Jim had his faults, but getting others into mischief while keeping out of it himself was not one of them. If he egged Jock on, he was more than ready to stand by him, and on these occasions his first act was to jump for his sticks, which were always pretty handy, and lie in readiness to take a hand if any of the gang should use what he considered unfair means of defence, such as throwing stones and kerries, or using assegais or knives; and Jim – the friend of Jock, the avoided enemy of all Shangaans, aching for an excuse to take a hand in the row himself – was not, I fear, a very impartial judge.
There was a day outside Barberton which I remember well. We were to start that evening. Knowing that if Jim got into the town he might not be back and fit to work for days, I made him stay with the waggons. He lay there flat out under his waggon with his chin resting on his arms, staring steadily at the glistening corrugated iron roofs of the town, as morose and unapproachable as a surly old watchdog. From the tent of my waggon I saw him raise his head, and following his glance, picked out a row of bundles against the skyline. Presently a long string of about fifty time expired mine boys came in sight. Jim, on his hands and knees, scrambled over to where Jock lay asleep, and shook him; for this incident occurred after Jock had become deaf.
‘Shangaans, Jock; Shangaans! Kill them; kill, kill, kill!’ said Jim in gusty ferocious whispers. It must have seemed as if Fate had kindly provided an outlet for the rebellious rage and craving for a fight that were consuming him.
As Jock trotted out to head them off, Jim reached up to the buckrails and pulled down his bundle of sticks and lay down like a tiger on the spring. I had had a lot of trouble with Jim that day and this annoyed me; but my angry call to stop was unavailing. Jim, pretending not to understand, made no attempt to stop Jock, but contented himself with calling to him to come back; and Jock, stone deaf, trotted evenly along with his head, neck, back and tail all level – an old trick of Jess’s which generally meant trouble for someone. Slowing down as he neared the Shangaans, he walked quietly on until he headed off the leader, and there he stood across the path. It was just the same as before: the boys, finding that he did nothing, merely stepped aside to avoid bumping against him. They were boys taking back their purchases to their kraals to dazzle the eyes of the ignorant with the wonders of civilisation – gaudy blankets, collections of bright tin billies and mugs, tin plates, three-legged pots, clothing, hats, and even small tin trunks painted brilliant yellow, helped to make up their huge bundles. The last boy was wearing a pair of Royal Artillery trousers, and I have no doubt he regarded it ever afterwards as nothing less than a calamity that they were not safely stowed away in his bundle – for a kaffir would sacrifice his skin rather than his new pants any day. It was from the seat of these too ample bags that Jock took a good mouthful; and it was the boy’s frantic jump, rather than Jock’s tug, that made the piece come out. The sudden fright and the attempts to face about quickly caused several downfalls; the clatter of these spread the panic; and on top of it all came Jock’s charge along the broken line and the excited shouts of those who thought they were going to be worried to death.
Jim had burst into great bellows of laughter and excited – but quite superfluous – shouts of encouragement to Jock, who could not have heard a trumpet at ten yards.
But there came a very unexpected change. One big Shangaan had drawn from his bundle a brand new side-axe: I saw the bright steel head flash, as he held it menacingly aloft by the short handle and marched towards Jock. There was a scrambling bound from under the waggon and Jim, with face distorted and grey with fury, rushed out. In his right hand he brandished a tough stout fighting-stick; in his left I was horrified to see an assegai, and well I knew that, with the fighting fury on him, he would think nothing of using it. The Shangaan saw him coming and stopped; then, still facing Jim, and with the axe raised and feinting repeatedly to throw it, he began to back away. Jim never paused for a second: he came straight on with wild leaps and bloodcurdling yells in Zulu fighting fashion and ended with a bound that seemed to drop him right on top of the other. The stick came down with a whirr and a crash that crimped every nerve in my body; and then the Shangaan dropped like a log.
I had shouted myself hoarse at Jim, but he heard or heeded nothing; and seizing a stick from one of the other boys I was already on the way to stop him, but before I got near him he had wrenched the axe from the kicking boy and, without pause, gone headlong for the next Shangaan he saw. Then everything went wrong: the more I shouted and the harder I ran, the worse the row. The Shangaans seemed to think I had joined in and was directing operations against them: Jim seemed to be inspired to wilder madness by my shouts and gesticulations; and Jock – well, Jock, at any rate had not the remotest doubt as to what he should do. When he saw me and Jim in full chase behind him, his plain duty was to go in for all he was worth; and he did it.
It was half an hour before I got that mad savage back. He was as unmanageable as a runaway horse. He had walloped the majority of the fifty himself; he had broken his own two sticks and used up a number of theirs; on his forehead there was a small cut and a lump like half an orange; and on the back of his head another cut left by the sticks of the enemy when eight or ten had rallied once in a half-hearted attempt to stand against him.
