by Wilbur Smith
Xhia’s tracks led straight towards the dark green ribbon of riverine bush on the horizon that marked the course of the Gariep river. They were only half-way there when Koots saw the springbuck herds ahead pronking, leaping high in the air with all four feet together and noses almost touching their front hoofs, the snowy dorsal plumes flashing in full display.
“Something’s alarming them,” Goffel said. “Maybe it is the Bushman.” Koots spurred forward. Then, through the dust kicked up by the antics of the springbuck herds, he saw a tiny familiar figure trotting towards them.
“By the breath of Satan!” Koots swore. “It’s him. It’s Xhia and he’s coming back!”
As he came towards them Xhia broke into a dance and a litany of triumph and self-congratulation. “I am Xhia, the greatest hunter of all my tribe. I am Xhia, the beloved of the ancestors. My eyes are like the moon for they see all, even in the night. My arrows are swift as swallows in flight, and no animal may run from them. My magic is so powerful that no man may avoid it.”
That same day Xhia led them to the Gariep river, and he showed Koots the wheel ruts of many wagons scored deeply into the soft alluvial earth along its banks.
“Four great wagons and one small one passed this way.” Through Goffel he explained the sign to Koots. “With the wagons were many animals, horses and cattle and some sheep. See here! The small wagon has returned towards the colony, but the four great wagons have gone on into the wilderness.”
“Whose wagons are these?” Koots asked him.
“In all the colony there are few burghers rich enough to boast five wagons. One of those is Klebe, the father of Somoya.”
“I do not understand.” Koots shook his head.
Goffel explained: “It seems that while Bakkat and Somoya led us on a chase through the mountains, Klebe came here to the Gariep with these wagons. When Somoya had stolen our horses and knew we could follow him no further, he came back here to meet his father.”
“What of the small wagon that went back towards the colony?” Koots wanted to know.
Xhia shrugged. “Perhaps after he had given the great wagons to his son, Klebe returned to the Cape.” Xhia touched the wheel marks with his toe. “See how deeply the wheels have bitten into the earth. They are heavily laden with goods.”
“How does Xhia know all this?” Koots demanded.
“Because I am Xhia, with eyes like the moon, that sees all.”
“That means the little bastard is guessing.” Koots lifted his hat and wiped the sweat from his balding pate.
“If we follow the wagons Xhia will give you proof,” Goffel suggested. “Or if he does not, you will shoot him and save yourself the cattle you promised him.”
Koots replaced his hat. Despite his forbidding expression he felt more confident of eventual success than at any time since they had left the colony.
It is plain to see that they are carrying much cargo, Koots thought. It may be that those wagons are worth almost as much as the bounty money itself. He looked towards the heat-shimmering horizon where the tracks led. Out there, there is no civilized law. Head money or cargoes, one way or the other I smell a sweet profit in this.
He dismounted and inspected the wagon tracks more closely, giving himself time to think. “How long since the wagons passed this way?”
Goffel referred the question to Xhia.
“Some months. It is not possible to say more than that. But wagons travel slowly, while horsemen travel fast.”
Koots nodded to Goffel. “Good, very good! Tell him to follow, and find proof of who these wagons belong to.”
They found proof a hundred leagues further and twelve days later. They came to a place where one of the wagons had run into an antbear hole and been badly damaged. A number of the spokes in one of the front wheels had been shattered. The travellers had camped for some days at the site of the accident, making repairs to the wagon. They had whittled and shaved new spokes, and discarded the damaged ones.
Xhia retrieved one of the broken pieces from where it had been thrown into the grass. He cackled with triumph. “Did not Xhia tell you this truth and that truth? Did you believe him? No! You did not believe him, you stupid white maggot.” He brandished the broken spar. “Know now, once and for all time, white man, that Xhia sees all and knows all.” He brought the fragment of the spoke to Koots and showed him the design that had been burnt into the wood with a branding iron. “Do you know this picture?” he demanded.
Koots grinned wolfishly and nodded with recognition.
