1972 - A Story Like the Wind (27 page)

Lammie, in the way of women who seem to attach a greater importance to age than men, immediately asked, ‘But surely
you
must know exactly how old he is?’

Ouwa shook his head emphatically. During the war he had indeed dared to ask Mopani his age. Mopani had looked at him in amazement. Somewhat bewildered, he had dismissed the question as if utterly irrelevant, ‘You know, Pierre-Paul,’ he said quietly, ‘that is something to which I have never given a thought.’

‘But surely, Mopani,’ Ouwa who could not resist the schoolmaster in himself and was compelled to approach life by way of questions and answers had persisted, ‘it isn’t a matter for thought? Surely it’s a very simple one of knowledge. You must have been asked the question for official reasons often enough to know the answer.’

‘If I have,’ Mopani replied in his normal, deliberate voice, ‘I have forgotten. I’ve never thought of myself or my friends or anybody at all in terms of age, I’m only interested in what people are, and not in how long they have been what they happen to be. Age is a matter between man and nature, it’s enough that the sun and the moon and the seasons keep an account of the span on earth of us all.’

Ouwa was about to go on but Lammie, whose eyes seemed to François to have widened and to glow more than ever at this reply, exclaimed, impressed, ‘He talked like that to you? It sounds more like the taik of a poet than a hunter.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Ouwa had commented. ‘He has a great deal of the poet in him, just as all Africans, Hottentots, Bushmen and all the other natural people you and I have known are poets at heart. You have only to listen, for instance, to old !#grave;Bamuthi to know that he could give the average Poet Laureate a few lessons. Only Mopani is not even as articulate as they are. You have to watch how he behaves as man and hunter to see really that he is an artist in fact and deed rather than words.’

He had then gone on to elaborate on the incident, which obviously had made a great impression on him, perhaps because, as François for all his love of Ouwa was to realize later rather sadly, he was a person essentially of an analytical and inquiring mind and could have envied the accepting and trusting spirit so necessary for the !#grave;Bamuthi or Mopani approach to life. He described how he and Mopani had sat there on a boulder looking at a great spread of baroque mountains and how, speaking thus, Mopani had waved an almost proprietary hand at the immense landscape suspended there so high in the blue and said, ‘There is my calendar on the wall.’ Then, pointing up at the sun he had added, ‘And there is my time-piece. Between them, they know when I was born and when I will have to die. That is enough for me, even if it isn’t enough for fellows like you.’

This part of the conversation was perhaps most important for François, who was all the time listening to his parents who were by now so absorbed in what they were saying to each other that they seemed unaware of his presence. François, as one has indicated often enough, had his own instinctive measure of time. He was, as he put it to himself, ‘sick and tired’ of having matters of which he could and could not do, or be told, or what he could and could not read, and a whole series of other choices, determined entirely in terms of what his age happened to be at a particular moment. His heart warmed even more, if that were possible, to Mopani for apparently sharing, even if not for precisely the same reasons, an equally dim view of the conventional approach to time and age. It struck him suddenly that Mopani had never really treated him like a child except in so far as his physical capacities were involved, never in matters of inner concern. It was as if Mopani’s attitude always implied that he regarded François as an equal. Many tiny examples of this sparkled suddenly on the surface of his mind like flakes of a full moon on a midnight sea. The largest and greatest flake of them all, of course, was the way in which Mopani had unhesitatingly told François that he was convinced that Ouwa was going to die.

These and many other recollections assailed him as he watched Mopani sitting in Ouwa’s place at the head of the table, reading from the Bible which was perhaps the only book he had ever completely read. The most wonderful feeling of being in partnership with the old hunter warmed him with reassurance and confidence. He had no intimation then that he was on the point of another demonstration of how much a partner Mopani was to make him feel.

Mopani had the habit of getting up not even at dawn but with the morning star, which at that time happened to be old Koba’s Dawn’s Heart. François knew this habit and, determined not to waste a minute of his time with Mopani, did not wait for Ousie-Johanna to call him in the mornings. He saw to it that he was up first, washed, dressed and waiting for Mopani in the breakfast room. He would be followed almost immediately by Ousie-Johanna, grumbling and muttering that it was just like men to expect women to be up at all hours of the day and night to serve them, since she too had to be up earlier than usual, but both Mopani and François knew she was secretly rather pleased to have such proof of how indispensable she was in the life of the men at Hunter’s Drift. After all, what can be worse for natural human beings, particularly women, than not being needed or wanted?

