A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  He would, of course, have preferred to set out for Mopani’s headquarters in a manner which would make it as hard as possible for his enemies to track him down. He knew various, secret approaches along which it would have been difficult for the enemy to overtake him. But, alas, if he was to draw their attention away from his hiding place that was now out of the question. He would have to take the shortest route to Mopani’s camp so as to make it obvious to even the most simple-minded of African trackers that he had left the area. If he did that, he was certain that his friends in the cave had a good chance of remaining undiscovered long enough for the enemy to move on and any garrison they left behind at Hunter’s Drift would become so relaxed that Xhabbo would find an opportunity of leading Nonnie and Nuin-Tara out of the cave without danger of detection.

  His conviction in this regard was absolute. Nothing he had overheard on his reconnaisance showed that the enemy were aware of the existence of Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara, or even of Nonnie. Thank Heaven, Nonnie and her father had arrived at Hunter’s Drift so late the previous night and, in any case, had been out of the district for so long, that even ’Bamuthi’s kinsman could not have known of Nonnie’s return.

  What he had to do, therefore, was to return to the cave, tell Xhabbo what had happened and how they had to change their plans. Then he would have to get Hintza out of the cave as soon as possible to accompany him on his way to Mopani’s camp because no set of tracks of his own, however plain, was going to convince his well-informed enemy, unless accompanied by those of his faithful dog.

  Moreover, he realised that he had little time to arrange all this. He had to reckon with the fact that the explosion and fire that was still standing there, so high in the night, must have woken everybody in the cave and that he could find himself involved in argument and discussion with his companions that would take more time than he could afford. Already the stars he knew so well showed him that he had not much more than an hour to two of darkness left, and he would have to be on his way before dawn. He was convinced that the greatest search the bush had ever experienced was already being organised and would be set in motion the moment it was light enough to see the ground.

  Yet, long as all this takes in the telling, the new course of action was perceived and completed in François’s mind before he reached the top of the hill and came to the place where he had to go down on hands and knees to crawl along the narrow track leading to the boulders and dense bushes that concealed the entrance to the cave. He was about to close in on the boulders when a dark shape came hurtling over their top and someone landed lightly on his feet on the track in front of him. It was the darkest hour of night, too dark to see anything except the blurred silhouette against the sheen of stars of someone crouched with an arm raised above a shoulder and a glint of metal that left François with no doubt that it was someone with spear at the ready.

  Fortunately, François’s sense of smell was as keen as ever and his nose instantly told him that it could only be Xhabbo. The moment Xhabbo’s feet found the track he called out in a whisper almost too loud for safety, “Xhabbo, Xhabbo, it’s me, Foot of the Day!”

  Xhabbo must have been nearer to using his spear than even François had dreaded, because relief at the sound of François’s voice broke almost like a sob from him. He fell on his knees down on the track beside François and took both his hands in his. He said, with emotion that made those electric Bushman words of his almost too indistinct for even François’s expert ears: “Foot of the Day, Foot of the Day, Xhabbo lives again.”

  Straight away, Xhabbo rushed on to explain how a sound, greater than any thunder he had ever heard, had jerked both himself and Nuin-Tara out of their sleep; how the earth underneath them shook and all the rocks trembled, until pebbles and sand came down on them like hail from the roof of the cave. François, fearful of the effect on Nonnie of such a shock was about to speak but Xhabbo seemed to know his mind. There was one most extraordinary thing, he said. When the last rumble and re-echo of the explosion had died, they could detect no sign that Nonnie was awake.

  The silence in the cave had been so dense that he thought the explosion had ruined his hearing. For, even if Nonnie had not stirred, why had there been no movement from Hintza? Surely no dog so “utterly a hunter” could have slept through such an event. Perhaps the trouble was not with his hearing but something more sinister. For instance, could part of the roof have fallen in and buried both? Immediately he had crawled towards the place where Nonnie lay. To his amazement she was still fast asleep. But stranger still was the behaviour of Hintza. He was, indeed as awake as Foot of the Day would have wished him to be; head high, ears erect, nose sniffing the air, ready for any danger. Yet he had not moved from Nonnie’s side, or uttered a single sound. He had just turned his head to lick Xhabbo’s hand and then resumed his position of extreme watchfulness.