It was the stylized picture of a cannon, a long nine-pounder on its carriage. In the ribbon below it were the letters CBTC. Koots had seen the same design on the flag that flew above the godown at High Weald, and on the pediment above the front wall of the main building. He knew that the initials stood for Courtney Brothers Trading Company.
He called his troopers and showed them the fragment of wood. They passed it from hand to hand. They all knew the design. The entire population of the colony was less than three thousand souls, and within its boundaries everyone knew everything about everyone else. After Governor van de Witten himself, the Courtney brothers were the richest, most influential men in the colony. Their coat-of-arms was almost as well known as that of the VOC. The brothers emblazoned it on all their possessions, their buildings, ships, wagons. It was the seal they used on their documents and the brand on their horses and livestock. There was no longer any doubt of the identity of the wagon train they were following.
Koots looked over his band, and picked out Richter. He tossed him the broken spoke. “Corporal, do you know what that is you are holding?”
“Yes, Captain, sir. It’s a wheel spoke.”
“No, Corporal!” Koots told him. “That is thousands of guilders in gold coin in your hand.” He looked from the two white faces, Oudeman and Richter’s, to the yellow and chocolate ones of Xhia and Goffel and the other Hottentots. “Do any of you still want to go home? Unlike that miserable bastard Le Riche, this time I will let you take your horse when you leave. The reward money is not all that we will win. There are four wagons also, and a herd of domestic animals. Even Xhia will win more than the six head of cattle I promised him. The rest of you? Do any of you want to go home, yes or no?”
They grinned at each other, like a pack of wild hunting dogs with the smell of a wounded quarry in their nostrils, and shook their heads.
“Then there is the girl. Would any of you black bastards like to play with a white girl with golden hair?”
They burst into laughter at the suggestion, lewd and loud.
“I must apologize, but one of you will not have that pleasure.” He looked them over thoughtfully. There was one Hottentot trooper whom he would be pleased to see the back of. His name was Minna, and he had a squint. This gave him a sly, villainous expression, which Koots had realized reflected accurately his true nature. Minna had sulked and whined ever since leaving the colony, and he was the only one of the troop who was exhibiting no enthusiasm for following the tracks of Jim Courtney’s wagons.
“Minna, you and I are brothers of the warrior blood,” Koots placed his arm around the man’s shoulders, “so it grieves me sorely that we must part. However, I need a good man and true to carry a message back to Colonel Keyser at the castle. I have to let him know of the success of our expedition. You, my dear and stalwart Minna, are the man for that job. I shall ask the colonel to reward you handsomely. Who knows? You may have some gold braid upon your sleeve, and gold in your pocket from this day’s work.”
Koots hunched over his grubby notebook for almost an hour as he composed the message. He knew that Minna was illiterate. After extolling his own achievements in the conduct of the expedition the final paragraph of his report to Colonel Keyser read, “The trooper who carries this message, Johannes Minna, lacks any soldierly virtues. It is my respectful recommendation that he be stripped of rank and privilege and discharged from the Company service without benefit of pension.”
And that, he t
hought, with satisfaction, when he folded the message, takes care of any obligation I might have to share the bounty with Minna when I bring Jim Courtney’s head back to the colony. “You have only to follow the wagon tracks, and they will lead you back to the Cape of Good Hope,” he told Minna. “Xhia says it is less than ten days’ ride.” He handed the message and the broken wagon spoke to Minna. “Give these both to Colonel Keyser in person.”
Minna leered and went with alacrity to saddle his horse. He could hardly believe his good fortune in escaping this dreadful journey, and being offered a reward for doing so.
The days sped by much faster than the slow turning of the wagon wheels. It seemed that the hours were too short for them to enjoy in full measure all the wonders they saw, or to savour the adventures, great and small, that they encountered each day. Were it not for the journal that Louisa kept with such dedication they would soon have lost track of those golden days. She had to nag at Jim to keep his promise to his father. He made the solar observations of their position only when she insisted that he do so, and she recorded the results.
