The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  In succeeding months he would never be far from such settlements, scattered over the lands 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 little 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 up bits of tender meat, placing it on his finger for the animal to lick off, and by the end of the third day the two men were competing with each other to see who would have the right to feed the little beast.

  ‘Swartejie, we’ll call him,’ Adriaan said, something like Blackie or the Little Black One, but the hyena assumed such a menacing stance that Adriaan had to laugh. ‘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 head muscles to operate the great, crunching jaws, he could present a frightening appearance, except that his innate good nature and his love of Adriaan, who fed and roughhoused with him, made his face appear always to be smiling. Short tail, big ears, wide-set eyes, he made himself into 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, damnit!’

  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! Damnit! 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 that obliterated the sun.

  ‘What to do?’ Dikkop asked.

  ‘I think we 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 quiet 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 descending 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 pass on.

  For seven hours Adriaan and Dikkop stood in 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 that remarkable gorge where the walls seemed to come together high in the heavens. Dikkop was frightened and wanted to turn back, but Adriaan insisted upon forging ahead, breaking out at last into that 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 the other and making strange sounds.

  He had become an exceptional pet, perhaps the finest animal Adriaan had ever known, placid like the best ox, brave like the strongest lion, playful like a kitten, and of tremendous strength like a rhinoceros. He enjoyed playing a fearsome game with Adriaan, taking the trekboer’s forearm in his powerful jaws and pretending to bite it in half, which he could have done. He would bring his teeth slowly together and impishly watch Adriaan’s face to see when pain would show. Tighter and tighter the great teeth would close until it seemed that the skin must break, and then, with Adriaan looking directly into the animal’s eyes, Swarts would stop, and laugh admiringly at the man who was not afraid, and he would release the arm and leap upon Adriaan’s lap and cover him with kisses.

  At times Adriaan would think: These years can never end. There will be enough land for everyone, and the animals will multiply forever. When he and Dikkop left a carcass it was good to hear the lions approaching, to see the sky filled with great birds waiting to descend and clean the feast.

  They came at last to the river, not the Zambezi, as Adriaan had promised, but the Limpopo, that sluggish stream that marked the natural northern borders of the subcontinent. Dr. Linnart had said the natural border was the Zambezi; Portuguese explorers had said the same; and anyone who had a map, rude and rough, saw that the Zambezi was the natural boundary, but reality dictated that this boundary be the Limpopo. South of here, the land was of a piece; north of here, it altered radically and could never be digested as an inherent part of a manageable unit.

  Perhaps Adriaan realized this in December 1767 when he stood at the Limpopo beside his irreparably broken wagon and his oxen and horses dying from disease. ‘Dikkop,’ he said, ‘we can’t go any farther.’ The Hottentot agreed, for he was tired, and even Swarts seemed relieved when the trio started south on foot. It was as if the hyena had a built-in compass which reminded him of where home had stood; he seemed to have known that he was heading away fro
m where he ought to have been, and now that he was homeward bound he manifested his joy like a sailor whose ship has turned into a proper heading.

  They formed a curious trio as they came happily down the spine of Africa. Swarts, with his big head and small bottom, took the lead. Then came Dikkop, with small head and enormous bottom. Finally there was Adriaan, a lean, white-haired trekboer, fifty-six years old and striding along as if he were thirty. Once Swarts insisted upon leaving the trail made by antelope and heading to the west, and when the men followed they found a small cave which they were about to ignore, until Dikkop looked at the roof and discovered a marvelous canopy showing three giraffes being stalked by little brown men; it had been painted there millennia ago by the ancestors of the Bushmen they had met. This way and that, men and animals moved, colors unfaded, forms still deftly outlined. For a long time Adriaan studied the paintings, then asked, ‘Where have they gone?’

  ‘Who knows, Baas?’ Dikkop replied, and Adriaan said, ‘Good boy, Swarts. We liked your cave.’

