The Covenant (5 page)

Idly, and with the provocative lassitude of a young girl who knows herself to be desirable, Naoka rolled from the hip on which she had been resting, adjusted her bracelets, looked to where Kharu waited, rose slowly, and delicately brushed the dust from her body, taking special care with her breasts, which glowed in the sun. Picking her way carefully, she stepped the few feet into Kharu’s quarters.

“Good wishes,” she said as if completing a journey of miles.

“Are you still grieving?” Kharu asked.

“No.” The girl spoke with lovely intonation, each word suggesting others that might have been said. “No, Kharu, dearest friend, I’m just living.” And she squatted on her haunches, knees and thighs tightly flexed, her bottom just off the ground.

“That’s a poor life, Naoka dear. That’s why I called.”

“Why?” Her face was a placid mask of innocence.

“Because I want to help you find a husband.”

Disdainfully the girl waved her right arm, indicating the bleak settlement: “And where do you expect to find me a husband?”

“My son Gao needs a wife.”

“Has he spoken to Kusha? She has a baby daughter.”

“I wasn’t really thinking of Kusha … or her daughter.”

“No?” the girl asked softly, smiling at Gumsto in a way to make him dizzy.

“I’ve been thinking of you,” Kharu said, adding quickly, “Now if you married Gao …”

“Me?” the girl said in what seemed astonishment. Appealing to Gumsto, she added, “I’d never be the proper wife for Gao, would I?”

“And why not?” Kharu demanded, rising.

“Because I’m like you, Kharu,” the girl said quietly. “The daughter
of a great hunter. And I was the wife of a hunter, not quite as good as Gumsto.” She flashed a look of power at the little man, then added, “I could never marry Gao. A man who has not yet killed his eland.”

For this terrible dismissal she had chosen a freighted word:
eland
. The clan coexisted with the antelope, finding in them their physical and spiritual needs. They divided the breed into some twenty categories, each its own distinguished unit with its own terrain and individual habits. Any hunter ignorant of the variations of the antelope was ignorant of life.

There were the elegant little klipspringers, not much larger than a big bird; the small impala with black stripes marking their rumps; and the graceful springbok that could leap as if they had wings. There were the duiker, red and short-horned, and a universe of middle-sized animals: steenbok, gemsbok, blesbok and bushbuck, each with a different type of horn, each with its distinctive coloring.

These prolific animals of the middle range the hunters stalked incessantly; they provided much food. But there were four larger antelope that fascinated the little men, for one of these animals would feed a clan: the bearded wildebeest that trampled the savanna in their millions; the lyre-horned nyala; the huge kudu with its wildly twisting horns and white stripes; and rarest of all, the glorious sable with its enormous back-curved horns, so enchanting that hunters sometimes stood transfixed when they chanced to see one. Beast of beauty, animal of wonder, the sable appeared only rarely, as an apparition, and men at their campfires would often recall where and when they had seen their first. Not often was a sable killed, for the gods had given them perceptiveness beyond normal; they kept to the darker groves and rarely appeared at exposed watering holes.

That left the animal which the hunters treasured above all others: the giant eland, taller than a man, a remarkable beast with horns that twisted three or four times from forehead to tip, a tuft of black hair between the horns, a massive dewlap, and a distinctive white stripe separating forequarters from the bulk of the body. To the hunters this stately animal provided food to the body, courage to the heart and meaning to the soul. An eland was walking proof that gods existed, for who else could have contrived such a perfect animal? It gave structure to San life, for to catch it men had to be clever and well organized. It served also as spiritual summary to a people lacking cathedrals and choirs; its movements epitomized the universe and
formed a measuring rod for human behavior. The eland was not seen as a god, but rather as proof that gods existed, and when, after the hunt, the meat of its body was apportioned, all who ate shared its quintessence, a belief in no way unusual; thousands of years after the death of Gumsto, other religions would arise in which the ritual of eating of a god’s body would confer benediction.

So Naoka, faithful to the traditions of her people, could laugh at old Kharu and reject the idea of a marriage with Gao: “Let him prove himself. Let him kill his eland.”

It was now obvious to Kharu that unless she made it possible for her son Gao to qualify as a hunter, and thus marry Naoka, that young woman was going to steal Gumsto, who showed himself pathetically eager for the theft. It became advisable for the old woman to encourage hunts, but to do this she must ensure an abundant supply of poison for the arrows. That had always been her responsibility, and she was prepared to find a new supply now.

Like her husband, she was deeply worried about the safe continuance of her clan, and she saw that to protect it she must instruct other women in the collecting of poisons, but none had demonstrated any special skill. Clearly, Naoka was the one on whom the clan must depend in the future, and it was Kharu’s job to induct her, regardless of the fear in which she held her.

“Come,” she muttered one morning, “we must replenish the poison.” And the two women, so ill-matched and so suspicious of each other, set forth upon their search.

They walked nearly half a day toward the north, two women alone on the savanna with always the chance of encountering a lion or a rhinoceros, but driven by the necessity of finding that substance which alone would enable the band to survive. So far they had found nothing.

“What we’re looking for is beetles,” old Kharu said as they searched the arid land, “but only the ones with two white dots.” In fact, they were not looking for adult beetles, only for their larvae, and always of that special breed with the white specks and, Kharu claimed, an extra pair of legs.

It was impossible to explain how, over a period of more than ten thousand years, the women and their ancestors had isolated this little creature which alone among beetles was capable of producing a poison
of remorseless virulence. How had such a discovery been made? No one remembered, it had occurred so very long ago. But when men can neither read nor write, when they had nothing external to distract their minds, they can spend their lives in minute observation, and if they have thousands of years in which to accumulate folk wisdom, it can become in time wisdom of a very high order. Such people discover plants which supply subtle drugs, and ores which yield metals, and signs in the sky directing the planting of crops, and laws governing the tides. Gumsto’s San people had had time to study the larvae of a thousand different insects, finding at last the only one that produced a deadly poison. Old Kharu was the repository of this ancient lore, and now she was initiating young Naoka.

