Edge of the Rain

by Beverley Harper

  He realised his vision, from one eye at least, was clearing. The pounding headache was nowhere near as bad and the feeling he wanted to be sick had subsided to some extent. He felt his swollen other eye. It was completely closed. He guessed it would be black and blue. His kidneys were on fire. His ribs hurt. Weariness overtook him. He crawled further into the hut, lay down on the woven sleeping mat, and fell instantly into a dreamless sleep.

  NINE

  For two weeks he lay in the hut, his body slowly recovering from the savage beating Jeff had given him. Most of his cuts and bruises healed quickly but his urine was bloody and it hurt to pee. Be knew this should not be so and, after ten days with no improvement, took action. He submitted willingly when Be brought the medicine man from another clan. He never questioned their sometimes strange methods of curing. He uttered no sound as small incisions were made in his back. He did not query the wildebeest horns which the medicine man placed over these cuts or when he sucked the air from the horns and used a sticky substance to seal the small holes made in their points. He sat perfectly still when, after a few minutes the medicine man pierced these seals, gently removed the horns and poured out the clotted blood which had collected from his wounds.

  He never discovered whether this treatment worked, or if he was on the point of recovery anyway, but he immediately began to feel better. Months later he was to learn that the tiny arrowhead used to cut his skin had first been smeared with the poison they used to such good effect when hunting. It was considered to be an essential element in the drawing of ‘bad blood’.

  Several days after the medicine man’s visit Alex felt strong enough to leave the hut. His legs were still rubbery but he joined a group of men and women sitting outside. They smiled at him and returned to their conversation, leaving him alone with his thoughts. As their rapid-fire clicking language washed over him and he watched their gentle faces, he felt completely at peace.

  !Ka was carving and whittling an animal bone and Alex watched with interest. !Ka saw him watching and put one end of the bone to his mouth and sucked in air, then blew outwards in an elaborate display of smoking a pipe. ‘n/i!xu,’ he said.

  Alex knew what the word meant. He just couldn’t say it. ‘N. . . tsk. . . i. . . pop. . . pop . . . u.’

  The Bushmen rolled on the ground laughing.

  ‘N,’ !Ka prompted.

  ‘N.’

  !Ka nodded approval. ‘Tsk,’ he said, showing Alex how he withdrew his tongue from just behind his front teeth. ‘N. . . tsk.’

  ‘N/,’ Alex responded.

  Several of the men clapped in encouragement.

  ‘N. . . tsk. . . i.’

  ‘N/i.’ Alex was smiling. Getting his tongue from ‘N’, through the ‘tsk’ and rapidly into the ‘i’ was difficult but he managed it.

  ‘N. . . tsk. . . i. . . pop.’ !Ka put his tongue against the hard palate, just where it rises to the roof of the mouth. When he removed it it created a hard popping sound.

  Alex lost it and they had to start again.

  Seeing his enthusiasm, !Ka began patiently and gently to teach Alex their language and ways. Alex was only too happy to learn; he was still basically a boy. !Ka and Be represented a safe world, a world without people like Jeff and Kel. In their company, and that of the others in the clan, he could stay a boy. He could never have verbalised this fact but he must have been subconsciously aware of it because when he was recovered enough to leave them he delayed.

  As soon as he was well enough he went looking for Nightmare. !Ka had done his best but his knowledge of the needs of a horse was scant. In this hostile environment, Nightmare’s seemingly unlimited capacity for grass and water taxed his meagre resources considerably. Even though he was, as yet, unable to converse in their language, Alex could see that. But he was reluctant to set her free; a bond had developed between him and the horse. Besides, having spent her life in the company of people and the safety of corrals, Nightmare would feed the lions as soon as he let her go.

  Nightmare solved the problem for him by coming into oestrus.

  In a barren land where only a handful of species had adapted in order to survive, there was no place for the wild horse. Their presence was unheard of. Not in the desert country, not in the flat cattle country, not in the Delta. Bechuanaland had no wild horses.