  Summer that year was very hot, and even though the trio was moving south, away from concentrated heat, Adriaan noticed that Dikkop was exhausted, so he looked for routes that would keep them away from the hot and dusty center and lead them out toward the eastern edge of the plateau, where they were likely to encounter cooling rains; and on one such excursion they came upon that quiet and pleasant lake where the flamingos had flown and Nxumalo had hunted his rhinoceros.

  It was at its apex now, a broad and lovely body of water to which a thousand animals came each evening, in such steady profusion that Swarts was benumbed by the possibilities he saw before him. Lurching here and there, chasing birds and elephants alike, he watched for any weakling, placing himself well back of the lions that were also stalking it, and ran in for bits of meat whenever an opportunity arose. When the bigger predators were gone, he would waddle into the lake to drink and wash himself, and he obviously enjoyed this part of the trip above any other.

  Dikkop was faring less well. It was 1768 now and he was sixty-three years old, a tired man who had worked incessantly at a hundred different tasks, always assigned him by someone else. He had lived his life in the shadow of white men, and in their shadow he was content to end his final days. He was not indifferent about his fate; eagerly he wanted to get back to the farm to see how Seena was doing, for he loved her rowdy ways and usually thought of himself as ‘her boy.’ He would be very unhappy if anything happened to him before he saw her again.

  He was to be disappointed. As the summer waned, so did he, and it became apparent that he would not be able to endure the long return journey: ‘My chest, he hurts, he hurts.’ Adriaan berated himself for having brought so old a man on so perilous an expedition, but when Dikkop saw this he said reassuringly, ‘Impossible to come without me. But you get back safe, I think.’

  He died before the chill of winter and was buried beside the lake he had grown to love; it was when Adriaan collected the stones for Dikkop’s cairn from the ruins of an ancient village dating back to the 1450s that he began talking seriously to his hyena: ‘Swarts, we’re piling these stones so your filthy brothers don’t dig him up and eat him, you damned cannibal.’ Swarts showed his enormous teeth in what could only be a grin, and after that whenever Adriaan consulted with him about which eland path to follow or where to spend the night, Swarts bared his teeth and nuzzled his master’s leg.

  Adriaan now had every reason to pursue vigorously his way homeward, but for reasons he could not have explained he lingered at the quiet lake, not exploring its hinterland but simply resting, as if he realized that this was a place to which men fled for refuge. From his sleeping place he studied the low mountains to the east, the twin peaks that looked like breasts, and the flatlands hungry for the plow. But most of all he kept his eyes upon the rim of the lake, where animals came to drink and across whose placid surface the flamingos flew.

  ‘Vrijmeer!’ he cried one day. ‘Swarts, this is the lake where everything that moves has freedom.’ That night he could not sleep. Restlessly he stepped across the inert body of his hyena to stand in moonlight as undisciplined thoughts assailed him: I wish I were young again … to bring a family here … to live beside this lake …

  It was not easy for Adriaan to admit that he was growing lonely. He had never talked much with Dikkop, nor looked to him for intellectual companionship. He was not afraid of traveling alone, because by now he knew every trick for avoiding dangers; he sensed where the kraals of the black people lay, and he swung away from them; he slept where no lion could reach him, relying upon Swarts to alert him if unusual developments occurred. The hyena was not really a good watchdog, he slept too soundly on a full belly, and with his master’s constant hunting he had a good supply of guts and bones to gorge upon; but he had a marked capacity for self-defense, and many animals that might have attacked Adriaan sleeping alone would think twice before risking a hyena’s great jaws and flashing teeth.

  The loneliness came from the fact that he had seen Africa, had touched it intimately along the mountains and the veld, and had reached the point where there were no more secrets. Even the fact that a majestic waterfall lay only a short distance to his northwest would not have surprised him, for he had found the continent to be greater than he had imagined or Dr. Linnart had suggested.

