1972 - A Story Like the Wind (9 page)

Luckily, feeling perhaps that he already had been rough enough with François !#grave;Bamuthi gave way without argument. He allowed François just time enough to order Hintza to stay behind and keep guard over the leopard. Then at a firm, long pace, full of the long, heavy grace with which a Matabele woodsman walked when his purpose was clear, !#grave;Bamuthi led the way down the track towards the milking sheds and the homestead beyond.

François arrived home to find his mother in the kitchen talking to their cook, a redoubtable old ‘Xhosa lady whom he always had to address most punctiliously as Ousie (Old Mother)-Johanna. (As a Christian she had a European name). To his relief neither of them appeared worried because the Matabele herdsmen who had brought in the first milk for breakfast had already assured them that François’s absence was merely due to the fact that he and !#grave;Bamuthi had gone to see to some old ‘baboon’ which appeared to have blundered into a lion trap. Besides, his mother was preoccupied with a far graver matter.

She was known to François, his father and every servant on the farm as Lammie (Little Lamb), the name given to her when a small child by the Amaxosa, and which had stuck to her ever since. No one ever called her by the formal ‘mistress’, much to the disapproval of European visitors who thought this far too familiar for the maintenance of white authority. François found Ousie-Johanna scolding her affectionately, telling her not to worry about Francis’s father. Ousie-Johanna was certain that he only had to eat more of her food, she assured her Lam-mietjie (Little, little lamb, as she addressed her mistress when particularly concerned for her), and he would soon be better. But all this obviously had not helped François’s mother much because beyond an affectionate ‘Good morning’ she hardly asked him what he had been doing.

Picking up the breakfast tray laid with broad orange slices of the finest pawpaws of Hunter’s Drift and some special milk food for his father, she merely remarked to François over her shoulder: ‘Please remember, Coiske [pronounced
Swaske;
a diminutive of endearment for François], I shall want your help to prepare for our journey.’

The impending journey was in the morning to the capital, where she was taking her husband to see the most learned medical specialists in the country. So urgent did she regard the journey that for the first time she was leaving François alone at Hunter’s Drift in the care of Ousie-Johanna and above all, of course, !#grave;Bamuthi. François had just time to explain that he was just going back to the trap to help !#grave;Bamuthi, a white lie he thought justifiable in the circumstances, and that as soon as they had finished there he would hurry back to help her.

That satisfied his mother, but not old Johanna. His mother was barely through the door when she went for François. She had been as alarmed by the heavy gun-shot as old !#grave;Bamuthi had been, and when on top of that she had discovered that François and Hintza were not in his room, she had run to the milking shed to raise the alarm.

François accordingly had to endure one of the severest scoldings he had ever had from an old lady who was devoted to him. This was something difficult for a young person of his quick temperament, particularly when he could not explain his feeling that he had done no wrong and he might not have succeeded had it not been for the excitement of his important new secret mission working as an antidote within him. He felt he had no option but to sit down in the kitchen as he always did for breakfast and eat as even he had not eaten before, especially when feeling so little like eating, otherwise he would arouse suspicion and give away his new-found purpose. Ousie-Johanna moreover had cooked an enormous breakfast for him: porridge of mealie (maize) meal, served with wild honey and cream; home-made sausages grilled on coals of fragrant wood; hot crusts of bread fresh from the oven and filling the air with one of the oldest and most reassuring, life-promising smells in the world; fresh butter, a bowl of amber peach jam and a blue enamel pot of coffee.

In fact, he did not even dare refuse a large second helping, because experience had taught him that nothing mollified Johanna, whose nature like that of all born cooks, was touchy in the extreme where her cooking was concerned, so much as tangible evidence that her food was appreciated. Fortunately François was a gulper of genius. He could eat a meal that would take his parents perhaps an hour to consume in just under ten minutes. Then, pushing his chair away, he dashed up to Johanna who was mixing a cake for afternoon tea by her table, seized her hand, pressed it against his cheek and said: ‘Thank you, Old Mother, that was super. Your food tastes better and better every day!’