  ‘Tell that to him,’ Alex muttered to himself in surprise. The black stallion appeared from nowhere and, judging by the clan’s reaction, they had never seen him before. He stood on a ridge, tossing his aristocratic head, his black mane flowing out like a woman’s hair. His coat shone in the sunlight, so black it almost looked blue. He stamped his powerful legs and sand flew. He looked exactly as he was: proud, beautiful and free. Alex had never seen such a magnificent horse.

  Neither had Nightmare. It was love at first sight. She reared and plunged against her tether.

  ‘Sshhh. Easy now.’ He spoke gently and blew softly on her nose. She quietened and stood still, rippling. With a lump in his throat he took off her halter. Nightmare trotted in a circle, came back to him and nudged his arm with her nose, looked over at the stallion, then, with sand flying from her hooves, kicking and bucking with joy, joined the stallion on the ridge. Both animals stood, side by side, tossing their heads, looking back at him, one a shining russet red, the other a glossy black. Then, with no signal between them, they wheeled and went racing away.

  Alex ran to the top of the ridge and watched them go. He told himself it was the right thing to do and swallowed hard against the ache in his throat. ‘She deserves to be free.’ He watched until they were out of sight. They ran side-by-side, turning their heads often to look at each other. Alex realised they were flirting. Something inside him soared. Months later, after he learned a bit of the San language, !Ka would explain it was the spirit of his own freedom, a rare event since men were usually bound by thought.

  He saw Nightmare occasionally after that—always in the company of the stallion. She never came closer than a hundred yards. It was as if she was checking to make sure he was still there.

  Alex spoke Setswana fluently. It was the common language spoken by most of the Bantu tribes in Bechuanaland. He actually spoke Setswana before he learned to speak English, the result of playing with the farm children at home.

  The language of the Bushmen however differed from place to place. Up north, near Shakawe, the Kung Bushmen spoke a different dialect from the desert dwellers. Alex knew a few of the northern Bushmen words—Pa occasionally hired them to work on the farm. They usually only stayed a few months before returning to their clans near the Tsodilo Hills but were always willing to befriend the young white child of the man who paid their wages.

  As time went by, what had first seemed to be a jumble of clicks and pops began to make sense. He realised that the San used five different clicks which ranged from something which sounded like a kiss, to one used to spur on a horse. It took longer for him to learn that words having the same sound could actually mean distinctly different things, depending on whether the vowel was stressed in nasal, breathy or normal tones. In addition, a low or high tone could further change a word.

  The clan had a great deal of fun at his expense, especially the day he got the tone wrong and implied that !Ka was smoking an elephant rather than a pipe. He persevered, however, and was soon able to make himself understood and follow the general direction of their conversation. But when !Ka mentioned finding Alex when he was a baby, Alex thought he had misunderstood the Bushman’s words.

  It took several months for !Ka, who patiently repeated the story over and over, to make Alex understand what it was the Bushman was trying to tell him. Even then, he believed !Ka must be mistaken. Surely his parents would have mentioned it. He had no recollection of the event although sometimes, like in his dreams, snippets of memory surfaced. Alex assumed they were nothing more than dreams.

  However, if the story were true, a number of things fell into place: Why he had a strong feeling of belonging to !Ka’s clan. Why
, as a child, he often sought the company of the Kung who worked for Pa. Why the sight of their tiny creased faces made him feel happy inside. And why, when others cursed the Bushmen as lazy or primitive or dishonest, Alex always had to swallow anger.

  He had been with the clan four months when !Ka told him they were moving on from the Kang area, going further southeast. Alex, with no hesitation, went with them.

  He enjoyed their lifestyle, particularly in the evenings when smoke rose from their cooking fires and the softly spoken clicking language could be heard around camp as husband and wife discussed domestic matters, friends spoke of hunting, men argued over someone’s laziness, yelling one moment, helpless with laughter the next, children played. He was a popular guest to their fires and was constantly being called over to sample food, or take a handful back to !Ka and Be. As he learned more and more of their language he developed a deep respect for their ways. They lived as one with nature. By learning their ways, he developed inside himself a profound contentment. The simplicity of their lifestyle left no room for pettiness, greed, envy or hate. At some stage he knew he had turned seventeen but he had no idea when and found it didn’t bother him. Life, time and daily activities were controlled by the five seasons.

