1972 - A Story Like the Wind (21 page)

To François’s delight Hintza seemed proud of this part of his work. However he had no time to waste in congratulations, for the presentiment of what awaited him in the kitchen at Hunter’s Drift was growing more ominous by the second. So he made certain that the three little bustard chicks, whose agitated hearts were beating visibly in the soft down at their throats, were comfortably housed in a mass of dead leaf and dry grass in his ample and now empty haversack, before he started to gather up the three dead bustards.

To his dismay, they were so plump and heavy that he despaired for a moment of ever being able to carry all three home together. He was compelled to waste a quarter of an hour making them lighter by gutting them. He then tied their legs together and slung them over the end of the muzzle of his gun to carry them over his shoulder along the shortest way home.

Even so, the birds were so heavy that he reached the Matabele kraals breathless. Fortunately no one was visible outside the beehive huts and he was not delayed by having to answer awkward questions. He hurried on straight to the kitchen where the moment his steps resounded in the courtyard, Ousie-Johanna appeared. Her dark skin was pale yellow with anger and anxiety and she was clearly determined to give François a lashing with her active tongue.

However, the sight of three superb bustards suspended over François’s shoulder had the most disarming effect on her. So François had time to speak up first and say: ‘I’m sorry, old Ousie, that I’m so late, but I’ve never known the bush so dead. I didn’t want to come home without keeping my promise to you and it was only by sheer luck that I came across these birds just a short while ago. You do understand, please, don’t you, dear little old Ousie?’

Ousie-Johanna, softened inwardly, still felt in duty bound to deliver some reprimand to him. However, just at that moment !#grave;Bamuthi appeared from the direction of the barns where he usually had his own food in the heat of the afternoon. His experienced eyes immediately took in the high quality of the birds François had brought home and he immediately uttered a series of Matabele praises in such words as ‘
Auck! Yebol Hakisof
and so on.

Anxious to have an ally to mollify the sorely tried Ousie-Johanna, François made the most of the opportunity and spoke again. ‘I’m certain, little old Ousie, that one gum bustard will be enough for the two of us, and that you would like !#grave;Bamuthi and his people to have the other two? Please choose one for us and let the old Father have the others. Besides, I have brought you something even better than food for the pot.’

Ousie-Johanna, who had been a widow for many years and who had come to regard !#grave;Bamuthi as the main substitute for the authentic voice of male authority she lacked in her life when Ouwa was away, immediately complied in a characteristic manner by pretending to be indignant with François. ‘You should know better than to teach me what is right in these matters François,’she told him severely, as the ‘François’ instead of the usual ‘Little Feather’ indicated. ‘From the moment I saw what you had on your shoulder, I decided to give !#grave;Bamuthi the pick of the birds. Choose, !#grave;Bamuthi please. But what is this talk of something else that you have got for me?’

François had already unslung his haversack and was by now sitting, breathing hard from his long slog home, on the edge of the stoep on to which the main kitchen door gave. Ordering Hintza to watch, he took one bewildered little bustard chick after the other out of the bag until all three were standing on trembling legs on the stone stoep, their bright turquoise eyes after the gloom of the bag in which they had travelled blinking and glittering in the platinum sun. The sight of the three helpless little birds overwhelmed Ousie-Johanna’s great and underemployed maternal heart. Her whole being flared up into a white heat of protective emotion. She gathered up the little birds and carried them straight into the kitchen where François and !#grave;Bamuthi heard her making her idea of bustard mother noises over them. Since Ousie-Johanna was in charge of the domestic chicken run at Hunter’s Drift, François read the noises as pure proof that the three little birds would soon have’a foster mother in the shape of a desolate hen whose eggs had failed to hatch and whose fate she had bemoaned to him only the day before.

François and !#grave;Bamuthi looked at each other. Their eyes met and they started laughing silently together until !#grave;Bamuthi brought the episode to a close by whispering to him: ‘It would be well to remember, Little Feather, that only once in a lifetime will bustards come in the dead hours of the day to save you from a well-deserved lashing of a wise old lady’s tongue. Remember that he who fetches water at the same place on the river bank too often, ends up in the crocodile.’

