Blue Horizon

by Wilbur Smith

  Louisa rode up as he straightened with the furry white pouch in his hand. He felt bound to explain: “It would taint the flesh if we left it.”

  She looked away. “What a magnificent animal. So big.” She seemed subdued by the enormity of what he had done. Then she sat up straighter in the saddle. “What must I do to help you?”

  “Tether the horses first,” he told her and she swung down from Trueheart’s back and led the horses to the gwarrie tree. She hitched them to the trunk, then came back.

  “Hold one of the back legs,” he said. “If we leave the guts inside, the meat will sour and spoil in a few hours.”

  It was heavy work, but she did not flinch from it. When he made the paunching stroke from the crotch to the ribs the bowels and entrails came ballooning out of the opening.

  “This is when you get your hands messy,” he warned her, but before he could go on, another voice spoke near at hand, a piping, childlike voice.

  “I taught you well, Somoya.”

  Jim spun round, the knife held instinctively in the underhand defensive grip, and stared at the little yellow man who sat on a rock watching them.

  “Bakkat, you little shaitan,” Jim shouted, more in fright than anger. “Don’t ever do that again. Where in the name of the Kulu Kulu did you come from?”

  “Did I startle you, Somoya?” Bakkat looked uncomfortable, and Jim remembered his manners. He had come close to giving offence to his friend.

  “No, of course not. I saw you from afar.” You must never tell a Bushman that you had overlooked him: he will take it as an insulting reference to his tiny stature. “You stand taller than the trees.”

  Bakkat’s face lit up at the compliment. “I watched you from the beginning of the hunt. It was a fair stalk and a clean kill, Somoya. But I think you need more than a young girl to help you dress the meat.” He hopped down from the rock. He paused in front of Louisa and crouched down, clapping his hands in greeting.

  “What is he saying?” she asked Jim.

  “He says that he sees you, and that your hair is like sunlight,” he told her. “I think you have just been given your African name, Welanga, Girl of Sunlight.”

  “Please tell him that I see him also, and that he does me great honour.” She smiled down at him and Bakkat cackled with delighted laughter.

  Bakkat carried a native axe hooked over one shoulder, and his hunting bow over the other. He laid aside the bow and quiver, and hefted the axe as he came to help Jim with the huge carcass.

  Louisa was amazed at how quickly the two of them worked. Each knew his job and did it without hesitation or argument. Bloody to the elbows they drew out the entrails and the bulging sac of the stomach. With barely a check in the work Bakkat cut a strip of the raw tripes. He slapped it against a rock to knock off the half-digested vegetation, then stuffed it into his mouth and chewed with unfeigned relish. When they pulled out the steaming liver, even Jim joined in the feast.

  Louisa stared in horror. “It’s raw!” she protested.

  “In Holland you eat raw herring,” he said, and offered her a sliver of the purple liver. She was about to refuse, then saw from his expression that this was a challenge. She hesitated still until she realized that Bakkat also was watching her with a sly smile, his eyes slitted between leathery wrinkles.

  She took the slice of liver, gathered her courage and placed it in her mouth. She felt her gorge rise but forced herself to chew. After the first shock of the strong taste, it was not unpleasant. She ate slowly, and swallowed it. To her deep satisfaction Jim looked crestfallen. She took another slice from his bloody hand and began to chew at it.

  Bakkat let out a squeal of laughter, and dug his elbow into Jim’s ribs. He shook his head with delight, mocking Jim, and miming the way she had won the silent contest, staggering around in a circle as he crammed imaginary lumps of liver into his mouth with both hands, weak with mirth.

  “If you were half as funny as you think you are,” Jim told him sourly, “you would be the wit of all the fifty tribes of the Khoisan. Now let’s get back to work.”

  They divided up the meat into loads for both the horses, and Bakkat made a sack of the wet skin into which he stuffed all the titbits of kidneys, tripes and liver. It weighed almost as much as he did, but he shouldered it and set off at a trot. Jim carried a shoulder of the eland, which almost buckled his knees, and Louisa led the horses. They covered the last mile down the gorge to Majuba in darkness.