  It is impossible to describe what effect this simple description of Hintza’s behaviour had on François. If ever a dog had provocation to ignore a master’s command to stay at his post, surely Hintza had had it that night. Yet that he should have rejected the temptation, struck François as such a demonstration of trust that he was almost overcome with emotion. In that microscopic vision of reality, instilled in men by disaster and danger, it was as if Hintza then became the plenipotentiary of all that was natural and instinctive in life and his behaviour a pledge that, no matter how the world of men might be ranged against François, nature was on his side and nature would see him through.

  He longed to go into the cave at once, just to touch Hintza and thank him with the special Bushman sounds he used when Hintza had done something remarkable and done it well. But he had to restrain himself for Xhabbo’s account had only just begun. He went on at once to describe how he had then left Hintza and Nonnie, told Nuin-Tara to sit there watching over them, seized his spear and crawled quickly outside to see if he could discover anything to show what terrible thing had shaken the earth. He had emerged to find Hunter’s Drift already in flames and, amazed, he watched the fire mount high in the sky.

  The fire obviously was connected with the explosion and both with Foot of the Day’s mission. The thought of this connection and its consequence so filled him with fear that for once he looked in vain inside himself for any tapping that might help him to understand what had occurred. There was just no tapping that he could hear; only a black hole of a feeling that so great an explosion and so large a fire could only mean that his own Foot of the Day, like so many other people that day, “had utterly fallen over on his side”.

  This feeling was immediately converted into the horror of certainty for, as he crouched there behind those great boulders for cover, staring over their broken rims into the fire and the night beyond, suddenly a great star came falling slowly, burning, out of the sky to vanish in the dark over the desert where he had his home. Hard on that there came the sound of their enemies screaming, shouting and calling at one another down below as if they were still masters of the world. In the end, he was about to go back to see whether, in the silence of the cave, some form of tapping would return to tell him what to do, when he had heard the first faint sounds of someone coming up the hill. Faint as the sounds were, they were so loud by Bushman and, he believed, Foot of the Day’s standards that he assumed that they must be made by one of their over confident enemies.

  As Xhabbo said this, François realised how tired he was and in how great a hurry, to have made so clumsy an approach over country he knew so well; all the more so when Xhabbo declared that he did not understand what had prevented him from using his spear immediately, when François’s shadow rose up from the track in front of the boulder behind which he was crouching, so certain had he been that the noise was made by an enemy. What terrible thing, he asked, had made François so reckless? What horror had caused that great fire and commotion down below?

  He wanted to take François back into the cave at once to answer his many questions in full and with the attention to detail which is so dear to B
ushman imagination and, incidentally, makes them perhaps the finest conversationalists on earth. But François held him back, and hastened to say that it would be better if Xhabbo heard what he had to say out there in case they woke up Nonnie, and that he wanted to avoid if at all possible. Xhabbo, therefore, had to be content with a quick summary of all that had happened; what François had overheard to make him change his plans and how, if he were to draw the enemy’s suspicions from the hill successfully, he had no time to lose.

  Xhabbo, despite his longing to hear all, listened without interruption and with growing understanding of how even more desperate their situation had become. When François came, at last, to the point where he emphasised that the sooner he left for Mopani’s camp the better, Xhabbo showed, in the most convincing manner, not only how he had come to understand but agreed. Taking François by the arm and pointing towards the clear-cut gap in the hills, where the great Amanzim-tetse river flowed like a wind to the East, he said: “Yes, you must utterly hasten. For look, there already is the big toe of Foot of the Day.”

