There was no hunting for several days after the affair with the kudu cow. Jock looked worse the following day than he had done since recovering consciousness. His head and neck swelled up so that chewing was impossible and he could only lap a little soup or milk, and could hardly bend his neck at all.
On the morning of the second day Jim Makokel’ came up with his hostile-looking swagger and a cross worried look on his face, and in a half-angry and wholly disgusted tone jerked out at me, ‘The dog is deaf. I say so! Me! Makokela! Jock is deaf. He does not hear when you speak. Deaf! Yes, deaf!’
Jim’s tone grew fiercer as he warmed up; he seemed to hold me responsible. The moment he spoke I knew it was true – it was the only possible explanation of many little things. Nevertheless I jumped up hurriedly to try him in a dozen ways, hoping to find that he could hear something. Jim was right. He was really stone deaf. It was pathetic to find how each little subterfuge that drew his eyes from me left him out of reach. It seemed as if a link had broken between us and I had lost my hold. That was wrong, however. In a few days he began to realise the loss of hearing, and after that, feeling so much greater dependence on sight, his watchfulness increased so that nothing escaped him. None of those who saw him in that year, when he was at his very best, could bring themselves to believe that he was deaf. With me it made differences both ways: something lost, and something gained. If he could hear nothing, he saw more. The language of signs developed, and taking it all round I believe the sense of mutual dependence and of mutual understanding was greater than ever.
There was a spot between the Komati and Crocodile rivers on the north side of the road where the White man seldom passed and nature was undisturbed. Few knew of water there; it was too well concealed between deep banks and the dense growth of thorns and large trees. The spot always had great attractions for me apart from the big game to be found there. I used to steal along the banks of this lone water and watch the smaller life of the bush. It was a delightful field for naturalist and artist.
There were numbers of little squirrel-like creatures; little fellows with bushy tails ringed in brown, black and white, of which the drivers made decorations for their slouch hats.
Along the water’s edge one came on the lagavaans, huge repulsive water-lizards at least a metre long, like miniature crocodiles, sunning themselves in some favourite spot in the margin of the reeds or on the edge of the bank. They give one the jumps by the suddenness of their rush through the reeds and plunge into deep water.
There were otters, too, big black-brown fierce fellows, to be seen swimming silently close under the banks. I got a couple of them, but was always nervous of letting Jock into the water after things, as one never knew where the crocodile lurked.
There were certain hours of the day when it was more pleasant and profitable to lie in the shade and rest. If one remained quiet, there was generally something to see and something worth watching.
There were caterpillars clad in spiky armour made of tiny fragments of grass – fair defence no doubt against some enemies and a most marvellous disguise. Other caterpillars, clad in bark, were impossible to detect until they moved. There were grasshoppers like leaves, and irregularly shaped stick insects, with legs as bulky as the body, and all jointed by knots like irregular twigs – wonderful mimetic creatures.
Jock often found these things for me. Something would move and interest him, and when I saw him stand up and examine a thing at his feet, turning it over with his nose or giving it a scrape with his paw, it was usually worth joining in the inspection. The Hottentot gods always attracted him as they reared up and ‘prayed’ before him. Quaint things, with tiny heads, thin necks and enormous eyes, that sat up with forelegs raised to pray, as a pet dog sits up and begs.
One day I was watching the ants as they travelled along their route – sometimes stopping to hobnob with those they met, sometimes hurrying past, and sometimes turning as though sent back on a message or reminded of something forgotten – when a little dry brown bean lying in a spot of sunlight gave a jump of a few centimetres. At first it seemed that I must have unknowingly moved some twig or grass stem that flicked it. But as I watched it there was another vigorous jump. I took it up and examined it but there seemed nothing unusual about it. It was just a common light brown bean with no peculiarities or marks. It was a real puzzle, a most surprising and ridiculous one. I found half a dozen more in the same place, but it was some days before we discovered the secret. Domiciled in each of them was a very small but very energetic worm. A trapdoor or stopper was so artfully contrived on one end of the bean that it was almost impossible with the naked eye to locate the spot where the hole was. The worm objected to too much heat and if the beans were placed in the sun or near the fire, the weird astonishing jumping would commence.
The beans were good for jumping for several months, and once in Delagoa, one of our party put some on a plate in the sun beside a fellow who had become a perfect nuisance to us. He had a mouthful of bread, and a mug of coffee in the way to help it down, when the first bean jumped. He gave a sort of peck, blinked several times to clear his eyes, and then pulled at his collar, as though to ease it. Then came another jump, and his mouth opened slowly and his eyes got big. The plate being hollow and glazed was not a fair field for the jumpers – they could not escape; and in about half a minute eight or ten beans were having a rough-and-tumble.
With a white scared face our guest slowly lowered his mug, got up and walked off without a word.
We tried to smother our laughter, but someone’s choking made him look back and he saw the whole lot of us in various stages of convulsions. He made one rude remark, and went on, but everyone he met that day made some allusion to beans, and he took the Durban steamer next morning.