It really was not necessary to remind François that he had pushed his luck in the last two days as far as it could go. He had already showed his awareness of this by warning Xhabbo that he would be unable to come to him until the afternoon of the following day. None the less he took !#grave;Bamuthi’s admonishment fully to heart. He spent the rest of the afternoon helping Ousie-Johanna about her kitchen, and getting the bustard chicks legally adopted in the chicken run, which was not difficult. So eager was the bereaved hen for some living thing to care for that !#grave;Bamuthi exclaimed, ‘
Auck!
Old Mother, your bird is so hungry for children that she would have taken newly hatched crocodiles into her nest.’ That done, François went to the milking sheds at the far end of the garden, making himself as useful as he could to !#grave;Bamuthi and the others.

Yet the moment he was in bed and alone, he found he did not even have the mind for reading one of his favourite adventure stories. All he could do was to struggle dutifully through his nightly reading of the Bible, on which Lammie and Ouwa insisted as the one imperative preparation for the night. On this particular occasion he found by another coincidence that the piece prescribed for his reading by Lammie, who had drawn up a list of readings for him to last six weeks, was the twenty-third Psalm, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’.

So much was Xhabbo in his mind that he found himself amending the opening lines to read, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd as Koeggen-A is Xhabbo’s shepherd’. So complex a mixture had François become that he found nothing contradictory or even the least bit incongruous in joining the name of Christian overlord and pagan god in one and the same poetic prayer.

Once the reading of the Psalm was ended, he said goodnight to Hintza, who was lying, eyes tightly shut and making little whimpering noises, legs and muscles twitching, as if he were engaged in a dream hunt after a dream quarry. He was, after all, as much a dreamer as a dog of action, to Francis’s unending satisfaction. At the sound of François’s voice, Hintza opened one reluctant eye, gave a feeble wag of his tail in acknowledgement and then instantly was fast asleep again, whimpering and twitching as he eagerly took up his dream hunt where he had been compelled to leave it off.

But François lay there awake for an unusually long time. His imagination was entirely absorbed by the whole thought of Xhabbo warm inside him like a mug of Ousie-Johanna’s best and hottest coffee on a cold winter’s morning.

At the same time his increased sense of having to be careful not to give him away stayed with him all through his sleep, until Ousie-Johanna called him as she always did with a cup of coffee and a couple of home-made rusks at dawn the following morning. As a result it was not necessary for her to remind him, ‘Now, my Little Feather, no wandering off into the bush after breakfast. I promised Lammie and Ouwa that you would do your school work for two hours every day, just as if they were here.’

Accordingly François sat dutifully at his school books after breakfast but it is doubtful whether he learned anything at all. His mind was still on Xhabbo in his cave and the long journey of at least thirty days’ hard walking which lay ahead of the little Bushman. He hardly saw the lines in his books, but kept on wondering how best he could help. One thing stood out clearly. He must gather extra provisions so that Xhabbo, whose wounded leg would handicap him sorely on his long march home, would not have to be strained in any arduous stalking of game for food. Happily that was the least of François’s problems. There was the vast store of biltong to which he could safely turn. He knew he could extract enough of it to last Xhabbo a month without anybody really noticing that any was missing. Also he could secrete enough dried peaches, apricots, raisins and figs, all light and nourishing substances, to add to the biltong. No, his real problem was how to give Xhabbo useful presents that would not just clutter up his person with unnecessary weight, making his march more complicated.

Here he was appalled by the narrowness of the choice which confronted him. Most of the material things in the world of Hunter’s Drift were far too cumbersome and complex to be of help to a Bushman, whose life was one of constant movement. Old Koba had always told him that Bushmen could never own more than they could carry easily on their persons.

