given your African name, Welanga, Girl of Sunlight.'
'Please tell him that I see him also, and that he does me great honour.' She smiled down at him and Bakkat cackled with delighted laughter.
Bakkat carried a native axe hooked over one shoulder, and his hunting bow over the other. He laid aside the bow and quiver, and hefted the axe as he came to help Jim with the huge carcass.
Louisa was amazed at how quickly the two of them worked. Each knew his job and did it without hesitation or argument. Bloody to the elbows they drew out the entrails and the bulging sac of the stomach. With barely a check in the work Bakkat cut a strip of the raw tripes. He slapped it against a rock to knock off the half-digested vegetation, then stuffed it into his mouth and chewed with unfeigned relish. When they pulled out the steaming liver, even Jim joined in the feast.
Louisa stared in horror. 'It's raw!' she protested.
'In Holland you eat raw herring,' he said, and offered her a sliver of the purple liver. She was about to refuse, then saw from his expression that this was a challenge. She hesitated still until she realized that Bakkat also was watching her with a sly smile, his eyes slitted between leathery wrinkles.
She took the slice of liver, gathered her courage and placed it in her mouth. She felt her gorge rise but forced herself to chew. After the first shock of the strong taste, it was not unpleasant. She ate slowly, and swallowed it. To her deep satisfaction Jim looked crestfallen. She took another slice from his bloody hand and began to chew at it.
Bakkat let out a squeal of laughter, and dug his elbow into Jim's ribs. He shook his head with delight, mocking Jim, and miming the way she had won the silent contest, staggering around in a circle as he crammed imaginary lumps of liver into his mouth with both hands, weak with mirth.
'If you were half as funny as you think you are,' Jim told him sourly, 'you would be the wit of all the fifty tribes of the Khoisan. Now let's get back to work.'
They divided up the meat into loads for both the horses, and Bakkat made a sack of the wet skin into which he stuffed all the tit bits of kidneys, tripes and liver. It weighed almost as much as he did, but he shouldered it and set off at a trot. Jim carried a shoulder of the eland, which almost buckled his knees, and Louisa led the horses. They covered the last mile down the gorge to Majuba in darkness.
Xhia trotted with the rapid bow- legged gait that the Bushmen call 'drinking the wind'. He could keep it up from first light in the morning until nightfall. As he went he talked to himself as if to a companion, replying to his own questions, chuckling at his jokes. Still on the run, he drank from his horn bottle and ate from the leather food bag slung over his shoulder.
He was reminding himself of how cunning and brave he was. 'I am
Xhia the mighty hunter,' he said, and gave a little jump in the air. 'I have killed the great bull elephant with the poison that tips my arrow.' He remembered how he had followed it along the banks of the great river. Doggedly, he had kept up the hunt during the time that it had taken the new moon to wax to the full, then wane again. 'Not once did I lose the spoor. Could any other man do that?' He shook his head. 'No! Could Bakkat perform such a feat? Never! Could Bakkat have fired the arrow into the vein behind the ear so that the poison was taken straight to the heart of the bull? He could not have done it!' The frail reed arrow could barely pierce the thick pachyderm hide it would never penetrate to heart or lung: he had had to find one of the great blood vessels close to the surface to carry the poison. It had taken the poison five days to bring the bull down. 'But I followed him all that time and I danced and sang the hunter's song when, at last, he fell like a mountain and raised the dust as high as the treetops. Could Bakkat have performed such a feat?' he asked the high peaks around him. 'Never!' he replied. 'Never!'
Xhia and Bakkat were members of the same tribe, but they were not brothers. 'We are not brothers!' Xhia shouted aloud, and he became angry.
Once there had been a girl, with skin as bright as the plumage of a weaver bird and a face shaped like a heart. Her lips were as full as the fruit of the ripe mar ula her buttocks were like ostrich eggs and her breasts as round as two yellow Tsama melons warming in the Kalahari sun. 'She was born to be my woman,' Xhia cried. 'The Kulu Kulu took a piece of my heart while I slept and moulded it into that woman.' He could not bring himself to say her name. He had shot her with the tiny love arrow tipped with the feathers of the mourning dove to demonstrate to her how much he wanted her.
