A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  Then they went over to the haversacks. Xhabbo was made to shoulder one of the two heaviest, the other of course was for himself. In addition he gave Xhabbo one satchel of precious ammunition to sling round the other shoulder and handed him a field flask. Nonnie and Nuin-Tara got the lightest of the haversacks, filled mostly with medicines, bandages, odd bits of spare clothing and cloth that François had accumulated over the months, including some old face towels and biltong and rusks packed in their dixies. Quickly he adjusted the straps on their shoulders, not only to ensure that they were comfortable but that they would not chafe their untried skins underneath. Noticing that the laces of Nonnie’s ankle boots were tied in an over-long single bow he knelt beside her and shortened them by doubling the bow, muttering an explanation that once years before he had nearly fallen in the path of a charging rhinocerous by tripping over his own laces. He had been saved only by ’Bamuthi roughly pushing him into the painful safety of a thorn-bush at the side of the track.

  “There, Nonnie,” he exclaimed, “out you go now. I’ll follow in a second.”

  Shouldering his own loads, easing his hunting-knife in its sheath and loading the magazine of his rifle to the full, he put out the last of the candles and crawled quickly out into the dark after her.

  He found the three of them close together, with Hintza beside Nonnie, standing just beyond the great old bush which covered the entrance to the cave. His eyes, already recovering fast from the impact of candle-light, showed him Xhabbo in the act of turning about and then getting down on his hands and knees to smooth out the marks of their crawling and Hintza’s feet on what there was of ground around the entrance to the cave. That done he scattered dried bits of grass and leaves over the places to look as if they had just been dropped there by the casual night air of the bush.

  It was all over in a matter of moments, and Xhabbo was whispering to him, “Foot of the Day, come quick and look and tell me what you feel we are to do.”

  Stepping carefully from stone to stone until they reached the great boulder which marked the far end of the concealed approach to the cave. They came upright behind it and looked over it in the direction of François’s shattered home below. François noticed that the truck which he and Xhabbo had heard had apparently arrived and was standing there with lights blazing to reinforce all sorts of other lights and fires that had been lit in what at the moment of his return to the cave had been an area of complete darkness. Indeed, there was an expanse of light stretched taut across the black like an immense piece of yellow fly-paper, against which the dark outlines of men appeared stuck frantic with movement as insects struggling to free themselves.

  Obviously the enemy was so sure of itself that it was making no attempt at concealment. The clamour of soldiers preparing for action at high speed was loud and clear in the still morning air. Ominous as it all was, it was so much what François had expected, and the distance between the hill on which they were standing and his old home was so great, that he would not have been any more alarmed than before, had not Xhabbo whispered in his ear.

  “Foot of the Day, all that your eyes feel themselves to be seeing down there is not all. Xhabbo knows that when he first came to stand by this grandfather of a boulder, his eyes were altogether full of men moving up along the river and spreading out round the hill down there below. Xhabbo has a tapping that tells him that some of these men are already near and others going round to the back of this hill towards the way we have to go. Look, see how high the Foot of the Day has stepped into the sky and how small a darkness we have left. But tell me, how are we to go? I, Xhabbo, knowing the way must go first, and you should come last to make us safe from the men coming up the hill. But I feel I need you for a greater danger in front and . . .”

  Xhabbo was interrupted by a rush of sound behind them. There, unbidden, was Hintza, leaping at François as he would never have dreamed of doing unless some imminent peril had freed him from professional obedience to orders and forced him to take so unusual an initiative as to leave his allotted place of duty by Nonnie’s side. As it happened the warning he had come to deliver was unnecessary because as his paws came to rest on François’s shoulder, there came from the far side of the hill three sharp, distinct barks of a fox followed by a long sustained piping of a night plover, exactly as François had requested in his intercepted letter to Mopani. The call came obviously from an expert in these things but not expert enough to deceive Xhabbo or even François because both turned instinctively to each other to confirm the deception.

  Xhabbo got in first with a Bushman idiom that would have made François laugh with delight at any other time. “Foot of the Day, those are not a fox and a plover feeling themselves to be men but a man feeling himself to be both fox and a plover.”

