Nakeesa, the Bushwoman, awoke just as dawn crept upon the silent veldt.
She belonged to that strange houseless race of wild hunters who roam the
waterless, illimitable deserts of the North Kalahari, subsisting
sometimes on game, at other times upon roots, reptiles, and berries.
It is needless to say that Nakeesa lay roofless. A little screen of
branches, interwoven with a friendly bush, sheltered her and her
sleeping husband and her child from the chill south wind that just now
began to move through the desert. It was June--midwinter--and the night
had been keen even to frostiness--so cold that Nakeesa had lain almost
_in_ the fire through the long hours. Her short hartebeest-skin cloak,
and the tiny skin petticoat about her loins, only half protected her
gaunt, three-quarter starved frame. The baby had nestled in the warmest
corner of her cloak, as near to the fire as might be without burning.
So close had Nakeesa lain to the pleasant warmth, that the shins of her
poor bony legs were burnt raw, as they had been for weeks past. Her
man, Sinikwe, lay scorched in exactly the same way.
You may never, indeed, see a Masarwa Bushman or woman who does not show
marks of fire-burn upon the nether limbs. Among the old people, if you
look close enough, you may see that their wrinkled breasts and bellies
are scorched and raw also.
Nakeesa sat up, pushed a half-burned stick or two into the smouldering
fire, and looked about her. Sinikwe lay still asleep. There was no
need to wake him, and, indeed, he would resent such interference. She
looked about her in a dull, rather hopeless way. There was no food in
the camp--if camp it could be called. Sinikwe had shot or snared no
meat of late. Drought lay upon the desert, and game was scarce. In a
little while she must be digging for roots in the hard sunbaked soil,
and her babe would be crying at her lean, starved breast. All day
yesterday had she been sucking water from a moist hole in the ground,
and discharging it from her mouth into ostrich shells and a calabash--a
sufficiently fatiguing operation in thirsty soil. But these things
alone hardly troubled Nakeesa. They were natural incidents of Bushman
life, and scarce needed regrets. Something deeper and more bitter lay
within her soul--something that even her cowed, submissive nature
constantly rebelled against.
Twelve months since, Nakeesa's father had handed her over to Sinikwe,
who, for the consideration of two solid brass cartridge cases (articles
much prized by Masarwas as snuff-boxes) and the half of a slain eland,
had bought her as wife. Now Nakeesa had no great admiration for
Sinikwe. He was a good hunter, it was true; all Masarwas are. But he
was lazy, and not very amiable; he was ugly even for a Bushman; and she
had had another youth in her eye. Kwaneet--the pleasant, merry
Kwaneet--who had shown her several little kindnesses at Makwa Pool, and
had presented her with many titbits of flesh, while their respective
families squatted near that water, was the man of her secret choice.
Kwaneet, too, knew this, and was anxious to link his fortunes with
Nakeesa's; but, most unfortunately, Sinikwe had acquired the coveted
cartridge cases from an English hunter, and had secured his wife.
Kwaneet, it is true, could easily have slain an eland, and had offered
to do so; but though, like Sinikwe, he carried at his neck--as every
decent Masarwa should--his own well-polished brass cartridge case, as
snuff-box, he had not two spare ones to offer Nakeesa's father; and so
he had lost Nakeesa, and Sinikwe had taken her.
Nakeesa's eyes, as she squatted over the fire this morning, ranged over
typical Kalahari scenery. In front of her lay an open grassy clearing,
yellow with sun-parched winter grass. This and other glades in the
vicinity Sinikwe meant to set fire to in a day or two, in order to renew
the vegetation, as the first rains came on, and so attract the game.
Beyond the clearing, and upon the left hand and right, stretched the
pleasant open forest of the desert--groves of giraffe-acacia (_kameel
doorn_), through which still wander freely in these pathless, waterless
solitudes the tall giraffe, the portly eland, the brilliant red
hartebeest, and the noble gemsbok (prototype of the fabled unicorn).