  !Ka taught him how influential the seasons were and how they related to the necessities of his people. Alex had arrived in January, in the middle of bara, the main summer rains. It was a time of hunting for meat and a time when their major plant food was available. The clan ate enormous meals at this time, storing the excess in their bodies. This season was followed by /=obe, a time for harvesting the nuts. Then !gum, the winter months of June, July and August. Food was still plentiful and the hunting was good. !ga, the time before the rains, was hardest. Water was difficult to find, even though the Bushmen had collected water when it was plentiful and stored it in ostrich eggs, buried in the earth to be dug up during !ga. It was in !huma, the spring rains before the heat of summer, when the clan replenished their depleted stores of water.

  Alex was expected to pull his weight, something he did readily. He became a kind of unofficial clan architect, being especially adept at erecting the two types of dwelling they used. If they were not staying long in one place, a flimsy structure was erected so that, when they moved on, the landscape could return to the way nature intended it. This was done using a semi-circle of saplings, bent towards each other and tied together with dried reeds. Grass thatch or reed mats were then placed over the living frame. A fireplace had to be set opposite the open doorway to warm the inside and also keep away unwanted predators. When the clan left this kind of temporary dwelling all they took with them were the reed mats. The sapling ties would rot allowing the young trees to spring up into their original shape. Any thatch on the roof either blew or rotted away.

  If a more permanent hut was required, a scaffolding of sorts became the skeleton framework, reinforced by horizontal ribs which were bound to the uprights by bark. Whichever kind of shelter was built, Alex soon realised that !Ka and his clan made certain it was invisible from a distance, inconspicuous from close up and would quickly return to the landscape as though man had never occupied a tiny space in it. It was almost as if they were apologetic for having disturbed the area.

  He learned how to make a bow, how to set snares, how to fire arrows with deadly accuracy, how to make the poison to immobilise an animal. Be gave him a kaross, a blanket made from black backed jackal skins, which kept him warm at night. He discarded his western clothes in favour of the modesty pouch, made from animal hide and sewn with sinew worn by the men. And then, after he had been with the clan several months, he received his first gift from someone other than !Ka and Be.

  Gift giving, as Alex had observed, was the way the clan networked. No-one kept a gift for more than a couple of months. It was always passed on to a trading partner. At some stage, that trading partner would reciprocate with a similar item. If the clan argued about anything it was either the distribution of food or another’s tardiness in the business of gift giving. So when N!ou gave him a quiver and another man gave him a hunting kit, Alex knew he would have to get busy and make something to give back. By clan standards he was poor, not having a proper gift giving network. He set about to rectify this.

  !Ka helped. He showed him how to make a quiver but explained, ‘It is no good finding a tube of root bark unless you have killed a gemsbok.’

  Alex asked him why.

  ‘The scrotum is used to cap the quiver.’

  But before he could kill a gemsbok he had to learn to make the poison and before that, where to find the pupa of the flea beetle. It was a long process.

  In the end, and with much advice and teaching from !Ka, he proudly gave N!ou a quiver. By then he had received other gifts. His own quiver contained five arrows, some special sticks used to make fire, a sharp stick for holding meat over flames, a hollow sip-stick for sucking up any moisture that may have collected in the hollows of trees or a little below the surface of the sand, and a stick with blobs of gum and vegetable mastic stuck to it for making running repairs to equipment while out hunting. His hunting kit held a digging stick, a knife and a bark saucer so he could mix his own poison. All these items had been given as gifts. Alex in turn, learned how to make them so he could reciprocate.

