Cuff blinked. “Must be something wrong with my eyes” “No,” said Mtengeni. “That hippo she is one of those I wanted you to see.”
The hippopotamus was green with pink spots.
She spied the men, grunted suspiciously, and slid back into the water.
“I still don’t believe it,” said Cuff. “Dash it, man, that’s impossible.”
“You will see many more things,” said Mtengeni. “Shall we go on?”
They found the rapid and struggled across; then walked along what might, by some stretch of the imagination, be called a trail. There was little sound other than their sucking footfalls, the hum of insects, and the occasional screech of a bird or the crashing of a buck through the reeds.
They walked for some hours. Then Mtengeni said: “Be careful. There is a rhino near.”
Cuff wondered how the devil the Zulu knew, but he was careful. Presently they came on a clear space in which the rhinoceros was browsing.
The animal couldn’t see them at that distance, and there was no wind to carry their smell. It must have heard them, though, for it left off its feeding and snorted, once, like a locomotive. It had two heads.
It trotted toward them sniffing.
The men got out their rifles. “My God!” said Athelstan Cuff. “Hope we don’t have to shoot him. My God!”
“I don’t think so,” said the warden. “That’s Tweedle. I know him. If he gets too close, give him one at the base of the horn and he … he will run.”
“Tweedle?”
“Yes. The right head is Tweedledum and the left is Tweedledee,” said Mtengeni solemnly. “The whole rhino I call Tweedle.”
The rhinoceros kept coming. Mtengeni said: “Watch this.” He waved his hat and shouted: “Go away! Footsack!”
Tweedle stopped and snorted again. Then he began to circle like a waltzing mouse. Round and round he spun.
“We might as well go on,” said Mtengeni. “He will keep that up for hours. You see Tweedledum is fierce, but Tweedledee, he is peaceful, even cowardly. So when I yell at Tweedle, Tweedledum wants to charge us, but Tweedledee he wants to run away. So the right legs go forward and the left legs go back, and Tweedle, he goes in circles. It takes him some time to agree on a policy.”
“Whew!” said Athelstan Cuff. “I say, have you got any more things like this in your zoo?”
“Oh, yes, lots. That’s what I hope you’ll do something about.”
Do something about this! Cuff wondered whether this was touching evidence of the native’s faith in the white omniscience, or whether Mtengeni had gotten him there for the cynical amusement of watching him run in useless circles. Mtengeni himself gave no sign of what he was thinking.
Cuff said: “I can’t understand, George, why somebody hasn’t looked into this before.”
Mtengeni shrugged. “Me, I’ve tried to get somebody to, but the government won’t send anybody, and the scientific expeditions, there haven’t been any of them for years. I don’t know why.”
“I can guess,” said Cuff. “In the old days people even in the so-called civilized countries expected travel to be a jolly rugged proposition, so they didn’t mind putting up with a few extra hardships on trek. But now that you can ride or fly almost anywhere on soft cushions, people won’t put themselves out to get to a really uncomfortable and out-of-the-way place like Ngamiland.”
Over the swampy smell came another, of carrion. Mtengeni pointed to the carcass of a waterbuck fawn, which the scavengers had apparently not discovered yet.
“That’s why I want you to stop this whatever-it-is,” he said. There was real concern in his voice.
“What do you mean, George?”
“Do you see its legs?”
Cuff looked. The forelegs were only half as long as the hind ones.
“That buck,” said the Zulu. “It naturally couldn’t live long. All over the Park, freaks like this they are being born. Most of them don’t live. In ten years more, maybe twenty, all my animals will have died out because of this. Then my job, where is it?”
They stopped at sunset. Cuff was glad to. It had been some time since he’d done fifteen miles in one day, and he dreaded the morrow’s stiffness. He looked at his map and tried to figure out where he was. But the cartographers had never seriously tried to keep track of the changes in the Okavango’s multifarious branches, and had simply plastered the whole Delta with little blue dashes with tufts of blue lines sticking up from them, meaning simply “swamp.” In all directions the country was a monotonous alternation of land and water. The two elements were inextricably mixed.
