1972 - A Story Like the Wind (60 page)

According to Mopani, François said at that point, learned scientists who knew only baboons in Zoos claimed that this was not an unselfish action on the part of the baboons. The scientists held that they were not disinterested but did it meticulously all day long purely in order to gather specks of much needed salt left in the coats of their fellow baboons in dried-up sweat. But that, Mopani had told François bitterly, was typical of the way scientists tried to reduce human beings as well as animals to something less than they were in actual living fact. One could not live with baboons as close neighbours in the bush without knowing they had what Ouwa had called, ‘the highly developed social conscience of the baboons’.

He wished that Nonnie could have seen, as he had on a few rare occasions, how baboons could die for one another. For instance, the worst enemy of the baboons was the leopard. Twice he had seen leopards pouncing on unsuspecting young baboons who had strayed too far from their fellows. The leopards had dragged them off screaming into the trees but old Adonis had immediately rallied all his grown-up followers with a series of the most exciting and manly barks François had ever heard. What was so impressive, he said, was that the baboons had responded and come to him immediately although they were obviously terribly frightened and wanting to do nothing more than run away to save their own skins. Yet despite all, with old Adonis in charge, they had charged after the leopards screaming in voices that were a most moving mixture of fear and courage. He had stalked after them to find them surrounding the leopards, screaming insults at them, barking at them, dashing in to snatch at their heels, thus forcing them finally to turn round in all directions so fast and so often that, dazed and bewildered, they had dropped their victims and allowed themselves to be driven away into the undergrowth. But unhappily, not before three of the baboons were dying, moaning in a most human way from terrible wounds.

There was only one fear which they seemed incapable of mastering, a fear with which he, François, sympathized deeply, and that was their fear of snakes. When they came across snakes they seemed to lose all control of their senses. For instance, he had seen old Adonis himself sitting on that very rock where he was sitting now, unaware of the fact that because it was such a hot place in the sun, an enormous copper-coloured Cape cobra had uncoiled itself at the foot of the rock to warm itself in the sun. The cobra and baboon had sunned themselves happily, unaware of each other’s presence, until some noise in the vicinity disturbed them both and the cobra swiftly threw itself up some seven feet into the air, eyes glittering, tongue flickering and its broad hood fully expanded to see what might be threatening it. With all that uncoiling and flashing of superb movement, the copper body lassooing the sunlight, old Adonis’s eyes were drawn downwards. The moment they recognized the cobra, a great cry of despair broke from him, sounding exactly like ‘Oh God!’ in Dutch, and he fell from the rock to land on the earth just beside the cobra. Fortunately the cobra was so alarmed by this descent of a god from Heaven that it shot away sideways into the thorns.

François broke off, feeling really carried away by the tale. He glanced sideways quickly, so quickly that Nonnie only just had time to look down at the baboons below.

She managed to exclaim however: ‘I wish I’d been with you to see it too. But how clever of you to discover such a wonderful place. It must have been awfully difficult to find, wasn’t it?’

Reassured, François explained how for years, even at Hunter’s Drift, each morning punctually at half past ten he had heard from far off the pitiful sound of young baboons wailing, sobbing and crying. Whenever he asked !#grave;Bamuthi and the others what this sound meant, they would just shrug their shoulders and answer with indifference that it was merely the baboons as usual punishing their young and teaching them how to behave. Pressed, they would add that the moment the sun showed above the bush, the baboons would come down from cliffs and tree-tops to look for food in the cool of the morning. Once they had had their breakfast they would set about educating their young before it got too hot for thought. When that was done, they would find a sheltered place for their siesta during the dead hour of the day, leaving a proven citizen on guard, as Adonis was just then. Then, in the afternoon they would go out again for more food and get back into the trees and cliff-tops well before dark.

When François had asked them if anyone had ever been to look at them, the Matabele had always said disdainfully, implying they had better things to do: ‘We are not
Baghatla
[Men-of-the-Baboon] that such matters should be of any concern to us.’

And there the matter had rested until a day came when François was out on his own in the bush, and this sound of whimpering had broken out very close to him. After that it had been just a question of stalking patiently in the direction of the sound, to arrive at the very place where they were now lying. From that time he had come regularly to watch the baboons. It was a favourite pastime and taught him more about the baboons and life in the bush than any book he had ever read.

