The Lost World of the Kalahari (33 page)

Fastidious hunters that they were, fearful of hitting the eland women and their young, Vyan and Ben fired almost simultaneously at the flying bull. But the distance was great and the target erratic, and though they tried again and again he vanished unscathed over the dune.

I very nearly joined in to fire at the same target, but something in me had already marked the fact that our Bushman hunters were not making for the main herd. Excited as I was by seeing the magnificent bull leading his herd out of their trance, and the noise of Ben and Vyan opening up on him, I checked my impulse long enough to have another look at our hunters. Then I saw it all: another great bull, nearly two hundred yards behind the main herd, was coming out of the bed of the watercourse on the farthest side. He, too, the moment the firing started, bounded forward, but much more slowly than the rest of the herd. In one so great and massive as he it could only mean that he was wounded and that despite the length and speed of the chase Nxou and Bauxhau had read his condition accurately from the spoor in the sand and made him their special quarry. None the less the bull was still going strongly enough to prolong the chase for an hour or more. Since the sun was dangerously low I shot at him immediately and managed to hit him in the hind-quarters. He faltered, walked on holding his head all the higher in the instinctive pride of a noble breed that makes the male scorn all sense of physical injury. But suddenly he sank back on to his hindquarters into the grass. Even then he went on holding his head up to look steadily at the little hunters closing in on him with their spears.

Gun in hand, running towards them as fast I could go, I still had time to notice how small they looked beside him as they went in, spear in hand, for the kill. They drove their spears straight at his heart, and when I came up to them Nxou was working his round in the heart of the bull to help him as quickly as possible over the end. But it is a law of life observed devoutly by the great animal kingdom of Africa, that one does not die unless one must. Great as was his pain and hopeless as the cause of life was for him, this lone bull still observed the royal law and would not accept the release of death. So I motioned our Bushmen away and put a bullet in his head.

Hardly was he dead than Nxou and Bauxhau started skinning the bull. That was the amazing part of the chase: without pause or break for rest they were fresh enough at the end to plunge straight away into the formidable task of skinning and cutting up the heavy animal.

As we watched them do it in the closing hour of the day, we noticed an expression on their faces that we had not seen before. Suddenly a deep laugh broke from Nxou. His arms covered with blood, he stood up from his work and said something to Bauxhau, who giggled like an excited girl. Dabe, hearing them, threw the round shabby little European hat he insisted on wearing high into the air and, in the grip of the same excitement called out in wild approval, ‘Oh, you child of a Bushman, you!'

I asked him what it all meant.

‘Master,' he said, almost beside himself, ‘now we are going to dance!'

I turned to Nxou and asked, ‘Why now?'

Because, he said with a freedom I had not experienced before, always, ever since the days of the first Bushman, no hunter had ever killed an eland without thanking it with a dance.

Now the place where we killed the eland was about fifty miles from the sip-wells. The trail had twisted and turned so much that I had no idea where we were or in which direction our camp lay. But Nxou and his companions had no doubt. That was another of the many impressive things about them. They were always centred. They knew, without conscious effort, where their home was, as we had seen proved on many other more baffling occasions. Once indeed, more than a hundred and fifty miles from home, when asked where it lay they had instantly turned and pointed out the direction. I had taken a compass bearing of our course and checked it. Nxou's pointing arm might have been the magnetic needle of the instrument itself so truly did it register. So now, turning for home I only had to consult Nxou and follow his directions.

But this was not yet the end of a wonderful day. Something very remarkable happened on the way back. We drove home slowly for the going was rough and our Land-Rovers deeply loaded with meat. The sun was down and the sky before us so red that Ben exclaimed in Afrikaans: ‘Dear Lord isn't that a perfect sunset to end a hunter's day? It looks really as if the Master Hunter up there,
die ou Baas Jagter daar bo
, has just killed his eland too.'