On the third morning after Mopani’s arrival, they had barely finished their coffee and rusks and were watching a classical pink dawn, unbelievably delicate and tender for so giant and rough a land, staining the glass of the windows.

Suddenly Hintza who, as usual, was sitting expectantly by François’s side waiting for his share of a sweet rusk dunked in sweeter coffee, lost all interest in food and whirled about to stare at the window, his nose as high in the air as possible, ears erect and alert, causing François to break off talking to Mopani so that he could focus all his attention on Hintza’s reactions. He was not absolutely certain, but he thought he could just hear a strange kind of sound vibrating against the windows, firmly shut against the cool of the early morning. At that moment, !#grave;Bamuthi burst through the door.

He wasted⁄no time on formal greetings but addressed himself straight away to Mopani, asking him to get his gun and come at once because an enormous elephant had suddenly emerged from the bush, apparently in a great rage, and was already trampling the modest gardens beyond the Matabele kraals. Faint as the light was, !#grave;Bamuthi was certain it was that great old rogue of an elephant which had threatened them some years before and whom they had succeeded in driving off. This old elephant was a legendary creature with a formidable reputation.

If all the stories told about it were to be believed, it was larger than the greatest elephant bull ever seen at Hunter’s Drift. Always alone, it was one of the most eccentric personalities of the bush; an
eminence grise
of nature, turned destructive and known everywhere by the name ‘Uprooter of Great Trees’. The only reason it hadn’t been hunted down and killed by the people of the bush was that it was thought to be mad. Madness gave it some sort of taboo. There was a universal feeling that madness was caused by the presence within the body of the spirit of a great magician who would be made even more angry and more malicious if the home that it had made for himself in the body of the elephant, were destroyed and the spirit forced to emigrate.

On this occasion !#grave;Bamuthi thought that this Uprooter of Great Trees was not only mad but drunk. The drunkenness surprised neither François nor Mopani because it happened to be the season when the delicious fruits of the marula tree were in such abundance that neither man, bird nor beast could consume them. Consequently the fruit was lying everywhere spread out on the earth, fermenting within their skins and becoming more and more charged with alcohol. Elephants who are perhaps the greatest gourmets of the bush, loved the fruit of the marula in all its forms but none so much as in an advanced alcoholic state. They would come from far and wide in the proper season to dine and wine on the fruit of the marula. As a rule, being decent citizens of the bush, they would take to their marula cups like honest gentlemen, just getting pleasantly drunk so that they swayed around full of an almost Teutonic
gemutlichkeit;
making noises that were their equivalent of hiccups; rubbing shoulders again and again, and patting one another affectionately on the back with unusually limp trunks.

When Hunter’s Drift was first established, the problem of preserving its gardens and fruit against such creatures as elephants had at once to be resolutely faced. Pierre-Paul and his Matabele helpers had been forced to deal severely with the elephant invaders of their cultivated terrain, killing many of their leaders in the process. Being the intelligent, sagacious creatures that they were, the point of the lesson soon went home and was so well preserved in their fantastic memories that from then on they had left Hunter’s Drift alone. But there was always from time to time the odd, eccentric elephant, made odder by separation from his community. Thinking himself the one valid exception to the rules of the elephant world, he would break out and try to plunder the succulent gardens of Hunter’s Drift.

Uprooter of Great Trees was the greatest example of them all. Pierre-Paul would have shot him long since if it had not been out of respect for !#grave;Bamuthi and his kinsmen who always pleaded that he should be given one more chance. The elephant had allowed himself to be scared away in the past, but !#grave;Bamuthi made it clear this morning, that although all the Matabele women and children had immediately assembled and done all they could by shouting, screaming, beating their iron domestic utensils as loudly as they could, the elephant just refused to move. On the contrary it seemed to be getting madder by the moment, so that !#grave;Bamuthi feared that not just the gardens but the lives of his own people were in great danger.

