A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  That done, Xhabbo sat down beside him and begged him for a quick account of what had happened. When Xhabbo had heard all, he told François firmly that there was no need in his view for them to separate. It was true, François and Hintza would have been unable to avoid leaving signs that an expert tracker could follow. But from what he had seen of the way François and Hintza came up the hill, they had done it so well that the trackers would find it most difficult to find their spoor and so would have to follow exceedingly slowly. More, not only François and Hintza but they all, needed good food slowly eaten, as well as a proper rest, because he feared they still had many dangers, troubles and a long, exhausting journey ahead of them. So now that they had recovered their breath, he was taking them to the shelter the women had already prepared. There, once they had eaten and he had made certain that François and Hintza were asleep, and resting in the way they had earned, he, Xhabbo, would take over the watch. In the night he would decide what to do.

  He said all this firmly and in the manner of one who had taken over supreme command. François did not protest because at last reassurance was complete. He prepared to get up, and indeed was already encouraging Hintza to do likewise, murmuring, “Well, my little old goggatjie, here we go for the last lap home. Only a few steps now, you blessed little old dog, and I’ll hand you over to one of the best nurses a dog could have in the bush.”

  Struggling to his feet, he saw Nuin-Tara followed closely by Nonnie, stepping with a long Atalanta stride out from between the bushes. His resilient body had recovered enough for him to give Nuin-Tara the greeting Bushman manners demanded and hear her warm response. He looked beyond to Nonnie to greet her as well, but could not yet take in any detail of her appearance. He only had an overall impression that she was looking surprisingly refreshed, more relaxed and lovelier than when he had last seen her. Indeed he was convinced he had never seen anything more welcoming than Nuin-Tara and Nonnie hurrying towards them. But that was as far as he got with his feelings. He managed only to begin a feeble, “Hello, Nonnie! How . . .” when Nonnie’s face was possessed with horror and then a searing pity as she took in all the obvious signs in their appearance of what they had endured.

  In particular, the sight of Hintza, his coat normally so burnished and bright, dull and stained with dirt now, and standing on three legs with that caricature of a white bow in the bandage on his back and bravely wagging a tail, when every wag must hurt, was too much for her. All the preconceived and highly imaginative plans she had formed for welcoming François and Hintza in a manner that would not be spoilt by excess either of warmth or restraint, went hurtling out of the windows of her mind. A strange, quick, fierce feeling that meant in effect, “To hell with Nuin-Tara. I am Luciana Monckton after all, and have a way of my own too,” took command of her.

  She pushed roughly past Nuin-Tara, in between Xhabbo and François, put her arms round François and kissed him warmly on both cheeks and held him tightly to herself. She held him in that way wherein the ancient language of physical contact has to speak for men and woman when words are inadequate and inaccessible. She held him thus for a while which, however long it may have appeared to the two onlookers, felt far too brief for her, before she let go and dropped on to her knees beside Hintza to stroke his up-lifted head lightly, and then put her cheek against his, saying, “Oh what have they done to you, my darling Hin? All these terrible men, what on earth have they done to you, you dear, innocent dog? How could they be so cruel and mean?”

  She went on in this uninhibited flow wherein the only reservation allowed came from a determination not to let relief over their safe return combine with distress over the wounded Hintza and make her tearful again. She felt somehow that she had earned the right not to cry in the last two days, and suddenly come of her own true age.

  Her restraint was helped by the call for action. Xhabbo was determined to get them all back under the ledge as soon as possible. Ordering Nuin-Tara to lead off, he and the others followed as fast as he thought it prudent for François and Hintza to go. That turned out to be slow, and he stopped to offer to carry François’s gun and ammunition for him. François refused, with what appeared to Nonnie to be a rude rebuff, but the bright look of admiration in Xhabbo’s eyes after François’s abrupt gesture made her realise that there was far more to it than she was capable of appreciating. She thought it best to concentrate on helping Hintza and leave François and Xhabbo to each other until they finally arrived at their home where Nuin-Tara was already in royal possession by their unlit fire.