This Kalahari forest scenery, flat though it is, is very beautiful,
resembling closely some English deer park, or the natural woodland of
some wild Surrey common.
The deep red glow of sunrise was now apparent through the trees to the
eastward, long streamers of rose-pink flew upwards in the pale sky; a
roller or two, brilliant in gorgeous colouring of metallic mauves and
violets, purples, blues, and greens, began to cry amid the forest, and
to flash hither and thither across the clearing. Dainty steinboks and
timid duykers (small antelopes, quite independent of water, to be found
all over the desert) rose stiff from their cold night couches, shook
themselves, and began to feed.
Suddenly a movement to the right attracts Nakeesa's attention. She
looks again, and an involuntary click of surprise and pleasure rises to
her tongue. She touches her man lightly. Sinikwe is awake and upon his
haunches in an instant; his narrow, bleared eyes seek what Nakeesa has
seen, and they watch together in a motionless silence.
From behind a spreading acacia tree, from which it has been plucking the
green leafage, strides into a little glade of the grove a great cow
giraffe. She is fat and fresh, her dappled, orange-tawny hide gleams
under the now risen sun with high condition, her great, melting, dark
eye is placid and free from fear. Timid creature though she is, in
these wilds she feels secure enough. She halts for a minute in the
glade, lazily champing at a bit of acacia leafage which projects from
her lips, and, raising her immense neck yet higher, and in the same
motion swinging her head easily round, looks behind for her fellows.
That giraffe cow, so plump, so well coloured, upon which Sinikwe's eye
is now fiercely rivetted, is young, but full grown. She measures
seventeen good feet from the base of her hoofs to the tip of her false
horns, as she stands there, and you may search all Africa--ay, all the
world--for a more wonderful, more beautiful picture of feral life in its
most primaeval form.
There is no air of wind blowing from the Masarwas towards the giraffe;
the breeze trends rather the other way, and they are safe from betrayal
by that foe. They are concealed from sight by the screen of bush
beneath which they crouch, and a few handfuls of sand, cast by Sinikwe
upon the smouldering fire, silently destroys that evidence of human
life.
In another minute the great creature swings her head round, satisfied
that her fellows are near, and stalks slowly on. She is but sixty yards
away now, and, passing another group of trees and some bush, emerges
upon the open glade. Before she has reached the further side, the rest
of the troop are to be seen following in her wake. There are six of
them in all: a mighty dark chestnut bull, nineteen feet tall, three more
cows, and two calves. The beautiful giants stride like strange
automatons across the clearing, with that gliding, deceptive walking
pace of theirs, and join the leader at a great spreading acacia, from
which they all begin to pluck, with upstretched necks and prehensile
tongues, the dark-green foliage.
Sinikwe's eyes had greedily followed the great cow in all her movements.
That is the quarry he means to strike for. Luckily he had smeared his
tiny bone-tipped reed arrows with fresh poison taken from the entrails
of the N'gwa caterpillar only yesterday. He now picks up his bow and
quiver, slings the latter across his back, and steals away by a
circuitous route to intercept the troop. It is three hours before he
gets his shot. At length, after infinite patience and manoeuvring, he
has wormed himself into a patch of thick bush, by which, as he had
reckoned, the great cow would pass. Stooping on one knee, he harbours
there, motionless as some bizarre figure of bronze; the cow glides past,
like some great desert ghost; Sinikwe lets fly his arrow deep into the
thinnest part of her tough hide, under the hinder part of the belly; the
startled creature flies crashing through the forest, and the Masarwa
knows that with her death is now only a question of hours. It may be a
day, or two days, or even three, but the poison already at work is fresh
and at its deadliest; the arrowhead went well home, and the cow is his.
He returns to Nakeesa, gives her the news, and sends her into the grass
veldt to dig up roots, while he himself prepares to make snuff. Taking
her babe on her back, neatly slung in her skin cloak, Nakeesa hies her
to a likely spot. She takes also with her an empty tortoiseshell in
which to bring home the bulbs, and a sharp-pointed stick garnished at
top with a circular piece of soft stone. With this last implement she
can the more easily crow up their dinner.
