EPILOGUE: THE DEATH OF ELLY ZAHM
For Levi Zendt and Elly Zahm, the newlywed Pennsylvania Dutch couple, the trail west in 1844 contained an unfolding series of surprises—it seemed almost as if a superior dramatist had prepared the script best calculated to excite the imagination. Now the first hills appeared, and the travelers began to realize that the going would be difficult, yet the way was eased with excellent grass and good water, from which they and the other immigrants could take consolation. Farmers from eastern areas saw the hickory, the oak, the plenitude of walnut and birch, and found themselves in reassuring surroundings, but suddenly at the crest of some hill they would catch a glimpse of landscape reaching to the horizon, infinitely far, with few trees and only scrub grass, and they would catch their breath at the strangeness of the land they were penetrating. The whole trip would be like this, one contrast after another.
At the end of the first week it began to rain, not the way it did back East, but in sullen sheets of water. The rain fell with such intensity that it bounced back up from the earth, and Elly Zendt wrote to her friend Laura Lou Booker:
June 2, Sunday … I am writing this at night huddled inside the Conestoga before a flickering candle. It is raining, but not like any you have seen in Lancaster. It falls in great tubfuls, drowning everything. Sometimes the wagon shakes so that I cannot control my pen, and the wind whistles so piercingly that I cannot think. Levi has put an India-rubber sheet over our wagon, but still the rain drips through. I understand how Noah felt.…
Summer was nearly over, and with her growing pregnancy Elly had attained a serenity she had not known before, and her thin face was becoming actually beautiful. She was now a mature woman of seventeen with a burgeoning loveliness, as if the prairie had called forth a miracle.
One evening, while Levi wandered over the prairie, collecting buffalo chips so that Elly would not have to work, she stayed in the wagon, writing to Laura Lou. This letter stands as an epistle of hope and prescience, epitomizing the contributions made by the brave women who crossed the plains in pioneer days:
August 27, Tuesday … To be pregnant takes away the sting of defeat, for just as we shall be starting a new community where the rivers meet, so Levi and I shall be starting a new family. Also, the land we are traveling is the kind that makes you proud, for it is beautiful in a manner that those of us who lived always in Lancaster could never have dreamed or appreciated. This afternoon we came over a hill and saw before us the two red buttes which have been our target since we left Fort John. They stood like signal towers, or the ramparts of a castle, and they created such a strong sense of home that all of us halted on the hill to appreciate the noble place to which God had brought us. Levi and I spent only a little while looking at the buttes, because our attention was taken by the mountains to the west, and we both thought that if we were to live within the shadow of such majestic hills we would become like them. It was now growing dark, and the sun disappeared and over the prairie which we have come to love so well came a bluish haze and then a purple and finally the first dark shades of night itself and we were all travelers on the crest of a hill. I feel assured that any family which grows up in such novel surroundings will be strong and different and I thank God that I am pregnant so that I can watch the growing.
Next morning, Elly was up early to prepare breakfast, and as she moved briskly toward the small pile of buffalo chips that Levi had gathered for her to be used as fuel for their fire, she did not heed the warning sound, and as she stooped to lift a large chip, a giant rattlesnake, bigger around than her arm, struck with terrifying speed and sank its fangs deep into her throat. Within three minutes she was dead.
‘It’s God’s mercy,’ McKeag said as Levi came rushing up, too late for even one last kiss. ‘It’s God’s mercy,’ the red-haired Scotsman repeated, as he gripped Levi by the shoulders. ‘I’ve seen ’em die slow from snakebite, all swole up. Levi, it’s better this way.’
Of the millions of words I’ve written, none have affected readers so emotionally as these short paragraphs describing the death of Elly Zahm. Hundreds have written to ask, ‘Why did you have to kill her off like that?’ An equal number have approached me personally to report that they wept at her death: ‘Why did you make her die so soon?’ And I reply, ‘That’s the way things happened in the settlement of the West.’