At this point François saw that old Adonis was suddenly extremely restless. He was taking funny little jumps straight up into the air, in order to be able to look down from a greater height in their direction. Between each jump he would sit down, still staring hard, and bring his long black arm and delicate wrist to arch over his greying hair while he scratched his head with one long black finger, just like an old Matabele counsellor confronted by a grave and problematical affair of state.

At first François hoped this was just one of Adonis’s routine precautions. But when Adonis did it four times and each time strained his eyes at the fringe of the bush where they lay, he feared something was giving them away. He re-examined the place where they lay and was about to conclude that nothing could possibly be wrong, and that all they had to do was to keep still, when he noticed that a shaft of sunlight, now striking through the bushes among which they were lying, had found Nonnie’s left hand and the little gold signet ring which she wore on her finger. Then, of course, he knew that it must be this sparkle in the shadows which had drawn old Adonis’s attention to them and that it was only a matter of moments now before he would take action.

He arrived at this conclusion just as Adonis took the highest leap of all and then, most ominously, did not go back to sitting on his haunches but returned to walking up and down the high sentinel cliff, never for a moment taking his eyes from their hiding place.

‘I’m afraid he knows now that something strange is here,’ François informed Nonnie. ‘So I’ll have to show Hin and myself to him, or he’ll come over and investigate, and that could have unpleasant consequences for all of us. I don’t want to have to shoot any of them.’

‘Can’t we quietly go away?’ Nonnie asked.

‘I fear that won’t do now,’ François replied. ‘I don’t want to spoil this place for them and that is precisely what might happen if we just run away and leave it to their imaginations. That way they’ll certainly come to all the wrong conclusions, and abandon this place altogether. They might think the leopards are back on their track again. No, Hin and I will have to show ourselves to them openly.’

‘Can’t I show myself too?’ Nonnie pleaded.

‘No,’ François answered, rather severely and abruptly she thought, not realizing that it was only because he himself was tense with need for speed. ‘He doesn’t know you. You just go on lying there and please, please tuck that little finger with the ring on it under your bush jacket, because it’s that that has given us away. And keep as still as you can.’

François took it utterly for granted that Nonnie would do as he told her. He didn’t even look to see that she did. He just called Hintza softly to come to him and rose slowly to his feet. With his gun at the trail and Hintza beside him he stepped leisurely out on to his rim of the theatre, in full view of Adonis and all the enormous gathering of baboons below.

From the theatre came the sound of a hundred and more baboons whisking into position to stare, alarmed, at the intruders. Then the day went completely silent. Old Adonis stopped in the middle of his sideways-walk and turned about, facing François with only the dip in the ridge and a space of some thirty yards between the two of them. For a moment François thought he was too late and that Adonis would let out his great war bark which always precedes attack. So quickly and calmly, a difficult combination which only his natural reflexes, conditioned to that end by !#grave;Bamuthi and Mopani’s training, could achieve, he raised his hand high above his head and called out part of the traditional greeting old Koba had taught him. The Bushman clicks of the consonants crackled like electricity on the still noonday air, ‘I saw you looming up from afar, oh you man there who sits on his heels.’

Hard on that he commanded Hintza in Bushman, ‘The grandfather greeting, Hin…quick. The grandfather greeting.’

Hintza immediately obeyed. He stepped out beside François, the sun a ridge of flame on his healthy tawny coat, aligned his long, elastic body on Adonis, and then stretched out both long front legs forward together as far as they would go and bent down towards the great baboon, so that his head and jaw were level with the ground.

Nonnie watched all this in apprehension. But suddenly the tension went out of the situation and she was amazed to see old Adonis go slack with relief and hear a couple of barks, great and round though not unfriendly, come from him, sounding very much like a gruff, ‘Oh, it’s only the pair of you again. Well, how do you do?’

She realized he had recognized François and Hintza, not surprisingly since he must have seen them a hundred and one times together in the bush. After waving an authoritative hand at the gathering below, as if to indicate, ‘Now get on with your schooling. It’s getting hotter by the minute’, he behaved as if the matter were of no further account.