  Xhia trotted with the rapid bow-legged gait that the Bushmen call “drinking the wind.” He could keep it up from first light in the morning until nightfall. As he went he talked to himself as if to a companion, replying to his own questions, chuckling at his jokes. Still on the run, he drank from his horn bottle and ate from the leather food bag slung over his shoulder.

  He was reminding himself of how cunning and brave he was. “I am Xhia the mighty hunter,” he said, and gave a little jump in the air. “I have killed the great bull elephant with the poison that tips my arrow.” He remembered how he had followed it along the banks of the great river. Doggedly, he had kept up the hunt during the time that it had taken the new moon to wax to the full, then wane again. “Not once did I lose the spoor. Could any other man do that?” He shook his head. “No! Could Bakkat perform such a feat? Never! Could Bakkat have fired the arrow into the vein behind the ear so that the poison was taken straight to the heart of the bull? He could not have done it!” The frail reed arrow could barely pierce the thick pachyderm hide—it would never penetrate to heart or lung: he had had to find one of the great blood vessels close to the surface to carry the poison. It had taken the poison five days to bring the bull down. “But I followed him all that time and I danced and sang the hunter’s song when, at last, he fell like a mountain and raised the dust as high as the treetops. Could Bakkat have performed such a feat?” he asked the high peaks around him. “Never!” he replied. “Never!”

  Xhia and Bakkat were members of the same tribe, but they were not brothers. “We are not brothers!” Xhia shouted aloud, and he became angry.

  Once there had been a girl, with skin as bright as the plumage of a weaver bird and a face shaped like a heart. Her lips were as full as the fruit of the ripe marula, her buttocks were like ostrich eggs and her breasts as round as two yellow Tsama melons warming in the Kalahari sun. “She was born to be my woman,” Xhia cried. “The Kulu Kulu took a piece of my heart while I slept and moulded it into that woman.” He could not bring himself to say her name. He had shot her with the tiny love arrow tipped with the feathers of the mourning dove to demonstrate to her how much he wanted her.

  “But she went away. She would not come to lie on the sleeping mat of Xhia the hunter. She went instead with the despicable Bakkat and bore him three sons. But I am cunning. The woman died from the bite of the mamba.” Xhia had captured the snake himself. He had found its hiding-place under a flat rock. He had tethered a live dove as bait beside it and when the snake slid out from under the rock, he had pinned it behind the head. It was not a large mamba, only as long as one of his arms, but its venom was virulent enough to kill a bull buffalo. He placed it in the girl’s harvesting bag while she and Bakkat slept. The next morning when she opened the mouth of the bag to place a tuber inside, the snake had bitten her three times, once on the finger and twice on the wrist. Her death, though swift, was terrible to behold. Bakkat wept as he held her in his arms. Concealed among the rocks, Xhia had watched it all. Now the memory of her death and Bakkat’s grief was so sweet that Xhia jumped with both feet together like a grasshopper.

  “There is no animal who can elude me. There is no man who can prevail against my guile. For I am Xhia!” he shouted, and the echo came back from the cliffs above. “Xhia, Xhia, Xhia.”

  After Colonel Keyser left him, he had waited two days and a night on the hills and in the forests of High Weald, watching for Bakkat. On the first morning he saw him come out of his hut in the dawn, yawn, scratch himself and laugh at the squeal of gas from betwee
n his buttocks. For the Bushmen a flourish of flatus was always a propitious sign of good health. He watched him let the herd out of the kraal and drive them down to the water. Lying like a partridge concealed in the grass Xhia saw the big white man with the black beard that they called Klebe, the hawk, ride down from the homestead. He was Bakkat’s master and the two squatted in the middle of the open field with their heads close together and they spoke in whispers for a long time so that no one could overhear them. Even Xhia was not able to creep close enough to pick up their words.

  Xhia grinned to watch their secret counsel. “I know what you are saying, Klebe. I know you are sending Bakkat to find your son. I know you are telling him to take care that he is not followed but, like the spirit of the wind I, Xhia, will be watching when they meet.”

  He watched Bakkat close the door of his hut at nightfall, and saw the glow of his cooking fire, but Bakkat did not come out again until the dawn.

