He was convinced. ‘This is your shauri, Sen. What do we do?’ Now he was sweating as heavily as I was.
I said ‘Slowly, slowly! Don’t turn your back and don’t move suddenly. They are watching us, Lo, Probably right here.’
We began backing off, clutching our weapons with sweat-greasy hands, eyes darting restlessly from side to side.
‘Talk to them, for God’s sake, Ben!’ Louren whispered. I found time to examine the discovery that the threat of poison could turn even a man like Louren into a coward.
‘Can’t take the chance. Anything could trigger them.’
‘They may be behind us.’ His voice shook, and I felt my skin between the shoulder blades cringe as I listened for the flute of the arrow. With each pace backwards I felt my fear shrinking, and fifty yards from the kill I risked hailing them.
‘Peace,’ I called. ‘We mean you no harm.’
The reply came immediately, birdlike and disembodied, seeming to emanate from the heated air itself.
‘Tell the big white-head to lay down his weapon, for we do not know him.’
‘Xhai.’ I cried out my relief and delight. ‘My brother!’
‘His eye was bright as the yellow moon,
His hoof struck fire from the iron hills.‘
We sang the buffalo song together, the men squatting around the leaping fire, clapping out the complicated rhythm with our hands. The women danced in an outer circle around us, swaying and shuffling, miming the buffalo and his gallant hunter. The firelight shone on their golden-yellow skins, their tiny childlike bodies with the startling bulge of buttocks and the fat little yellow breasts joggling to the dance rhythm.
‘The arrow-bird flew from my hand
Swift as a bee, or a stooping hawk.‘
The branches of the trees around us were heavy with festoons of raw meat, hung out to dry, and beyond the firelight the jackal and hyena howled their frustrations to the star-bright heavens, as they snuffed the tantalizing odours.
The blood when it flowed was bright as a flower
And sweet as wild honey was the flesh of his body,‘
The dance ended at last, and the women giggled and trilled as they flocked to the fire to cram more meat into their little round bellies. Bushmen and women are awed by physical size, and to them Louren was a huge golden giant. They discussed him in a frank and intimate manner, starting at his golden head and working downwards until I laughed out aloud.
‘What’s so funny?’ Louren demanded, and I told him.
‘My God, they didn’t say that!’ Louren was shocked, staring at the women in horror, and they covered their mouths with their hands as they giggled.
I sat between Xhai and Louren, one of them smoking and the other eating a Romeo and Juliette cigar, and I translated for them. They spoke of the animals and the birds for they had a common love of the chase.
‘My grandfather told me that when he was a young man the buffalo in this land below the great river were as locusts, black upon the earth - but then the red sickness came.’
‘Rinderpest,’ I explained to Louren.
‘And they died so that they fell one upon the other, so thick that the vultures could not fly with the load of their bellies, and their bones lay in the sun like the fields of white Namaqua daisies in the spring time’
They talked on after the women and children had curled up and fallen asleep like little yellow puppies in the dust. They spoke of noble animals and great hunts, and they became friends beside the fire so that at last Xhai told me shyly, ‘I should like to share the hunt with such a one. I could show him an elephant, like those that my grandfather knew, with teeth as thick as my waist and as long as the shaft of a throwing spear.’
And there goes any further pretence of looking for ruins and caravan routes, I thought, as I watched Louren’s face light up at the suggestion.
‘But,’ I added, ‘he says you must leave the Land-Rover here. They heard us coming for half an hour before we arrived today and he says this elephant is old and cunning. Which means we will have to get some sleep now. We’ve got a hell of a day ahead of us tomorrow.’
By the time the sun came up we had been on the march for three hours, dew had soaked our trousers to the knees but we had walked the night’s chill out of our joints and were extending ourselves, stepping out with full stride to keep the two tiny brown figures in view. Xhai and Ghal were into that loose-limbed trot that would eat away the miles all day without flagging, their little brown forms danced ahead of us through the thickening thorns and Jessie bush.
‘How you doing, Ben?’
I grunted and changed the shotgun to my other shoulder.
‘The little bastards can certainly foot it.’
‘Brother, you have only just started,’ I warned him. They led us into bad, broken country where harsh black ridges of ironstone thrust from the earth and the thorn was grey and spiny and matted, where deep ravines rent the walls of steep tableland outcrops and the heat was a fierce dazzling thing that sucked the moisture from our bodies and dried it in rings of white salt on our shirts. It was the type of country that a canny old elephant bull, pursued by men all his life, might choose as a retreat.
We rested for half an hour at noon, seeking shade in the lee of a boulder whose black surface was scalding to the touch and drinking a few mouthfuls of lukewarm water, then we went on and almost immediately cut the spoor.
‘There and there.’ With the point of a poison arrow, Xhai traced the outline of a padmark on the iron-hard earth. ‘Do you not see it?’ he asked with exasperation, and though we circled the area, tilting our heads learnedly, neither of us could make it out.
‘If that’s an elephant spoor,’ muttered Louren, ‘I’m a Chinese tinker.’ But Xhai set off confidently on a new