Out there in the hot sun Nakeesa patiently digs and digs, slowly
accumulating the dish of roots. The red sandy soil is now burning hot
to the touch; there is no inch of shade from the scorching sun, and she
has not tasted food or water for twenty hours. These things trouble the
Bushwoman not at all; they have always been a part of her existence, and
she cannot imagine a world without toil and heat, hunger and thirst.
Just now, too, she is somewhat comforted at the thought of a mighty
feast of meat in the not distant future. Sinikwe is lazy, and time
after time neglects to hunt game when Kwaneet--Kwaneet is often in her
mind--would have brought in good store of flesh. But Sinikwe, to give
him his due, is as good a hunter and spoorer as any in the wide
Kalahari, if the game is nigh and not far to seek. She knows that the
giraffe is as good as dead, that soon, for a few brief days, she may
revel in a gross plenty, and that her babe will be less petulant again.
In two hours Nakeesa has filled the tortoiseshell and returns to her
man.
Sinikwe, meanwhile, has been having an easy time, preparing a fresh
supply of snuff against his coming spooring operations and the feast
that is to follow. Out of the dead fire he has extracted some ash from
a particular sort of bush which he put in last night. This he works
down to the finest possible consistency. Taking from a leather pouch a
tiny piece of tobacco--the precious gift of a Lake trader--he cuts off a
piece, and in turn reduces that to fine dust by means of flat stones.
Then carefully mingling the ashes and the tobacco dust, and again
grinding them down together, his snuff is made. With this prized
commodity he can refresh his jaded senses upon a difficult spoor,
titillate his nerves after a big gorge of flesh, and purchase the
pleased glances of his wife when in his bounty he shall deign to bestow
a pinch or two upon her. Besides his snuff-making, an operation
demanding the gravest care, Sinikwe has sharpened up the blade of his
only spear, at once his weapon of defence, carver and skinning-knife, to
the haft of which he has fastened his skin cloak and a small calabash of
water in preparation for the journey before him. He has sharpened, too,
his primitive hatchet, used for chopping bones and extracting marrow.
That hatchet--the head of iron, the haft of rhinoceros horn--is
Sinikwe's most treasured possession. His father acquired it long since,
at infinite cost of feathers and ivory from the Bechuana who fashioned
it.
Presently Nakeesa comes in, and the roots--curious little smooth bulbs,
sweet and nutty to the taste--are divided, three-fourths to Sinikwe,
one-fourth to Nakeesa. These bulbs are bestowed in thin transparent
crops taken from dead guinea-fowls, which are now softened in water for
the purpose. A skewer of wood is run throughout several; in half an
hour the sun has again dried these curious receptacles, and the
Bushman's bread supply is complete. Taking his lion's share of the
food, and munching a few bulbs before he departs, Sinikwe now exchanges
with his wife a few sentences in that curious, whining, inarticulate
form of speech peculiar to the Bushman, every passage of it as full of
clicks as tongue, throat, teeth, and palate can make it; shoulders his
belongings, and sets off briskly upon the spoor of the wounded giraffe.
Nakeesa is to follow him at leisure; she will, you may swear, be up at
the carcase long before Sinikwe has made much havoc with it. But she
has to carry more water and the child, and will take her own time. She
devours a few bulbs and then goes to the water-pit. At present there is
no water there, only some moist sand in a deep hollow. But Nakeesa
knows what she is about. To the end of a hollow reed she has fastened a
tuft of grass. This she inserts into the damp hole which she scoops
from the sand. Then she kneads sand round the base of her rude pump and
over the tuft of grass and sucks. Little by little the water thus
collected reaches and fills her mouth, from which it is discharged, by
means of a thick stalk of desert grass, into an ostrich shell. It is
hard work and slow, but in two hours Nakeesa has filled her three
remaining ostrich shells. These and some others, the holes of which are
all carefully sealed with grass, she bestows in a rude net of fibre.