It was strange how Jim, even in that mood, yielded to the touch of one whom he regarded as his ‘Inkos’. I could not have forced him back: in that maniac condition it would have needed a powerful combination indeed to bring him back against his will. He yielded to the light grip of my hand on his wrist and walked freely along with me; but a fiery bounding vitality possessed him, and with long springy strides he stepped out – looking excitedly about, turning to right and left or even right about, and stepping sideways or even backwards to keep pace with me – yet always yielding the imprisoned arm so as not to pull me about. And all the time there came from him a torrent of excited gabble in pure Zulu, too fast and too highflown for me to follow, which was punctuated and paragraphed by bursting allusions to ‘dogs of Shangaans’, ‘axes’, ‘sticks’ and Jock.
Near the waggons we passed over the ‘battlefield’, and a huge guffaw of laughter broke from Jim as we came on the abandoned impedimenta of the defeated enemy. Several of the bundles had burst open from the violence of the fall and the odd collections of the natives were scattered about; others had merely shed the outside luggage of tin billies, beakers, pans, boots and hats. Jim looked on it all as the spoils of war, wanting to stop and gather in his loot there and then, and when I pressed on, he shouted to the other drivers to come out and collect the booty.
But my chief anxiety was to end the wretched escapade as quickly as possible and get the Shangaans on their way again; so I sent Jim back to his place under the waggon, and told the cook boy to give him the rest of my coffee and half a cup of sugar to provide him with something else to think of and to calm him down.
After a wait of half an hour or so a head appeared just over the rise, and then another, and another, at irregular intervals and at various points: they were scouting very cautiously before venturing back again. I sat in the tent-waggon out of sight and kept quiet, hoping that in a few minutes they would gain confidence, collect their goods and go their way again. Jim, lying flat under the waggon, was much lower than I was and – continuing his gabble to the other boys – saw nothing. Unfortunately he looked round just as a scared face peered cautiously over the top of an ant heap. The temptation was, I suppose, irresistible: he scrambled to his knees with a pretence of starting afresh and let out one ferocious yell that made my hair stand up; and in that second every head bobbed down and the field was deserted once more.
If this went on there could be but one ending: the police would be appealed to, Jim arrested and I should spend days hanging about the courts waiting for a trial from which the noble Jim would probably emerge with three months’ hard labour; so I sallied out as my own herald of peace. But the position was more difficult than it looked: as soon as the Shangaans saw my head a
ppearing over the rise, they scattered like chaff before the wind and ran as if they would never stop. They evidently took me for the advance guard in a fresh attack and, from the way they ran, seemed to suspect that Jim and Jock might be doing separate flanking movements to cut them off. I stood upon an ant heap and waved and called, but each shout resulted in a fresh spurt and each movement only made them more suspicious. It seemed a hopeless case, and I gave it up.
On the way back to the waggons, however, I thought of Sam – Sam with his neatly patched European clothes, with the slouchy heavy-footed walk of a nigger in boots, with his slack lanky figure and serious timid face! Sam would surely be the right envoy; even the routed Shangaans would feel that there was nothing to fear there. But Sam was by no means anxious to earn laurels; he was clearly of the poet’s view that ‘the paths of glory lead but to the grave’; and it was a poor-looking weak-kneed and much dejected scarecrow that dragged its way reluctantly out into the veld to hold parley with the routed enemy that day.
At the first mention of Sam’s name Jim had twitched round with a snort, but the humour of the situation tickled him when he saw the too obvious reluctance with which his rival received the honour conferred on him. Between rough gusts of laughter Jim rained on him crude ridicule and rude comments; and Sam slouched off with head bent, relieving his heart with occasional clicks and low murmurs of disgust. How far the new herald would have ventured, if he had not received most unexpected encouragement, is a matter for speculation. Jim’s last shout was to advise him not to hide in an antbear hole; but, to Sam’s relief, the Shangaans seemed to view him merely as a decoy, even more dangerous than I was; for, as no one else appeared, they had now no idea at all from which quarter the expected attack would come. They were widely scattered more than half a mile away when Sam came in sight; a brief pause followed in which they looked anxiously around, and then, after some aimless dashes about like a startled troop of buck, they seemed to find the line of flight and headed off in a long string down the valley towards the river.
Now, no one had ever run away from Sam before, and the exhilarating sight so encouraged him that he marched boldly on after them. Goodness knows when, if ever, they would have stopped, if Sam had not met a couple of other natives whom the Shangaans had passed and induced them to turn back and reassure the fugitives.
An hour later Sam came back in mild triumph, at the head of the Shangaan gang; and ‘drest in a little brief authority’, stood guard and superintended while they collected their scattered goods – all except the axe that caused the trouble. That they failed to find. The owner may have thought it wise to make no claim on me; Sam, if he remembered it, would have seen the Shangaans and all their belongings burned in a pile rather than raise so delicate a question with Jim; I had forgotten all about it – being anxious only to end the trouble and get the Shangaans off; and that villain Jim ‘lay low’. At the first outspan from Barberton next day I saw him carving his mark on the handle, unabashed, under my very nose.