  So clear was the night, so defined the horizon in the wide gap in hill and bush that François, for the first time in his life, saw star-rise. First, a fine spike of silver above a line of ink, followed by a faint glow until suddenly, five-pointed and darting light, needle-fine at their eyes, was the whole of the morning star, old Koba’s Dawn’s Heart, Xhabbo’s Foot of the Day. That was sign enough to send them hurrying into the cave.

  Nuin-Tara was inside the entrance, waiting, François was to find, with a wooden cudgel in hand which she dropped when she felt rather than saw François coming after Xhabbo. Relief broke also like a great sigh from her. She would have spoken too, no doubt, had not Xhabbo whispered to her that they had to be more quiet than ever, but for once the atmosphere was not under the command of only the three of them.

  François’s presence, which Hintza’s infallible nose detected at once, was too much for him. His loyalty to François still held him on the ground beside Nonnie but, for the moment, he had lost control of his tail. François’s fear of waking Nonnie barely balanced his joy at the sound of Hintza’s tail, lashing the floor of the cave. It was as loud in his ears as that of those broomsticks his fastidious old Ousie-Johanna once had used daily to beat the dust out of her bedside rug which never had any dust in it to beat out. Afraid that Hintza’s eager tail might do what the explosion had failed to do, and wake Nonnie, he went to him quickly, but this time with his habitual and expert silence. He knelt beside Hintza in the dark, stroked him fondly with one hand while he took him by the tail with the other before coaxing him gently away from Nonnie’s side, to post him as their sentry by the entrance to the cave. He then lit a candle, as far away from Nonnie as possible, and asked Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara to crouch between the candle and Nonnie so that the light should not disturb her.

  That done, he took up the letter he had written some hours before, hardly believing that it was not all done in another age. He would have liked to re-write it but all he could do was to add a postscript, telling her briefly that the mission of the night was successfully accomplished, so successfully that he was leaving immediately now to go to Mopani for help. While he was away—he underlined the sentence—none of them was to leave the cave on any account whatsoever. He hastened to stress that his new mission would be far less dangerous than the last. He believed that he had every chance of success and, with luck, he should be back with help in four or five days’ time at the most. (He deliberately exaggerated the time it would take in case of accidents because, if all went well, he knew he could do the journey in two days and nights.) He added that, should he not return in a week, she must please do what he had asked her to do had he failed to return from his excursion to his home the previous night.

  It did not take him long to write this, yet, in the process, he must have looked in Nonnie’s direction a dozen times to be reassured that she remained asleep. The moment the postscript was written, he went to his store of food at the far end of the cave, helped himself to a few rusks and some biltong—just enough to see him and Hintza on the way. Food in the future for them all was going to be one of their greatest problems and his instincts already warned him that it should be as sparingly used as possible.

  That done, he said goodbye to Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara. Xhabbo wanted to come outside with him but François begged him not to. He stressed that even so great an expert as Xhabbo, from now on, should not leave the cave, in case he left some fresh sign outside. Old signs would not matter but any new ones made after dew-fall in the day to come could be fatal. Xhabbo, for a moment, looked as if he would protest, but then exclaimed softly that as the last thing his tapping had told him was to stay quietly in the cave, he would do as François asked. He would keep to the cave for seven days and seven nights without moving from it. If François had not come back on the seventh night, he would ask his tapping what to do unless the tapping, of its own account, came to him with a new summons before. But meanwhile he would have to listen to François’s tapping as if it were his own, because that seemed to be the only tapping left in that dark world at the moment.

  As he told François this, François thought he saw, by that very still, upright candle flame between them, a look come into both Xhabbo’s and Nuin-Tara’s eyes which he had never encountered before. It was a very old look, perhaps the oldest look of which the eyes of the oldest living people in the world are capable: the look on a beloved person as though for the last time. It so nearly unmanned him that he blew out the candle before he himself could take a last look at Nonnie. The sound of the blood in his ears was so loud that he hardly heard Xhabbo’s and Nuin-Tara’s whispered, “Go carefully, Foot of the Day. Go carefully, and our father Mantis goes with you.”

