Hunter-Gatherer

Meanwhile we had learnt something of their story. They came from a plain called after a fabulous kind of sweet potato dug up there three years ago. Their arms were not long enough to demonstrate the size of the potato to us. The plain was, as they put it in their tongue, ‘far, far, far away’ to the east. It was lovely how the ‘far’ came out of their mouths. At each ‘far’ a musician’s instinct made the voices themselves more elongated with distance, the pitch higher with remoteness, until the last ‘far’ of the series vanished on a needle-point of sound into the silence beyond the reach of the human scale. They left this ‘far, far, place’ because the rains just would not come. Their water was gone; the tsamma – melons which meanwhile sustained them and the game on which they live – were soon eaten up. The roots and tubers we compared to potatoes and turnips were more and more difficult to find and in any case not enough for survival. The game had moved away first. Only snakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders, and some ants were left. Then one night lightning flashed over the horizon in the west. They knew at once what to do. Since they own nothing permanently which they cannot carry, they could act at once. The men just took up their bows, poisoned arrows, and spears and left the plain behind them; the women bundled up in skin shawls their water-flasks of ostrich egg-shells and their stampingblocks – the wooden pestles and mortars which are their most precious possessions and badge of womanhood. Grubbing-sticks in hand, and for long hours with the youngest children on their hips, they followed their men. They made for the quarter in the west where the lightning flashed most. They had forgotten how many days they had walked towards the lightning, but they were ‘many, many, many’. The awful part was that, though the lightning went on flashing along the horizon every night, they seemed to get no nearer the rain. Their condition steadily deteriorated, the country became increasingly desolate, yet they had endured this sort of thing so often before that they took it entirely for granted. They seemed to think it hardly worth the effort of remembering and certainly not that of talking about it. Yet despite the lack of detail and Dabé’s difficulty in coping with their dialect, we gathered that on this cloudless day without the least hint of rain their desperation was nearing its climax. They had just left the old father and mother behind, not expecting ever to see them again, when they heard the sound of our Land-Rovers. Yes! they knew about motor vehicles and avoided them because they connected them only with police patrols. No! they themselves had never seen any police, but some kinsmen of theirs had been taken away from their family once and had never come back because the police had caught them roasting a giraffe they had killed for food. But afraid as they were of police in particular and white men in general, they needed help so badly that they made straight for the place where they heard our vehicles.

We did not ask them what they would have done had they not met us, but the question provoked a lively discussion among my companions. The Bushmen had no food of any kind left. They had no water, and when I asked what they used instead of water they showed me some remains of a large root rather like an outsize turnip. They had six of these fragments in the slings carried by the women, and they were eighteen souls in all. By scraping the root with a wooden knife into their hands and squeezing the crushed material, they produced a bitter white juice which they said was better for thirst than water. Water, the old father suddenly interjected, licking his lips at the memory of his last gallon-full, was much too sweet. 

For some of my companions all this was clear proof that the Bushmen would never have been able to reach the fringe of the area where the rains had broken. Others, led by Ben Hatherall, my old guide and friend, who was born in the desert and grew up with the Bushmen, stoutly maintained that except for the old couple they would have made it. Dabé thought so too. Judging by the speed with which they had recovered after their drink of water, before they had even eaten, the Bushmen were not yet damaged by their terrible experience in any fundamental way

The camp as a result was well found by the time we left. Ben and Wyndham Vyan, whose skill with his gun had kept us all fed for months, travelled ahead in one Land-Rover. I followed in another with Dabé and the strongest of the young men among our new Bushman acquaintances. The moment of madness had passed from the day by then, and the sun was still. In its long slanted light the smoke of our camp-fire stood high and blue in the golden air. Six other little columns of smoke surrounded it. Rising from the little shelters built by the Bushmen, they were more slender and sensitive than ours but as upright and blue. For me they made the picture complete. 