  “You try to lull me, Bakkat, but will it be tonight or tomorrow?” he asked, as he watched from the hilltop. “Is your patience greater than mine? We shall see.” He watched Bakkat circle around his hut in the early light, searching the earth for the sign of an enemy, for someone who had come to spy upon him.

  Xhia embraced himself with glee, and rubbed his back with both hands. “Do you think I am such a fool as to come in close, Bakkat?” This was the reason he had sat all night upon the hilltop. “I am Xhia and I leave no sign. Not even the high-flying vulture can discover my hiding-place.”

  All that day he had watched Bakkat go about his business, tending his master’s herds. At nightfall Bakkat went into his hut again. Xhia worked a charm in the darkness. He took a pinch of powder from one of the stoppered duiker-horn flasks on his beaded belt and placed it on his tongue. It was the ash of a leopard’s whiskers, mixed with the dry, powdered dung of a lion and other secret ingredients. Xhia mumbled an incantation as it dissolved in his own saliva. It was the spell for outwitting prey. Then he spat three times in the direction of the hut in which Bakkat lived.

  “This is a charm of great power, Bakkat,” he warned his enemy. “No animal or man can resist its spell.” This was not always true, but whenever it failed there was always good reason for it. Sometimes it was because the wind had changed direction, or because a black crow flew overhead, or because the sore-eye lily was in bloom. Apart from these and similar circumstances it was an infallible charm.

  Having cast the spell he settled down to wait. He had not eaten since the day before, so now he swallowed a few fragments of smoked meat from his food bag. Neither hunger nor the cold wind off the snows of the mountain deterred him. Like all his tribe he was inured to pain and hardship. The night was still, proof that his spell was efficacious. Even a small breeze would have covered the sounds for which he was listening.

  It was soon after the moon had set that he heard a nightbird utter its alarm call in the forest behind Bakkat’s home. He nodded to himself. “Something moves there.”

  A few minutes later he heard the nightjar’s mate whirl up from the forest floor, and by correlating the two clues he guessed the direction in which his quarry was moving. He went down the hill, silent as shadow, testing each footfall with his bare toe for twigs or dry leaves that might crackle and disclose his presence. He stopped to listen at every second step, and heard, down by the stream, the dry rustle of a porcupine erecting its quills as a warning to a predator who had ventured too close. The porcupine might have seen a leopard, but Xhia knew it had not. The leopard would have lingered to harass its natural prey, but a man moved on immediately. Not even an adept of the San, such as Bakkat or even Xhia himself, could have avoided encountering the nightjar or the prowling porcupine in the darkness of the forest. Those little signs had been all that Xhia needed to work out how Bakkat was moving, and the direction he was taking.

  Another hunter might have made the mistake of closing in too swiftly, but Xhia hung back. He knew that Bakkat would backtrack and circle to make certain he was not followed.

  “He is almost as cunning in the lore of the wild as I am. But I am Xhia and there is no other like me.” Telling himself this made him feel strong and brave. He found where Bakkat had crossed the stream and, in the last rays of the waning moon he picked out a single wet footprint gleaming on the top of one of the river boulders. It was the size of a child’s, but broader, and there was no arch.

  “Bakkat!” He gave a little hop. “I will remember the shape of your foot all the days of my life. Have I not seen it a hundred times running beside the track of the woman who should have been my wife?” He remembered how he had followed their tracks into the bush so that he could creep up on them and watch them as they coupled, writhing together in the grass. The memory made him hate Bakkat with a fresh, corroding passion. “But you will never savour those melon breasts again. Xhia and the snake have seen to that.”

  Now that he had clearly established the direction and run of the spoor, he could hang back to avoid, in the dark, the traps that Bakkat would surely set for him. “Because he moves in darkness he will not be able to cover his sign as completely as he would in daylight. I will wait for the coming of the sun to read more clearly the sign he has left for me.”