There is a goodness-knows-what-will-turn-up-next atmosphere about the bushveld which is, I fancy, unique. The story of the curate, armed with a butterfly net, coming face to face with a black-maned lion may or may not be true – in fact; but it is true enough as an illustration. It is no more absurd or unlikely than the meeting at five metres of a lioness and a fever-stricken lad carrying a white green-lined umbrella – which is true! The boy stood and looked. The lioness did the same. ‘She seemed to think I was not worth eating, so she walked off,’ he used to say – and he was trooper 242 of the Imperial Light Horse who went back under fire for wounded comrades and was killed as he brought the last one out.
I knew an old cross-bred Hottentot-Bushman who half humorously and half seriously blended the folklore, stories and superstitions of his strange and dying race with his own hunting experiences.
Jantje had a wrinkled dry-leather face with hollow cheeks, high cheek-bones, and little pinched eyes, so small and so deeply set that no one ever saw the colour of them. The peppercorns of tight wiry wool that did duty for hair were sparsely scattered over his head like the stunted bushes in the desert, and his face and head were seamed with scars too numerous to count.
I put Jantje on to wash clothes the day he turned up at the waggons to look for work, and as he knelt on the rocks stripped to the waist I noticed a very curious knotted line running up his right side from the lowest rib into the armpit.
He laughed almost hysterically, his eyes disappearing altogether and every tooth showing, as I lifted his arm to investigate the scar, and in high-pitched falsetto tones he shouted in a sort of ecstacy of delight, ‘Die ouw buffels, baas! Die buffels bull, Baas!’
‘Buffalo. Did he toss you?’ I asked.
Jantje seemed to think it the best joke in the world and with constant squeals of laughter and graphic gestures gabbled off his account.
His master, it appears, had shot at and slightly wounded the buffalo, and Jantje had been placed at one exit from the bush to prevent the herd from breaking away. As they came towards him he fired at the foremost one, but before he could reload the wounded bull made for him and he ran for dear life to the only tree near – one of the flat-topped thorns. He heard the thundering hoofs and the snorting breath behind, but raced on hoping to reach the tree and dodge behind it. A few metres short, however, the bull caught him, in spite of a jump aside, and flung him with one toss right on top of the thorn tree.
When he recovered consciousness he was lying face upwards in the sun, with nothing to rest his head on and only sticks and thorns around him. He did not know where he was or what had happened. He tried to move, but one arm was useless and the effort made him slip and sag. He thought he was falling through the earth.
Presently he heard regular tramping underneath him and the breath of a big animal, and the whole incident came back to him. By feeling about cautiously he at last located the biggest branch under him, and getting a grip on this he managed to turn over and ease his right side. He could then see the buffalo. It had tramped a circle round the tree and was doing sentry over him. Now and again the huge creature stopped to sniff, snort and stamp, and then resumed the round, perhaps the reverse way. The buffalo could not see him and never once looked up. Relying entirely on its sense of smell, it kept up the relentless vengeful watch for hours, always stopping in the same place, to leeward, to satisfy itself that the enemy had not escaped.
Late in the afternoon the buffalo, for the first time, suddenly came to a stand on the windward side of the tree. After a good minute’s silence, it turned its tail on Jantje and with angry sniffs and tosses stepped swiftly and resolutely forward some paces. There was nothing to be seen, but Jantje judged the position and yelled out a warning to his master whom he guessed to be coming through the bush to look for him. At the same time he made what noise he could in the tree-top to make the buffalo think he was coming down. The animal looked round from time to time with swings and tosses of the head and threatening angry sneezes, much as one sees a cow do when standing between her young calf and threatened danger. It was defending Jantje, for his own purposes, and facing the danger.
For many minutes there was dead silence. No answer came to Jantje’s call, and the bull stood its ground glaring and sniffing towards the bush. At last there was a heavy thud below, instantly followed by the report of the rifle – the bullet came faster than the sound. The buffalo gave a heavy plunge and with a grunting sob slid forward on its chest.
Round the camp fire at night Jantje used to tell tales in which fact, fancy, and superstition were curiously mingled. The drivers, for whose benefit they were told, listened open-mouthed, and I often stood at their fire, an interested listener.
The tale of his experiences with the honey bird which he had cheated of its share was the first I heard him tell. Who could say how much was fact, how much fancy, and how much the superstitions of his race? Not even Jantje knew that. He believed it all.
The honey bird met him one day with cheery cheep-cheep, and as he whistled in reply it led him to an old tree where the beehive was. It was a small hive, and Jantje was hungry, so he ate it all. All the time he was eating, the bird kept fluttering about, calling anxiously, and expecting some honey or fat young bees to be thrown out for it. When he had finished, the bird came down and searched in vain for its share. As he walked away the guilty Jantje noticed that the indignant bird followed him with angry cries and threats.
All day long he failed to find game. Whenever there seemed to be a chance an angry honey bird would appear ahead of him and cry a warning to the game. That night as he came back, empty-handed and hungry, all the portents of bad luck came to him in turn. An owl screeched three times over his head; a goatsucker with its long wavy wings and tail flitted before him in swoops and rings; a jackal trotted persistently in front looking back at him; and a striped hyena, humpbacked, savage, and solitary, stalked by in silence, and glared.