The Zulu was looking for a dry spot free of snakes. Cuff heard him suddenly shout “Footsack!” and throw a clod at a log. The log opened a pair of jaws, hissed angrily, and slid into the water.
“We’ll have to have a good fire,” said Mtengeni, hunting for dry wood. “We don’t want a croc or hippo wandering into our tent by mistake.”
After supper they set the automatic bug sprayer going, inflated their mattresses, and tried to sleep. A lion roared somewhere in the west. That sound no African, native or Africander, likes to hear when he is on foot at night. But the men were not worried; lions avoided the swampy areas. The mosquitoes presented a more immediate problem.
Many hours later, Athelstan Cuff heard Mtengeni getting up.
The warden said: “I just remembered a high spot half a mile from here, where there’s plenty of firewood. Me, I’m going out to get some.”
Cuff listened to Mtengeni’s retreating steps in the soft ground; then to his own breathing. Then he listened to something else. It sounded like a human yell.
He got up and pulled on his boots quickly. He fumbled around for the flashlight, but Mtengeni had taken it with him. The yell came again.
Cuff found his rifle and cartridge belt in the dark and went out. There was enough starlight to walk by if you were careful. The fire was nearly out. The yells seemed to come from a direction opposite to that in which Mtengeni had gone. They were high-pitched, like a woman’s screams.
He walked in their direction, stumbling over irregularities in the ground and now and then stepping up to his calves in unexpected water. The yells were plainer now. They weren’t in English. Something was also snorting.
He found the place. There was a small tree, in the branches of which somebody was perched. Below the tree a noisy bulk Moved around. Cuff caught the outline of a sweeping horn, and knew he had to deal with a buffalo.
He hated to shoot. For a Park official to kill one of his charges simply wasn’t done. Besides, he couldn’t see to aim for a vital spot, and he didn’t care to try to dodge a wounded buffalo in the dark. They could move with racehorse speed through the heaviest growth.
On the other hand, he couldn’t leave even a poor fool of a native woman treed. The buffalo, if it was really angry, would wait for days until its victim weakened and fell. Or it would butt the tree until the victim was shaken out. Or it would rear up and try to hook the victim out with its horns.
Athelstan Cuff shot the buffalo. The buffalo staggered about a bit and collapsed.
The victim climbed down swiftly, pouring out a flood of thanks in Xosa. It was very bad Xosa, even worse than the Englishman’s. Cuff wondered what she was doing here, nearly a thousand miles from where the Maxosa lived. He assumed that she was a native, though it was too dark to see. He asked her if she spoke English, but she didn’t seem to understand the question, so he made shift with the Bantu dialect.
“Uveli phi na?” he asked sternly. “Where do you come from? Don’t you know that nobody is allowed in the Park without special permission?”
“Izwe kamafene wabantu,” she replied.
“What? Never heard of the place. Land of the baboon people, indeed! What are you?”
“Ingwamza.”
“You’re a white stork? Are you trying to be funny?”
“I didn’t say I was a white stork. Ingwamza’s my name.”
“I don’t care about your name.
I want to know what you are.”
“Umfene umfazi.”
Cuff controlled his exasperation. “All right, all right, you’re a baboon woman. I don’t care what clan you belong to. What’s your tribe? Batawana, Bamangwato, Bangwaketse, Barolong, Herero, or what? Don’t try to tell me you’re a Xosa; no Xosa ever used an accent like that.”
“Amafene abantu.”
“What the devil are the baboon people?”
“People who live in the Park.”
Cuff resisted the impulse to pull out two handfuls of hair by the roots. “But I tell you nobody lives in the Park! It isn’t allowed! Come now, where do you really come from and what’s your native language and why are you trying to talk Xosa?”
“I told you, I live in the Park. And I speak Xosa because all we amafene abantu speak it. That’s the language Mqhavi taught us.”
“Who is Mqhavi?”
“The man who taught us to speak Xosa.”
Cuff gave up. “Come along, you’re going to see the warden. Perhaps he can make some sense out of your gabble. And you’d better have a good reason for trespassing, my good woman, or it’ll go hard with you. Especially as it resulted in the killing of a good buffalo.” He started off toward the camp, making sure that Ingwamza followed him closely.