Jim was more reliable with the gold pans and he tested the sands of every river they crossed for the precious metal. On many occasions he found a bright yellow tail of metallic dust around the rim of the pan, but his excitement was short-lived when he tested it with hydrochloric acid from the gold-finder’s chest, and the yellow metal bubbled and dissolved. “Iron pyrites! Fool’s gold!” he told Louisa bitterly. “How old Humbert would laugh at me as a dupe.” But the disappointment and bitterness did not last long, and within hours Jim’s enthusiasm would have fully regenerated. His boyish optimism was one of the things Louisa found endearing about him.
Jim looked for signs of other human presence, but there was little evidence of this. Once they found the tracks of wagon wheels preserved in the sterile crust of a salt pan, but Bakkat declared them to be very old indeed. Bakkat’s concept of the passage of time was different from that of the European mind, so Jim pressed him further. “How old is very old, Bakkat?”
“These tracks were made before you were born, Somoya,” he told Jim. “The man whose wagon made them is probably dead of old age.”
There were other, fresher signs of human existence. These were of Bakkat’s own people. Wherever they found a rock shelter or cave in the side of a hill or kopje, there were usually whimsical, vividly coloured paintings decorating the rock walls, and fairly recent hearths on which charcoal fragments showed how the little people had cooked their quarry, and discarded the bones on the midden piles nearby. Bakkat was able to recognize which clans of the tribe had passed this way by the symbols and styles of the paintings. Often when they were examining these artistic tributes to strange gods and quaint custom, Louisa sensed the deep longing and nostalgia that Bakkat felt for his people, who were living the free, careless existence that nature had decreed for them.
The land changed as they travelled across it, the plains giving way to forests and hills with rivers running through wide green valleys and straths. In places, the bush was so dense and thorny that they could not force a way through it. Even attempts to cut a roadway for the wagons failed. The tangled branches were iron hard and defied the sharpest axes. They were obliged to make detours of many days to pass around these jungles. In other places the veld was like English parkland, open and fertile, with great trees as tall as cathedral columns and widespread canopies of green leaf. Birds and monkeys shrieked and chattered in the treetops as they competed for fruit.
It seemed that there were animals and birds wherever they cast their eyes. The numbers and varieties never palled. They ranged in size from tiny sunbirds to ostriches taller than a mounted man with white plumes in their wings and tail tufts, from shrews not much bigger than Jim’s thumb to hippopotamus as heavy as their largest oxen. These behemoths seemed to inhabit every pool and river, their huge bodies crowded so close together that they formed massive rafts on which the white egrets perched as though they were rocks.
Jim sent a hardened ball between the eyes of one old bull. Although he plunged below the surface in his death throes and disappeared from their sight, on the second day the gases in his belly brought him to the surface and he floated like a balloon with his stubby legs sticking into the air. With a span of oxen they dragged the carcass to the bank. The pure white fat that filled his body cavity filled a fifty-gallon water keg when rendered down. It was perfect for cooking and sausage-making, for the manufacture of soap, for lubricating the wheel hubs of the wagons, or for greasing the rifle patches.
There were so many kinds of antelope, each with flesh of different taste and texture: Louisa was able to order her favourites from Jim’s rifle, like a housewife from her butcher. Herds of dun-coloured reedbuck lived on the grassland under the tall trees. Fantastically striped zebra galloped together in herds. They came across other horse-like antelope, with backs and limbs of ebony black, bellies of frosty white, and huge back-swept scimitar-shaped horns. In every thicket and thorn forest they found nervous kudu with spiral horns, and herds of bovine black buffalo, so numerous that they flattened the tangled bush when they stampeded.
Always Jim longed for his first sighting of elephant, and at night spoke of them with almost religious awe. He had never laid eyes on a living beast, but their tusks were piled high in the Company godown at High Weald. In his youth Jim’s father had hunted the elephant in the eastern lands of Africa, a thousand miles and more from where Louisa and he now found themselves. Jim had been reared on tales of his father’s chases after these legendary animals, and the thought of his first encounter with them became an obsession to him. “We have travelled almost a thousand leagues since we left the Gariep,” he told Louisa. “Surely no other man has travelled further from the colony. We must come up with the elephant herds very soon.”