—J.A.M.
THE HYENA
It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa. Now for almost a decade little rain had fallen; the earth had baked; the water had lowered and become increasingly brackish.
The hippopotamus, lying with only her nostrils exposed, knew intuitively that she must soon quit this place and move her baby to some other body of water, but where and in what direction, she could not decide.
The herd of zebra that came regularly to the lake edged their way down the bare, shelving sides and drank with reluctance the fetid water. One male, stubbornly moving away from the others, pawed at the hard earth, seeking to find a sweeter spring, but there was none.
Two lionesses, who had been hunting fruitlessly all night, spotted the individual zebra and by arcane signals indicated that this was the one they would tackle when the herd left the lake. For the present they did nothing but wait in the dry yellow grass.
Finally there was a noise. The sun was still some moments from rising above the horizon when a rhinoceros, looking in its grotesque armor much the same as it had for the past three million years, rumbled down to the water and began rooting in the soft mud, searching for roots and drinking noisily.
When the sun was about to creep over the two conical hills that marked the eastern end of the lake, a herd of eland—big, majestic antelope that moved with rare grace—came to drink. When they appeared, a little brown man who had been watching through the night, hidden in deep grass, whispered a prayer of thanks: ‘If the eland come, there is still hope. If that rhinoceros stays, we can still eat.’
His attention was deflected by a thunder of hooves. Zebra lookouts had spotted the lionesses and had sounded retreat. Like a swarm of beautifully colored birds, the black-and-white animals scrambled up the dusty bank of the lake and headed for safety.
But the male who had seen fit to wander off, dissociating himself from the herd, now lost its protection, and the lionesses, as planned, cut him off from the others. There was a wild chase, a leap onto the hindquarters of the zebra, a piteous scream, a raking claw across the windpipe. The handsome animal rolled in the dust, the lionesses holding fast.
Seven other lions moved in to share the kill, attended by a score of hyenas who would wait for the bones, which they would crush with their enormous jaws to salvage the marrow, while aloft, a flight of vultures gathered to take their share when the others were gone.
It was in October 1766, when Adriaan Van Doorn was at the advanced age of fifty-four, that he and his half-Hottentot companion Dikkop left home to explore the Zambezi River, a wild river some fifteen hundred miles to the north. ‘How long will you be gone?’ his wife, Seena, and his young brother, Lodevicus, had asked.
‘Three years,’ Adriaan said, and with a flick his whip he started his oxen north.
They took with them sixteen reserve oxen, four horses, a tent, extra guns, more ammunition than they would probably need, sacks of flour and four bags of biltong. They wore the rough homemade clothes of the veld and carried a precious tin box containing Boer farm remedies, medicinal herbs and leaves, their value learned through generations of experience.
They moved slowly at first, seven or eight miles a day, then ten, then fifteen. They let themselves be diverted by almost anything: an unusual tree, a likelihood of animals. Often they camped for weeks at a time at some congenial spot, replenished their biltong and moved on.
As the two went slowly north, they saw wonders that no settler had ever seen before: rivers of magnitude and vast deserts waiting to explode into flowers, and most interesting of all, a
continual series of small hills, each off to itself, perfectly rounded at the base as if some architect had placed them in precisely that position. Often the top had been planed away, forming mesas as flat as a table. Occasionally Adriaan and Dikkop would climb such a hill for no purpose at all except to scout the landscape ahead, and they would see only an expanse so vast that the eye could not encompass it, marked with these repetitious little hills, some rounded, some with their tops scraped flat.
In the second month of their wandering, after they had rafted their luggage wagon across a stream the Hottentots called Great River, later to be named the Orange, they entered upon those endless plains leading into the heartland, and late one afternoon at a fountain they came upon their first band of human beings, a group of little Bushmen who fled as they approached. Throughout the long night Adriaan and Dikkop stayed close to the wagons, guns loaded, peering into the darkness apprehensively. Just after dawn one of the little men showed himself, and Adriaan made a major decision. With Dikkop covering him, he left his own gun against the wheel of the wagon, stepped forward unarmed and indicated with friendly gestures that he came in peace.
