Tales of South Africa. H. A. Bryden
many Masarwa women, a great conversationalist, soon found herself acquiring a strong influence over the simple, easily managed hunter. Yet she had a great affection for Kwaneet, and tempered her sway with many little amenities.
In their second winter together the drought had been intense; not a pit or sucking-hole held water in the desert, there were no melons, and the game had nearly all trekked for the rivers. And so Kwaneet and Nakeesa, too, had quitted the open veldt and the waterless forest, and lived temporarily on the banks of the upper Tamalakan, north-east of Lake Ngami.
One morning Kwaneet came back to their camping-place with a piece of welcome news. Half a mile away he had found the carcase of a fat zebra, killed by a lion quite recently, and only a quarter devoured. Here was a ready-made feast, without the trouble of hunting. Nakeesa had two children now; her elder, a boy, by Sinikwe, a precocious little Bushman imp, could toddle alone; her younger, Kwaneet’s son, she still carried. They set off together along the river, which was now swarming with bird life. Roseate flamingoes and ibises, lovely egrets, storks and cranes and herons, were to be seen decking the shallows. Charming jacanas with chestnut plumage, white and golden gorgets, long legs, and the slenderest spidery feet, ran in little troops upon the thinnest film of floating vegetation. Great spur-heeled Senegal cuckoos flapped heavily from one reed-bed to another. Duck, geese, widgeon, and teal thronged the spreading waters, and clamoured incessantly. A hippopotamus or two blew in the distance; sluggish crocodiles floated, log-like yet watchful, in middle stream. For the Masarwas, who love the dry deserts, and shun the haunts even of black mankind, all this wealth of river-life seemed a very welcome and a very novel change. But then there was a kraal of Makobas within five miles, which was a drawback.
It was not long before they came to the dead zebra, which lay in a little opening from the river, surrounded by dense bush. Kwaneet went first. He walked up to the carcase and stooped to examine it. As he did so there was a fierce, guttural growl from the bush nearest to him, a lightning-like flash of a yellow body, and in an instant he lay there beside the zebra, a great yellow-maned lion standing over him. The brute stood with bared teeth, snarling in fiercest wrath. Kwaneet had driven him from his prey that morning, it is true, but he had bided his time, and now his revenge had come. For once the Masarwa had made a miscalculation. As a rule the lion, driven from its prey in daylight will steal away without showing fight. This particular lion happened to be very hungry and very daring; there were not many hunters in that country, and so Kwaneet had suffered.
But in the instant that the lion made his rush and stood over the Masarwa, many things thronged into Nakeesa’s brain. Her man there, from whom she had received so many kindnesses, and with whom she had lived so happily – nay, for a Bushwoman, so merrily – lay there in dire peril. Surely his life was better than hers. Surely she could strike a blow for him? Her babes, herself, all other things, were forgotten; she must save Kwaneet, the best, and kindliest, and bravest hunter of all that wilderness. She had Kwaneet’s assegai upon her shoulder. With this she ran in upon the lion, and with all her force drove home the blade deep into its ribs.
The wound was not a mortal one – at the moment – and the enraged brute turned instantly at Nakeesa, struck her to earth, and then fastened his teeth, with a hideous, crunching sound, deep in the bones of her neck. For a good half minute it continued this deadly work, then, noticing the year-old child, crying in the back of the woman’s cloak, it gripped that also between its teeth, and put an end to it. Meanwhile Kwaneet, almost uninjured by the lion’s first rush, had crawled away unnoticed, and, with Nakeesa’s elder lad, regained a place of safety.
So Nakeesa lay there dead by the river, her days of toil and of pleasure all ended. She had shown two great extremes of evil and good in her nineteen years of existence. She had refused to save the life of Sinikwe (the man who treated her ill, and whom she loathed) from the puff-adder – an act as good as murder, most men will say. And for Kwaneet, who had treated her with some kindliness, and whom she loved with as much love as a Masarwa is capable of, she had given her whole being – life itself. She could do no more.