Ousie-Johanna’s eyes went bright and their corners wrinkled with pleasure. The natural artist that she was made her shy, sensitive and tentative as a child, though one would never have suspected it when one saw how large and Olympian her own cooking had made her. Now she was delighted to the point of embarrassment with the praise. Her cheeks went so hot that she put her hands to them and by way of self-correction answered gently: ‘Little Feather, you were always a beautiful liar’, the Amaxosa way of calling someone a gross flatterer.

But when François asked her if she could quickly prepare some sandwiches and a big thermos flask of coffee made with pure milk to take back to the trap, where he had work to do, she replied: ‘Auck! I might have known, Little Feather, that you praised me only because you wanted something more!’

While Johanna was preparing the food, François ran quickly into the store room and helped himself from the large store of medical supplies kept there. He took bandages, first-aid dressings, three dozen M and B 693 tablets (the latest and reputedly infallible drug to prevent fatal poisoning from wounds and infections caused by no matter what agents, whether lion, leopard, or the thousands of unusual invisible microbes of Africa), some iodine, a dozen tablets of the latest painkiller, and some of the sleeping draughts which had been prescribed for his father.

He then rushed to his own room, exchanged the old muzzle-loader for his lighter ·22 repeater, snatched the large military water-flask given to him for day-long excursions into the bush, and went back to the kitchen where old Johanna had his food and thermos already packed beautifully into his haversack. A handful of dried raisins and apricots from the Cape had been thrown in, unsolicited, a sure sign that he was fully restored to Ousie-Johanna’s graces.

Calling at the slaughter room at the far end of the wide courtyard behind the kitchen to select what he thought was the best knife for skinning, he stuck it into his belt at the side of his own hunting knife and set off to trot back towards Hintza and the dead leopard, avoiding the milking shed in case of further questioning but not forgetting on the way to stop by a water-furrow in the garden to fill his flask.

He got back to the trap none too soon. Hintza was foaming at the mouth and about to drop with exhaustion from his work of keeping the vultures away from the carcass of the leopard. With their usual cunning they had descended from the trees and surrounded Hintza and the dead leopard, in a thickly packed circle. As one segment of the circle moved in on Hintza and the dead leopard, Hintza would be forced into dashing at them to chase them away. They would do this with fantastic agility for such awkwardly-shaped and heavy birds, fluttering backward just fast enough to give Hintza the illusion that he might at any minute be able to catch them. While doing this, the segments behind Hintza would close in, their long scraggy necks outstretched and their sharp beaks ready to strike.

No doubt they would have succeeded if Hintza had not been in similar predicaments before, although for never so long as on this occasion. He would know through his acute senses and experience, exactly when he had chased the false, deceitful vultures far enough. He would then whirl about and dash back to the leopard just in time to scatter the advancing section of the rapacious rear-guard. Of course, no sooner had he got them at a safe distance from the leopard, than he had to whirl about to repeat the process with the other flank of the army of vultures. So the battle had gone on and on until now he was so tired and exhausted that if it had not been for the fact that he came from a long line of fighting ancestors he would have dropped, dead-tired to his knees and given up the struggle at least half an hour before François arrived on the scene.

François himself was so angry with the vultures and so provoked by seeing what they had done to Hintza, that without hesitation he shot five of them. Any pity that he might have felt for so excessive and hot-headed an action was cancelled by seeing the rest of the vultures fall on their dead kinsmen and devour them. They had not even the excuse of starvation because in a world so full of game and carnivorous animals, they were always fat and well-fed.

Another cause for his anger was that the behaviour of the vultures had upset his priorities. He had fully intended to go first to the aid of the little Bushman. But with Hintza so exhausted he now had to set about the arduous task of skinning the leopard, or the vultures would devour the animal, skin and all, in his absence.