At night as he lay unable to sleep the bats came and made faces at him; a night adder rose up before his face and slithered out its forked tongue – the two black beady eyes glinting the firelight back; and whichever way he looked there was a honey bird, silent and angry, yet with a look of satisfaction, as it watched. So it went all night. No sleep for him. No rest!
In the morning he rose early and taking his gun and chopper set out in search of hives. He would give all to the honey bird he had cheated, and thus make amends.
He had not gone far before, to his great delight, there came a welcome chattering in answer to his low whistle, and the busy little fellow flew up to show himself and promptly led the way, going ahead ten to twenty metres at a flight. Jantje followed eagerly until they came to a small donga with a sandy bottom, and then the honey bird, calling briskly, fluttered from tree to tree on either bank, leading him on.
Jantje, thinking the hive must be near by, was walking slowly along the sandy bed and looking upwards in the trees when something on the ground caught his eye and he sprang back just as the head of a big puff-adder struck where his bare foot had been a moment before. With one swing of his chopper he killed it. He took the skin off for an ornament, the poison glands for medicine, and the fangs for charms, and then whistled and looked about for the honey bird, but it had gone.
A little later on, however, he came upon another, and it led him to a big and shady wild fig tree. The honey bird flew to the trunk itself and cheeped and chattered there, and Jantje put down his gun and looked about for an easy place to climb. As he peered through the foliage he met a pair of large green eyes looking full into his. On a big limb of the tree lay a leopard, still as death, with its head resting on its paws, watching him with a cat-like eagerness for its prey. Jantje hooked his toe in the reim sling of his old gun and slowly gathered it up without moving his eyes from the leopard’s, and backing away slowly, step by step, he got out into the sunshine and made off as fast as he could.
It was the honey bird’s revenge. He knew it then.
He sat down on some bare ground to think what next to do, for he knew he must die if he did not find honey and make good a hundred times what he had cheated.
All day long he kept meeting honey birds and following them. But he would no longer follow them into the bad places, for he could not tell whether they were new birds or the one he had robbed. Once he had nearly been caught. The bird had perched on an old antheap, and Jantje, thinking there was a ground hive there, walked boldly forward. A small misshapen tree grew out of the antheap, and one of the twisted branches caught his eye because of the thick ring around it. It was the coil of a long green mamba, and far below that, half-hidden by the leaves, hung the snake’s head with the neck gathered in half-loop coils ready to strike him.
After that Jantje kept in the open, searching himself among rocks and in old dead trees for the tell-tale stains that mark the hive’s entrance. But he had no luck, and when he reached the river in the early afternoon he was glad of a cool drink and a place to rest.
For a couple of hours he had seen no honey birds, and it seemed that at last his pursuer had given him up, for that day at least. As he sat in the shade of the high bank, however, with the river only a few metres from his feet, he heard again a faint chattering. It came from the riverside beyond a turn in the bank, and it was too far away for the bird to have seen Jantje from where it called, so he had no doubt about this being a new bird. It seemed to him a glorious piece of luck that he should find honey by the aid of a strange bird, and be able to take half of it back to the hive he had emptied the day before and leave it there for the cheated bird.
There was a beach of pebbles and rocks between the high bank and the river, and as Jantje walked along it on the keen look-out for the bird, he spotted it sitting on a root half-way down the bank some twenty metres ahead. Close to where the chattering bird perched there was a break in the pebbly beach, and there shallow water extended up to the perpendicular bank. In the middle of this little stretch of water, and conveniently placed as a stepping-stone, there was a black rock, and the barefooted Jantje stepped noiselessly from stone to stone towards it.
An alarmed cane rat, cut off by Jantje from the river, ran along the foot of the bank to avoid him, but when it reached the little patch of shallow water it suddenly doubled back in fright and raced under the boy’s feet into the river.
Jantje stopped. He did not know why, but there seemed to be something wrong. Something had frightened the cane rat back on to him, and he stared hard at the bank and the stretch of beach ahead of him. Then the rock he meant to step on to gave a heave, and a long blackish thing curved towards him; he sprang into the air as high as he could, and the crocodile’s tail swept under his feet.
Jantje fled back like a buck – the rattle on the stones behind him and crash of reeds putting metres into every bound.
For four days he stayed in camp waiting for someone to find a hive and give him honey enough to make his peace. Then, for an old snuff box and a little powder, he bought a huge basketful of comb, and put it all at the foot of the tree he had cleaned out.
Then he had peace.
The men believed every word of that story: so, I am sure, did Jantje himself. The buffalo story was obviously true, and Jantje thought nothing of it. The honey bird story was not, yet he gloried in it. It touched his superstitious nature, and it was impossible for him to tell the truth or to separate fact from fancy and superstition.
How many of fact there may have been in it I cannot say. Honey birds gave me many a wild-goose chase, but when they led to anything at all it was to hives, and not too snakes, leopards and crocodiles. Perhaps it is right to own up that I never cheated a honey bird. We pretended to laugh at the superstition, but we left some honey all the same -– just for luck. After all, as we used to say, the bird earned its share and deserved encouragement.