  Again the vagrant thought struck, this time with pain, and he said in a loud voice, ‘God, Swarts, I wish I were young again. I’d cross the Limpopo. Go on and on, past the Zambezi all the way to Holland.’ He had not the slightest doubt that given a good pair of shoes, he could walk to Europe. ‘And I’d take you with me, little hunter, to protect me from the dik-diks.’ He laughed at this, and Swarts laughed back at the idea of anyone’s needing protection from the tiniest of antelopes who leaped in fear at the fall of a leaf.

  Perhaps this recurrent loneliness was a premonition, for as they came down off the spacious central plateau to cross the Great River, he saw that Swarts was becoming restless. The hyena was two and a half years old now, a full-grown male, and as they came into territory where other hyenas hunted in packs, Swarts became aware of them in new ways, and sometimes at dusk gave indications that he wanted to run with them. At the same time he knew deep love for his human companion and felt a kind of obligation to protect him, to share with him the glories of the hunt.

  So he vacillated, sometimes running toward the open veld, at other times scampering back in his lurching way to be with his master; but one night, when the moon was full and animals were afoot, he suddenly broke away from Adriaan, ran a short distance into the veld, stopped, looked back as if weighing alternatives, and disappeared. Through his sleepless night Adriaan could hear the sounds of hunting, and when day broke, there was no Swarts.

  For three days Adriaan stayed in that area, hoping that the hyena would return, but he did not. And so, with regret almost to the point of tears, Adriaan set out for the mountains that protected his farm, and now he was truly alone, and for the first time in his life, even afraid. From the latitude of the stars he calculated that he might be as far as three hundred miles north of his destination, afoot, with a diminishing store of ammunition and the necessity of covering that expanse of open country when he was not quite sure where he was.

  ‘Swarts,’ he shouted one night, ‘I need you!’ And later, as he lay fitfully sleeping, he heard the sound of animals, many of them, trampling near to where he was hiding, and he began to shiver, for he had not heard this noise so close before. Then slowly he came awake, and was aware of something pressing upon him, and it was Swarts, snoring in the old manner.

  Now he talked with the animal more than ever, as if the hyena’s return laid bare his need for companionship; Swarts, for his part, kept closer to his master, as if after tasting the freedom of the wild, he realized that partnership with a human being could have its rewards, too.

  Down the long plains they came. ‘It must be over this way, Swarts,’ Adriaan said, looking at the last line of hills that rose from
the veld. ‘The farm is probably down there, and when you meet Seena you two are going to have fun. She’s red-headed and she’ll throw things at you if you don’t look out, but you’ll like her and I know she’ll like you.’ He was not at all sure how Seena would take to sharing her hut with a hyena, but he kept assuring Swarts that it would be all right.

  But the hyena’s recent experience in the wild had revived animal habits, and one evening after Adriaan shot a gemsbok, a beautiful creature with white-masked face and imperial horns, a lioness thought it safe to move in and command the kill, whereupon Swarts leaped at her, receiving a horrible slash of claw across his neck and face.

  When Adriaan, screaming at the lioness, reached his companion, Swarts was dying. Nothing that the man might do could save the beast; his prayers were meaningless, his attempts to stanch the blood fruitless. The great jaws moved in spasms and the eyes looked for the last time at the person who had been such a trusted friend.

  ‘Swarts!’ Adriaan shouted, but to no avail. The hyena shuddered, gasped for air, got only blood, and died.

  ‘Oh, Swarts!’ Adriaan moaned repeatedly through the night, keeping the misshapen body near him. In the morning he placed it out in the open where the vultures could attend it, and after an anguished farewell to a constant friend he resumed his journey south.

  Now he was truly alone. Almost everything he had had with him at the start of his exploration was gone: ammunition, horses and oxen lost to the tsetse fly, the wagon, the trusted Hottentot, his shoes, most of his clothing. He was coming home bereft of everything, even his hyena, and his memories of the grandeurs he had seen were scarred by the losses he had sustained. Most of all he mourned for Swarts; Dikkop, after all, had lived his life, but the hyena was only beginning his, a creature torn between the open veld and the settled farm that was to have been his home.