A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  François went black with despair for he could not imagine how Hintza could not be impaled on the bayonet or, if not, hurt severely, perhaps fatally. But as he felt it, a rifle clattered on a stone ahead, and the shadow of the man fell over. Sounds of a violent struggle came up from the ground nearby and then there, almost at his feet, was a man not only fighting for his life and grunting as he was trying in vain to call for help. Yet no sound of any kind came from Hintza, which he knew was a sign that Hintza had a mind for nothing but killing and was not going to waste any breath and energy on noise.

  How wise Hintza was in concentrating on this single issue was immediately clear to François as he slid to a halt beside the struggling pair. Hintza had his teeth firmly fastened just above the place where the neck joined the shoulder of his enemy and was desperately trying to keep a burly man pinned down to the earth until he could strangle him with his teeth. The man was obviously powerful and filled with the energy of desperation. Somehow he had managed to pull out a long jungle knife from his belt and was just bringing it up to stab Hintza low down in his side.

  Without hesitating, François shot the man through the head. Doing so he had no feelings of any kind except relief that he was in time to save Hintza’s life, and that they had to move on at once if they were to get away safely.

  “Come, Hin, quick. Follow me!” he called out. But Hintza was still sunk deep down in the profound instincts involved in a dog’s fight to the death for his and François’s survival that he went on savaging the throat of the dead man as if he could still come alive again. And for once he did not heed François’s call. François was forced to lose invaluable moments, kneeling by him and whispering in his ear, almost like a mother to an hysterical child, “There now, Hin, there now, boy, it’s all over. All over now and nothing to fear. We must go at once. There now, Hin, come and look, he’s dead. Oh come at once, at once! Do you hear me, sir?”

  This last “at once” and its sequence were uttered in his severest tone and it was only then that Hintza let go and responded. To François’s horror, he responded on only three of his four legs. François wanted to see to the other leg there and then, but the shooting was louder and wilder than ever and the air above them filled with the sound as if all the wild bees in Africa were swarming for a world war.

  There was only one comfort in all that noise. He believed the sound of his own shot would have been lost in it. For all he knew, with such careless and wild shooting his enemies might not only be shooting at shadows but at one another. He was amazed to find that the thought of such a possibility became a kind of prayer for them indeed to shoot and kill one another until not a single person was left alive. Yet he knew the prayer was vain and that he had no time to lose because sooner or later sanity would return to the scene. With the day near, his and Hintza’s spoor would be found and they would once more be pursued, this time even more ardently and in greater numbers than the day before.

  For the moment he had to suppress his concern for Hintza’s condition in the greater concern of finding a safe place in the bush ahead where he could attend to the wound, saying to himself over and over again as he concluded this, “Dear God, please make it only a wound and not a broken leg. I might be able to deal with a wound but with a broken leg, neither Hintza nor I can ever hope to get away.”

  In this manner he moved as fast as he thought Hintza could follow along an old game track that led deeper into the bush and along the foot of a range of hills running to the south, parallel and between the great gorge to which Xhabbo was travelling. Once deep in the bush, just as soon as the first light exploded over the hushed bush, he stopped to look and listen carefully. There was still some spasmodic shooting in the distance far behind him but as yet no sound of pursuit or startled flight of any of the many birds of morning to suggest one. He could turn at last to Hintza who was bravely still at his heels, without a whimper of protest. Kneeling down, and in a voice gentle as a woman’s François said, “Oh come now, dear Hin. Let’s look and see what he did to you, that terrible man!”

  The light was good enough to show that Hintza had a deep bayonet thrust in the soft part of his left back leg. Fortunately his healthy young blood had already begun to congeal and was only very slightly oozing from the centre, so that François knew no vital artery or vein could have been cut. Gently he felt the crooked leg around the wound, fingered the muscle and sinews, and softly caressed the bone up and down from the paw to where it joined the body.

  Hintza shivered with the pain of the contact, gentle as it was, but stood still without a sound. Thank God! The bone was not broken, and though the wound itself seemed terrible enough François felt now he could deal with it. He hastened to extract from his pocket one of the field dressings he always carried on him, clamped it on the wound and bandaged it firmly in position. The wound, thank Heaven again, was in the one place where he could bandage it with the certainty of it staying in position, for he found he could knot the bandage both underneath the groin and again on top of Hintza’s spine.

  That done, he took some of the aureomyocin tablets he carried with his field dressings, and poured some water from his flask into his hat. He opened Hintza’s jaws, pushed the tablets down his throat, held his jaws together and tilted his chin for just long enough to be certain that the tablets had gone down.

  “Good Hin, good,” he said. “There’s some water for you.”

  Hintza needed no urging and lapped up the water. When he had done, he looked up in a way so like the look on his face when he had been pleading for more chocolate a few hours before, that François could not say no. Knowing that there was a stream ahead, he poured all the water left in his flask into his hat and happily watched Hintza drinking it all up, scolding him as he did so in the excessive jest of relief without bounds, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, frightening me like that. Shame on you, you miserable, outrageous little hound. Yes, frightened me to death, you terrible old goggatjiefn1 you!”