Struck by this glimpse of the poet in Ben which was rarely exposed I was about to answer when he went on: ‘You know I once saw a little Bushman imprisoned in one of our gaols because he killed a giant bustard which according to the police, was a crime, since the bird was royal game and protected. He was dying because he couldn't bear being shut up and having his freedom of movement stopped. When asked why he was ill he could only say that he missed seeing the sun set over the Kalahari. Physically the doctor couldn't find anything wrong with him but he died none the less!'

We were silent for a while, and then, trying to break out of the gloom, I said: ‘I wonder what they'll say at the sip-wells when they learn that we've killed an eland?'

‘Excuse me, Master,' Dabe said, bolder than I had ever known him, ‘they already know.'

‘What on earth do you mean?' I asked.

‘They know by wire,' he declared, the English word ‘wire' on his Bushman tongue making me start with its unexpectedness.

‘Wire?' I exclaimed.

‘Yes. A wire, Master. I have seen my own master go many times to the D.C. at Gemsbok Pan and get him to send a wire to the buyers telling them when he is going to trek out to them with his cattle. We Bushmen have a wire here' – he tapped his chest – ‘that brings us news.'

More than that I couldn't get out of him, but even before we were home it was clear that our sceptical minds were about to be humbled. From afar in the dark, long before our fires were visible from a place where we stopped to adjust our heavy load, the black silence was broken by a glitter of new song from the women.

‘Do you hear that, oh, my Master?' Dabe said, whistling between his teeth. ‘Do you hear? They're singing the Eland Song.'

Whether by ‘wire', or by what mysterious means, they did know at the sip-wells and were preparing to give their hunters the greatest of welcomes. By that time we ourselves were so identified in deed as well as mind with our hosts that, despite the vast differences of upbringing and culture, their exalted mood also became our own.

Accordingly I woke up the next morning with a feeling of profound achievement. Jeremiah, John, Cheruyiot, as they set about cutting up the fat of the great eland brisket to sweeten our hard fare, seemed to be purring with satisfaction. My European companions emerged from their sleep in similar mood, and I'd never seen a camp happier than we were that morning and prepared for the dance that was to come. ‘The first ball of the season' as Duncan called it.

Apart from this it was also one of those Kalahari days which seemed to be charged with a meaning of its own. I felt as if it had been shaped by some master designer to carry forward into a new dimension the pattern that had been achieved on the previous evening.

Hitherto, in the rush of recording human events, I have neglected to tell of the unfolding of the seasons which accompanied them. All the time at the sip-wells it had been growing steadily and frighteningly hotter. The sun had long ceased to be a friend, and the scorched earth which had daily shrunk back into its last reserve of shade had steadily darkened until at noon-day the leaves of the gallant thorn trees looked as if they were about to crumble to ashes, and greeted the sunset with a sigh of relief that was echoed in our own exhausted senses. Often at noon I would see Nxou and his companions throw themselves down beside us in shade that was little more than a paler form of sunlight and instantly go to sleep, more weary with heat than with distances run. This was perhaps the most moving of all their gestures, this instant act of trust between them and the harsh desert earth which, though too harsh for us, had been kinder to them in its pagan heart than we had ever been. They lay there, securely clasped to the earth and nourished with sleep at its unfailing bosom. But when they woke they instantly stood up to scan the sky for cloud and other signs of rain as if even in their deep sleep they had felt the Mother Earth exclaim: ‘Dear God, will such dryness never end?'

Daily too, on our far-hunting round, we noticed that the surface of the desert became more churned and pitted where buck and other animals had dug, with hoof and claw, to get at the roots and tubers which could give them the relief of moisture that the heavens increasingly denied. No European can know how deep this need and anxiety of the waste-land of Africa enters into the blood and mind of its children. Here at the sipwells it was no laughing matter. Nxou and his people did not fear for their store of water supply, which was deep in the sand and protected against the sun. But they feared what the lack of rain would do to the grasses and the game on which they lived. They alone knew what kind of disaster could come if the rains failed. I am certain many a Bushman community has perished from drought and famine in the Kalahari unknown to anyone, with only a vortex of vultures in the blue to mark the place of their going, and only the hyaena and jackal to sing their funeral song. Daily the shadow of this deep fear lengthened in our awareness as sun after sun went down without a cloud in the sky; and night upon night came and went without the hopegiving flicker of lightning below the star-uneasy horizon.

