1972 - A Story Like the Wind (10 page)

He himself had been born in the desert, but in all the Bushmen there was a hope that one day they would be able to come back to their home in this cave. The memory of it and the love of it was kept alive among them by the stories, poems and songs taught to them by their parents from the time they were born, and even in the great art of the dances they danced around the fire at least once a year in the desert, to express the joy they would all feel when the great day came and they could take possession of their cave, honey-pastures (they loved honey above all things) and hunting grounds again. Moreover, it was the accepted tradition among his people when the first-born son was about to become a man—here he looked at François and said, in other words when he reached the age that François appeared to have reached—for the father to lead the boy out of the desert-and secretly show him the way to the cave. There he would live with him for a week or two so that his memory of it, the magic spirit of the place and the sense of return which living in it, re-created, would remain with the son for ever. When the father died, as his had done, the son would have to return to tell the cave the sad news and make its new master known to it. He thought that if François would help him, the best thing to do now would be to make for the cave. He could lie up there safely, since the cave had never been discovered by any other race. When he was fully recovered, he could make his way back again to the safety of the desert.

François’s excitement at this piece of intelligence was only matched by his relief that there was in fact a place nearby where the gravely injured man would be safe. His only doubt was whether the Bushman would be strong enough to get to the cave, and he unhesitatingly said so. But thanks to the pain-killer and the food, as well as his indomitable spirit and natural resilience, the little Bushman at once illustrated how capable he was of setting out there and then. He stood up without any assistance on one leg, picked up his bow and arrows and spear, grasped his spear in his right hand and leaning on its shaft he hobbled out on to the track on his own.

François immediately offered him his arm to help as he had helped before but the Bushman would have none of it, only allowing him to carry his bow and quiver. For the rest, he just begged François to follow and slowly started through the bush northwards, in the direction of the hills. There was no track of any kind to follow, but the Bushman seemed to know every stone, tree, shrub and plant individually as if they had been intimate friends all his life. Indeed, he went straight without hesitation, as François had read in his books a homing pigeon would, still knowing the way back to the loft where it had been born, despite having been hooded and taken a thousand miles away.

What impressed François even more was that not once did the Bushman, handicapped as he was with that terribly mangled leg, step on a blade of grass or bruise a leaf thereby leaving signs behind him of their progress through the bush. So they climbed steadily upwards, with many a rest in the shade of storm bush and acacia trees, until at last they came to the top of one of the horns of the crescent of hills which enclosed Hunter’s Drift. They stood there for a moment, hidden behind some black storm bushes and looked down five hundred feet into the swirling waters of the swollen Amanzim-tetse, the River of Sweet Waters. Clearly there was no way up the sheer cliff from the river and, what was far worse, so far as François could see there appeared to be no way along its face either. Yet still the little Bushman did not hesitate.

He turned sharply to the right, went down on his hands and knees and crawled forward slowly underneath the black storm bushes until suddenly they came to a narrow cleft in the rock face, blocked by an enormous boulder. Here the little Bushman signalled to François to be silent and come to his side. He whispered to François for help saying he wished to climb up the boulder. Instantly François assisted him and, on the top, the Bushman lost no time in sliding over it and vanishing down the far side.

François and Hintza followed quickly, just in time to see the Bushman once more down on all fours and crawling underneath some more bushes along the cleft. They all continued thus, took a sharp right turn, followed it away from the river for some fifty yards and came to an abrupt stop against another cliff face, with both trees and bushes of thorn as well as wild raisins growing thick and tall at its base.

Without hesitating again the little Bushman crawled on his stomach straight into this formidable undergrowth. François and Hintza followed. The undergrowth was so thick that after the broad sunlight outside François could hardly see his way ahead. But after a minute or two he found himself facing a round hole at the base of the cliff, just big enough to crawl through as the Bushman was doing. He followed, Hintza panting at his heels, and then stood up in one of the widest and deepest caves he had ever seen. The little Bushman was sitting back against a wall within, gasping for breath but obviously well content, as François could see, because some hundreds of feet away there were several narrow openings through which shafts of light struck into the cave, illuminating the yellow sandstone surfaces until they glowed like honey and making the level, soft sandy floor of the cave like an orange coloured mat.