  It was unnecessary for either of them to comment on the danger to which it testified because it could only have come at a moment when their enemies were certain of their position. What was far more serious, it had come from behind them, proving that Xhabbo’s eyes had not deceived him when they had seen the dark shadows of men deploying at the base of the hill.

  “You’re right,” François told Xhabbo urgently. “We must go ahead and our women must follow, Nonnie behind and Nuin-Tara last because Nuin-Tara will feel any danger coming from behind us long before Nonnie. But I can’t help feeling we cannot go on like that for long. It will be difficult for the four of us and Hin to get by the enemy without being seen and even if we do get by we shall leave so great a spoor that they will have no difficulty in following us. And I’m not sure that someone like Nonnie can travel fast enough with us all day long keeping ahead of the enemy. It there not something else we can do? You see Xhabbo, I have not told you yet but the enemy does not know about you and Nuin-Tara and Nonnie. I am certain they only know about me and Hintza. Would it not be best if we could somehow make the enemy go on believing that?”

  François was speaking purely out of instinct. It was an area of life on which he had no experience and he felt that he should turn to Xhabbo who must have experienced similar dangers many times and would have been minutely schooled in the tradition evolved by the Bushmen throughout thousands of years of persecution in all the best ways of dealing with such a situation.

  From the way Xhabbo grasped his hand and pressed it, he knew at once how right he had been. Words softly uttered flowed from him; the clicks that are the Bushman consonants crackled like electricity on his lips as he said that he knew his Foot of the Day would be feeling as he, Xhabbo, was feeling. Foot of the Day was right, there was only one thing to do, the Bushmen had always found in these circumstances. Feeling themselves to be utterly surrounded by their enemy they would choose one or two of the fastest and best among them to show themselves so that the enemy seeing them would go after them and give the main body a chance to escape. There could be no faster and better than Foot of the Day and Hintza, except that he found himself feeling full of longing to come with them. But someone had to show the women the way. Only he, Xhabbo, knew the way. Not even Nuin-Tara had ever travelled the way they were going now. So he would beg his Foot of the Day, once they were safely over the top of the hill and half-way down the slope, to branch off away to the south. Branching off he would show himself to the enemy but show himself only in a way that looked not deliberate and, above all, not so much that the enemy could kill him with those weapons that killed at so great a distance.

  Did Foot of the Day, Xhabbo asked obliquely, know a deep gorge that if they started running now they would reach just after sunrise? It began where a little river feeling itself to be only a little river, joined the great river they all knew, and the great river feeling itself to be great took the little river under its arm and carried it safely to the great water on the other side of the bush and hills. Did Foot of the Day know far up this gorge, a great mountain crowned with a wreath of cliffs the Bushmen called “Lamb-snatcher’s cliffs” because they were favourite roosting places of the “lamb-snatchers”, the greatest of all African
eagles?

  Yes, François assured him, he had twice been on patrol in this gorge with Mopani and knew the cliffs. Though he did not say so he marvelled at Xhabbo’s choice because it was just about the wildest of wild places in this area, over-populated with leopards, nyala, bush-buck, wild pigs, pythons and snakes, densely covered with bush and the ground so broken that few human beings ever went there by choice.

  Well then, Xhabbo continued, obviously relieved that François knew the place, underneath the greatest cliff there was an imperceptible track among great boulders, standing almost shoulder to shoulder and protected in between by broom, blue-bush, wild juniper and raisin bushes. Foot of the Day and Hintza, having made certain that they had utterly deceived the enemy and sent them on a false trail, should make their way back to this place by nightfall. He would find Xhabbo waiting there on the edge of the track to take them to another Bushman place of rest.

  Meanwhile Foot of the Day was not to be afraid for that utterly woman of his. Once certain that the enemy was following Foot of the Day and Hintza, he would lead them down to an old hippopotamus track hidden in the rushes and papyrus on the banks of the great river, and so on to the black gorge where, stepping from stone to stone, they would leave no spoor behind and find shelter on Lamb-snatcher’s Hill.