With this load, together with a calabash of water, her babe, her larder
and household gear (the bulbs, a steinbok skin, and the tortoiseshell),
she sets off on her way towards that banquet of giraffe flesh for which
her soul now pines. It is a long, long journey, but she has no trouble
whatever in following Sinikwe's spoor. She traces it to the spot where
the Masarwa set off upon the tracks of the wounded cow, and then, mile
after mile through the desert, she deciphers easily the familiar tale
that slowly the earth unfolds to her. The giraffe is strong and lusty,
and the poison takes long to do its work upon so huge a frame.
Nakeesa toils on doggedly with her load. She sleeps the first night
(she started in the afternoon) in a belt of Mopani forest. At earliest
dawn, as soon as she can see spoor, she is away again steadily trudging.
It is weary work. The white glare of the sun upon the light calcareous
sand, through which she ploughs all morning, is trying enough; yet
infinitely more distressing is it when she crosses the four miles of a
vast salt pan. The blinding glare thrown up from the flat white surface
of the pan makes even the seasoned eyes of a Bushwoman throb and smart,
and the heat is terrible.
There is a gleam of satisfaction even upon the salt pan, however.
Nakeesa sees plainly enough by the spoor that the giraffe cow is in sore
trouble. Here she has reeled, there spurned the smooth white sand as
she starts off again at speed, galled into frenzy by the poison that now
runs riot through her veins. And ever, like bloodhound upon a trail,
run the footprints of Sinikwe side by side with the giraffe spoor.
Nakeesa sees that he has put on his hide sandals, so burning is the
glittering white sand. So plain is the tale to her eyes that Nakeesa
knows now surely enough that to-morrow by noon she will rest by the dead
carcase.
In the hottest hour of afternoon, as she mounts with a sense of relief
the further edge of the great salt pan, Nakeesa sees a figure coming
towards her. Who can it be? Not Sinikwe, certainly. In five minutes
her old lover, Kwaneet, stands before her. They squat them down beneath
a solitary Mopani tree, whose bifid, butterfly-like leaves (now parched
and shrivelled), turned ever edgewise to the sun, afford them the
scantiest shade, and exchange greeting. Kwaneet takes a little--a very
little--of the precious snuff from the cartridge case at his neck, and
offers his friend a pinch from the palm of his hand. With a gratitude
almost too great for words Nakeesa takes and enjoys the precious stuff.
What a relief! No dainty cup of afternoon tea was ever so grateful to
fashionable dame as that pinch of snuff to the weary Masarwa woman. Her
eyes sparkle a little, she plucks up energy again.
"So, Kwaneet!" she says. "Have you had water? Whence come you?"
"There is no water," replies the Masarwa. "I am eaten up by the sun.
Two mornings agone I drank a little. I go to Makwa, where there may be
yet a little. And I shall there hunt for hartebeest-skins against the
coming of Khama's headmen. What news have you, Nakeesa? I saw the
print of Sinikwe's sandal yonder, following the Ng'habe," (giraffe),
"and so came on this way, knowing I should meet you. How goes life with
you?"
"There is no news," returned Nakeesa. "I heard some lies only from the
Bakalahari at Bachukuru fountain. Khama's men are hunting in Mababi.
As for me and my babe, we starve. Sinikwe has done no hunting till
yesterday for moons past. Better had it been if thou hadst been my man,
Kwaneet!"
"Come with me now, Nakeesa," replied Kwaneet. "I will find thee meat.
We will go far," (pointing north) "and defy Sinikwe."
"Nay, I dare not," answered Nakeesa. "Sinikwe would follow and slay us
in our sleep. I dare not. Be patient. Something may happen. Our life
is short, and has many dangers."
During this interview Nakeesa had been turning over something in her
mind. The snuff and its pleasures quite decided her. She took an
ostrich eggshell from her burden, cleared the orifice of grass, and
offered water to Kwaneet. The Masarwa drank half the contents of the
shell, then returned it to Nakeesa.
"Thanks for the drink; the water is good. But what will Sinikwe say?"
"Oh, that is nothing," returned the woman. "I spilled the water, did I
not? and Sinikwe must do his worst. If he returns this way he will know
who had it. I cannot help it. You are my friend--and far more."
Nakeesa knew there would be trouble about the water. She herself had
had but one sip since she started. She dared to take no more. But she
knew her risk, and cheerfully accepted it--for Kwaneet's sake. In ten
minutes they parted and went their ways. Bushmen are not a
demonstrative folk, and there was little fuss on leave-taking.
Not a little cheered by the meeting with Kwaneet, Nakeesa held steadily
on her course till sundown, and for the second night slept upon the
spoor of her husband and the now dying giraffe. Again with the earliest
streaks of light she rose and pursued her journey. Her babe was very
fretful. She herself yearned for the end of the travel; even for a
Bushwoman ground nuts are but poor sustenance for a three days' foot
journey, under a heavy load, and smitten by a parching sun. Only the
immense vitality and the silent capacity for endurance characteristic of
these desert-bred Masarwas sustained her. In the early cool of this
fair African morning Nakeesa passed through tracts of leguminous bush,
decked in a bravery of lilac-coloured blossom. As she emerged upon a
broad opening, a troop of noble gemsbok stood at gaze at fifty paces,
then cantered leisurely away, their long, spear-like horns glinting to
the sunlight. But neither the splendour of the dawn, nor the pleasant
flowers, scarcely even the great antelopes, had any attraction for
Nakeesa's eyes.
At last, just upon hot noon, Nakeesa looked skywards, and saw against
the hard, torrid glare bands of vultures wheeling and circling high
above the earth. There, at last, was her goal. Below the foul birds
the giraffe undoubtedly lay dead. Sinikwe's presence alone kept them
aloof. In half an hour Nakeesa stood by the carcase and greeted her
husband. Sinikwe paused in his operations--he was chopping ribs from
the huge frame, and from head to foot was smeared and stained with
blood. For once he was in a good humour; blood and meat had rendered
him mellow, as with wine. The day passed in butchering and drying meat,
in a continual round of feasting. At night, by the fire, Sinikwe,
utterly gorged and drunk with flesh, lay down to sleep. Nakeesa had had
enough, but she had not eaten in so gross a manner as her lord. Even to
the woman of the desert there seem intuitively to come restraints and
limits, which to the man are unknown.
The stars came sparkling forth in their hosts, the deep indigo hollow of
space intensifying their marvellous brightness. Amid that galaxy of
diamonds, the Southern Cross, Orion's Belt, the Great Dog, Centaurus,
Cetus, and many another constellation, stood majestic.
Presently the weird, shrill wail of the jackal and the hideous cry of
hyaenas told that even in these dry wastes the night creatures were
wandering in search of food. These sounds disturbed not Nakeesa, though
she heard them; she knew that the fire and the presence of human life
would sufficiently protect the giraffe's carcase. There were no lions
so far from water. Towards midnight the risen moon, now nearly at her
full, shone broad upon the veldt. Her intense brightness made clear all
things upon the desert, and paled the stars. The night grew very chill
as the hours crept by. Unconsciously, Nakeesa and her man lay yet
closer to the fire. It was an hour past midnight when Nakeesa suddenly
awoke. Neither the strong moonlight nor the fretful cries of the
jackals had roused her, but an almost imperceptible vibration of the
sand somewhere near. What danger was it? Very softly she raised her
head and peered from beneath her cloak. Yes, she was right; there, ten
yards away, something crawled over the dry red sand. Under the amazing
brilliancy of the moon it was quite clear to Nakeesa what the thing was.
It was a great puff-adder; and the gentle vibration of the reptile's
scales against the sand, as it slowly crawled, had aroused her.
