1972 - A Story Like the Wind (28 page)

Calmly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, he looked down at François and said in his deliberate even voice: ‘You take him, cousin.’

François could never tell how it happened that he, too, responded as if the occasion were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for him. He had no time for thought, fear, emotion or reflection that he had never before shot at an elephant. He seemed suddenly to have become an entirely objective instrument. His father’s gun came to his shoulder. His eyes filled with the image of the head of Uprooter of Great Trees, focused on the one place in the bone of the massive brow where there was a small opening to the brain. He held the sights of his rifle on this central spot in the head of the elephant until his eyes and target were completely at one. Then pressure of his finger on the trigger tightened naturally, without a tremor, to release a flower of flame at the end of his rifle. A shot rang out, sounding oddly remote to him as though it had come from the rifle of someone else at his side. Instantly, unbelievably, the vast old elephant sank on to his knees, shook his head for a moment, shuddered like a torpedoed ship and rolled slowly on his side’to vanish among the tall mealies and the long millet like a gallant destroyer going down into the incorruptible green of the high sea of morning.

Mopani, although it took François a long time to appreciate it, paid him the greatest of all compliments by not praising his shot. He just remained standing silently by François’s side. But had François looked up into the eyes of the old hunter just then, he would have been surprised at the complex emotions showing in them.

François, however, was busy reloading his gun and then he had the duty of walking slowly forward with the gun at the ready towards the elephant in case the animal was just stunned. Yet it needed only one look at the elephant to know that it was dead. And then the strangest of feelings overcame François. It seemed to one part of himself that he had just made an immense black hole in his life. At one moment there had been so much life in the shape of the gigantic and embattled old elephant filling all the dew-fresh world. Now there was nothing, nothing at all. François had no feelings of triumph, or of personal achievement. All that had happened seemed to have had nothing to do with him. He was conscious only of this odd sort of melancholy.

Then he noticed that Mopani had come to stand beside him.

Looking down at the elephant, he exclaimed, ‘
Ja-nee
, he was
darem
a monument of his kind.’

Both
ja-nee
and
darem
used in Mopani’s observation at this solemn moment needed no explanation to Franpois. Both were fundamentals in the authentic vocabulary of this singular old hunter, as well as idioms of a vanished generation of pioneers in Africa.
Ja-nee
literally means ‘yes-no’, and Mopani always used it when he was confronted with an aspect of reality which to him went far beyond mere question and answer, positive and negative, or opposites of any kind. It was for him an expression in the here and now of the mysterious, inexpressible and abiding paradox that is at the heart of all inanimate and living matter, but most especially at the heart of man on his brief, zigzag trajectory through space and time. The way Mopani uttered the phrase, the ‘yes’ was perhaps some kind of entrance for the spirit, the ‘no’ an exit of a great cosmic paradox stretched in between the two extremes like a dark, unexplored bush.

Darem
is even more difficult to explain, suggesting an apprehension of reality independent of all possible qualification of adjective or adverb, a word for which one has encountered no equivalent in any other language. If one were forced to translate it one would be compelled to use a combination of many terms as, for instance, in Mopani’s exclamation beside the body of Uprooter of Great Trees. It would mean something to the effect that ‘in the meantime, notwithstanding, however, Uprooter of Great Trees was a monument of his kind’, implying that no matter what arguments, exceptions and objections the world could bring against this specific observation it would still remain permanently and indisputably true. It is not difficult to see, therefore, how well the
darem
also served the sense of the ultimate paradox of the ‘yes-no’ embedded in the foundation of Mopani’s character.

That too is why one has been compelled to elaborate on these two favourite expressions of Mopani’s, not only because they are part of the code of his character but also so that when the need arises to use them again, one will know not just their literal meaning but all they intimate of Mopani’s wordless philosophy and of his awareness of the ultimate that was present in a specific occasion in François’s life.

Perhaps as significant an indication of the transcendental emotions evoked by the killing of Uprooter of Great Trees, so strangely timed by life for first light, was the fact that !#grave;Bamuthi reacted not in precisely the same way but on parallel lines, which, as François knew from his school books, met only in infinity. And who can dispute that infinity was not present there at that moment?

!#grave;Bamuthi, taller than the tallest among his clan, had come to stand also in silence beside them. The clan had followed close behind and was crowding around because they wanted the reassurance of their own eyes that the unbelievable elephant was indeed stretched out dead on the earth in front of them.

After a while !#grave;Bamuthi spoke with great solemnity. ‘Uprooter of Great Trees was a great lord,’ he said, ‘and his trunk was his hand. He must forgive us for killing him but we could not help it.’ Then he slowly turned his back on the elephant and commanded his own people: ‘See that you thank our lord the elephant for allowing himself to be killed so that we can live. See, there in his body we have food for many more days than the maize and millet which he trampled under his great feet could have given us.’

Obviously he was uttering what was in the hearts of all the men, women and children present. Immediately the women uttered the ululating sound that François had heard many times before. While this sound was still shimmering in the air as the sunlight was beginning to shimmer on the sea of the trembling leaves of the great bush, the men and the boys linked arms together and in a long line raised their legs high above their heads and brought them down simultaneously on the earth again and again, until the ground resounded like a drum, all in the manner which tradition prescribed for honouring a king.

That then was the end in the physical world of the affair of Uprooter of Great Trees. It was not the end, however, in the minds of !#grave;Bamuthi and his people, who would go on talking about it with elaborations for generations. Nor, of course, was it the end for François whose memory of that morning would accompany him all his days. Far more important than these obvious considerations, was another consequence not so easily recognized, which would influence his own character profoundly in the months to come.

In this connection one faces the most subtle aspect of Mopani’s role in the affair. He himself had hardly ever known any other schoolroom than the bush. Events such as the killing of Uprooter of Great Trees were examples of object lessons from which he himself had learned from his famous father. For them both the bush had been the blackboard of life.