  At that Hintza, quick to detect a note of reproach even in jest, looked so abashed that François put his arms round him, pressed him to him and for a moment held his own cheek against Hintza’s, saying, “Of course you know I don’t mean a word of it! You’ve been a wonder. Without you I would have been on the end of that bayonet and not you. Now come, let’s get away from this place and all these terrible people. I’ll go as gently as I can.”

  He started off on the same track, still bearing south of Xhabbo’s course, first at a fast walk, repeatedly looking over his shoulder to measure if it was not too much for Hintza. But as he noticed that Hintza was keeping up with ease and no obvious increase of pain, he began jogging along, gradually raising the pace to the speed necessary for putting a safe distance between him and his enemies, before the heat of the day made travelling over-exacting. He was reassured to find that even so Hintza was keeping up well. Nonetheless, the sight of him bravely coming along on three legs just as if he had his usual four in use so moved François that he could not help stopping after a while. When Hintza came up to him he said in a voice harsh with affection, “You know what, you little old insect, you’re a bloody marvel! I’d like you to know I’m only doing this so we can have a great a gap as possible from our enemies and find a nice place ahead for you to lie up and rest.”

  The sound of the shooting had vanished and only the silence of the bush told him that somewhere far back something utterly foreign of which it heartily disapproved had entered it. Indeed, so still was it just then and so listless had the wind of morning become that he no longer heard as much as a whisper from the leaves, but only the beat of his heart drumming at his temples. He was about to go on when an odd new sound reached him from some hundred yards to the north-west of the track, towards the way of the wind that Xhabbo was following. Faintly at first, but growing gradually louder, he heard a strange rumbling, as if numbers of vast witches’ cauldrons had suddenly been brought to the boil. He thought he knew what it meant, but it sounded too good to be true, and he
was compelled to make sure.

  Just ten yards away there stood a dead giant of a tree and instantly he made for it. Its bark was ragged and the trunk deeply scratched by the claws of many leopards who obviously used it as a nail-file for sharpening the points of their crampon claws as well as the top for an observation post. He had no need to tell Hintza of his intentions, as Hintza had often enough seen him doing what he was about to do. He climbed up the tree, noticing-as he went higher how well the leopards had pioneered the way for him. Almost at the top he found a fork high enough to show him the bush spread out like an immense sea of green and gold around him. It was as if he were there at the mast-head of the morning and could look back to where the hills above his old home were purple with shadow below, but with their bushy heads ringed with crowns of diamond-dew light. There was no sign as yet that their tracks had been found and that they were being pursued, because there were by now enough birds, baboons and apes awake for warning if that were so.

  Concentrating on the area to the north-west where the volume of rumbling was greatest, he noticed that the immense surface of the bush was mysteriously agitated, leaves trembling, branches waving and some of the tallest tree-tops shaken as if caught in gusts of wind in this utterly windless moment. François, of course, had never seen the sea but had read a great deal about it, and in that kind of crows-nest of the bush in which he found himself, he had a feeling as if a school of enormous fish were on the move over there.

  This impression was heightened when in gaps in between the greatest of the trees, one immense marble back after another began showing itself in a slow arc of eurhythmic movement as it passed over the smoking crest of early light, drifting like spume and spray of the swell of the sea-green forest deep, before vanishing in the trough below another vast wave of shadow looming beyond, in the way that the whales of his picture-books seemed to love to show their backs above the swinging sea. And then of course he could not doubt: they were to the ocean of his bush what whales were to the sea. The superfluous confirmation came when all round him the slender ends of the long blue-grey trunks of elephants emerged elegantly from the ocean of shadow to sniff the sun-dipped tree-tops and burning tips of branches until they found a sprig to the taste of their gourmet palates. Their trunks would curl round it then like the tendrils of some vast convolvulous, wrench it off with an audible crack and pull it down into the ocean of shadow below, without the bodies that powered the process becoming visible, so that the disembodied scene had a strange Merlinesque quality about it. But soon he saw trunks and great marble backs plunge on reunited and at last the gleam of ivory tusks, incandescent, warm, knightly above a caparison of purple shadow, forming altogether a vision so numinous as to take command of François’s senses.

  It had always been one of his favourite sights but his familiarity with it had never bred any feelings of contempt. Indeed this morning it was as if he were seeing it for the first time, and he was strangely uplifted, for in the presence of this great assembly of the lords of his bush, he seemed to have rediscovered a moment of innocence in his life, free from fear and malice. Utterly without fear themselves, in their giant strength unusually tender and wise, loving in their relationships with one another, and considerate of other forms of being, even if to a plant somewhat large of appetite, they seemed to him to be breakfasting so at peace and at one with life and their companions that the “I” in him became a one too.

  This “one” just could not help feeling that what had happened back at Hunter’s Drift was an aberration which would never happen again, and it had only to seek admission to this noble and most ancient order to be at peace and at one with itself as well. But even more immediate to the François of that moment, was a feeling that he had only to accept this assembly of peers as his guide now and they would direct him to a stream of running water where they went daily, not only for refreshment and delight but out of a sense of cleanliness that was next to the great feeling of godliness they gave out at that hour.

