Jock of the Bushveld

by Percy Fitzpatrick

  The effect was quite electrical! Like an arrow from the bow Jock flew at him. The warning shout came too late, and as Jock’s teeth fastened in him behind the terrified boy gave a wild bound over the kudu, carrying Jock like a streaming coat-tail behind him.

  The work was stopped and the natives drew off in grave consultation. I thought that they had had enough of Jock for one day and that they would strike work and leave me, probably returning later on to steal the meat while I went for help from the waggons. But it turned out that the consultation was purely medical and in a few minutes I had an interesting exhibition of native doctoring. They laid the late orator out face downwards, and one burly ‘brother’ straddled him across the small of the back; then after a little preliminary examination of the four slits left by Jock’s fangs, he proceeded to cauterise them with the glowing ends of sundry sticks which an assistant took from the fire and handed to him as required. The victim flapped his hands on the ground and hallooed out ‘My babo! My babo!’ but he did not struggle; and the operator toasted away with methodical indifference.

  The orator stood it well!

  I took Jock away to the big tree near the pool: it was evident that he too had had enough of it for one day.

  Jantje

  There was no hunting for several days after the affair with the kudu cow. Jock looked worse the following day than he had done since recovering consciousness: his head and neck swelled up so that chewing was impossible and he could only lap a little soup or milk, and could hardly bend his neck at all.

  On the morning of the second day Jim Makokel’ came up with his hostile looking swagger and a cross worried look on his face and, in a half angry and wholly disgusted tone, jerked out at me, ‘The dog is deaf. I say so! Me! Makokela! Jock is deaf. He does not hear when you speak. Deaf! Yes, deaf!’

  Jim’s tone grew fiercer as he warmed up; he seemed to hold me responsible. The moment the boy spoke I knew it was true – it was the only possible explanation of many little things; nevertheless I jumped up hurriedly to try him in a dozen ways, hoping to find that he could hear something. Jim was right; he was really stone deaf. It was pathetic to find how each little subterfuge that drew his eyes from me left him out of reach: it seemed as if a link had broken between us and I had lost my hold.

  That was wrong, however. In a few days he began to realise the loss of hearing; and after that, feeling so much greater dependence on sight, his watchfulness increased so that nothing escaped him. None of those who saw him in that year, when he was at his very best, could bring themselves to believe that he was deaf. With me it made differences both ways: something lost and something gained. If he could hear nothing, he saw more; the language of signs developed; and taking it all round I believe the sense of mutual dependence for success and mutual understanding was greater than ever.

  Snowball went on to the retired list at the end of the next trip.

  Joey the Smith stood at the forge one day, trimming a red-hot horseshoe, when I rode up and dropping the reins over Snowball’s head, sang out ‘Morning, Joey!’

  Joey placed the chisel on the shoe with nice calculation of the amount he wanted to snip off; his assistant boy swung the big hammer, and an inch cube of red-hot iron dropped off. Then Joey looked up with, what seemed to me, a conflict of innocent surprise and stifled amusement in his face. The boy also turned to look, and – the insignificant incident is curiously unforgettable – trod upon the piece of hot iron. ‘Look where you’re standing,’ said Joey reproachfully, as the smoke and smell of burning skin-welt rose up; and the boy with a grunt of disgust, such as we might give at a burned boot, looked to see what damage had been done to his ‘unders’. It gave me an even better idea of a nigger’s feet than those thorn-digging operations when we had to cut through a solid whitish welt a third of an inch thick.

  Joey grinned openly at the boy; but he was thinking of Snowball.

  ‘I wonder you had the heart, Joey, I do indeed!’ I said, shaking my head at him.

  ‘You would have him, lad, there was no refusin’ you! You arst so nice and wanted him so bad!’

  ‘But how could you bear to part with him, Joey? It must have been like selling one of the family.’

  ‘ ‘Es, Boy,’ es! We are a bit stooped – our lot! Is he still such a fool, or has he improved any with you?’