But what really excited him was when he saw that the smooth walls of the cave were completely covered with the most wonderful paintings he had ever seen. One was of a whole herd of eland in full flight, running with such speed that watching them he felt he could almost hear the wind of their speed sing like violins in his ears. Another large slab carried a lovely conversation piece with a couple of tall giraffes standing tenderly over a baby giraffe crouched at their feet. Another had a painting of a lion with its claws in the back of a giant sable antelope which it was in the process of pinning down to the earth, and so on and on until most of the animals of the Africa he knew and loved were represented on the walls, in one characteristic role or another. But the greatest panel of all seemed to be reserved for something that had never been seen on land or sea as far as François knew. It was of an enormous serpent wriggling out of a gigantic shell, and a tiny Mantis with a small mongoose at its side, sitting calmly in front of the serpent, as if telling it. ‘Now you had better behave yourself or you will get into trouble.’

Over praying mantis, mongoose and serpent there was unmistakably the arc of a rainbow. Below the rainbow, as if belonging to it, was a delicately drawn and painted porcupine and beside the porcupine, two little hands obviously imprinted on the canvas of stone after having been dipped in red paint.

François could have gone on staring for hours at all this, feeling not only as if he were in an art gallery but in some kind of a church as well, but he was interrupted by the Bushman saying to him, in a voice blurred this time not with pain but with great emotion: ‘This is my place and the place of all my people.’

François would have loved to have asked the little Bushman the many questions that were welling up in him, but the sound of a human voice had brought him back to immediate realities. He had already been over-long. He must lose no time getting home if he were not to be missed and people come searching for him. He hurriedly explained all this to the Bushman, made him lie down on his back, undid his improvised dressings of the early morning and explained that he was now going to apply the most magic of all medicines to the wound. He warned that it would hurt as even the trap itself had not hurt. He poured the iodine into the raw wound. Far from flinching, as François had expected, a great look of happiness came into the Bushman’s face as he felt the iodine stinging like needle thrusts into his leg, the pain obviously convincing him that François’s magic must be very good magic indeed.

François then bound the leg with proper field dressings and clean, sterilized bandages, made the Bushman swallow three tablets of M and B 693, and told him to take three more when the sun went down. He gave him three more pain-killing tablets and three more sleeping draughts to take at sunset. He placed the remainder of the sandwiches and the field flask of water on the ground beside him. Finally, he made the Bushman promise that he would not move until François came to him again the next day, which he assured him he would, although at an hour which he could not now determine. He was then ready to leave, and was about to turn and make for the entrance of the cave where the daylight shone like water on the surface of a deep well when, to his amazement the Bushman, hurt as he was, stood up and raised his hand half above his shoulder rather like a rough Roman salute and thanking him profusely, ended with the words: ‘Until today Xhabbo was one; now he is two.’

François’s embarrassment at so full an expression of thanks from the Bushman, because he had only done what appeared to him perfectly natural and obvious, was so acute that he doubted whether he could respond adequately. His knowledge of the uninhibited people among whom he had grown up told him he had to do so, unless he were to appear boorish, as Africans think all ‘red strangers’ are only too apt to be. But how?

He could only take refuge in the kind of expression Koba had taught him a well brought-up Bushman might have used on such an occasion and answered shyly: ‘And now that you have come, I live again.’

Something else occurred to him that made him ask, ‘I did hear right? Your name is indeed Xhabbo?’

‘Because my father felt utterly that my coming was Xhabbo to him,’ the little Bushman answered in the round-about manner of a language, which may lack logic and reason but more than compensates for them in feeling: ‘I have come to feel myself also utterly to be Xhabbo and to feel not a little that there could be no other name for me.’