One night round the fire, all of us obsessed with this discharge of disquiet in our blood, Ben told us something which perhaps shows how deeply contained is the natural Bushman in the rhythms of the seasons, and how much he is a part of their great plans. Ben told us that the little man's womenfolk would become sterile during periods of drought and, until the rains broke, would cease to conceive. He knew this from his own experience and from that of great hunters before him. That was one reason why the Bushman had such small families. Had we not noticed, he asked, that there were no pregnant women around? Where else in Africa would we see so many married and vigorous young women and not one in the family way? Yet this fear of drought went even deeper than that. If a woman had conceived in a fall of rain that was not maintained and bore a child in a period of drought which threatened the survival of all, immediately at birth the child was taken from her, before, as Dabe confirmed, ‘it could cry in her heart', and was killed by the other women. The anguish and bitterness with which those who loved children performed this deed, Ben said, proved how necessary it was. Also he thought it would silence those who condemned them from their armchairs of plush and plenty. We went to bed with a new dimension added to our view of the dark necessities among which this rare flame of Stone Age life burned.

But on this particular morning there was a first real promise of rain in the air. The atmosphere was silver-dim with sudden moisture and heavy with electricity and heat. Soon after breakfast a cloud no larger than the Old Testament's hand of man appeared with a flag of wind at its head. It was soon followed by others, and all morning long we watched with growing excitement cloud upon cumulus cloud piling up like towers and palaces over some enchanted
Tempest
island. Were we to be privileged to celebrate the hunter's fulfilment not only with meat that was the food of his gods, but also with the water that was wine to his earth? As the day wore on the answer seemed likely to be positive. Yet even so I, who had seen so many promises of rain snatched away at the last moment from the cracked lips of the African earth, was afraid to hope until, at long last, the thunder began to mutter on a darkening horizon. By the time the first dancers started coming into our camp the rumble of thunder was constant and rolling slowly nearer like noise of a great battle. Suddenly it made our small camp look puny and exposed. Yet it added to the jubilation of the dancers in the clearing we had made for them.

How lovely they looked! The women had rubbed some fat into their skins and their bodies were a-glitter. Their jewellery, too, seemed to have been polished and flashed in the sun which moved on, undismayed, to grapple with the giant cloud rising in the west. The women walked towards us already attuned to the music, humming, quivering, and swaying with its rhythm and song. As they arrived they quickly collected on the edge of the clearing and began singing aloud, beating time with their feet and hands. Occasionally one of the older women would run out into the open, her arms stetched wide like the wings of a bird, her mincing steps and jeering song mocking the men who had not yet appeared from the bush, for their tardiness.

The men, however, held back out of sight, obedient to their own part in the overall pattern of the dance to come. They seemed, deliberately, to provoke the women to a greater and greater frenzy of singing and longing. When at last they came it was because they could no longer keep away and were compelled almost against their will. Then a moan as of great pain broke from them. Arms stretched out, feet ceaselessly pounding and re-pounding the earth, they came bounding out of the bush with that cry of theirs: ‘Oh, look, like birds we come!'

When this happened the triumph in the women's voices soared like a star in the night and brought about a new intensity of passion to their singing. The men became so drawn into the mood of the music that it was nearly impossible to recognize their individuality. An archaic mask sat on all faces as they began to sing and dance the theme of the Eland. I have seen many primitive dances. They are invariably communal affairs and tend to have a bold, often violent, and fairly obvious pattern. But this music was rich, varied, tender, and filled with unworldly longing. It had a curious weave and rhythm to it, some deep-river movement of life, turning and twisting, swirling and eddying back upon itself in order to round some invisible objects in its profound bed as it swept on to the sea.