From the moment !#grave;Bamuthi first reported the appearance of Uprooter of Great Trees, Mopani’s active imagination had seized on the possibility that this could be a unique opportunity to establish firmly in François a process of increasing self- reliance which he, Mopani, felt certain the boy was going to need much sooner than either he or his parents realized. He had seized the opportunity all the more eagerly because he knew that standing ready with his own gun at François’s side there was really no danger in letting François shoot first. Yet he had had the imagination to do it with an appearance of such casual- ness that no one could have told that he also had been prepared to shoot if necessary.

François in his own inevitable review of what had happened, could not help suspecting something of the kind and in the frank manner customary between them, was prompted repeatedly to ask: ‘But Uncle, could you really have thought that I’d kill Uprooter of Great Trees with my very first shot? Surely you were standing there ready all the time to finish him off if I failed?’

‘Look, Coiske,’ Mopani would reply patiently to each question, ‘no hunter worth his salt would have faced such a moment with a companion, no matter how old or experienced, without being ready to come to his help. All sorts of things can always go wrong for the best of us as, indeed, they have for me. But I can honestly say, it never occurred to me that you would fail.’

With each patient answer Mopani’s realization grew that the long-term strategy of his answers did not deprive them of a basic truth. His real contribution to the morning perhaps had been his inexorable perception that this could be an occasion, designed uniquely by life for François, and that no matter what the outcome he had to leave it to the boy to resolve.

Most important of all, he hoped, would be the fact that he had, indeed, never doubted the outcome of the occasion. He would, perhaps, have discussed these considerations with François but that would have needed a capacity for saying extremely complicated things in a simple way, which Mopani did not think he possessed. He thought he was capable, at the most, of saying simple things in complicated ways.

All he could get himself to do, therefore, was to talk at some length of the unfailing knack life seemed to have of confronting a man at the most unexpected moments with problems as large and dangerous as had been old Uprooter of Great Trees. Human beings, he stressed, always knew more than they allowed themselves to know. One of the things they never knew clearly enough was the power they possessed of overcoming problems even if they were thrice the size of Uprooter of Great Trees. Provided men looked them straight in the face, stood fast and directed their imaginations truly to the centre (as François had done that morning), they would find their strength. Would his little Cousin, for instance, he asked, putting his hand on François’s shoulder, have known the day before that he had it in him to stop one of the greatest of rogue elephants from destroying the gardens, kraals and, perhaps, the lives of some of his Matabele friends as well? Surely if asked such a question the night before his little Cousin’s answer would have been ‘No’. Yet how wrong he would have been.

That part of it all was not over-difficult to express. Life for Mopani was, in essence, allegorical. The fact that almost the only books he had read had been the Bible and
The Pilgrim’s Progress
had not only helped him to see but also to speak of all experience in an allegorical manner. What defeated him was how to tell François with words to match all his tenderness for the boy, that at the centre of all his generalizations was the immediate and specific concern of preparing him for Ouwa’s death which was much nearer, he was convinced, than anyone else, except perhaps Ouwa, realized.

He was convinced that François’s need for this kind of awareness was all the more urgent because François appeared to have an illusion that somehow he could prevent the inevitable for Ouwa. He feared the consequence of such an illusion for François, as much as he did Ouwa’s death, because it would inflict on the boy when at his most vulnerable, two blows in place of one: the loss of Ouwa plus a sense of personal failure.

Mopani knew from his own experience that this sense of personal failure was the greatest Uprooter of Great Trees a man could be asked to overcome. His experience had taught him that the only answer in those circumstances lay in the way one stood up to the occasion. In the end neither success nor failure mattered as much as the manner of meeting the challenge. He would not, therefore, have suggested anything which might weaken François’s resolve to challenge the inevitable. All he wanted to ensure was that the encounter of the morning somehow confirmed in François his overall capacity to deal with the future no matter what it might hold in store.

Whether his motives were suspected by François or not, Mopani could not know for certain. His relationship over the years with François had created such a quick system of communication between the two of them that François understood the inexpressible as well as he did the expressible in their conversation. More words could have blurred the meaning of all that had happened between them on that day. So when Mopani announced at the end of the meal that he thought he would have to get back to his own duties early the next morning, François was not surprised. He just accepted instinctively that it was the natural moment for Mopani to go.

Mopani’s reason was simply that his departure on such a triumphant note, far from harming it, could help it to grow in the additional isolation that his going would impose on François. Yet he felt it necessary to accompany the announcement with the qualification that, quite apart from the call of his duties, he wanted to be at the end of the telephone in case he had more messages to bring from Lammie and Ouwa. Besides, he promised, that whether there were any messages or not, he would be back again soon to see François. Perhaps, the next time, he could take him away from his lessons for a few days on one of his shorter patrols into the bush?

So at sunrise the next day François found himself faced with another goodbye. It was extraordinary to him how the pattern of life at Hunter’s Drift determined that most of the ‘goodbyes’ had to be said at dawn and most of the welcomings at sunset. All the same, having to separate from Mopani so soon after the going of Xhabbo, even in these most favourable circumstances made him miserable. Therefore as a pretext for putting off the moment of parting for as long as possible, he joined Ousie-Johanna in preventing Mopani from setting out on his journey on a first-light diet of rusks and coffee, as he obviously wanted to do, by insisting on his staying until he had eaten an unusually large breakfast.

In honour as well as in appetite bound, he set Mopani an example of how one should deal with such a breakfast. Hintza was as exemplary as his master, because when François gave the three dogs three large fresh raw lumps of meat, Hintza had done with his share long before Nandi and !#grave;Swayo, who needed it far more than he did; after all, they had a long journey through the bush ahead of them.