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

transgression of the Matabele code and was quite prepared to sit down on the track, there and then, and die.
    However, François had immediately produced his snake-bite outfit, tied his handkerchief tightly above the spot where !#grave;Bamuthi had been bitten, put a stout piece of wood through it and twisted it as tightly into the version of a surgical tourniquet as his father had taught him, to prevent the poison from speeding up along the arteries to !#grave;Bamuthi’s heart where it would immediately be fatal. He had then injected the serum thrice into !#grave;Bamuthi’s leg at different places, one above the other.
    While doing this he tried to comfort !#grave;Bamuthi by saying: ‘Please don’t worry, Old Father, this is powerful medicine, far more powerful than that of any snake. Soon you will be well, I promise you.’
    But old !#grave;Bamuthi had just shaken his head sadly and replied: ‘Little Feather, when the spirits call as this great black spirit has called me now, no medicine of man can stop me from having to follow and lose my shadow.’ This last phrase was a Sinda-bele image of dying.
    François had gone on doing all he could to comfort !#grave;Bamuthi but !#grave;Bamuthi had just said: ‘Thank you, Little Feather, but please say no more because I must now sit here and prepare myself for the long journey.’
    From that moment until nearly two hours later he had refused to speak, and just sat there, still as black marble, his wide dark eyes so sad and remote that they almost made François cry. He did not even seem to notice that François, every few minutes, was unwinding his improvised tourniquet so that the blood could flow again and then tightening it up again to control the circulation for a while longer. This François was doing, as he had been taught, in order to prevent gangrene.
    When finally he had removed the tourniquet and noticed that apart from !#grave;Bamuthi’s state of mind, there was nothing seriously wrong with him he had urged. ‘Come, Old Father, you see the medicine has worked. There is nothing wrong. Let us leave the cow and calf and go home to rest.’
    But it had taken some hours more before !#grave;Bamuthi was convinced. Then he had allowed François to lead him home, walking more like a somnambulist than a person fully awake. But this episode had created an even greater bond between them.
    The real point of the experience, François was soon to learn, was that the snake-bite antidote worked well only when applied against bites inflicted on the extremities of human beings and of the bigger animals like cattle and horses. But when the bites were inflicted as they invariably were, on the heads of the dogs it was impossible to put a tourniquet round the head of a dog and, although one could inject any amount of serum above the snake bite itself, the wound usually was too near the vital nerve centres of the brain for the antidote to disperse the poison in time.
    Thanks to Hintza’s grasp of Bushman and his confidence in François, this lesson was quickly and absolutely learned. It became the cornerstone, as it were, for the whole complicated edifice of Hintza’s education in all the many matters of life and death in the bush. He learned to stand still, silent at Francis’s side, pointing with nose and tail in the direction in which his keen senses had located the enemy, until commanded otherwise. Moreover Hintza had been skilfully helped by François to cultivate a kind of urgent, almost supersonic whisper to be used in moments of acute crisis for communication with François.
    This was perhaps the greatest triumph in François’s relationship with Hintza because Hintza was, even for a dog, a prodigious and most inspired barker. Indeed in the beginning his gift and love of barking had been highly troublesome because at one time even François had begun to despair whether he—I say he from now on because by now Hintza had ceased to be an ‘it’ at Hunter’s Drift and was very