As Ben had predicted, we came across game quite early the next day and set about getting meat for the Bushmen as quickly as we could. The first buck we saw was a duiker. It had bolted on the Steenbuck first alarm and was already running full out when Wyndham spotted it. Normally he might not have shot, because it made an exceptionally difficult target. Once on the run a duiker never stops to look back. I have seen only one exception to the rule in all my years in Africa. That was some years before in the Kalahari, and the duiker which had paused to glance back was promptly shot by Vyan before it could pass on the bad habit to others. Invariably it goes fast over bush and grass, its head down, showing little more than its back above the cover, all with a motion rather like that of a frightened porpoise diving in and out of the swell of the sea. It is this movement which made the old Afrikaner hunters call it duiker(diver), and which makes it so difficult to shoot. Today the shot was even more difficult than usual, for by the time Vyan had halted his vehicle and had his gun up, the back of the duiker was arching for the last time above a crest of the bush at the limit of our vision. Yet he brought it down with a deft instinctive shot, and the exclamation of wonder from the Bushman at my side was good to hear. 

We went on for a while now without seeing more game or, what was far more discouraging, the spoor of any. When the noise of our vehicles finally woke a little steenbuck from his sleep and he rose out of the bed he makes more neatly and snugly perhaps than any other quadruped in Africa, I felt I had to shoot. Yet I hated doing it. For me the steenbuck has always been one of the loveliest and most lovable of African buck. It and the Klipspringer are part of my own childhood world of magic, and this little steenbuck was a superb example of his kind. He stood at the end of a bare patch of crimson sand about twenty yards away, beside the purple shade of the bush behind which he had made his bed, and there he eagerly fed the precise little flame of his vivid self to the rising conflagration of another desert day. He stood as still and fine drawn as an Etruscan statuette of himself. His delicate ears were pointed in my direction, his great purple eyes wide open, utterly without fear and shining only with the wonder of seeing so strange a sight at this remote back door of life. Remembering the gaunt faces of the famished Bushmen, I shot quickly before he should get alarmed or the sight of his gentle being weaken me. I would not have thought it possible I could miss at so short a distance. Yet I did. My shot merely made the little buck shake his delicate head vigorously to rid his ears of the tingle of the shock of the explosion from my heavy gun. Otherwise he showed no trace of alarm. I took much more careful aim and shot a second time. Again I missed. Still the little buck was unafraid. He just turned his head slightly to sniff at the wind raised by the bullet when it passed close by his ears. So near was he to me that I saw his black patent-leather little nose pucker with the effort. I shot until the magazine of my gun was empty and still he stood there unhurt, observing my Land-Rover keenly as if trying to discover what the extraordinary commotion was about. I believe he would have stood there indefinitely, taking in the strangeness of the occasion, had I not entreated Vyan to shoot from his vehicle much further away. Vyan succeeded merely in nicking slightly the saffron petal of one of the steenbuck’s ears. Only then did the steenbuck whisk swiftly about, a look of reproach in his eyes. The sun flashing briefly on the tips of his black polished toes, he vanished with a nimble bound in the scrub. I drove on very much aware that I had not lightened what promised just then to become the long task of getting enough food for the Bushmen and, now that the steenbuck was safely gone, more put out than I cared to admit by such poor marksmanship. Yet I was even more disconcerted to find both Dabé and the new Bushman apparently highly delighted at the outcome of the affair. Had they been amused, I would not have been surprised. Indeed I expected my companions to pull my leg about the incident for days to come. Yet delight in someone so famished as our new companion so amazed me that I interrupted something he was saying, a wide smile on his fine-drawn face. 

‘What on earth has he said to please you so?’ I asked the grinning Dabé. 

‘Oh! He is just saying what we all know to be so,’ Dabé answered in the indulgent manner of someone instructing an ignorant child, which he and the other Bushmen at the Sip Wells had always adopted when discussing their own private world with me. ‘The steenbuck is protected with great magic and very difficult to kill.’ 

‘What sort of magic?’ I asked, remembering my association of the buck with my childhood world of magic. ‘His own magic or the magic of other people?’ 

‘Oh. Just magic!’ Dabé said in a superior voice, leaving unsatisfied the curiosity which always nagged me more than ever when the curtain between the mind of the Bushman and our own lifted only to flop back just as I thought I was to be allowed to see behind it. Yet my imagination had seized on the encounter more firmly than I knew. I know of few things more awesome than finding that all one’s most determined efforts to injure another living creature have been unaccountably frustrated. Throughout the long hot day, at all sorts of odd moments, my mind returned to the vision of that gentle little buck standing untroubled amid blast after blast from my gun. 