If that were to happen, !#grave;Bamuthi would be so suspicious that it would not take him long to find out, from the many tell-tale tracks in the bush, that François had been up to something most extraordinary. He had no option, therefore, but to skin the leopard at once. He had been taught the art of skinning by so fine a craftsman as !#grave;Bamuthi and had practised on goats, sheep, oxen, eland and even giant sable, ever since he was big enough to handle a knife. That, and the growing feeling of urgency to help the wounded Bushman, made him as quick on this occasion as any man could have been. The moment he had the skin Cut away, unblemished, heavy and wet as it was, he rolled it in a bundle and hoisted it on to his shoulders.

Calling on Hintza to fellow, he marched down the track to the place where he had hidden the Bushman. He found him lying awake, propped against the rock, an arrow in his bow, no doubt brought to the alert by the noise François had made shooting the vultures. Fortunately François had taken the precaution of announcing himself by once more calling out the proper Bushman greeting, before he showed himself at the entrance to the ledge.

The little man’s relief at his coming was as obvious as it was gratifying to François. He crawled in underneath the ledge, threw down the leopard skin and sat beside the Bushman. Then he took out of his satchel the flask of hot, sweet coffee and made the Bushman drink its contents together with two tablets of pain-killer.

François followed this up with a third of the, as usual, over-generous supply of sandwiches Ousie-Johanna had made for him, reassuring the little Bushman as he passed the food to him that everything he was drinking and eating contained great magic to counter the harm the trap had done to him. He remembered from what old Koba had told him that there was for the Bushman magic in everything and therefore all their problems and complications had to have magic answers as well. Indeed he himself, strong and unusually mature for a boy of thirteen, was still young enough and so much under the influence of the people of the bush, from Matabele to Barotse and Shangaan, to believe secretly almost as much in magic as they or any Bushman had ever done. Although magic might not be all, he was convinced that it was not an illusion as his rational father, however dear to him, insisted, and he believed it still applied to life in the bush to an astonishing degree.

While he talked, he was happy to notice how quickly the painkiller had taken effect and that the look of pain and strain was vanishing from the eyes and face of the injured Bushman. François thought that he had never seen so wonderful a pair of eyes. Although the Bushman was young the eyes had an astonishing light in them as if coming from so far back in time that it took his breath away. All this, of course, at the time was not an articulate observation so much as just instinctive feeling on François’s part. As well as the vanishing of the look of pain, the hot coffee and food rapidly brought back the little Bushman’s strength, which he showed in a new firmness in his voice and increasingly lively responses to Francis’s efforts at making his idea of proper bedside conversation.

When at last he thought that the Bushman was, for the moment, out of pain and strong enough, he raised the question which was uppermost in his mind. He explained that he fully realized how the Bushman must not be allowed to fall into Matabele or any other strange hands, even European hands. But if he were not to do so, they would have to find a far better hiding place for him than the ledge under which they were sitting at that moment. They would have to do so quickly because unless François returned home soon, people would come searching for him and then the discovery of the Bushman would inevitably follow.

At this point the little man interrupted and explained that he himself knew the perfect hiding place near at hand.

François looked amazed. He could not help exclaiming: ‘But surely you haven’t been here before, how could you possibly have done so, in this enemy country?’

For the first time a delightful smile came to the Bushman’s face and he nodded his rather Mongolian head vigorously. Quickly, in his own language, full of clicks so easily and lightly uttered that the words crackled like electricity on his lips, he explained to François. He had indeed been in this country once before, as a boy of about François’s age. Here, close by, well hidden in the cliffs above the river was a deep cave, which from the time of the people of the early race had been the home of the little Bushman’s clan. They had been forced to leave it when the coming of the Matabele, Barotse and Shangaan as well as the ‘red strangers’ had started the process of mercilessly hunting them down and exterminating his people. It had become impossible for them to hunt in the bush for food, although they were certain they could have kept the whereabouts of their great and ancient cave a secret indefinitely, so well was it hidden. So one sad day, long before he was born, his people at the dead of night had moved out of the cave and gone out into the great desert beyond where they already knew many others of their kinsmen had fled.