The first thing he discovered was that he couldn’t see the light of any fire to guide him back. Either he’d come farther than he thought, or the fire had died altogether while Mtengeni was getting wood. He kept on for a quarter of an hour in what he thought was the right direction. Then he stopped. He had, he realized, not the vaguest idea of where he was.
He turned. “Sibaphi na?” he snapped. “Where are we?”
“In the Park.”
Cuff began to wonder whether he’d ever succeed in delivering this native woman to Mtengeni before he strangled her with his bare hands. “I know we’re in the Park,” he snarled. “But where in the Park?”
“I don’t know exactly. Somewhere near my people’s land.” “That doesn’t do me any good. Look: I left the warden’s camp when I heard you yell. I want to get back to it. Now how do I do it?”
“Where is the warden’s camp?”
“I don’t know, stupid. If I did I’d go there.”
“If you don’t know where it is, how do you expect me to guide you thither? I don’t know either.”
Cuff made strangled noises in his throat. Inwardly he had to admit that she had him there, which only made him madder. Finally he said: “Never mind, suppose you take me to your people. Maybe they have somebody with some sense.”
“Very well,” said the native woman, and she set off at a rapid pace, Cuff stumbling after her vague outline. He began to wonder if maybe she wasn’t right about living in the Park. She seemed to know where she was going.
“Wait,” he said. He ought to write a note to Mtengeni, explaining what he was up to, and stick it on a tree for the warden to find. But there was no pencil or paper in his pockets. He didn’t even have a match safe or a cigarette lighter. He’d taken all those things out of his pockets when he’d lain down.
They went on a way, Cuff pondering on how to get in touch with Mtengeni. He didn’t want himself and the warden to spend a week chasing each other around the Delta. Perhaps it would be better to stay where they were and build a fire—but again, he had no matches, and didn’t see much prospect of making a fire by rubbing sticks in this damned damp country.
Ingwamza said: “Stop. There are buffalo ahead.”
Cuff listened and heard faintly the sound of snapping grass stems as the animals fed.
She continued: “We’ll have to wait until it gets light. Then maybe they’ll go away. If they don’t, we can circle around them, but I couldn’t find the way around in the dark.”
They found the highest point they could and settled down to wait. Something with legs had crawled inside Cuff’s shirt. He mashed it with a slap.
He strained his eyes into the dark. It was impossible to tell how far away the buffalo were. Overhead a nightjar brought its wings together with a single startling clap. Cuff told his nerves to behave themselves. He wished he had a smoke.
The sky began to lighten. Gradually Cuff was able to make out the black bulks moving among the reeds. They were at least two hundred yards away. He’d have preferred that they were at twice the distance, but it was better than stumbling right on them.
It became lighter and lighter. Cuff never took his eyes off the buffalo. There was something queer about the nearest one. It had six legs.
Cuff turned to Ingwamza and started to whisper: “What kind of buffalo do you call—” Then he gave a yell of pure horror and jumped back. His rifle went off, tearing a hole in his boot.
He had just gotten his first good look at the native woman in the rapidly waxing dawn. Ingwamza’s head was that of an overgrown chacma baboon.
The buffalo stampeded through the feathery papyrus. Cuff and Ingwamza stood looking at each other. Then Cuff looked at his right foot. Blood was running out of the jagged hole in the leather.
“What’s the matter? Why did you shoot yourself?” asked Ingwamza.
Cuff couldn’t think of an answer to that one. He sat down and took off his boot. The foot felt numb, but there seemed to be no harm done aside from a piece of skin the size of a sixpence gouged out of the margin. Still, you never knew what sort of horrible infection might result from a trifling wound in these swamps. He tied his foot up with his handkerchief and put his boot back on.
“Just an accident,” he said. “Keep going, Ingwamza.”