  “Yes, Xhabbo, yes,” François replied, praying that somehow he would not fail and that from somewhere, Heaven knew where, he would find the strength to do what he had to do. “You are utterly right. All I would ask is that the three of you take great care even now not to leave any spoor. As you say, the only spoor they must see now is mine and Hintza’s. And I am feeling full of a longing that finding our spoor leading the other way they will not stop to look for any other signs that might take them to the place of Mantis. I am feeling utterly that this place must remain as it has remained, and that I will not have betrayed it to your enemies.”

  François had hardly spoken when the fox and plover once more proclaimed their false announcement of Mopani’s coming but this time somewhat nearer, clearly indicating that out there in the darkness at the foot of the hill on the far side, their ring of armed men had been tightened. Also the sound had a new and imperious quality as if the person who uttered it could not understand why François had not yet showed himself, as he had promised to do in his letter to Mopani.

  They hastened then to rejoin the women. Xhabbo whispered his instructions to Nuin-Tara while François explained his to Nonnie, stressing that whatever happened she had to keep station between Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara. He told her as nonchalantly as he could that he and Hintza were moving out to the right to cover their flank and that she must not be at all alarmed if she did not see them for quite awhile. He begged her to go on as she had so admirably started on her own in his previous absence, and to study Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara in everything. And he added, with a tenderness that only comes to people in moments of disaster, “You’ve been wonderful Nonnie in all this, far more wonderful than I ever imagined any girl could possibly be. I know you will end up by doing all even better than Nuin-Tara. So off you go and stick as close as you can to Xhabbo, and all will be well in the end.”

  Nonnie had no idea how she managed it for she had her own shrewd concept of what François’s comings and goings could mean. But she could just utter what sounded to François a convincing reply, however unsteady the words felt in her own ears, “All right. And thank you. I’ll be seeing you. But please, please take care.”

  She turned quickly, before she could betray the fear clamouring within her, and following Xhabbo’s example she stepped out lightly from stone to stone after him with Nuin-Tara, close and graceful as a klipspringer behind her.

  François and Hintza, making no effort to conceal their spoor, moved off quickly to take up their station beside Xhabbo. Silently they went lightly, and all together, over the hill and down the far side as fast as they could. Half-way down, that faked Mopani call went up and out for a third time, more imperious then ever and so close that François knew they could never get by the men who must be circling or the person simulating the call unless he and Hintza diverted their attention as Xhabbo had suggested.

  “I go now, Xhabbo,” he whispered, oddly rough in tone out of anxiety and sense of haste. “I go. But please, whatever you hear, do not walk from your path or let either of the two women walk from the path either. Go! And your father Mantis goes with you.”

  Xhabbo did not reply in words. He paused briefly in his tracks just to raise his hand to his shoulder, palm out, in a final salute, a kind of Bushman hail and farewell, which François could only just read across the lengthening gap of darkness between them where he was already bending over Hintza ordering him to heel before they branched away fast towards the south. A quick glance over his shoulder showed him the shadows of Nonnie and Nuin-Tara, hurrying to catch up with the fading shadow of Xhabbo. Then the combined shadows vanished as presumably on Xhabbo’s command they sank to the ground, in order to try crawling forward unseen.

  He himself took great care to heed Xhabbo’s warning not to make himself over-conspicuous. He allowed himself only a measured ostentation, suggesting a carelessness produced by exhaustion rather than design. When he had gone a hundred yards or so away to the south, he paused and crouched down to look carefully around him. The morning star was high but the “Horns of the bullocks” hour had not yet come. It was darker than ever. The starlight was clear and the star murmer, so quintessential an element of all experience in François’s world, sounded as though it were the universal equivalent of a Greek chorus in a theatre of fate summoning the day from the wings of time to play its part in this new act of the play in which he had been so brutally cast. The whole declining outline of the hill, its fringe of boulders and bushes behind him were clear cut against that sky of stars and there was not a sign of Xhabbo or the two women, nor any sound of movement in that direction. And all that was good and encouraging, until there came a characteristic warning from Hintza at his side.