He gave the problem all his thought and imagination which was as quick as only that of a young person compelled to spend much of his time alone, could be. Towards the end of his two hours he seemed to have come to some solution. He would give Xhabbo the best and sharpest of his own hunting knives, since Xhabbo carried none with him. Then he would add the lightest and biggest field flask which they had in the large store of army surplus supplies which they kept in the attic. He knew that Xhabbo had done the thirty days’ march out of the desert with only such water as he could carry in three ostrich egg shells which he had buried near the river, ready for filling for the return journey. So their largest flask would not only hold more than half a dozen ostrich egg shells of water but would also be unbreakable and far less of an encumbrance, slung across Xhabbo’s shoulder.

But perhaps his one real inspiration was remembering they had in their stores some old·fashioned flints with yards of inflammable flex for making fire, as his mother’s ancestors had made fire on their trek into the interior of Africa. He could easily show Xhabbo how to make fire with these flints and Xhabbo would then be certain of fire even on the windiest and stormiest of days, when the classical Bushman method of laboriously twirling a round stick on a hole made in another piece of wood, would be most difficult, if not impossible.

Although his mind was full of other precious possessions that he would have liked to heap on Xhabbo, who seemed so vulnerable, defenceless and deprived that it brought tears to Francis’s eyes, he sadly accepted that anything more would not help but just burden the wounded man to the point of dangerously slowing him down.

Immediately his two hours were over he sought out !#grave;Bamuthi and handed over to him his three favourite hunting knives complete with leather sheaths. He explained to !#grave;Bamuthi that they were dull and begged him as a great favour to sharpen the knives for him, declaring, undeniably flattering as it was to !#grave;Bamuthi because it was also true, that no one in the world could sharpen knives so expertly.

‘All three knives at once, Little Feather?’

!#grave;Bamuthi exclaimed, giving him so shrewd and questioning a look that François felt uncomfortable. Was !#grave;Bamuthi, somewhere inside his observant self beginning to suspect that since the shooting of the leopard, something new and strange had entered François’s life? Suddenly afraid, he knew that even with the utmost care and forethought, he would be very lucky if this wise, experienced and extremely imaginative old Matabele gentleman who knew him perhaps even better than Ouwa did, were not to find out what he was contriving.

Almost like a stranger he heard himself covering up and saying, ‘One will do, Old Father, if you’re busy. I only thought that in the long run it might be less trouble to do the lot while you were at it.’

As he said it, François secretly was deeply appalled that he could suddenly be so cunning. He blushed with shame, remembering all the warnings that !#grave;Bamuthi had given him in the past against having secrets. But the shame dispersed at the thought that it was all in a good cause. Had not !#grave;Bamuthi himself on that memorable evening of punishment and redemption some years ago, observed that one could deceive for the good of one’s own people? What more was he doing than just being secretive to save Xhabbo from enemies?

Happily, !#grave;Bamuthi grunted as if he felt himself ungracious and declared that three indeed were hardly more trouble than one. So he took François to the great grindstone in the barn where all the sickles, knives and assegai blades were brought for sharpening. While !#grave;Bamuthi sharpened the knives, his grey head bent over the stone with that air of dedication which comes to primitive people whenever they do something that has its origins in the long forgotten millenniums of their beginnings, François turned the wheel for him and from time to time when !#grave;Bamuthi asked, poured a little water on the stone, where the blades of his knives soon shone like the most precious of metals and flashed in the shadows. At last !#grave;Bamuthi was able to test them by using them as razors on the side of his cheek.

Then, holding them triumphantly out to François, he said, ‘Look, Little Feather, how easily it removes the hair from my cheek. You will have no trouble in skinning a hippopotamus or even an elephant now with any one of these.’

François thanked him profusely and ran back into the house to collect the rest of his presents for Xhabbo. Even so he had to wait for another couple of hours before Ousie-Johanna called him in to lunch with her in the kitchen. By that time he was so tormented by his desire to join Xhabbo, that his appetite had completely gone. Yet this new cunning self forced him to eat as big a meal as he had ever done, lest his loss of appetite was noticed.

Even with a meal eaten, he did not feel it safe to rush off at once into the bush at that dead hour of the day. Ousie-Johanna, he was certain, would have found this so unusual that she might even have tried to restrain him. The last thing he wanted was an argument, because he was no match for her. All he could do was to think of something to distract Ousie-Johanna’s attention.