  ‘Joey, I’ve learned him – full up to the teeth. If he stops longer he will become wicked, like me; and you would not be the ruin of an innocent young thing trying to earn a living honestly, if he can?’

  ‘Come round behind the shop, Boy. I got a pony’ll suit you proper!’ He gave a hearty laugh, and added ‘You can always get what you arsk for – if it ain’t worth having. Moril! Don’t arsk! I never offered you Snowball. This one’s different. You can have him at cost price; and that’s an old twelve-month account! Ten pounds. He’s worth four of it! Salted an’ shootin’! Shake!’ and I gripped his grimy old fist gladly, knowing it was ‘jonnick’ and ‘a square deal’.

  That was Mungo Park – the long, strong, low-built half-bred Basuto pony – well-trained and without guile.

  I left Snowball with his previous owner, to use as required, and never called back for him; and if this should meet the eye of Joey the Smith he will know that I no longer hope his future life will be spent in stalking a wart-eyed white horse in a phantom Bushveld. Mungo made amends.

  There was a spot between the Komati and Crocodile Rivers on the north side of the road where the white man seldom passed and nature was undisturbed; few knew of water there; it was too well concealed between deep banks and the dense growth of thorns and large trees.

  The spot always had great attractions for me apart from the big game to be found there. I used to steal along the banks of this lone water and watch the smaller life of the bush. It was a delightful field for naturalist and artist, but unfortunately we thought little of such things, and knew even less; and now nothing is left from all the glorious opportunities but the memory of an endless fascination and a few facts that touch the human chord and will not submit to be forgotten.

  There were plenty of birds – guineafowl, pheasant, partridge, korhaan and bush pou. Jock accompanied me of course when I took the fowling-piece, but merely for companionship; for there was no need for him on these occasions. I shot birds to get a change of food and trusted to walking them up along the river banks and near drinking pools; but one evening Jock came forward of his own accord to help me – a sort of amused volunteer; and after that I always used him.

  He had been at my heels, apparently taking little interest in the proceedings from the moment the first bird fell and he saw what the game was; probably he was intelligently interested all the time but considered it nothing to get excited about. After a time I saw him turn aside from the line we had been taking and stroll off at a walking pace, sniffing softly the while. When he had gone a dozen yards he stopped and looked back at me; then he looked in front again with his head slightly on one side, much as he would have done examining a beetle rolling his ball.

  There were no signs of anything, yet the grass was short for those parts, scarce a foot high, and close, soft and curly. A brace of partridges rose a few feet from Jock, and he stood at ease calmly watching them, without a sign or a move to indicate more than amused interest. The birds were absurdly tame and sailed so quietly along that I hesitated at first to shoot; then the noise of the two shots put up the largest number of partridges I have ever seen in one lot, and a line of birds rose for perhaps sixty yards across our front. There was no wild whirr and confusion: they rose in leisurely fashion as if told to move on, sailing infinitely slowly down the slope to the thorns near the donga. Running my eye along the line I counted them in twos up to between thirty and forty; and that could not have been more than half. How many coveys had packed there, and for what purpose, and whether they came every evening, were questions which one would have liked answered now; but they were not of sufficient interest then to encourage a second visit another evening.
The birds sailed quietly into the little wood and many of them alighted on branches of the larger trees. It is the only time I have seen a partridge in a tree; but when one comes to think it out, it seems common sense that, in a country teeming with vermin and night prowlers, all birds should sleep off the ground. Perhaps they do!

  There were numbers of little squirrel-like creatures there too. Our fellows used to call them ground squirrels and ‘tree-rats’, because they live underground, yet climb trees readily in search of food; they were little fellows like meerkats, with bushy tails ringed in brown, black and white, of which the waggon boys made decorations for their slouch hats.

  Jock wanted a go at them: they did not appear quite so much beneath notice as the birds.

  Along the water’s edge one came on the leguaans, huge repulsive water lizards three to four feet long, like crocodiles in miniature, sunning themselves in some favourite spot in the margin of reeds or on the edge of the bank; they give one the jumps by the suddenness of their rush through the reeds and plunge into deep water.