Then his dreams had something to feed upon. They came upon a whole forest whose trunks had been thrown to earth as though by a hurricane of wind, and shattered to splinters. Those trees left standing had been stripped of their bark by the mighty pachyderms.
“See how they have chewed the juice out of the bark.” Bakkat showed Jim the huge balls of desiccated bark the animals had spat out. “See how they have torn down this tree, which once stood higher than the mainmast of your father’s ship—and they ate only the tender top leaves. Hau! They are truly wondrous beasts.”
“Follow them, Bakkat!” Jim pleaded. “Show these beasts to me.”
“These signs were made a full season ago. See how the marks of the pads that they left in the mud of the last rains have dried hard as stone.”
“When will we find them?” Jim demanded. “Will we ever find them?”
“We will find them,” Bakkat promised. “And when we do, perchance you will wish we had not.” With a thrust of his chin he indicated one of the fallen trees: “If they can do that to such a tree, what might they do to a man?”
Each day they rode out to explore the land ahead, to look for fresher elephant sign, and blaze a road for Smallboy and the wagons to follow. Always they had to make certain of sources of potable water and good fodder for the oxen and other domestic animals, and to refill the fagies against the times when their search for fresh water-holes might prove unsuccessful. Bakkat showed Jim how to watch the flight of flocks of sandgrouse and other birds, and the direction of travel of the thirsty game herds to the nearest water-holes. The horses were also good guides—they could smell it on the wind from many miles off.
Often they reached so far ahead of the wagon train that they were unable to return to its security and comfort before the setting of the sun, and they were forced to pitch a fly-camp wherever darkness and exhaustion overtook them. However, on those nights that they returned to the wagons it was always with a sense of joyous homecoming when they saw the campfires from a distance, or heard the lowing of the oxen. Then the dogs rushed out, barking with excitement, and Smallboy and the other drivers shouted greetings.
Louisa marked the calendar religious
ly, and she never missed the Sabbath. She insisted that she and Jim stay in camp for that day. They slept late on Sunday mornings, hearing each other wake as the sun shone through the chinks in the afterclap. Then they lay on their own cardell beds and chatted drowsily through the canvas of the wagon tents, until Louisa argued with Jim that it was time to be up and about. The smell of Zama brewing coffee at the campfire would convince him that she was right.
Louisa always cooked a special Sunday dinner, usually with some new recipe from the cookbook Sarah had given to her. In the meantime Jim saw to the small jobs around the camp that had been neglected during the week, from shoeing a horse to repairing a tear in the wagon tent or greasing the wheel hubs.
After lunch they often slung hammocks in the shade of the trees and read to each other from their small library of books. Then they discussed the events of the past week, and made plans for the week ahead. As a surprise for Jim on the first of his birthdays they spent together, Louisa secretly carved a set of chessmen and a board, using woods of different colours. Although he tried to look enthusiastic, Jim was not entirely enchanted by the gift for he had never played the game before. But she read him the rules from the back pages of the almanac, then set up the board under the spreading branches of a mighty camel-thorn tree.
“You can play white,” she told him magnanimously, “which means you move first.”
“Is that good?” he demanded.
“It is of the utmost advantage,” she assured him. With a laugh he advanced a rook’s pawn three squares. She made him correct this, then proceeded to give him a thorough and merciless drubbing. “Checkmate!” she said and he looked startled.
Humiliated by the ease with which she had accomplished this feat, he examined the board minutely and argued the legitimacy of each move that had led to his defeat. When it became apparent that she had not cheated, he sat back and stared morosely at the board. Then, slowly, the light of battle dawned in his eyes, and he squared his shoulders. “We will play again,” he announced ominously. But the result of their second game was no less humiliating. Perhaps for this reason Jim became captivated by it, and it soon became a major, binding force in their shared existence. With Louisa’s tactful tuition he made such rapid progress that soon they were almost evenly matched. They fought many memorable, epic battles across the chequered board but, strangely, these encounters brought them closer together.