  François was incapable of realising in full the meticulous preparations made for his home-coming but a general impression of order and readiness more vivid than might have been expected had its impact. Ordered by Nonnie to relax and made comfortable by Nonnie placing an empty rucksack underneath his right elbow, he lay on his side by the fire-place watching the fire being lit. Soon the agony of exhaustion began to recede and a more rounded feeling of a healthy physical weariness moved into its place. He made no effort to speak and explain but just let his eyes first go slowly back and forth from Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo opposite him. He was entranced and warmed by a beauty as of another world and age on their faces, full and bright, immanent and overflowing. It seemed to him that the heat and flame of the rising fire evaporated into a mist of saintly yellow that blurred the precise outlines of their features. From them his eyes would go to Nonnie beside him, Hintza’s head resting on the edge of her bush tunic and one hand, understandingly not stroking a coat wherein every movement hurt, but just resting lightly for reassurance where head and shoulders met. Gradually the memory of the day and the hurt of it, went from him until the moment became totality, round and complete.

  As a result, he revived sufficiently to take on what he still felt to be his particular duty. First, he asked Nonnie and Nuin-Tara to fill all their dixies with water and put them on the fire to boil. Xhabbo had already assured him that there were ample supplies of water available in a deep crevice in the rock nearby. There the water caught on the summit of the hill during the rains and stored in the pores of stone, leaked out through holes in a gigantic cistern to form pools in clefts below. From there the bees fetched the crystal liquid they used in the making of honey on a scale that made Lamb-snatcher’s Hill one of the greatest storehouses on earth of the magical substance. He made Nonnie make hot chocolate lavishly for them all. But just before Hintza was allowed his ample share, two more aureomyocin tablets, two sedatives and two sleeping pills were forced down his throat.

  That done, he asked Nuin-Tara to select twelve pieces of their driest biltong, while he extracted what he had left of preserved apricots, peaches and apples in his pockets. He set Nuin-Tara who knew the manner of it best, pounding the biltong on stone until it was all loose and ravelled like old rope. But he insisted on cutting it himself into suitable pieces for spreading in the bottom of five half dixies. The shredded biltong was joined with dried fruit and just enough water to lap at the edges of the topmost layers and then given back to Nuin-Tara. Soon a delicate scent from François’s improvised casserole drifted on the air, giving it an oddly sophisticated feeling for Nonnie, all the more pronounced in her acute awareness because of so unlikely and wild a setting.

  All this while, François hardly spoke to Nonnie, apart from asking her help. His communication with her was through intense looks as if he could not yet believe the miracle that she was really there beside him and Hintza and their company complete at last. Moreover he had great difficulty in keeping open his own eyes, because Xhabbo’s calm, experienced presence gave him such a feeling of having been relieved of an impossible burden of responsibility which he had carried alone too long, that he could abandon himself, almost without impediment, to pamper a vast physical fatigue that is a luxury of the senses and balm of mind, and which civilised life has forfeited because it no longer earns or knows how to value it.

  In fact François was in a twilight state of being where he was not sure whether he felt awake or was
dreaming of being awake. All that he was seeing and hearing of Nonnie was on the margin of a profound crepuscule of awareness, which was like a kind of enriched dreaming. But the feeling of dreaming came abruptly and rather joyfully to an end when, for the first time in his life, he heard a loud snore break from Hintza who normally was the quietest of sleepers imaginable. The snore was so loud that Nonnie, amused, could not resist calling to François softly, in the gentlest of teasing ways, “Why, François, you do surprise me! Whoever would have thought that you’d keep company with a hound who snored so loudly in his sleep?”