'But she went away. She would not come to lie on the sleeping mat of Xhia the hunter. She went instead with the despicable Bakkat and bore him three sons. But I am cunning. The woman died from the bite of the mamba.' Xhia had captured the snake himself. He had found its hiding-place under a flat rock. He had tethered a live dove as bait beside it and when the snake slid out from under the rock, he had pinned it behind the head. It was not a large mamba, only as long as one of his arms, but its venom was virulent enough to kill a bull buffalo. He placed it in the girl's harvesting bag while she and Bakkat slept. The next morning when she opened the mouth of the bag to place a tuber inside, the snake had bitten her three times, once on the finger and twice on the wrist. Her death, though swift, was terrible to behold. Bakkat wept as he held her in his arms. Concealed among the rocks, Xhia had
watched it all. Now the memory of her death and Bakkat's grief was so sweet that Xhia jumped with both feet together like a grasshopper.
'There is no animal who can elude me. There is no man who can prevail against my guile. For I am Xhia!' he shouted, and the echo came back from the cliffs above. 'Xhia, Xhia, Xhia.'
After Colonel Keyset left him, he had waited two days and a night on the hills and in the forests of High Weald, watching for Bakkat. On the first morning he saw him come out of his hut in the dawn, yawn, scratch himself and laugh at the squeal of gas from between his buttocks. For the Bushmen a flourish of flatus was always a propitious sign of good health. He watched him let the herd out of the kraal and drive them down to the water. Lying like a partridge concealed in the grass Xhia saw the big white man with the black beard that they called Klebe, the hawk, ride down from the homestead. He was Bakkat's master and the two squatted in the middle of the open field with their heads close together and they spoke in whispers for a long time so that no one could overhear them. Even Xhia was not able to creep close enough to pick up their words.
Xhia grinned to watch their secret counsel. 'I know what you are saying, Klebe. I know you are sending Bakkat to find your son. I know you are telling him to take care that he is not followed but, like the spirit of the wind I, Xhia, will be watching when they meet.'
He watched Bakkat close the door of his hut at nightfall, and saw the glow of his cooking fire, but Bakkat did not come out again until the dawn.
'You try to lull me, Bakkat, but will it be tonight or tomorrow?' he asked, as he watched from the hilltop. 'Is your patience greater than mine? We shall see.' He watched Bakkat circle around his hut in the early light, searching the earth for the sign of an enemy, for someone who had come to spy upon him.
Xhia embraced himself with glee, and rubbed his back with both hands. 'Do you think I am such a fool as to come in close, Bakkat?' This was the reason he had sat all night upon the hilltop. 'I am Xhia and I leave no sign. Not even the high-flying vulture can discover my hiding place.'
All that day he had watched Bakkat go about his business, tending his master's herds. At nightfall Bakkat went into his hut again. Xhia worked a charm in the darkness. He took a pinch of powder from one of the stoppered duiker-horn flasks on his beaded belt and placed it on his tongue. It was the ash of a leopard's whiskers, mixed with the dry, powdered dung of a lion and other secret ingredients. Xhia mumbled an incantation as it dissolved in his own saliva. It was the spell for out110
witting prey. Then he spat three times in the direction of the hut in which Bakkat lived.
This is a charm of great power, Bakkat,' he warned his enemy. 'No animal or man can resist its spell.' This was not always true, but whenever it failed there was always good reason for it. Sometimes it was because the wind had changed direction, or because a black crow flew overhead, or because the sore-eye lily was in bloom. Apart from these and similar circumstances it was an infallible charm.
Having cast the spell he settled down to wait. He had not eaten since the day before, so now he swallowed a few fragments of smoked meat from his food bag. Neither hunger nor the cold wind off the snows of the mountain deterred him. Like all his tribe he was inured to pain and hardship. The night was still, proof that his spell was efficacious. Even a small breeze would have covered the sounds for which he was listening.
It was soon after the moon had set that he heard a night bird utter its alarm call in the forest behind Bakkat's home. He nodded to himself. 'Something moves there.'
A few minutes later he heard the nightjar's mate whirl up from the forest floor, and by correlating the two clues he guessed the direction in which his quarry was moving. He went down the hill, silent as shadow, testing each footfall with his bare toe for twigs or dry leaves that might crackle and disclose his presence. He stopped to listen at every second step, and heard, down by the stream, the dry rustle of a porcupine erecting its quills as a warning to a predator who had ventured too close. The porcupine might have seen a leopard, but Xhia knew it had not. The leopard would have lingered to harass its natural prey, but a man moved on immediately. Not even an adept of the