“There he is!” she cried, delighted at having tracked down her prey, and with Naoka at her side, watching attentively, she lay prone, her face a few inches from earth: “Always look for the tiny marks he leaves. They point to his hiding place below.” And with her grubbing stick she dug out the harmless larva. Later, when it had been dried in the sun, pulverized and mixed with gummy substances obtained from shrubs, it would convert into one of the most venomous toxins mankind would discover, slow-acting but inevitably fatal.

“Now my son can kill his eland,” Kharu said, but Naoka smiled.

Only two tasks remained before the imperiled clan was free to embark upon its heroic journey: Gumsto must lead his men to kill a ritual eland to ensure survival; and his wife must seek out the ostriches. Gumsto attacked his problem first.

On the night before the hunt began, he sat by the fire and told his men, “I have sometimes followed an eland for three days, hit him with my arrow, then tracked him for two more. And when I stood over his fallen body, beautiful and slain, tears sprang from my eyes, even though I had tasted no water for three days.”

The effect of this statement was ruined when Kharu growled, “We’re not interested in what you did. What are you going to do this time? To help your son kill his eland?” Gumsto, staring lasciviously at Naoka, ignored the question, and was profoundly excited when the girl winked at him, but on the hunt his desire to find an inheritor of his skills drove him to work with Gao as never before.

“In tracking, you notice everything, Gao. This touch here means that the animal leans slightly to the right.”

“Is it an eland?”

“No, but it is a large antelope. If we came upon it, we’d be satisfied.”

“But in your heart,” Gao said, “you would want it to be an eland?”

Gumsto did not reply, and on the fifth day he spotted an eland spoor, and the great chase was on. Avidly he and his men trailed a herd of some two dozen animals, and at last they spotted them. Gumsto explained to his son which of the animals was the most likely target, and with caution they moved in.

The delicate arrows flew. Gumsto’s struck. The eland rubbed itself against a tree, and the poison collected by Kharu and Naoka began to exert its subtle effect. One day, two days, then a moonless night settled over the savanna and in darkness the great beast made a last effort to escape, pushing its anguished legs up a small hill, slowly, slowly, with the little men always following, never rushing their attack, for they were confident.

At dawn the eland swayed from side to side, no longer in control of its movements. The fine horns were powerless; the head lowered; and a violent sickness attacked its innards. He coughed to clear himself of this undefined pain, then tried to gallop off.

The animal stumbled, recovered, and got to the top of the sandy rise, turning there to face his pursuers. When he saw Gumsto charging at him with a club, he leaped forward to repel this challenge, but all parts of his body failed at once, and he fell in a heap. But still he endeavored to protect himself, lashing out with his hooves.

And so he lay, fighting with phantoms and with the shadows of little men, defending himself until the last moment when rocks began smashing down upon his face and he rolled in the dust.

With intense passion Gumsto wished to utter some cry that would express his religious joy in slaying this noble beast, but his throat was parched and he could do nothing but reach down and touch the fallen eland. As he did so he saw that Gao had tears for the death of this creature, and with a wild leap he caught his son’s hands and danced with him beside the eland.

“You were the good hunter today!” Gumsto shouted, inviting the other men to join, and they did, in celebration of the eland and Gao’s honest participation. As they danced, one man who stood aside began a song of praise for this eland who had defended himself so gallantly:

While the other women dried strips of eland to take on the perilous journey, Kharu attended to the ostriches, and with Naoka at her side to learn this element of survival, she walked far south to where the huge birds sometimes nested. She was not concerned with the birds themselves, for they were barely edible; what she sought were their eggs, especially old ones that had not hatched and were dried in the sun.

When they had collected a score, their contents long since evaporated, they wrapped them carefully in the cassocks they wore, slung them over their shoulders, and returned to camp, where the men were much relieved to see their success.

“We’re almost ready to leave,” Kharu said, as if she had satisfied herself with omens, but before the clan dare move, she and Naoka must attend to the eggs. They carried them to the edge of the brackish water, and there, with a sharp stone awl, she made a neat hole in the end of each egg. Then Naoka submerged it in the lake, allowing it to fill. When all the eggs contained water, however poor, Kharu studied them for leakage and instructed Naoka in plugging the holes with wads of twisted grass: “These will keep the clan alive through two risings of the new moon.”

When the time came to assemble the travelers, Gao was missing, and a young hunter said, “He’s up there.”

High on the rear face of the hill, in a kind of cave, they found Gao standing by a fire. About his hips hung a rhinoceros-skin belt, from which dangled seven antelope tips containing his colors. On a sloping rock he had engraved with a series of puncturing dots his evocation of the dark rhinoceros which had escaped because of his carelessness. With purity of line he boldly indicated the head with one sweep from mouth to horn, using another unbroken line to show
the huge bulk of the animal, horn to tail. It was in the representation of the hindquarters, however, that he was most effective, for with one swift stroke he indicated both the form of the ham and its motion in running. The front legs, thundering across the veld, he again indicated in one sweep of line, and the colors he used to show the animal in its swift movement through the grass vibrated against the heavy color of the rock.

Run through the grass, dark beast! Gallop over the unconquered savanna, horns high! For a thousand years and then ten thousand run free, head level with the earth, feet pumping power, line and color in perfect harmony. Even Gumsto, looking at the completed animal, had to admit that his son had transmuted the moment of defeat when the rhinoceros broke free into a glowing record of what had otherwise been a disappointing day, and he was personally proud when a singer chanted: