A Sparrow Falls

  Pungushe was aware of the wind in the same way as the helmsman of a tall ship is, for it was as important to him as it is to a mariner. He knew exactly at each moment of the day its force and direction, anticipated any change before it occurred and he did not have to carry an ash bag nor wet a finger, the knowledge was instinctive.

  Now he moved carefully into a downwind position from the wounded animal. It did not occur to him to thank any providence for the constant easterly breeze that put him fairly between the cat and the near boundary of Chaka’s Gate.

  Silent as the cloud shadow moves across the earth, he moved in on the cat, judging the extreme limit of her acute hearing before kneeling facing where she lay three hundred yards away.

  He filled and deflated his lungs rapidly a dozen times, the great muscled chest swelling and subsiding as he built up reserves of oxygen in his blood. Then he caught a full breath and stretched out his neck at a peculiar angle, cupping his hands to his gaping mouth to act as a sounding board.

  From the depths of the straining chest issued a low drumming rattle, that rose and sank to a natural rhythm and ended with an abrupt little cough.

  The lioness’ head came up in a single flash of movement, her ears erect, her eyes alight with yellow lights, for in her pain and fear and confusion she had heard the old tom calling to her, that low, far-carrying assembly call with which he had directed her hunting so often, and which he had used to bring her to him when separated in thick bush.

  The pain of rising was almost too much for her, the wound had stiffened and her neck and shoulder and chest were crushed under a granite boulder of agony, but at that moment she heard for the first time the distant yelping chorus of the dog pack. She and the old tom had been hunted by dogs before, and the sound gave her strength.

  She came up and stood for a moment on three legs, favouring the right fore, panting heavily and then she went forward, whining softly at the pain, carrying the bad leg high, lunging for balance at each stride.

  Mark watched from the ridge, saw the yellow cat start to move again, hobbling slowly westwards at last. Far ahead of her, keeping out of sight, the big Zulu trotted, pausing whenever she faltered to kneel and repeat the assembly call of a dominant male lion, and each time the lioness answered him with eager little mewling grunts and hobbled after him, westward towards the dreaming blue hills that guarded the Bubezi Valley.

  Mark had heard the old hunters’ stories before; old man Anders had always claimed that his gunbearer, who had been killed by an elephant on the Sabi River in ‘84, could call lions. However, Mark had never seen it done, and secretly had put the story into the category of the picturesque but apocryphal.

  Now he saw it happening, and still wanted to doubt it. He watched fascinated from his grandstand upon the ridge, and only a change in the clamour of the dog pack made him swing his binoculars back towards the east.

  At the rocky shoulder of the ridge, where he had set his bait of powdered biltong and snuff, the pack milled confusedly. There were eight or nine dogs, a mongrel pack of terriers and boer hounds and ridgebacks.

  The determined hunting chorus had disintegrated into a cacophony of whines and yelps, while Dirk Courtney over rode them, standing in his stirrups to lay about them furiously with the horse-whip.

  Mark took Trojan’s reins and led him down off the ridge, using what little cover there was, but confident that the huntsmen were too involved with their own problems to look ahead and see him.

  When he reached the place beside the thorn thicket where the lioness had last lain, he cut a branch with his clasp knife, and used it like a broom to brush away any sign the cat had left.

  He followed slowly westwards towards Chaka’s Gate, pausing every few minutes to listen for the drumming lion call, watching the ground as he moved, and using the branch to brush away all lion sign, covering for his lioness, until in the dusk they climbed a low saddle through the hills and in slow, drawn-out procession, went down to the Bubezi River.

  Pungushe made his last call in darkness, and then ran out in a wide circle, leaving the lioness within a hundred yards of the river, knowing how she would be burned up by the heat of the wound and crazed for water.

  He found Mark by the glow of his cigarette.

  ‘Get up,’ said Mark, and gave him an arm. Pungushe did not argue. He had run almost without a pause since before dawn, and he swung up behind Mark.

  They rode home, two up on Trojan’s broad sway back, and neither of them spoke until they saw the lantern light in the cottage window.

  ‘Jamela,’ said Pungushe. ‘I feel the way I did the day my first son was born.’ And there was a tone of wonder in his voice. ‘I did not believe a man could feel thus for a devil that kills cattle and men.’

  Lying in the darkness, with Marion beside him in the double bed, Mark told her about it. Trying to convey the wonder and the sense of achievement. He told her what Pungushe had said, and stumbled for words to describe his own feelings, to come haltingly at last into silence.

  ‘That’s very nice, dear. When are you going into town again? I want to buy some curtains for the kitchen. I though a checked gingham would look pretty, what do you think, dear?’

  The lioness gave birth to her cubs in the thick jessie bushes that choked one of the narrow tributary valleys which came down off the escarpment.

  There were six cubs, but they were almost three weeks old when Mark first saw them. He and Pungushe lay belly down on the edge of the cliff that overlooked the valley when she led them back from the river in the dawn. The cubs followed her in an untidy straggle spread over a hundred yards. The sinew in her right fore had healed crooked and slightly shorter, which gave her a heaviness in her gait, a roll like a sailor’s as she came up the draw. One of the cubs, more persistent than the rest, was trying to suckle from her pendulous, heavy, multiple dugs as she walked. He kept making clumsy flying leaps at them as they swung above his head; mostly he fell on his head and got trodden on by his mother’s back feet, but once he succeeded and hung like a fat brown tick on one nipple. The lioness whirled about and cuffed him left and right, then began to lick him with a tongue that wrapped around his head entirely and knocked him on his back again.

  One of the other cubs was stalking his siblings, crouching in ambush behind a single blade of grass, with flattened ears and viciously slitted eyes. When he leapt out on his brothers and sisters and they totally ignored his warlike manoeuvres, he covered his embarrassment by turning back and sniffing the grass blade with such attention that it seemed this had been his original intention.

  Three of the others were hunting butterflies. There had been a new hatching of colotis ione. On white and purple wings they fluttered close to the earth and the cubs reared on their hind legs and boxed at them with more gusto than skill, over-balancing at the end of each attack and collapsing in a fluffy tangle of outsized paws.

  The sixth cub was hunting the tails of the butterfly-hunters. Every time they slashed their little tufted tails in the feverish excitement of the chase, he pounced upon them with savage growls and they were forced to turn and defend themselves against the sting of his needle-sharp baby teeth.

  The progress of the family from river to jessie thicket was a long drawn out series of unseemly brawls, which the lioness finally broke up. She turned back and gave that drumming cough which promised imminent retribution if not obeyed instantly. The cubs abandoned their play, formed an Indian file and trotted after the lioness into the shelter of the jessie.

  ‘I would like to know how many females there are in the litter,’ Mark whispered, grinning fondly like a new father as he watched them go.

  ‘If you wish, Jamela, I will go down and look under their tails,’ Pungushe offered solemnly. ‘And you will treat my widows generously.’

  Mark chuckled and led the way back down the side of the hill.

  They had almost reached the tree where Mark had left Trojan, when something caught his eyes. He turned aside and kicked hopefully at the little
heap of stones, before he realized that they had not been erected by human hands, but had been pushed up by the surface roots of a siringa tree.

  He gave a grunt of disappointment and turned away. Pungushe watched him speculatively, but made no comment. He had seen Mark perform that strange little ritual a hundred times before, whenever an unusual rock or pile caught his attention.

  It had become a custom that every few evenings Mark would wander across from the thatched cottage at main camp, half a mile to where Pungushe’s wives had erected the cluster of huts that was the family home.

  Each hut was shaped in the perfect cone of a beehive, long whippy saplings bent in to form the framework and the thatch bound in place by the plaited string of bark stripped from the saplings.

  The earth between the huts was smoothed and brushed, and Pungushe’s carved wooden stool set before the low doorway of his personal sleeping hut. After Mark’s fourth visit another, newly carved stool appeared beside it. Though it was never spoken of, it was immediately apparent that this had been reserved exclusively for Mark’s visits.

  Once Mark was seated, one of the wives would bring him a bowl to wash his hands. The water had been carried laboriously all the way from the river, and Mark merely damped his fingertips so that it would not be wasted.

  Then the youngest wife knelt in front of him, smiling shyly, and offered with both hands a pot of the delicious sour utshwala, the Zulu millet beer, thick as gruel and mildly alcoholic.

  Only when Mark had swallowed the first mouthful would Pungushe look up and greet him.

  ‘I see you, Jamela.’

  Then they could talk in the relaxed desultory fashion of men totally at ease in each other’s company.

  ‘Today, when we came down off the hill after watching the lions, you turned off the path and kicked at some stones. It was for this strange custom I named you; this endless seeking, this looking and never finding.’

  Pungushe would never ask the direct question, it would have been the grossest bad manners to ask outright what Mark was looking for; only a child or an umlungu, a white man, would be so callow. It had taken him many months to ask the question, and now he framed it in the form of a statement.

  Mark took another pull at his beer pot and offered Pungushe his cigarette case. The Zulu declined with an open hand, and instead began to roll his own smoke, coarse tarry black tobacco in a thick roll of brown paper, the size of a Havana cigar. Watching his hands Mark replied:

  ‘My father and my mother died of the white sore throat, diphtheria, when I was a child, and an old man became both father and mother to me.’ He started to answer the question in as devious a manner as it had been asked, and Pungushe listened, nodding and smoking quietly.

  ‘So this man, my grandfather whom I loved, is buried somewhere in this valley. It is his grave I seek,’ he ended simply, and realized suddenly that Pungushe was staring at him with a peculiar sombre expression.

  ‘What is it?’ Mark asked.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Six seasons ago.’

  ‘Would this old man have camped beneath the wild figs?’ Pungushe pointed down the valley. ‘Where first you camped?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mark agreed. ‘He always camped there.’ He felt the surge of something in his chest, foreknowledge of something momentous about to happen.

  ‘There was a man,’ said Pungushe, ‘who wore a hat, a hat under which an impi could have camped—’ and he made a circle of his arms, exaggerating only a little the size of a double terai brim, ‘and who had a beard, shaped thus like the wings of a white egret—’ An image of the old man’s forked beard, snowy and stained only around the mouth with tobacco juice, leapt in Mark’s mind. ‘An old man who walked like the secretary bird when it hunts for locusts in the grass.’ The long thin legs, the stooped arthritic shoulders, the measured stride, the description was perfect.

  ‘Pungushe!’ Mark exploded with excitement. ‘You know him!’

  ‘Nothing moves in this valley, no bird flies, no baboon barks, but the jackal hears and sees.’

  Mark stared at him, appalled at his own oversight. Of course Pungushe knew everything. Pungushe the silent watcher, why in God’s name had he not thought to ask him before?

  ‘He followed this path!’ Pungushe walked ahead of Mark, and with the natural skill of the born actor mimicked John Anders, the halting gait, and stooped shoulders of an old man. If Mark half closed his eyes, he could see his grandfather as he had seen him so many times before.

  ‘Here he turned off the path,’ Pungushe left the game trail and started up one of the narrow dried-out watercourses. Their feet crunched in the sugary sand. Half a mile further, Pungushe stopped and pointed at one of the shiny water-polished black boulders.

  ‘Here he sat and set his rifle aside. He lit his pipe and smoked.’

  Pungushe turned and scrambled up the steep bank of the water-course.

  ‘While the old man smoked, the fourth man came up the valley. He came as a hunter, silently, following the easy spoor of the old man.’ He used the Zulu word of respect for an elder, ixhegu.

  ‘Walt, Pungushe,’ Mark frowned. ‘You say the fourth man? I am confused. Count the men for me.’

  They squatted down on the bank and Pungushe took a little snuff, offered the horn to Mark who refused, then sniffed the red powder out of his palm, closing one nostril at a time with his thumb. He screwed his eyes closed and sneezed deliciously before going on.

  ‘There was the old man, your grandfather, ixhegu.’

  ‘That is one.’

  ‘Then there was another old man. Without hair on his head nor on his chin.’

  ‘That is two,’ Mark agreed.

  ‘Then there was a young man with very black hair, a man who laughed all the time and walked with the noise of a buffalo herd.’

  ‘Yes. That is three.’

  ‘These three came together to the valley. They hunted together and camped together below the wild figs.’

  Pungushe must be describing the Greylings, the father and son who had made the sworn deposition to the Ladyburg magistrate. That was as he had expected, but now he asked, ‘What of the fourth man, Pungushe?’

  ‘The fourth man followed them secretly and ixhegu, your grandfather, did not know of him. He had always the manner of the hunter of men, watching from cover and moving silently. But once when your grandfather, ixhegu, had left camp to hunt alone for birds along the river, this secret man came to the camp below the wild figs and all three of them spoke together, quietly but with closed faces and wary eyes of men who discuss affairs of deadly moment. Then the silent man left them again and went to hide in the bush before ixhegu returned.’

  ‘You saw all this, Pungushe?’ Mark asked.

  ‘What I did not see, read in the spoor.’

  ‘Now I understand about the fourth man. Tell me what happened that day.’

  ‘Ixhegu was sitting there, smoking his pipe,’ Pungushe pointed down into the water-course. ‘And the silent one came and stood here, even where we now sit, and he looked down at your grandfather without speaking, holding his isibamu, his rifle, thus.’

  ‘What did ixhegu do then?’ Mark asked. He felt nauseous with the horror of it.

  ‘He looked up and asked a question in a loud voice, as a man does when he is afraid, but the silent one did not reply.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘I am sorry, Jamela, knowing that ixhegu was of your blood, the telling of it gives me pain.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Mark.

  ‘Then the silent one fired once with his rifle, and ixhegu fell face down in the sand.’

  ‘He was dead?’ Mark asked, and Pungushe was silent a moment.

  ‘He was not dead. He was shot here, in the belly. He moved, he cried out.’

  ‘The silent one fired again?’ Mark felt the acid bite of vomit in the back of his throat.

  Pungushe shook his head.

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He sat down on the bank, here
where we sit, and he smoked silently, watching the old man ixhegu lying down there in the sand, until he died.’

  ‘How long did he take to die?’ Mark asked in a choked, angry voice.

  Pungushe swept a segment of the sky to indicate two hours of the sun’s course. ‘At the end ixhegu was calling out in Zulu as well as his own language.’

  ‘What did he say, Pungusher

  ‘He asked for water, and he called to God and to a woman who might have been his mother or his wife. Then he died.’

  Mark thought about it with surges of nausea alternating with flashes of bitter hating anger, and racking grief. He tried to imagine why the killer had let his victim die so slowly, and it was many minutes before he remembered that the story must have already been arranged that the old man was to die in a hunting accident. No man accidentally shoots himself twice. The body was to have only one gunshot wound. But the stomach was always the most agonizing wound. Mark remembered how the gut-wounded screamed in the trenches as they were being carried back by the stretcher-bearers.

  ‘I grieve with you, Jamela.’

  Mark roused himself at Pungushe’s words.

  ‘What happened after ixhegu died?’

  ‘The other two men, the old bald one and the young loud one, came from the camp. All three of them talked here, beside the body. They talked for a long time, with shouting and red angry faces, and they waved their hands thus, and thus.’ Pungushe imitated men in heated argument. ‘One pointed here, another pointed there, but in the end the silent one spoke and the other two listened.’

  ‘Where did they take him?’

  ‘First they opened his pockets, and took from them some papers and a pouch. They argued again, and the silent one took the papers and put them back in the dead man’s pockets—’ Mark realized the wisdom of this. An honest man does not rob the corpse of an accident victim. ‘Then they carried him up the bank, and this way—’ Pungushe stood and led Mark four hundred yards into the forest, below the first steep gradient of the escarpment. ‘Here they found a deep ant-bear hole, and they pushed the old man’s body down into it.’