1972 - A Story Like the Wind Read Online Free PDF

Franjois but, at his request, to everybody else at Hunter’s Drift. The Bushman ‘Tza’ was added only when one really wanted the dog to go after live game.
    These two words were so effective, old Koba had told him, because the hunters of the people of the early race got them straight from the stars. The stars, Koba said, were the greatest hunters of all and if François would come with her one night and walk out away from the sounds of the house into the darkness, she would give him an example of what she meant.
    So he had gone with her on a very cold, clear and still winter’s night and waited until there was not even the sound of a lion, jackal, hyena, bush-buck, owl or night plover to be heard. Then, as they stood beside the thick hedge of massive fig-trees which lined the orchard and looked up deep into a sky bursting at its black seams with the weight of the stars, François had become aware of a far sound rather like that in the great mother-of-pearl shell in his father’s library when held to the ear.
    ‘Now listen, Little Feather,’ Koba had said, ‘listen and hear the sounds they make hunting up there in the bush of the night.’
    Obediently he had turned his right ear, already alerted, to the stars. At once quite clearly he had heard the stars, faintly yet distinctly, crying out: ‘ Tssisk! ’ and a host of others crying out: ‘ Tza! ’
    With this proof from the universe itself of the effectiveness of Bushman in communicating with natural things, François had used no other language between Hintza and himself. Soon he was convinced that there was almost nothing spoken in Bushman which Hintza, or Hin as he was now called, did not follow.
    Within three months, Hintza knew the Bushman names of all the most important animals, reptiles, and birds in the bush and the words of command that François was likely to use in their connection. For instance, François had only to say ‘snake’ in Bushman and it was quite unnecessary for him to add the command ‘stand and watch’, because Hintza knew already that it was absolutely forbidden for him to tackle any snakes, much as he would have liked to. This too was an inexorable law at Hunter’s Drift because the bush was full of poisonous snakes of all kinds and many dogs, even the mongrel dogs, had been lost through snake-bite because out of a natural aversion for them they would insist on challenging every snake they saw. The result was that they invariably got bitten in the head and even though they might kill the snake they would die themselves of the poison from the fangs of the serpents.
    From an early age, therefore, like his father and mother, François was made to carry in a leather pouch attached to the leopard skin belt which he wore round his tough green whipcord bush jackets, a complete anti-snake-bite outfit that consisted of a small scalpel, a hypodermic syringe, and an antidote of serum specially prepared in the capital and renewed every six months. This serum was most effective against snake poison and if immediately injected just above a bite into the blood stream of a snake’s victim, counteracted the poison so effectively that within a day, the person or animal bitten could continue their lives as if nothing had happened.
    In fact François himself had saved !#grave;Bamuthi’s life thus on one occasion when they had been out in the bush looking for a lost cow and calf. !#grave;Bamuthi had been bitten on the ankle of his bare foot by a black mamba, the most poisonous of all the snakes in the bush. Unfortunately, !#grave;Bamuthi, wise and experienced as he was, like all Matabele and Zulus, was extremely superstitious about snakes, particularly black mambas, because they all regarded them as reincarnations of their ancestors which had either come to warn, comfort or punish them for some neglect of tribal ethics. !#grave;Bamuthi accordingly had immediately assumed that he had been punished thus by the spirit of his ancestors for some unwitting