track, turned round first to see that François was near, before he moved on again.

They went on like this silently for about ten minutes and, much to François’s relief, passed safely through the narrowest and most dangerous part of the cleft in the hills. Just beyond, the cleft broadened rapidly into a wide valley and there the first thing that François noticed was an enormous baboon ‘lookout’, perched high on a boulder of the purple crown of
krans
of stone around the head of the hills above him, its auburn coat already on fire with the first rays of the sun. This baboon, instead of setting about his duty of getting his fellow cliff-dwellers marshalled and out on their business of collecting food before it got too hot was looking intently to the east in the direction of the track which François and Hintza were following. As if that were not enough, on top of the hill on the other side of the track, on a vast saffron boulder, another old baboon was being equally neglectful of his tribal duties and was looking intently up the valley in the same direction.

More significantly still, Hintza had suddenly come to a halt, and was staring ahead. François hastened to join him. With a brief, low and perhaps unnecessary: ‘Stand Hin! Stand!’ he himself stood at the dog’s side while his own keen eyes searched bush, hills and sky ahead.

It didn’t take him long to discover what held the baboon’s attention. About a quarter of a mile away the branches of a grove of some of the tallest marula trees in the bush were shaking as if caught in a whirlwind. François stared at the heavy branches while the sunlight crept so far down the flanks of the hills that it touched the tops of the trees. Then he realized that all that intensive agitation of leaves and branches was being caused by the excited gathering of some of the biggest vultures he had ever seen. The fact that the vultures were massing in this way in the top of the trees was proof to him of their uncanny instinct for knowing when and where some living thing was about to die.

‘What do you think it is Hin,
Xkha?
’ [lion]

Hintza, who knew the deep, explosive word ‘lion’ well, gave him a steady, negative look in reply.

‘
Xkaueydken?
’ [leopard] François asked, using the Bushman word again. Hintza’s look was, if possible, even more negative than before.

‘Well, what is it then, Hin?’ François pleaded.

A faint whimper of uncertainty was all that he got out of Hintza, before he whirled about swiftly and started off again.

This, however, was far too precipitous and reckless a procedure for François’s liking because obviously they were near the climax of their ventures.

‘Heel!’ he called out softly but clearly.

To Hintza’s great credit he came back, however reluctantly, and for the first time took up his position close behind François. François then silently and slowly cocked the hammer of his muzzle-loader, made sure that the firing cap was firmly in position and, with the gun now at the ready, the butt firmly resting in his right arm, the blue eight-sided muzzle on the left, he noiselessly pushed forward, step by slow step. Hintza followed so skilfully that François was quite certain that he would arrive unobserved at the foot of the marula trees where by the minute the vultures were getting more impatient and demanding. But one old vulture perched high in the sun, its long neck erect and naked, with a large, scraggy Adam’s apple prominent and red as a piece of raw meat in the sun, looked down and saw a glint of light on the barrel of François’s gun. It squeaked a curse of warning like an old witch, before taking ponderously to the air on broad, clumsy wings, to be followed by the others, until some fifty of these enormous birds were circling the gold and green bush with shadows of crepe, and robbing the morning instantly of all its innocence.

More carefully than ever, therefore, because of the alert the flight of vultures must have proclaimed to all and sundry in the bush for miles around, François went forward bent nearly double in order to get into position where he could sink on his stomaoh and crawl closer to the trees.

He was on the point of lowering himself into-a crawling position to wriggle forward when almost at once the three sounds of a twang, a swish and a dull plop hit his ear. His bush hat, which he wore only in the cool of the morning and dewfall of night, flew from his head. As he fell flat on his face, before turning quick as a cat on his back to check the mechanism of his gun in the shelter of the brush, he noticed his hat stuck on a thorn bush above him with an arrow through its crown. Hintza, bristling with apprehension and irritation, was looking down at him as if to say: ‘Now that is just the sort of thing that will happen if you do not allow me to lead.’

The Coming of Xhabbo

O
ne glance was enough to reassure François that his ancestral gun had come to no harm and no dust had gathered around the hammer or trigger in the shock of his fall to the ground. All that was reassuring in a way but what was most alarming and utterly inexplicable to him, was the arrow through his hat. Obviously somewhere near at hand there was somebody who, to put it mildly, wished neither him nor Hintza well. Such a thing had never happened to him or anyone else at Hunter’s Drift before. Who could it be? And why?

Unusually mature because of the independence thrust on him at so early an age by his lonely life in the bush, François searched his memory for some fact or fragment of knowledge that could explain the arrow, let alone the kind of person who could be using a bow and arrow even in that remote bush, at so late a period in time. The answer to all that, he was certain, was vital before deciding their next move.

None of the members of the many various tribes who had worked at Hunter’s Drift from the time he had been born had ever in their history used bows and arrows. After all, he had spent enough days and evenings sitting with them all in their huts, listening to the stories of their past to know that. He knew, as well as any African child, how they had protected themselves against wild beasts and defended themselves against many enemies throughout long and, for him, Homeric histories. For instance, he even knew the secret names supposedly charged with invincible magic which the Matabele at Hunter’s Drift gave to their favourite weapons, and would on no account have disclosed to their most intimate friends, let alone the ‘red strangers’ as they called the white people who had conquered their land.

Much of this François owed to his rare relationship with !#grave;Bamuthi. Not only was he a Matabele aristocrat but head of the clan from which both their herdsmen and watchmen came.

Once, years before, in the course of telling François the story of a battle in which his own great-grandfather had fought in one of ‘Mzilikatze’s impis against the Baganda on the shores of the great lakes in the far north, and noticing how profoundly François was identified with him and his story, his last reserve of secrecy had melted away in an upsurge of affection. He had broken off his story, produced his great ox-hide shield, placed all his spears, his assegais, and his clubs upon it, and told the entranced young boy, on the pledge of secrecy, what the role of each had been in the fighting; and how they were addressed before the battle.