Mopani, who always gave the appearance of being his most leisurely when there was need for speed and action, looked steadily at !#grave;Bamuthi over his steaming cup of coffee, and observed: ‘Elephants, like men, should know that it is the beginning of the end, when they start drinking before breakfast in the morning.’ He paused for a moment and then remarked: ‘Well, cousin [endearingly dropping the ‘little’], I expect our coffee can wait for once and we had better see what we can do about this old Uprooter of Great Trees.’

Moreover, he gave François no advice, as Ouwa probably would have done, as to what gun he should choose for himself. Mopani left it entirely to François. He put his cup down, got up without another word and went out of the breakfast room to come back almost at once with his own favourite 9-9 mm. Mauser on his arm, just as François returned with Pierre-Paul’s own elephant gun in his hands.

They left the house and the moment they were out on the stoep, they could hear the barking of the dogs, the shouts and cries of men, women, girls and boys, the clamour of cooking pot lids and empty paraffin tins being beaten, beyond the Matabele kraals. The din, though remote, was intense and obviously desperate.

Hintza wanted to be off at full speed. François’s inclination was not altogether different but one look at Mopani clearly showed him that such an approach would not do, because although he was walking fast, Mopani was taking care not to move too fast and arrive on the scene short of breath, depriving his shooting of the accuracy which the occasion was obviously going to demand. That was another of his maxims François remembered; no hunter worth the name ever walked at a pace which forced him to breathe through his mouth.

So François restrained both himself and Hintza, adjusting their pace to Mopani’s. But not !#grave;Bamuthi. He quickly vanished into the garden, where by now the dawn had exploded beyond the fir trees and was fanning up and out like a bush fire.

When they arrived, there, in front of Mopani and François, right in the centre of the vast magic lantern slide which the dawn had made of the sky, soared the black shape of Uprooter of Great Trees looking like a giant apparition which had come bursting through barriers of unrecorded history and forgotten myth. He was surrounded in a wide circle by about forty screaming human beings who were pelting him as fast as they could with stones, burning faggots of wood that sped like swarms of fireflies through the air, long dark assegais, outsize knobkerries and anything else they could lay their hands on. But as !#grave;Bamuthi had warned them, the elephant was refusing to be scared. At the same time Uprooter of Great Trees did not know exactly what to do.

Elephants are notoriously short-sighted, though they have the most remarkable senses of smell and hearing, but neither smell nor hearing could give this elephant a bearing on his enemies in his present plight since, totally surrounded as he was, his senses were assailed equally from all directions. The result was that at one moment he would throw up his trunk, trumpet a sort of cavalry call to battle, promptly roll up the sensitive trunk tucking it away for safety under his chin, and charge in one direction, only to find his enemies vanish out of range of his limited sight. So the next moment he would whirl about with fantastic nimbleness, charging the opposite way with the same vain result, except that with every charge more and more of the gardens were being trampled. Also, being faster than his enemies, each charge carried him inexorably closer to the frail circle of the Matabele kraal.

The moment Mopani and François arrived the Matabele men, women and children became silent with relief. They were obviously exhausted and worse still, near to losing their courage. The silence was more frightening to François than all the clamour had been. In the sudden silence, the morning air which always preceded sunrise made the leaves of the bush rustle like the sound of a remote sea, and the leaves in that light shone like scales of bronze. Soon their whispering was lost as birds, baboons, and a couple of lions sent up their own Hosanna to the day. When this was over, François heard plainly the stomach of Uprooter of Great Trees boiling like a witch’s cauldron with spirit, rage and exertion. For a moment the vast marble elephant looked as overawed by the silence of its enemies as was François. It was standing still itself, its long trunk between the longest pair of ivory tusks that François had ever seen, stretched out searching for scent. A pair of enormous black ears fanned the speckled space between them for sound, like the fins of a giant fish keeping station at the bottom of some unfathomed ocean. He had time only to observe so much and no more. Mopani out of his immense experience knew such a moment could not last. Soon this strange, enraged, crazy and rather drunk elephant would be encouraged by the silence and resume his campaign of destruction.