  François knew at once what he would do. He would put himself and Hintza in the protection of this great company, swimming so it seemed in the ocean of shadow since no legs were visible as yet to explain their movement. The resolve became all the more ardent when in a vacant patch nearby there appeared the largest old elephant ever seen in that part of the bush. François knew him well and treasured him above all others. He came from Mopani’s reserve, like the immense following of which he was king-emperor. Over many years in which he and his people had been scrupulously protected by Mopani and his rangers, he had lost much of his hatred of men and came near to acquiring a relationship of trust with them. He was so conspicuous and remarkable an elephant that in the manner of the bush he had to have a name of praise. The Matabele rangers gave him one of the greatest in their history: they called him Mosilikatze.fn2 But for François he had always been Hannibal the Great.

  That was sign enough to send François slithering down the tree. The rumble of stomachs now was very near. If not careful, he would soon be caught in the middle of the herd itself, when what he really wanted to do was to travel with Hintza just slightly ahead of them, keeping touch through the sound of their boiling, bubbling stomachs, staying always close enough to know at once if anything happened to alarm them. He knew that provided he and Hintza kept only thirty yards ahead of the elephants, they would be in no danger of being seen because elephant eyesight is notoriously bad. He was not even afraid that they would pick up his and Hintza’s smell, although they have the keenest sense of smell of any animal in the bush, since what little breath was left in the wind of morning was stirring from them towards him.

  Even should they pick up a whiff of his and Hintza’s scent, they were so discriminate and had such incredible memories that he believed they would recognise the scent as that of old and proved friends, and whether they saw or smelt, they would not attack but merely move circumspectly aside, which was the one thing above all others François wanted to avoid. He wanted them to move directly after him so that the elephants would eliminate his and Hintza’s tracks. Although his enemies would certainly find his and Hintza’s spoor sooner or later merging with the great satin imprints elephants made on the rough red texture of the earth, no tracker could possibly imagine that a boy and a dog could have done anything except give way as quickly as possible before the advance of so great a column of beasts. Should the enemy be bold enough to press directly after the elephants and try to disperse so great a herd, they would not help themselves thereby, because he and Hintza would be warned by such alert animals, long before the enemy caught up with them, and have time enough to find a good place of hiding.

  Accordingly François hastened to break the good news to Hintza, who of course already knew all about the presence of the elephants despite his reluctant pre-occupation with his own pain. In the telling he put his hand to Hintza’s nose, afraid that he might find it hot and dry with fever from the wound. To his amazement it was still faintly damp and cool. Considering the long distance Hintza had come on only three legs, this, even more than the brigade of imperial guards covering their withdrawal now, raised François’s hopes, for it suggested that the tablets he had given Hintza, as once he had given them to the wounded Xhabbo, were doing their work and preventing fever and infection from his deep wound.

  When he judged the nearest rumbling to be only ten yards away, he led off down the track again. Elephants even when browsing can move so fast that François was afraid they would have to travel once more on the run. But their protectors appeared to be finding the food so much to their taste that they were unusually leisurely in their advance. Whenever François looked behind he would see one great granite shape after the other, pause to extract a bouquet of succulent green leaves from a tree anointed and dressed with sun and insert it like the finest of French salads with aristocratic precision into their mouths. Most reassuring of all, Hannibal the Great himself was so full of the peace of the morning and so conscious of the dignity his high office demanded t
hat he was not only eating more slowly and fastidiously than the rest but in between one dish of green and another, one course of sweet wild berries and another, was leading his formation at his stateliest pace, so that it took François and Hintza two hours to reach the stream, when normally he could have done the distance easily in under an hour. But that, considering Hintza’s plight, was all to the good.

  Since the stream there was particularly shallow, or “feeling itself to be only a little stream” as it would have been put by Xhabbo, who, pray God, was by now well on his way to safety, François crossed it easily and without hesitation so that Hannibal the Great could exercise his imperial prerogative of having the shaded banks for the refreshment and ablution of himself and his subjects. On the far side he found shelter and shade for themselves behind a slate blue boulder under an umbrella of some vast wild fig trees. For the bush stepped down on to the edge of the stream and raised its greatest columns there. Should the need arise, he had cover abundant and to spare at hand for his and Hintza’s safety.

  Settling Hintza down in the smoothest patch of ground he could find, he went at once to the stream to fetch one hatful of water after the other, watching the elephants come glistening with dew out of the shadows of the bush, their young rushing eagerly ahead with trumpet-squeals of joy at the sight of the stream, while their parents followed like Patricians about to take to Roman waters. Hintza lapped up his water with obvious gratitude and François then allowed himself a hatful, refilled his empty flask and prepared to bed down beside Hintza for as long as the heat of the day lasted. But just for a moment he sat up. Yes, his eyes had not deceived him; there, only a mile to the north-west of him was the summit of Lamb-snatcher’s Hill. He had not been wrong in concluding that the elephants were following the route from the reserve which he and Mopani had taken when they themselves had gone on patrol in the gorge on the far side of the hill.