  Time passed. There was always something new to learn, something else which needed doing. Alex was in no hurry. The simple, day-today activities filled him with a great sense of contentment. Then !Ka, returning from one of his hunting trips, showed him a stone. ‘You had one of these when we found you. It made you laugh.’

  Alex held the diamond up against the sky. He remembered his excitement when he saw the round light the night of the dance. The same thing was happening to him now, a kind of shivery tingle which he could feel from his scalp down to the base of his spine. He could not understand it then, had no way of knowing why the lights seemed familiar. Now he thought he knew. The lights flashing off the diamond were spectacular. ‘Where did you find this?’

  !Ka pointed east. ‘In the throat of an ostrich. The same way you found one.’

  ‘Will you show me tomorrow?’

  !Ka said he would.

  Alex had a new name. They called him !Oma, after the one whose spirit had flown to save him as a baby. Although he could not possibly have been related, they enforced their traditional laws and told him he could never marry a woman called Be. With only about thirty-five names at their disposal for each sex, names were transmitted from grandparent to grandchild according to strict rules. By prohibiting him from marrying a woman named Be, they were protecting him from the sin of incest. Alex took the advice seriously. It was a serious issue. He doubted, however, if it was one which would ever affect him, although he would not insult them by saying so.

  Having killed a gemsbok, Alex officially became a man in the clan’s eyes. This was a significant occasion since a man who has not killed an animal remains a child and is forbidden to marry. !Ka, as Alex’s surrogate father, took the event seriously and performed The Rite of the First Kill. A shallow incision on Alex’s back was rubbed with charred meat and fat. The resultant scar, which Alex would carry for the rest of his life, ensured an inner force which compelled him to hunt and provided magic to bless him with superior hunting skills. No woman was allowed to touch his bow and arrows ever again in case they weakened his hunter’s heart.

  Alex, who had grown up believing that on attaining the age of twenty-one the key to the door of life would be his, felt a pride of achievement, a surge of masculinity and adulthood, which far exceeded anything he expected he might feel when he reached twenty-one. In the eyes of the clan he was a man. In the eyes of his own world it would be another four years before he became one. With his newly acquired status providing encouragement, Alex decided it was time to take his life into his own hands.

  They were camped in the Jwaneng district, about as far towards the rising sun as they cared to travel. Further east lived the Bantu and the white man, both of whom the
Bushmen shunned. From Jwaneng they habitually roamed north. By the time they were ready to move Alex felt confident he had learned enough to survive in the hostile desert environment. The diamond !Ka had given him made him want to find more. As much as he enjoyed being with the clan, as much as he appreciated the serenity of their simple, non-capitalistic lifestyle and envied them for it, his own upbringing told him that finding more stones was the chance of a lifetime. He could not help himself. Diamonds would provide for his future and there was too much white man inside Alex for him to turn his back on that. !Ka had taken him to where he had found the stone. The area beckoned. The clan left without him.

  The simplicity with which the Bushmen lived was never more evident as when they moved from one place to another. Each family had packed their permanent belongings into two leather sacks, each sack no larger than an overnight bag. Their farewell was casual, leaving no doubt that they would see each other again. Be placed her hand on his face and said, ‘Go well, my son.’ !Ka advised him where to find buried ostrich eggs in the event he ran out of water. Then the clan left and he was on his own, aware that the hollowness in his stomach was far greater than he’d ever felt before.

  But !Ka had taught him well. ‘A man should know two things,’ he had said. ‘He should know how to live with others, and he should know how to live with himself. When a man knows these things there is little else he needs.’ So he headed east knowing he was bound to the clan by some unseen ribbon of love and this gave him comfort.

  He carried the stone in his hunting kit and brought it out often, marvelling at the smooth whiteness of it. Holding it up, if he got it just the right way, reds, blues and greens, topaz and yellow and pure white flashed back. At some stage in the diamond’s history it had fractured along a cleavage plane, leaving a perfectly flat surface. It had then split in a different direction inside the stone, creating naturally a reflective angle which absorbed and dissected the sunlight before radiating it back.