Luckily for the Bushmen, Ben and Vyan were better and more dedicated marksmen than I. Soon afterwards we ran into more game and within two hours they had killed another duiker, two springbuck rams, and a lone old male ostrich. All that meat turned into biltong should last the Bushmen well into the country where the rains had broken. Stopping only to disembowel the game, we turned back and travelling in the same tracks for the third time found them so firm that we made our camp at the fall of night.

They started at once unloading the game, and went straight on to skinning and cutting up the animals with skill and dispatch. I watched them, absorbed in the grace of their movements. They worked with extraordinary reverence for the carcasses at their feet. There was no waste to mock the dead or start a conscience over the kill. The meat was neatly sorted out for specific uses and placed in separate piles on the skin of each animal. All the time the women stood around and watched. They greeted the unloading of each arrival with an outburst of praise, the ostrich receiving the greatest of all, and kept up a wonderful murmur of thanksgiving which swelled at moments in their emotion to break on a firm phrase of a song of sheer deliverance. How cold, inhuman, and barbarous a civilized butcher’s shop appeared in comparison! 

The last red glow in the west died down behind the purple range of cloud, and it went utterly dark beyond our camp. Our own fires rose higher than ever, straining like a gothic spire towards the stars which were appearing in unusual numbers. Soon the stars were great and loud with light until the sky trembled like an electric bell, while every now and then from the horizon the lightning swept a long sort of lighthouse beam over us. At last the Bushmen stood up from their work with a deep sigh of satisfaction, scraped the blood from their arms with their knives and wiped their hands on stubbles of grass. The women and children came silently forward to help them carry away the meat piled on the skins. They vanished in the darkness beyond our fire, and only the soundof voices joined there in a common purpose revealed that they had not gone for good. Then the voices too faded out, and soon after the flames of their own fires began to go up one by one. As always their fires were more circumspect than our own. Ours was a cathedral of flame, theirs little more than slender candles burning in a night devout under stars.

‘Gone by the morning?’ Duncan exclaimed, as if he had other hopes for them and himself.’ Gone without even saying thank you for what we have done for them?’ 

His dismay was so genuine that we all laughed. Besides, his last remark touched on an old controversy. Some of my companions were continually worried by the apparent inability of Africans in general and Bushmen in particular to say ‘thank you’ for any help or gifts made to them. 

Ben answered him, not without a certain amused irony. 

‘But surely you would not expect thanks from anyone for the little we have done? Surely you do not want to be thanked merely for having behaved well? Do you expect a woman to say “thank you” every time you raise your hat to her? Well, however much we appear to have done for the Bushmen here, to them it is just good manners and no more than was to be expected of properly brought up people. If our positions were reversed, they would without hesitation do the same for us or anyone else, but they would not expect to be thanked for it. No! They would not risk insulting you by suggesting with a “thank you” that it was unusual for you to behave well!’ 

Ben appealed to me for support amid the laughter his explanation provoked. I have suffered all over Africa from the delusion of Europeans that, because the indigenous peoples of the dark continent have not the fulsome expressions for gratitude we have, they feel no gratitude. It was as unreal to me as another prejudice noticed long ago in Britain – that since the French had no single word for home, they did not really value their home-life. I had no hesitation in backing up Ben with an example of the Bushmen’s regard for manners. I told my companions a story I once heard from Faanie Ritchie. She had known Lucy Lloyd and the Bleeks, who were the first people ever to make a serious study of the Bushman tongue. In order to do so they had gained permission from the government at the Cape to house at the bottom of their garden in a suburb of Table Bay a number of Bushman convicts from the national gaol. The Bushmen soon became very attached to the Bleek family, with the exception of one little man. He behaved so badly that the Bleeks one day asked the Bushmen why he was difficult when they were all good and helpful. 

‘Oh, but don’t you know?’ they exclaimed amazed. ‘He was brought up by Europeans!’