1972 - A Story Like the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page A

first clear memory was not even of old Koba’s wrinkled magnolia skin and somewhat Mongolian face, but rather of the peacock light of brilliant Hunter’s Drift sunsets playing on a necklace of heavy dark blue and red glass beads that she always wore, and the sound of her voice singing a Bushman lullaby to coax him, against his will, to sleep.
    Bushman was a most difficult language to speak because almost every other consonant in it was a click of some kind. François’s mother, who knew only a few words which she liked to use from time to time as a token of respect when speaking to Koba, would flush with the effort of pronouncing them. François therefore could easily have been discouraged from going on with it, if it had not been for four things. First of all, he possessed a child’s supple tongue. Then there was his great love for Koba. Also there was the attraction, that appeals to all young people who are compelled, out of the need of protecting values which the grown-up world have forgotten, to lead in a sense a disguised life, of having his own secret language. It was almost as if an important part of himself felt it were on enemy territory, where it was safer to use a code for communicating with those who shared its secrets. Bushman seemed the perfect answer to this need. Finally, there was the overwhelming fact that Koba had assured him that all the animals, birds, reptiles and insects of Africa, and also the plants, understood the onomatopoeic Bushman tongue.
    She told him many stories of how in the beginning the people of the early race, as she called the first Bushman, lived in complete harmony with all living things and plants on earth. She explained that it was only when the people of the early race snatched the first fire from underneath the wing of the great ostrich ancestor of all ostriches and started using it for their own selfish ends, that the animals took fright and ran away from human beings. But even though they fled, they never forgot the meaning of the sound in which they had first conversed in harmony with men.
    François thought that from his own short experience of life he had already some intimation that old Koba was right. Even from the start Hintza had seemed to bring evidence to support her. One day François was playing with his puppy in the sun on the stoep of Hunter’s Drift and the puppy wandered off on his own near the edge of the high stoep.
    François, afraid that it might fall over, called out loudly to him in Bushman, ‘Here, Hintza! Here!’
    In his shout he had put the emphasis on the tza and to his amazement his puppy, instead of turning around and coming back to him, had leapt forward and vanished over the brink of the stoep. Alarmed, François dashed after the puppy and saw that it had picked itself up out of the dust, fortunately unhurt, but weak at the knees with shock and a strange, inner excitement, while it stared about wildly, the hair of its coat bristling and its mouth open, growling at the vacant day which was trembling with light and heat, as if expecting to see some kind of enemy ahead.
    At once revelation came to François. Koba had long ago explained to him why the two most important words of command for hunting dogs were tisisk and tza —used by everyone from the Cape of Storms to Broken Hill. Tssisk was used when one wanted a hunting dog to go into the bush and flush out whatever one’s quarry happened to be; tza when one wanted a hunting dog to go as fast as possible after the quarry, once it was flushed. His father, Mopani Theron and even the Matabele unfailingly used no other words for these precise purposes.
    Accordingly François realized instantly how the ‘tza’ in Hintza had been taken instinctively for a word of command by the puppy. He knew that, henceforth, he would have to be most careful to use Hintza’s name differently, or serious and even dangerous confusion might arise between them. So from then onwards Hintza became ‘Hin’ not only to