  In the first flush of the dawn he picked up the spoor again. The wet footprint had dried leaving no trace, but within a hundred paces he found a dislodged pebble. Another hundred paces and there was a broken blade of grass, dangling and beginning to wither. Xhia did not stop to pore over these clues. A quick darting glance confirmed his instinct and enabled him to make minute adjustments to his direction. He smiled and shook his head when he found where Bakkat had lain in wait beside his spoor. Because he had squatted unmoving for so long, his bare heels had left indentations in the earth. Then, much further on, he found where Bakkat had made a wide circle to wait again beside his own spoor, the same way as a wounded buffalo circles back to wait for the hunter who pursues him.

  Xhia was so pleased with himself that he took a little snuff, sneezed softly and said, “Know, Bakkat, that it is Xhia who follows, that Xhia is your master in all things!” He tried not to think of the honey-yellow girl, the one thing in which Bakkat had prevailed.

  Once the spoor led into the mountains it became even more elusive. Up one long narrow valley he found where Bakkat had hopped from rock to rock, never touching soft earth or disturbing a blade of grass or other growing thing, except for the grey lichen that grew sparsely on the rocks. This plant was so dry and tough, and Bakkat so light, his sole so small and pliant, that he passed over it almost as softly as the mountain breeze. Xhia squinted to pick out the slightly different shade of lichen grey where his foot had touched. Xhia kept carefully to the side of the tracks furthest from the rising sun, to highlight the faint spoor and not to disturb it in case he was forced to come back to rework it.

  Then even Xhia was confounded. The tracks climbed a scree slope, again moving from rock to rock. Then abruptly, half-way up the scree, the tracks ended. It was as though Bakkat had been plucked into the sky in the talons of an eagle. Xhia went on in the established line of the spoor until he reached the head of the valley, but he found nothing more. He went back to where the sign ended, squatted down and turned his head one way then the other to contemplate the faint smears on the lichen coating of the rocks.

  As a last resort he took another pinch of the magical powder from the duiker horn and let it dissolve in his saliva. He closed his eyes to rest them, and swallowed the mixture. He half opened his eyes and, through the veil of his own lashes, he had a fleeting glimpse of movement, faint shadows like the flicker of bats’ wings in the gloaming. When he looked directly at them they disappeared as though they had never existed. The saliva dried in his mouth and the skin on his arms prickled. He knew that one of the spirits of the wilderness had touched him, and what he had seen was the memory of Bakkat’s feet running across the rocks. They were running not upwards but back down the scree.

  In that moment of heightened awareness,
he realized, from the colour of the lichen, that Bakkat’s feet had touched it twice, going up and coming back. He laughed out loud. “Bakkat, you would have deceived any other man, but not Xhia.” He moved back down the scree and saw how he had done it. How he had run up the slope, bouncing from rock to rock and then, in mid-stride, he had reversed direction and run backwards, his tiny feet falling exactly in the same spoor. The only telltale sign was the slight colour difference of the double tracks.

  Near the bottom of the slope the spoor passed under the low branch of a Boer bean tree. Lying on the earth beside the tracks was a fragment of dried bark no bigger than a thumbnail. It had recently fallen or been dislodged from the branch above. At this point the double tracks on the lichen-coated rocks suddenly became single tracks again. Xhia laughed out loud.

  “Bakkat has taken to the trees like the baboon that was his mother.” Xhia went to stand under the outspread branch, jumped, caught a hold and drew himself up until he stood upright, balancing on the narrow branch. He saw the marks Bakkat’s feet had made on the bark. He ran along them to the main trunk of the tree, slid down to the earth, picked up the spoor again and ran along it.

  Twice more Bakkat had set him puzzles to solve. The first of these was at the base of a red cliff and cost him more time. But after the Boer bean tree he had learned to look upwards and found the place where Bakkat had reached up high and traversed hand over hand along a ledge so that his feet had not touched the earth.

  The sun had started down the sky by the time he reached the place where Bakkat had laid the second puzzle. This one seemed to defy even his powers of solution. After a while he felt a superstitious tingle of his nerves that Bakkat had worked some counter-charm and grown wings like a bird. He swallowed another dose of the hunter’s powder, but the spirits did not touch him again. Instead his head began to ache.

  “I am Xhia. No man can deceive me,” he told himself, but even though he said it loudly he could not dispel the sense of failure that slowly overwhelmed him.