  There were otters, too, big black-brown fierce fellows, to be seen swimming silently close under the banks. I got a couple of them, but was always nervous of letting Jock into the water after things, as one never knew where the crocodile lurked. He got an ugly bite from one old dog-otter which I shot in shallow water; and, mortally wounded as he was, the otter put up a rare good fight before Jock finally hauled him out.

  Then there were the cane-rats, considered by some most excellent and delicate of meats, as big and tender as small sucking pigs. The cane-rat, living and dead, was one of the stock surprises, and the subject of jokes and tricks upon the unsuspecting: there seems to be no sort of ground for associating the extraordinary fat thing, gliding among the reeds or swimming silently under the banks, with either its live capacity as rat or its more attractive dead role of roast sucking pig.

  The hardened ones enjoyed setting this treat before the hungry and unsuspecting and, after a hearty meal, announcing – ‘That was roast rat: good, isn’t it?’ The memory of one experience gives me water in the gills now! It was unpleasant, but not equal to the nausea and upheaval which supervened when, after a very savoury stew of delicate white meat, we were shown the fresh skin of a monkey hanging from the end of the buckrails, with the head drooping forward, eyes closed, arms dangling lifeless and limp open hands – a ghastly caricature of some hanged human, shrivelled and shrunk within its clothes of skin. I felt like a cannibal.

  The water tortoises in the silent pools, grotesque muddy fellows, were full of interest to the quiet watcher, and better that way than as the ‘turtle soup’ which once or twice we ventured on and tried to think was good!

  There were certain hours of the day when it was more pleasant and profitable to lie in the shade and rest. It is the time of rest for the Bushveld – that spell about middle day; and yet if one remains quiet, there is generally something to see and something worth watching. There were the insects on the ground about one which would not otherwise be seen at all; there were caterpillars clad in spiky armour made of tiny fragments of grass – fair defence no doubt against some enemies and a most marvellous disguise; other caterpillars clad in bark, impossible to detect until they moved; there were grasshoppers like leaves and irregularly shaped stick insects, with legs as bulky as the body, and all jointed by knots like irregular twigs – wonderful mimetic creatures.

  Jock often found these things for me. Something would move and interest him; and when I saw him stand up and examine a thing at his feet, turning it over with his nose or giving it a scrape with his paw, it was usually worth joining in the inspection. The Hottentot gods always attracted him as they reared up and ‘prayed’ before him; quaint things, with tiny heads and thin necks and enormous eyes, that sat up with forelegs raised to pray, as a pet dog sits up and begs.

  One day I was watching the ants as they travelled along their route – sometimes stopping to hobnob with those they met, sometimes hurrying past, and sometimes turning as though sent back on a message or reminded of something forgotten – when a little dry brown bean lying in a spot of sunlight gave a jump of an inch or two. At first it seemed that I must have unknowingly moved some twig or grass stem that flicked it; but as I watched it there was another vigorous jump. I took it up and examined it but there was nothing unusual about it, it was just a common light brown bean with no peculiarities or marks; it was a real puzzle, a most surprising and ridiculous one. I found half a dozen more in the same place; but it was some days before we discovered the secret. Domiciled in each of them was a very small but very energetic worm, with a trapdoor or stopper on his one end, so artfully contrived that it was almost impossible with the naked eye to locate the spot where the hole was. The worm objected to too much heat and if the beans were placed in the sun or near the fire the weird astonishing jumping would commence.

  The beans were good for jumping for several months, and once in Delagoa one of our party put some on a plate in the sun beside a fellow who had been doing himself too well for some time previously: he had become a perfect nuisance to us and we could not get rid of him. He had a mouthful of bread, and a mug of coffee on the way to help it down, when the first bean jumped. He gave a sort of peck, blinked several times to clear his eyes and then with his left hand pulled slightly at his collar, as though to ease it. Then came another jump, and his mouth opened slowly and his eyes got big. The plate being hollow and glazed was not a fair field for the jumpers – they could not escape; and in about half a minute eight or ten beans were having a rough and tumble.