  François, happy that Hintza for the first time that long day should be out of pain, was of course not offended by the teasing. And yet Hintza was so intimate and inexpressible a factor in his emotions that he had instant reservations beyond reason or claims of humour about the aptness of Nonnie’s tone, however affectionate the utterance. He found himself, therefore, without justification, stung on Hintza’s account and as a result responded somewhat pompously, “There are a lot of things about me and Hintza that you don’t know, as you’ll no doubt find out in time to come.”

  Nonnie asked quickly, “For instance?” Then without giving him a chance to reply she prattled on. “For instance, in the practice of administering drugs . . .? By all accounts Xhabbo was your first victim. I, the unsuspecting Luciana Monckton was your second. And now this poor innocent dog who has been your sleeping partner all his life. He’s been so drugged that he’s disgracing himself with a shameless exhibition of snoring, that must be audible even to those baboons barking on the cliff outside.

  François did not mind the re-direction of the teasing towards him. Half-awake as he was, he was somewhat light-headed and oddly confident for once in the world of unfamiliar emotion into which the coming of Nonnie into his life had taken him.

  Spontaneously and precisely in the word and tone he had used on Hintza on countless occasions, he said, “Oh shut up, Nonnie!” And before she could reply, he added, “But seriously, the little beggar has fallen asleep a bit too soon. I wanted him to have some of that stew before I do what I have to do. But it can’t be helped. He’ll just have to go on sleeping without it and have it cold when and if he wakes up in the night. But now, Nonnie, would you please take that dixie of his and mine, rinse them carefully, fill them with water and put them on to boil because I deliberately gave him those pills you distrust so that he would be dead to the world while I undid his dressing and saw to his wound, because otherwise it’d hurt like hell.”

  While they waited for the water to come to the boil, their own casserole was pronounced ready at last. Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara ate theirs with relish and that sense of the miraculous of all the new food François had brought into their life. They smacked their lips repeatedly with delight and sang little snatches of gratitude to him, Mantis and life.

  Even Nonnie thought it one of the best dishes she had ever eaten. The astringent apricot and tart apple blended with bland peach to balance the surprisingly rich meat, which now after a long, gentle simmering proved to have been well marbled with fat, and delighted her palate with its fullness.

  “You are obviously as good a cook as—” she paused deliberately “—as you are a pharmacist.”

  François was too tired to carry the banter further, too tired really even to eat any more. The chocolate had been almost enough. Glad that his friends were enjoying food of his invention and barely half-way through his own helping, he offered what was left to Nonnie. When she refused, he offered it to Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara whom he was certain could have eaten ten times as much, considering how many days without proper food they had been on the march to come and warn him at Hunter’s Drift.

  He then leant back on his elbow, silently fighting off his sleep until they had all eaten, and the water for Hintza’s wound was boiling.

  Nonnie, who for all her objection to gulping was finished well before the others, insisted on helping François. She held Hintza’s head gently but firmly in her lap while François undid the bandages. As foreseen the field dressing was stuck fast as with glue in the congealed blood of the wound. Slowly François let the hot water drip on to the dressing, soaking it through and through. Soaking his own handkerchief with water repeatedly, he sponged the skin and hair around the wound. Still Hintza lay there snoring away as if he were not a badly wounded animal but some natural boulevardier of the bush who had drunk and eaten too well at his favourite café and been overtaken with sleep in the process. The only time he showed any signs of intrusion of pain in that far-off world of sleep where he was so deeply entrenched, was a shudder and transformation of the snore into a quick, odd puppy-like whimper when François cut the hair between dressing and skin and finally pulled away the dressing.

  Nonnie was shaken by the size and extent of the wound and the way it was bleeding again, for the dressing had brought away with it the scab which had formed underneath. She had never before looked into a wound like that in any animal or human being. She thought she would be sick.

  “Dear Mother in Heaven,” she exclaimed, “this is too awful! I had no idea it was so bad. How did it happen to him? You haven’t told me a thing yet.” Her look and tone were full of reproach.

  François was both too tired and emotionally unprepared to talk about so raw a subject. “It was done by a bayonet,” he said curtly.