Ingwamza went, Cuff limping behind. The sun would rise any minute now. It was light enough to make out colors. Cuff saw that Ingwamza, in describing herself as a baboon-woman, had been quite literal, despite the size, general proportions, and posture of a human being. Her body, but for the greenish-yellow hair and the short tail, might have passed for that of a human being, if you weren’t too particular. But the astonishing head with its long bluish muzzle gave her the appearance of an Egyptian animal-headed god. Cuff wondered vaguely if the ‘fene abantu were a race of man-monkey hybrids. That was impossible, of course. But he’d seen so many impossible things in the last couple of days.
She looked back at him. “We shall arrive in an hour or two. I’m sleepy.” She yawned. Cuff repressed a shudder at the sight of four canine teeth big enough for a leopard. Ingwamza could tear the throat out of a man with those fangs as easily as biting the end off a banana. And he’d been using his most hectoring colonial-administrator tone on her in the dark!
He made a resolve never to speak harshly to anybody he couldn’t see.
Ingwamza pointed to a carroty baobab against the sky. “Izew kamagene wabantu.” They had to wade a little stream to get there. A six-foot monitor lizard walked across their path, saw them, and disappeared with a scuttle.
The ‘fene abantu lived in a village much like that of any Bantu people, but the circular thatched huts were smaller and cruder. Baboon people ran out to peer at Cuff and to feel his clothes. He gripped his rifle tightly. They didn’t act hostile, but it gave you a dashed funny feeling. The males were larger than the females, with even longer muzzles and bigger tusks.
In the center; of the village sat a big umfene umntu scratching himself in front of the biggest hut. Ingwamza said, “That is my father, the chief. His name is Indlovu.” To the baboon-man she told of her rescue.
The chief was the only umfene umntu that Cuff had seen who wore anything. What he wore was a necktie. The necktie had been a gaudy thing once.
The chief got up and made a speech, the gist of which was that Cuff had done a great thing, and that Cuff would be their guest until his wound healed. Cuff had a chance to observe the difficulties that the ‘fene abantu had with the Xosa tongue. The clicks were blurred, and they stumbled badly over the lipsmack. With those mouths, he could see how they might.
But he was only mildly interested. His foot was hurting like the very devil. He was glad when they led
him into a hut so he could take off his boot. The hut was practically unfurnished. Cuff asked the ‘fene abantu if he might have some of the straw used for thatching. They seemed puzzled by his request, but complied, and he made himself a bed of sorts. He hated sleeping on the ground, especially on ground infested with arthropodal life. He hated vermin, and knew he was in for an intimate acquaintance with them.
He had nothing to bandage his foot with, except the one handkerchief, which was now thoroughly blood-soaked. He’d have to wash and dry it before it would be fit to use again. And where in the Okavango Delta could he find water fit to wash the handkerchief in? Of course he could boil the water. In what? He was relieved and amazed when his questions brought forth the fact that there was a large iron pot in the village, obtained from God knew where.
The wound had clotted satisfactorily, and he dislodged the handkerchief with infinite care from the scab. While his water was boiling, the chief, Indlovu, came in and talked to him. The pain in his foot had subsided for the moment, and he was able to realize what an extraordinary thing he had come across, and to give Indlovu his full attention. He plied Indlovu with questions.
The chief explained what he knew about himself and his people. It seemed that he was the first of the race; all the others were his descendants. Not only Ingwamza but all the other amafene abafazi were his daughters. Ingwamza was merely the last. He was old now. He was hazy about dates, but Cuff got the impression that these beings had a shorter life span than human beings, and matured much more quickly. If they were in fact baboons, that was natural enough.
Indlovu didn’t remember having had any parents. The earliest he remembered was being led around by Mqhavi. Stanley H. Mqhavi had been a black man, and worked for the machine man, who had been a pink man like Cuff. He had had a machine up on the edge of the Chobe Swamp. His name had been Heeky.
Of course, Hickey! thought Cuff. Now he was getting somewhere. Hickey had disappeared by simply running his truck up to Ngamiland without bothering to tell anybody where he was going. That had been before the Park had been established; before Cuff had come out from England. Mqhavi must have been his Xosa assistant. His thoughts raced ahead of Indlovu’s words.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 91