As for Kwaneet, having satisfied himself, without much emotion, at a later period of the day, of the death of his wife and child, and having taken as much zebra meat as the lion had left, he went his way. Nakeesa’s elder child – now three years old – was, of course, a perfectly useless encumbrance to him. He therefore sold the boy to some Batauana people for a new assegai, and soon after returned to his desert life.
Nakeesa’s bones are long since scattered, broken, and devoured by the beasts of the desert; but her skull, a little, round, smooth skull, lies there, yellow and discoloured, in the far swamps of the Tamalakan river. Her poor, squalid, desert love-story can scarcely be said to point a moral, or even adorn a tale. It merely affords one more instance of the complex nature of the human heart – of human emotions – even in the crudest and most savage aspect of African life.
Chapter Three.
A Desert Mystery
One of the cheeriest of Christmas Days was that spent on the pleasant banks of the Limpopo River, not many years since. Two hunting friends were trekking through Bechuanaland towards the Zambesi, and it happened by great good fortune that, just at the junction of the Notwani and Limpopo Rivers, they found outspanned the wagons of two hunters and traders southward bound from the far interior. These men were travelling down-country with heavy loads of ivory, ostrich feathers, skins, and other produce, and they had with them a big troop of cattle obtained in barter. In these fitful encounters in the African wilderness men are always well met, and it needed no pressing from the new-found acquaintances to induce them to outspan together, and combine forces for Christmas cheer and Christmas chatter. A brief council of war soon settled the all-important question of commissariat. Smallfield, the younger of the traders, had shot a good rooibok the evening before, which furnished venison for all, and they had already baked a store of bread from fresh Boer meal. The new-comers, on their side, freshly equipped from Kimberley, could provide tinned plum-puddings, tinned tomatoes, peas, jams, and other luxuries, including dried onions, most precious of vegetables in the veldt; and they had further some excellent Scotch whisky. They had, besides, half a dozen brace of guinea-fowl and pheasants, shot during the day in the jungles bordering the river, so that all the concomitants of a capital African banquet were ready to hand.
Just at sundown the preparations were complete, and no merrier party, you may swear, ever sat down to their Christmas meal. They supped by the light of a roaring camp-fire, eked out by a lantern or two placed on the cases that served for tables. The servants were enjoying themselves at another fire at a little distance; the oxen lay peacefully at their yokes; the wagons loomed large alongside, their white tents reflecting cheerfully the ruddy blaze of the fire; the night was perfect, still and warm, and the stars, like a million diamond sparks, scintillated in the intense darkness of the dome above. What wonder, then, that all felt happy and contented?
Supper at length over, the coffee-kettle was banished to obscurity and the whisky produced. The travellers lit their pipes and toasted their absent friends and each other, and then ensued a long and delightful evening.
The traders were two capital, manly fellows, well versed in the sports and toils and pleasures of the far interior; the new-comers themselves had been in the hunting veldt before, and they had all, therefore, many things in common. Many and many a yarn of the chase and adventure they exchanged; many a head of gallant game they slew again by the cheerful blaze. The up-country trekkers mentioned that they thought of trying a new bit of veldt, rather away from the beaten track, if but they could find water in the desert, and good guides and spoorers – they were bent on entering the wild and little-known tract of country north of the road to the Mababi veldt. “Well,” said the elder of the traders – Kenstone was his name – “you’ll find game there after the rains – giraffe, gemsbok, hartebeest, eland, koodoo, roan antelope, and perhaps a few elephant, or a rhinoceros or two. But it’s a wild, barren veldt; the country as you go north is a good deal broken, and, unless the rains have been good, water is terribly scarce there. As for myself,” (gazing rather moodily at the camp-fire, and stroking his thick, brown beard), “I once went into that veldt, and never wish to see it again. I had a most uncanny adventure there – an experience I never again wish to repeat if I live to a hundred. In all the years (and they are close on five-and-twenty now) I have been in the hunting veldt, I never spent