  “A bayonet? How? Where? When?” she demanded, pale and distraught, realising how little she knew of the dangers François had been through that day.

  Brief and crisp, he told her what had happened and added a tender, lingering grateful afterthought, “If it hadn’t been Hin, it would have been me at the end of that bayonet.”

  “But how on earth did you manage to get away?” Nonnie persisted, as she forced herself to go on looking into the wound, feeling that she owed it to them to discover what they had suffered on behalf of them all and marvelling why Hintza’s leg had not been sliced from his body.

  “I shot him through the head as Hin kept him pinned to the ground by the throat,” François replied.

  He sounded strangely casual and concerned only with concentrating on washing away the dirt and dried blood around the wound, obviously unaware that he had not explained fully.

  “Oh how awful for you, you poor François,” Nonnie said, brimming over with sympathy, imagining from all she had heard and read about such things that François must be overcome with remorse at having had to kill another human being.

  To her amazement François replied, unexpectedly vehement, “There was nothing awful about it at all. I was only too glad to kill him before he could kill Hin and me.”

  All this was so self-evident now to him that he would have left it there, had he not realised suddenly that even the self-evident could be unusual. For all at once, unbidden, there came to him vividly the memory of the day when he had been compelled to shoot his first elephant in the shape of Uprooter of Great Trees—an episode of which Nonnie had been fully informed in the past.

  He found himself saying in amazement as much to himself as to her, “Why it’s odd, Nonnie, now that you make me think about it, I felt no regret, none at all. It all happened so quickly but not so fast that I could not feel a strange, sharp kind of pleasure shooting the man. Yet I felt only sad and sorry when I shot old Uprooter of Great Trees. That poor old beast was drunk, old, an outcast and not really knowing what he was doing. But this man and his friends knew perfectly well what they were doing. They were not drunk, but acting under orders from other calculating men determined to kill us. But I’ll tell you more about that later. It’s a terrible story.”

  It was Nonnie’s turn to be astonished. Her impulse to be remorseful for François in the matter now seemed to have been shallow. It left her as if it had never been. Instead the woman in her was strangely reassured. She looked at François in a new and proud way, as if deep down in her there was something that had to know that the men who accompanied her through life should be the kind of men who would not hesitate to kill on behalf of lif
e. It was her first private and personal encounter with the uncomfortable fact that life in its extremities has need for death. She was utterly bewildered and deeply moved by the complex of unexperienced feelings rushing at her, so that trembling she took François’s hand, pressed it to her cheek and said like a person just woken from sleep: “Oh bless you, François, bless you and thank you both.”

  François hardly heard her. The contact and deed were enough, but he had just then finally cleaned out the wound and wanted to complete the work. In any case, before he could respond, Nonnie spoke up, offering to fetch a new field dressing and fresh bandages from her larder. But François said no. He asked her only for a tube of yellow aureomyocin ointment, which she watched him spread thick and wide all over the wound, carefully massaging it into the skin around the edges.

  “But surely you’ll bandage a new dressing over it?” she asked, bewildered, when he sat back, as if it were all done.

  “No, Nonnie. The reason I wanted to dress the wound the moment I got back was so that a scab can have as long as possible to form over it in the night. The scab, as Mopani says, is nature’s field dressing, and no man can improve on it. Hin will be far more comfortable with his own natural field dressing and no bandaging to restrict his circulation. If he goes on sleeping and snoring away like that he’ll grow a wonderfully thick scab before morning. And he’ll need it too! Won’t you, you old goggatjie?”

  He laid a hand that suddenly felt like lead for a moment on Hintza’s head and realised that his day had come to an end. He could not go on talking any longer, even to Nonnie. He could not keep his eyes open for any purpose whatsoever, however urgent. He just had to sleep and at once. He could barely say goodnight to any of them. Through blurred eyes, he looked at the place of sleep prepared for him and the empty haversack at its head put there by Nonnie as a pillow.