The moon shone bright against one side of the loathsome creature, making
clear beneath its searching rays the flat venomous head, the vile,
wicked eye, nay, even the very scales of the swollen serpent. Upon the
other side, as Nakeesa saw, a narrow band of ink-black shadow moved with
the slow motion of the reptile. All this Nakeesa noted instantly. What
enthralled her attention yet more was the direction in which the
puff-adder headed. It made directly for Sinikwe, attracted
instinctively by the promise of warmth. At any other time, probably,
the Bushman would have awakened--his instincts would have warned him;
but now, overcome by the debauch of flesh, he slept on.
Meanwhile, as the snake slowly approached her man, something like a
struggle arose in Nakeesa's breast. Conscience goes for little in the
wilds, yet something like conscience told her that if the puff-adder
reached Sinikwe and caused his death, hers was the blame. But, she
argued, he is a desert man and can surely protect himself. She ignored
wilfully his gorged, helpless slumber; she thought only of Kwaneet, of
her own wrongs. After all, human life is of small account with the
Bushman; he must take his risks. She had seen her own mother's corpse
half devoured by a lion; her brother had died disembowelled by a
buffalo's horn. What is death in the desert? Here was fate in the form
of a puff-adder. Why should she interfere with it? So reasoned Nakeesa
as the moments fled. The serpent reached Sinikwe; it crawled slowly,
slowly beneath a corner of his skin cloak, close to his breast and arm,
and lay still.
For two hours Nakeesa lay watching in a frozen silence the end of this
terrible business. At last Sinikwe stirred. The weight of his body
shifted heavily on to the snake; there was a struggle beneath the cloak,
a dreadful cry arose from the Bushman, and then, like a mad thing,
Sinikwe leapt to his feet. The hideous reptile, its long curved fangs
still fixed deep in the man's breast, hung on, as these snakes will do.
Sinikwe took the vile creature by the neck, tore it from its hold, and
flung it to earth. Nakeesa meanwhile had sprung up, as if from sleep,
and snatched up the assegai. With a blow she broke the serpent's back,
and then with the sharp blade cut off its head.
But for Sinikwe life was now as good as ended. Despite his Bushman
remedies, the poison quickly overpowered him. After an hour and a half
of dreadful pain, gallantly borne, he fell into a torpor. As the sun
rose he lay upon the sand there dead.
An hour after sunrise Nakeesa quitted the spot. She left the body to
the vultures and jackals and hyaenas. A Bushman needs no burial.
Taking as much meat as she could carry, the unfinished water, and her
child, she set off to join Kwaneet. It was a long two days' journey,
this time cheerfully endured. Before sunset of the second day, she
squatted herself down by the side of the man of her choice, at the water
of Makwa.
"I am here, Kwaneet," she said. "Sinikwe is dead. A snake slew him at
night by the giraffe. Take me, I am thine."
So Kwaneet, not displeased, took Nakeesa to wife, and for a year or more
they wandered about the desert, hunting, drinking at this pit and that;
sometimes, when the drought gripped that thirsty land, devouring the
bitter water-melons in place of drink, as they roamed the great deserts
and followed the game. Those were the pleasantest days of Nakeesa's
hard life. She had never known flesh so abundant; they wandered far
afield into the most secluded haunts of the game, and Kwaneet had never
been so successful in his hunting. Moreover, Kwaneet was neither a
difficult man to live with, nor a hard master, and Nakeesa, by nature,
like many Masarwa women, a great conversationalist, soon found herself
acquiring a strong influence over the simple, easily managed hunter.
Yet she had a great affection for Kwaneet, and tempered her sway with
many little amenities.
In their second winter together the drought had been intense; not a pit
or sucking-hole held water in the desert, there were no melons, and the
game had nearly all trekked for the rivers. And so Kwaneet and Nakeesa,
too, had quitted the open veldt and the waterless forest, and lived
temporarily on the banks of the upper Tamalakan, north-east of Lake
Ngami.
One morning Kwaneet came back to their camping-place with a piece of
welcome news. Half a mile away he had found the carcase of a fat zebra,
killed by a lion quite recently, and only a quarter devoured. Here was
a ready-made feast, without the trouble of hunting. Nakeesa had two
children now; her elder, a boy, by Sinikwe, a precocious little Bushman
imp, could toddle alone; her younger, Kwaneet's son, she still carried.