  He answered with an almost inaudible, “And may you stay in peace.”

  Rifle in hand, haversack of food slung across his shoulder, he whispered to Hintza to follow and crawled out of the cave. He stayed on hands and knees at the exit just long enough to make certain that his eyes could see through the dark. Then he slung his rifle too across his shoulder and called Hintza to him. As Hintza’s head and shoulders appeared at the entrance, François held out his arms and picked him up.

  It had been a long time since he had last carried Hintza and he was astonished to find him almost too heavy to manage. But carry him he had to, if Hintza was not to leave marks on dew-wet grass and bushes on the side of the hill. Somehow, François found the strength to step with Hintza carefully from stone to stone, until at last he reached the track at the bottom of the hill. With immense relief he put him down and had a quick look at the sky. Thank God! It was still dark. The morning star was high, but there was, surprisingly, no streak as yet of first light.

  With Hintza now at his side, François retraced his steps to Hunter’s Drift. When he arrived opposite the overhang of rock where he, Xhabbo, Hintza and the dying Mtuny wa had successfully hidden from the enemy the previous day, he stepped out of the track. Making no effort to conceal his spoor, he walked firmly to the ledge of rock and the fringe of bushes concealing the cavity underneath, crawled through it and, as he expected, found Mtunywa’s body stretched out on the sand exactly as they had left him. With great difficulty he forced himself to crawl all round Mtunywa, roughing up the surface of sand and pebbles, so as to remove any prints Xhabbo’s naked feet might have left on them. He knew it was all necessary work and yet felt as if he were desecrating a tomb and was not surprised that Hintza shared his feelings, to such an extent that at the first scent of Mtunywa a whimper of dismay escaped from him, loud and long enough to draw a half-hearted reprimand from François for the breach of discipline it was.

  His relief when he could leave was immense and once through the fringe of bushes, he paused only to tear a page from his despatch book, crumple it up in his hand and drop it in a conspicuous place nearby, convinced that his enemies would see it later and, seeing it, be led to discover his hiding place and Mtunywa’s body. Once that happened, he
was certain, they would be convinced that they had solved the mystery of where he had disappeared to the previous day, and look no further.

  From there he hurried to the edge of the clearing, to stand immovable in the shadow of the bushes. Carefully he observed the slowly dying fire of his home and the clearing in between. It was still empty and so quiet that the pitiful sound of the cattle lowing in their kraals once more reached him distinctly. Kneeling down beside Hintza, he told him to scout quickly in the direction of his home to look for any sign of leopard. He knew, of course, that there would be none after such a night of fire and clamour and destruction, but he knew that a dog as intelligent as Hintza always needed a definite and plausible task.

  Hintza, who loved nothing more than a feeling of being important to François, had the additional incentive of a night of inactivity behind him and he vanished like a Bushman arrow into the clearing. He was only gone some five minutes, but even that was almost too much for he returned just as the first light, ’Bamuthi’s “hour of the horns of the bullock”, showed red as blood against the far edge of the bush across the clearing.

  Yet François was content, knowing that even five minutes would have been long enough for a dog as fast as Hintza to cover the clearing with spoor which the enemy could not fail to find and, finding, conclude that Hintza had been with him all the time. That done, he turned his back on his home and started down the track leading to Mopani’s camp, at a double of which even Nonnie’s father would have approved, and without any attempt to conceal their spoor.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Dawn of Heitse-Eibib

  NORMALLY, OF COURSE, François would never have been so reckless as to travel through the bush at that hour, at such a pace. It was the moment when the carnivorous animals who had failed to kill the evening before or during the night, would lie in wait for some defenceless prey. They knew only too well that the relief which the end of a night, made darker and longer by danger and need for unceasing vigilance, brought to the life of the bush was always so great as the day flowered wide open around them that they would allow themselves the rare luxury of unawareness, and behave as if they had no enemies.