Xhabbo
, as François knew only too well from Koba, meant Dream, and Dream, she had taught him, was a favourite name for all the first-born sons in eminent Bushman clans.

All this time Hintza, who had had his first experience of rock climbing on such a scale that he must have qualified as the first ridge-back Alpinist in southern Africa, had been lying with his head in his paws. After all, he had just about had the most exhausting and eventful day of his eighteen-month-old life, what with waking François before dawn, facing leopards, chasing away vultures and all the other tiresome chores a hunting dog has imposed upon him when accompanying human beings who are so deficient in the essentials of bush education such as having a proper sense of smell and hearing. His long pink tongue was fluttering like a canna petal in the breeze while he panted like a blacksmith’s bellows.

François now called to him, ‘Here, Hin!’

Hintza immediately controlled his breath, rose with all the slow dignity of sheer fatigue and went to François.

Pointing to Xhabbo, François said politely: ‘Hin, shake. This is Xhabbo and Xhabbo, this is Hin, who will be yours as he is mine.’

Hintza, an expert in the art of shaking paws, gracefully held his out immediately, indeed so quickly that François had to explain, and beg Xhabbo to take it. Shaking hands, let alone paws, is not a Bushman custom, and any breach of etiquette could now offend Hintza’s sensitive concept of what was fitting and set him against Xhabbo. Luckily, Xhabbo was as intelligent and quick on the uptake as he was brave and good-looking and to François’s great joy the introduction went off without a flaw.

On that note François raised his hand and gave Xhabbo the Bushman farewell: ‘
Taixai-Xhum
’, ‘May you rest well.’

Quickly, without looking back, lest he be tempted to stay longer, he crawled out of the cave. When he stood up outside in the daylight and saw that Hintza had appeared at his side, for the first time that day he could allow perhaps one of the most singular aspects of that singularly eventful morning to rise to the surface of his mind.

‘Hin,’ he asked softly, bending down and stroking Hintza affectionately. ‘Tell me, how could you possibly have known that there was something unusual in the trap in. the dark of morning, when not another dog either at home or at !#grave;Bamuthi’s kraal knew anything about it at all? Come on Hin, out with the secret! How did you do it?’

Hintza looked up at François, head cocked sideways as always when listening carefully to his words. He seemed to understand the question perfectly because immediately that sensitive damp, ink-black nose of his contracted in scores of infinitely fine little creases, vibrating with the effort of expressing their own extreme of concentration, while he re-enacted the scene in Francis’s room as if he were sniffing the black morning air all over again, clearly indicating. ‘I have not got this nose for nothing, you know. It was a scent we have never smelt at Hunter’s Drift before and, of course, I had no option but to let you know.’

François himself was well aware of the fact that different human beings had smells of their own. The Matabele were as little inclined to like the smell of the Europeans as the Europeans liked theirs, and he remembered how that he himself had been struck by the acid, desert tang the little Bushman carried on his person when he helped him on his way down the track towards the first sanctuary.

Proud of Hintza as never before, he hurried back towards the ledge where he had left the leopard’s skin, loaded it on his shoulder and carried it home in triumph. He arrived just as Johanna was impatient to serve the afternoon tea and where !#grave;Bamuthi and all the others were gathered. At the sight of the skin they gave him, half in play and half in earnest, the royal Matabele salute. François felt almost like one of the legionaries of whom he had read, returning with a rare trophy of war from the far perimeter of the great and vanished Roman Empire.

Hunter’s Drift

T
he meal that followed François’s return was one of the strangest he could remember. His father had insisted on getting up and was already in his usual place at the head of the table when François, after a quick wash, hurried in to join his parents. The signs of something indefinably but seriously wrong, which François had noticed in his father that memorable evening when Hintza had first come into his life, had not proved an illusion. Pierre-Paul Joubert, to give François’s father his full name, had continued to deteriorate in health steadily over the past eighteen months. He was now so weakened and obviously seriously ill that his wife, despite all his protestations, was taking him on the long journey to the capital to see the best doctors in the country.