At the invitation of the Bushmen, Adriaan and Dikkop stayed at that fountain for a week, during which time Adriaan learned many good things about the ones his fellow Dutchmen called ‘daardie diere’ (those animals), and nothing so impressed him as when he was allowed to accompany them on a hunt, for he witnessed remarkable skill and sensitivity in tracking. The Bushmen had collected a large bundle of hides, which Dikkop learned would be taken ‘three moons to the north’ for trade with people who lived there.
Since the travelers were also headed in that general direction, they joined the Bushmen, and twice during the journey saw clusters of huts in the distance, but the Bushmen shook their heads and kept the caravan moving deeper into the plains until they reached the outlying kraals of an important chief’s domain.
The Bushmen ran ahead to break the news of the coming of the white stranger, so that at the first village Adriaan was greeted with intense curiosity and some tittering, rather than the fear that might have been expected. The blacks were pleased that he showed special interest in their huts, impressed by the sturdy workmanship in stone and clay and the walls four to five feet high that surrounded their cattle kraals. As he told Dikkop: ‘These are better than the huts you and I live in.’
News of their arrival spread to the chief’s kraal and the chief sent an escort of headmen and warriors to bring these strangers before him. The meeting was momentous, for Adriaan was the first white man these blacks had seen. They came to know him well, for he stayed with them two months, and were excited when he demonstrated gunpowder by tossing a small handful on an open fire, where it flamed violently. The chief was terrified at first, but after he mastered the trick, he delighted in using it to frighten his people.
‘How many are you?’ Adriaan asked one night.
The chief pointed in the four compass directions, then to the stars. There were so many people in this land.
When Adriaan studied the communities he was permitted to see, it became obvious to him that these people were not recent arrivals in the area. Their present settlement, the ruins of past locations, their ironwork traded from the north, their copious use of tobacco—all indicated long occupancy. He was especially charmed by the glorious cloaks the men made from animal skins softened like chamois. He liked their fields of sorghum, pumpkins, gourds and beans. Their pottery was well formed, and their beads, copied from those brought to Zimbabwe three hundred years earlier, were beautiful. He accepted their presence on the highveld as naturally as he did the herds of antelope that browsed near the fountains.
In succeeding months he would never be far from such settlements, scattered over the land as they crossed, but he rarely contacted the people, since he was preoccupied with reaching the Zambezi. Besides, he worried that other chiefs might not be as friendly as the man who danced with joy at the flash of gunpowder.
As they moved north they shot only such food as they required, except one morning when Dikkop became irritated with a hyena that insisted upon trying to grab her share of an antelope he had shot. Three times he tried in vain to drive the beast away, and when she persisted he shot her. This might have occasioned no comment from Adriaan but for the fact that when she died she left behind a baby male hyena with fiery black eyes; she had wanted the meat to feed him, and now he was abandoned, snapping his huge teeth at Dikkop whenever he approached.
‘What’s out there?’ Adriaan called.
‘Baby hyena, Baas,’ Dikkop replied.
‘Bring him here!’
So Dikkop made a feint, leaped back, and planted his foot on the beast’s neck, subduing him so that he could be grabbed. Struggling and kicking but making no audible protest, the baby hyena was brought before Adriaan, who said immediately, ‘We’ve got to feed him.’ So Dikkop chewed bits of tender meat and put them on his finger for the animal to lick off; by the end of the third day the two men were competing with each other for the right to feed the little beast.
‘Swartejie, we’ll call him,’ Adriaan said, which meant something like Blackie or the Little Black One, but the hyena assumed such a menacing stance that Adriaan laughed and said, ‘So you think you’re a big Swarts already?’ and that’s what he was called.