They set off together along the river, which was now swarming with bird
life. Roseate flamingoes and ibises, lovely egrets, storks and cranes
and herons, were to be seen decking the shallows. Charming jacanas with
chestnut plumage, white and golden gorgets, long legs, and the
slenderest spidery feet, ran in little troops upon the thinnest film of
floating vegetation. Great spur-heeled Senegal cuckoos flapped heavily
from one reed-bed to another. Duck, geese, widgeon, and teal thronged
the spreading waters, and clamoured incessantly. A hippopotamus or two
blew in the distance; sluggish crocodiles floated, log-like yet
watchful, in middle stream. For the Masarwas, who love the dry deserts,
and shun the haunts even of black mankind, all this wealth of river-life
seemed a very welcome and a very novel change. But then there was a
kraal of Makobas within five miles, which was a drawback.
It was not long before they came to the dead zebra, which lay in a
little opening from the river, surrounded by dense bush. Kwaneet went
first. He walked up to the carcase and stooped to examine it. As he
did so there was a fierce, guttural growl from the bush nearest to him,
a lightning-like flash of a yellow body, and in an instant he lay there
beside the zebra, a great yellow-maned lion standing over him. The
brute stood with bared teeth, snarling in fiercest wrath. Kwaneet had
driven him from his prey that morning, it is true, but he had bided his
time, and now his revenge had come. For once the Masarwa had made a
miscalculation. As a rule the lion, driven from its prey in daylight
will steal away without showing fight. This particular lion happened to
be very hungry and very daring; there were not many hunters in that
country, and so Kwaneet had suffered.
But in the instant that the lion made his rush and stood over the
Masarwa, many things thronged into Nakeesa's brain. Her man there, from
whom she had received so many kindnesses, and with whom she had lived so
happily--nay, for a Bushwoman, so merrily--lay there in dire peril.
Surely his life was better than hers. Surely she could strike a blow
for him? Her babes, herself, all other things, were forgotten; she must
save Kwaneet, the best, and kindliest, and bravest hunter of all that
wilderness. She had Kwaneet's assegai upon her shoulder. With this she
ran in upon the lion, and with all her force drove home the blade deep
into its ribs.
The wound was not a mortal one--at the moment--and the enraged brute
turned instantly at Nakeesa, struck her to earth, and then fastened his
teeth, with a hideous, crunching sound, deep in the bones of her neck.
For a good half minute it continued this deadly work, then, noticing the
year-old child, crying in the back of the woman's cloak, it gripped that
also between its teeth, and put an end to it. Meanwhile Kwaneet, almost
uninjured by the lion's first rush, had crawled away unnoticed, and,
with Nakeesa's elder lad, regained a place of safety.
So Nakeesa lay there dead by the river, her days of toil and of pleasure
all ended. She had shown two great extremes of evil and good in her
nineteen years of existence. She had refused to save the life of
Sinikwe (the man who treated her ill, and whom she loathed) from the
puff-adder--an act as good as murder, most men will say. And for
Kwaneet, who had treated her with some kindliness, and whom she loved
with as much love as a Masarwa is capable of, she had given her whole
being--life itself. She could do no more.
As for Kwaneet, having satisfied himself, without much emotion, at a
later period of the day, of the death of his wife and child, and having
taken as much zebra meat as the lion had left, he went his way.
Nakeesa's elder child--now three years old--was, of course, a perfectly
useless encumbrance to him. He therefore sold the boy to some Batauana
people for a new assegai, and soon after returned to his desert life.
Nakeesa's bones are long since scattered, broken, and devoured by the
beasts of the desert; but her skull, a little, round, smooth skull, lies
there, yellow and discoloured, in the far swamps of the Tamalakan river.
Her poor, squalid, desert love-story can scarcely be said to point a
moral, or even adorn a tale. It merely affords one more instance of the
complex nature of the human heart--of human emotions--even in the
crudest and most savage aspect of African life.