François, followed by Hintza, then retreated into the cover of the brush, knelt beside Nonnie and asked her to crawl backwards with him until their heads were well below the rim of the theatre. As he helped her on to her feet later he said with obvious relief, ‘Phew! Yes-no, as Mopani would say, that was
darem
a near thing. Thank goodness we can behave normally again.’

He would have set off immediately for home, had not Nonnie rushed at Hintza and put her arms round his neck. ‘Oh Hin,’ she fussed over him, ‘whoever taught you to curtsy so beautifully? You’re certainly the most wonderful dog ever. I wish I could curtsy half as well.’

François, who knew that Hintza, in his heart of hearts, felt it just a little beneath his dignity to curtsy to baboons when he gave only one royal paw to the far superior human beings of his world, thought it most understanding of Nonnie to help restore Hintza’s self-respect. He thanked her and explained, ‘You know, poor old Hin rather resents having to kow-tow to anyone or anything, particularly baboons. He believes a little bit as you do, that they’re not at all as beautiful and wonderful as they themselves think; that they’re inclined to give themselves unnecessary airs and be far too pretentious and too fond of playing tricks. But
that
will make him really feel a good deal better, and more inclined to curtsy in future.’

Nonnie immediately rallied to the defence of Hintza, declaring passionately, ‘Oh, I think you’re being most unfair! I don’t think that curtsy of his was at all unwilling or could have been bettered. I’m certain he did his utmost, didn’t you Hin?’

Hintza with all this became so obsequious that François could not help saying, half in earnest but with one of his rare smiles, ‘I do believe Hin, you’ve forsaken me and come to prefer Nonnie.’ Both Nonnie and Hintza answered him with glances full, dark and wide with reproach. Hintza, indeed, had a subtle suggestion in the eyes implying that not only had he understood but also that he found François’s observation completely illogical. ‘What’s the difference?’ his look asked. ‘Sure, if I love one, I must love the other one as much, or would you want me to lead a dog’s life for ever, torn between the two of you?’

The episode of the baboons is perhaps the most complex example of the secret life of his world which François shared with Nonnie during that too brief period at Hunter’s Drift. There were many others, slight, fragmentary and apparently isolated. Yet in the final count all joined together to form a single experience which glowed in Nonnie’s spirit like the colourful detail of one of those great French medieval tapestries of
La Grande Chasse
which Nonnie had seen with her mother in the museums of Paris. These, too, had been seen as in a dream through the dark woods and opaque forests of an oblivious Europe long before its great awakening from an age of darkness.

There was, too, the occasion when they came across the hunting spider. Spiders normally frightened Nonnie. Yet in François’s company on a track in the bush, with the grass and the leaves- around them all mother-of-pearl with dew and the opal dawn, she actually found the spider beautiful. François, as usual in front, stopped and beckoned her to his side to whisper, ‘Look there.’

She came up quickly, but in the densely camouflaged bush at first saw nothing.

‘Can’t you see?’ François whispered.

Dismayed, Nonnie shook her head, certain that she had missed something stupendous.

Then she heard him put a name to the creature, ‘A trapdoor spider.’

With a great effort she managed to see it at last; a hunting spider, spread out ready for the sun beside its home. The spider was still and its long legs silver with dew. Its body was centred upon them, sparkling like an Indian ruby. It was brilliant in that prismatic first light of morning. For the moment she forgot, indeed, that it was a spider. Willingly she obeyed François’s suggestion to stand still and not to move because the vibrations of the ground under their feet, however silently they moved, might make the spider vanish.

‘Look just beyond it and you’ll see its home,’ François told her.

She looked, and there, near by in the bare earth, was what looked like a miniature man-hole with a round cover raised on a hinge straight above it. Only this cover was not made of metal but appeared to be of some soft mauve material which glowed like raw silk. At that moment the day exploded into sunlight, and a bright shaft splintered on the track beside them, so that she could look into the hole itself. To her amazement it appeared to be lined with velvet. She had never seen anything made by human hand and needle that looked so neat, well-chosen and well fitting. The science, cunning, and the sheer perfection of it impressed her far more than the baboons. She was sorry therefore when François announced: ‘Now watch. You’ll see how carefully this little Red-Riding Hood locks her door after her.’