He showed the endearing characteristics of a domesticated dog without losing the impressive qualities of an animal in the wild. Because his forequarters were strong and high, his rear small and low, he lurched rather than walked, and since his mouth was enormous, with powerful cheek muscles to operate the great, crunching jaws, he could present a frightening appearance. But his innate good nature and his love of Adriaan, who fed and roughhoused with him, made his face appear always to be smiling. With a short tail, big ears, wide-set eyes, he made himself a cherished pet whose unpredictable behavior supplied a surprise a day.
He was a scavenger, but he certainly lacked a scavenger’s heart, for he did not slink and was willing to challenge the largest lion if a good carcass was available. But once when the two men came upon a covey of guinea fowl and wounded one, Swarts was thrown into a frenzy of fear by the bird’s flapping wings and flying feathers. As winter approached and the highveld proved cold, whenever Adriaan went to his sleeping quarters—eland skin formed like a bag, with soft ostrich feathers sewn into a blanket—he would find Swarts sleeping on his springbok pillow, eyes closed in blissful repose, his muscles twitching now and then as he dreamed of the hunt.
‘Move over, dammit!’ Adriaan would say. The sleeping hyena would groan, lying perfectly limp as Adriaan shoved him to one side, but as soon as the master was in the bed, Swarts would snuggle close and often he would snore. ‘You! Dammit! Stop snoring!’ and Adriaan would shove him aside as if he were an old wife.
They saw animals in such abundance that no man could have counted them, or even estimated their numbers. Once when they were crossing an upland where the grass was sweet, they saw to the east a vast movement, ten miles, twenty miles, fifty miles across, coming slowly toward them, raising a dust cloud so huge that it obliterated the sun.
‘What to do?’ Dikkop asked.
‘I think we’ll stand where we are,’ Adriaan replied, not at all pleased with his answer but unable to think of any other.
Even Swarts was afraid, whimpering and drawing close to Adriaan’s leg.
And then the tremendous herd approached, not running, not moving in fear. It was migration time, and in obedience to some deep impulse the animals were leaving one feeding ground and heading to another.
The herd was composed of only three species: vast numbers of wildebeest, their beards swaying in the breeze; uncounted zebras, decorating the veld with their flashy colors; and a multitude of springbok leaping joyously among the statelier animals. How many beasts could there have been? Certainly five hundred thousand—more probably, eight or nine—an exuberance of nature that was difficult to comprehend.
And now they were desce
nding upon the three travelers. When they were close at hand, Swarts begged Adriaan to take him up, so the two men stood fast as the herd came down upon them. A strange thing happened. As the wildebeest and zebras came within twenty feet of the men, they quietly opened their ranks, forming the shape of an almond, a teardrop of open space in which the men stood unmolested. And as soon as that group of animals passed, they closed the almond, going forward as before, while newcomers looked at the men, slowly moved aside to form their own teardrop and then passed on.
For seven hours Adriaan and Dikkop and Swarts stood on that one spot as the animals moved past. Never were they close enough to have touched one of the zebras or the bounding springbok; always the animals stayed clear and after a while Swarts asked to be put down so that he could watch more closely.
At sunset the western sky was red with dust.
In the next months the landscape changed dramatically. Mountains began to appear on the horizon ahead, and rivers flowed north instead of east, where the ocean presumably lay. It was good land, and soon they found themselves in a remarkable gorge where the walls seemed to come together in the heavens. Dikkop was frightened and wanted to turn back, but Adriaan insisted upon forging ahead, breaking out at last into a wonderland of baobab trees whose existence defied his imagination.
‘Look at them!’ he cried. ‘Upside down! How wonderful!’
For several weeks he and Dikkop and Swarts lived in one huge tree, not up in the branches, which would have been possible, but actually inside the tree in a huge vacancy caused by the wearing away of soft wood. Swarts, responding to some ancient heritage in a time when hyenas had lived in caves, reveled in the dark interior spaces, running from one to another and making strange sounds.
Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature Page 16