  Hintza was standing, ears erect, nose and tail aligned, pointing away to his right where François at once made out the shadow of a man crouched forward and low, moving foot by slow foot up the hill. Some fifty yards away to the left another shadow moved likewise. The moment Xhabbo had foreseen had come. François felt over the straps of his haversack as if by reflex, tested his hunting knife to see that it was still loose in its sheath, quietly slipped the safety catch from his gun and with his free hand made certain that all his loads and buckles were firm and safe. Thanks to that long draught of brandy, the stiffness and aches in his body seemed to have been anaesthetised for they vanished completely at that moment. The relief of it, joined with the cool air of the morning, made him feel unbelievably refreshed, as he said to Hintza with a will, “Now listen, Hin, no fighting unless it’s necessary. I see those two men. Yes, I see them, you dear, blessed dog of dogs, and thank you for telling me. We’re going to try and get by in between them. I count on you to tell me if there are any others ahead. So now you step straight out in front of me as if you are stalking a leopard and I’m following close behind. As fast as you can, boy.”

  Hintza whisked about and went into the relevant attitude almost gaily, as if this were just a continuation of the series of hunts he and François had conducted so successfully in the past, and led off with incomparable skill. Even François found it hard to follow his shadow, so that it took barely a minute for them to arrive mid-way in line between the two men coming up the hill.

  There François stopped, put his hand on Hintza’s rump as a sign for him to crouch down and lie still while he went down on his stomach as well with only his head raised to look up and along the slope of the hill. To his joy, the two men were moving now even more slowly and carefully than ever, straight towards the summit. Both to the right and left of the two he heard faint sounds that suggested they had companions out on their flanks. But thank Heaven, no sound of any sort had come as yet from where Xhabbo and the two women were moving. Yet he was certain that
he could not count on them remaining undiscovered for long unless he did something at once to distract the enemy. He jumped soundlessly to his feet, whispering urgently, “Here now, Hin, here! Straight down the hill as fast as we can. If anyone tries to stop us now, fight as much and as hard as you like.”

  Hintza leaped forward and down the hill, and François bounded after him, not with a clatter but nonetheless a thud from stone to stone, at that speed loud enough to be audible some distance away. His enemies heard it almost at once. In that impulsive and inexperienced way of theirs which both the Scot and the Frenchman had condemned, the men nearest to François, in whose ears the sound was therefore loudest, began calling out warnings for everyone to hear far and wide. Then it was as if the hillside around them was a great graveyard with its moment of resurrection arrived; wherever he glanced as he ran men were coming up straight out of graves of darkness alarmingly upright and alive, armed and ready for attack, because the air was light with the phosphorescent glint of stars on the steel of many bayonets.

  Yet quick as the enemy reaction was, to the right and left of François, there still remained a wide gap in their line which he and Hintza, he felt, could get through with relative ease, provided they moved at their greatest speed. So they ran for it all out with no effort at concealment.

  “Go, Hin, go to it!” he called out, perhaps more in encouragement to himself than to Hintza, who was tireless. They were almost safe at the far rim of the gap, close to where the dark fringe of the bush impinged on the hill, when one of the enemy must have seen him clearly enough to shoot, for suddenly bullets went by like angry bees at his ear, followed by the rasp of automatic rifle fire. From all around and behind the hill men began shooting rapidly and long so that it sounded as if a full-scale battle had broken out there. Miraculously, still unhit, François reached the foot of the hill and was beginning to feel certain that everyone would be rushing to the place of the shooting so that Xhabbo and the women would be safe, when a large black figure jumped out from behind a boulder directly in Hintza’s path. A dagger of flame stabbed at the dark and a shot rang out. Thank God! He could tell from the sound that the shot had not found a mark, but had merely gone close enough to make Hintza swerve from his course. François was already near enough to see a gun with a bayonet at the end thrusting at Hintza and the long, speed-taut shadow of Hintza flying, it seemed, almost directly into the point of the bayonet.