  With a white scared face our guest slowly lowered his mug, screened his eyes with the other hand and, after fighting down the mouthful of bread, got up and walked off without a word.

  We tried to smother our laughter, but someone’s choking made him look back and he saw the whole lot of us in various stages of convulsions. He made one rude remark, and went on; but everyone he met that day made some allusion to beans, and he took the Durban steamer next morning.

  The insect life was prodigious in its numbers and variety; and the birds, the beasts and the reptiles were all interesting. There is a goodness knows what will turn up next atmosphere about the Bushveld which is, I fancy, unique. The story of the curate, armed with a butterfly net, coming face to face with a black-maned lion may or may not be true – in fact; but it is true enough as an illustration; and it is no more absurd or unlikely than the meeting at five yards of a lioness and a fever-stricken lad carrying a white green-lined umbrella – which is true! The boy stood and looked: the lioness did the same. ‘She seemed to think I was not worth eating, so she walked off,’ he used to say – and he was Trooper 242 of the Imperial Light Horse who went back under fire for wounded comrades and was killed as he brought the last one out.

  I had an old cross-bred Hottentot-Bushman boy once – one could not tell which lot he favoured – who was full of the folklore stories and superstitions of his strange and dying race, which he half humorously and half seriously blended with his own knowledge and hunting experiences. Jantje had the ugly wrinkled dry leather face of his breed, with hollow cheeks, high cheekbones and little pinched eyes, so small and so deeply set that no one ever saw the colour of them; the peppercorns of tight wiry wool that did duty for hair were sparsely scattered over his head like the stunted bushes in the desert; and his face and head were seamed with scars too numerous to count, the souvenirs of his drunken brawls. He resembled a tame monkey rather than a human creature, being, like so many of his kind, without the moral side or qualities of human nature which go to mark the distinction between man and monkey. He was normally most cheery and obliging; but it meant nothing, for in a moment the monkey would peep out, vicious, treacherous and unrestrained. Honesty, sobriety, gratitude, truth, fidelity and humanity were impossible to him: it seemed as if even the germs were not there to cultivate, and the material with which to work did not exist. He had certain make-believe substitutes, which had in a sense been grafted on to his na
ture and appeared to work, while there was no real use for them; they made a show, until they were tested; one took them for granted, as long as they were not disproved: it was a skin graft only, and there seemed to be no real ‘union’ possible between them and the tough alien stock. He differed in character and nature from the Zulu as much as he did from the white man; he was as void of principle as – well, as his next of kin, the monkey; yet, while without either shame of, or contempt for, cowardice; he was wholly without fear of physical danger, having a sort of fatalist’s indifference to it; and that was something to set off against his moral deficit. I put Jantje on to wash clothes the day he turned up at the waggons to look for work, and as he knelt on the rocks stripped to the waist I noticed a very curious knotted line running up his right side from the lowest rib into the armpit. The line was whiter than his yellow skin; over each rib there was a knot or widening in the line; and under the arm there was a big splotchy star – all markings of some curious wound.

  He laughed almost hysterically, his eyes disappearing altogether and every tooth showing, as I lifted his arm to investigate; and then in high-pitched falsetto tones he shouted in a sort of ecstasy of delight, ‘Die ouw buffels, Baas! Die buffels bull, Baas!’

  ‘Buffalo! Did he toss you?’ I asked.

  Jantje seemed to think it the best joke in the world and with constant squeals of laughter and graphic gestures gabbled off his account.

  His master, it appears, had shot at and slightly wounded the buffalo, and Jantje had been placed at one exit from the bush to prevent the herd from breaking away. As they came towards him he fired at the foremost one; but before he could reload the wounded bull made for him and he ran for dear life to the only tree near – one of the flat-topped thorns. He heard the thundering hoofs and the snorting breath behind, but raced on hoping to reach the tree and dodge behind it; a few yards short, however, the bull caught him, in spite of a jump aside, and flung him with one toss right on top of the thorn-tree.