The next time Jim got drunk he added something to his opinion of Sam: ‘Sam no good: Sam leada Bible! Shangaan, Sam; Shangaan!’
The Berg
The last day of each trip in the Bushveld was always a day of trial and hard work for man and beast. The Berg stood up before us like an impassable barrier. Looked at from below, the prospect was despairing – from above, appalling. There was no road that the eye could follow. Here and there a broad furrowed streak of red soil straight down some steep grass-covered spur was visible: it looked like a mountain timber-slide or the scour of some tropical storm; and that was all one could see of it from below. For perhaps a week the towering bulwarks of the Highveld were visible as we toiled along – at first only in occasional hazy glimpses, then daily clearer higher and grander, as the great barrier it was.
After many hard treks through the broken foothills, with their rocky sideling slopes and boulder-strewn torrent beds, at last the Berg itself was reached. There, on a flat-topped terrace-like spur where the last outspan was, we took breath, halved our loads, double-spanned and pulled ourselves together for the last big climb.
From there the scoured red streaks stood out revealed as road tracks – for made road there was none; from there, lines of whitish rock and loose stones and big boulders, that one had taken for the beds of mountain torrents, stood revealed as bits of ‘road’, linking up some of the broken sections of the route; but even from there not nearly all the track was visible. The bumpy rumbling and heavy clattering of waggons on the rocky trail, the shouts of drivers and the crack of whips, mixed with confusing echoes from somewhere above, set one puzzling and searching higher still. Then in unexpected places here and there other waggons would be seen against the shadowy mountains, creeping up with infinite labour foot by foot, tacking at all sorts of angles, winding by undetected spur and slope and ridge towards the summit – the long spans of oxen and the bulky loads, dwarfed into miniature by the vast background, looking like snails upon a face of rock.
To those who do not know, there is not much difference between spans of oxen; and the driving of them seems merely a matter of brute strength in arm and lung. One span looks like another; and the weird unearthly yells of the drivers, the cracks – like rifle-shots – of the long lashes, and the hum and thud of the more cruel doubled whip, seem to be all that is needed. But it is not so; heart and training in the cattle, skill and judgment in the driver, are needed there; for the Berg is a searching test of man and beast. Some, double-spanned and relieved of half their three-ton loads, will stick for a whole day where the pull is steepest, the road too narrow to swing the spans and the curves too sharp to let the fifteen couples of bewildered and despairing oxen get a straight pull; whilst others will pass along slowly but steadily and without check, knowing what each beast will do and stand, when to urge and when to ease it, when and where to stop them for a blow, and how to get them all leaning to the yoke, ready and willing for the ‘heave together’ that is essential for restarting a heavy load against such a hill. Patience, understanding, judgment and decision: those are the qualities it calls for, and here again the white man justifies his claim to lead and rule; for, although they are as ten or twenty to one, there is not a native driver who can compare with the best of the white men.
It was on the Berg that I first saw what a really first class man can do. There were many waggons facing the pass that day; portions of loads, dumped off to ease the pull, dotted the roadside; tangles of disordered maddened spans blocked the way; and fragments of yokes, skeis, strops and riems, and broken disselbooms, told the tale of trouble.
Old Charlie Roberts came along with his two waggons. He was ‘old’ with us – being nearly fifty; he was also stout and in poor health. We buried him at Pilgrim’s Rest a week later: the cold, clear air on top of the Berg that night, when he brought the last load up, brought out the fever. It was his last trek.
He walked slowly up past us, to ‘take a squint at things’, as he put it, and see if it was possible to get past the stuck waggons; and a little later he started, making three loads of his two and going up with single spans of eighteen oxen each, because the other waggons, stuck in various places on the road, did not give him room to work double spans. To us it seemed madness to attempt with eighteen oxen a harder task than we and others were essaying with thirty; we would have waited until the road ahead was clear.
We were halfway up when we saw old Charlie coming along steadily and without any fuss at all. He had no second driver to help him; he did no shouting; he walked along heavily and with difficulty beside the span, playing the long whip lightly about as he gave the word to go or called quietly to individual oxen by name, but he did not touch them; and when he paused to ‘blow’ them he leaned heavily on his whipstick to rest himself. We were stopped by some break in the gear and were completely blocking the road when he caught up. Anyone else would have waited: he pulled out into the rough sideling track on the slope below, to pass us. Even a good span with a good driver may
well come to grief in trying to pass another that is stuck – for the sight and example are demoralising – but old Charlie did not turn a hair; he went steadily on, giving a brisker call and touching up his oxen here and there with light flicks. They used to say he could kill a fly on a front ox or on the toe of his own boot with the voorslag of his big whip.
The track he took was merely the scorings made by skidding waggons coming down the mountain; it was so steep and rough there that a pull of ten yards between the spell for breath was all one could hope for; and many were thankful to have done much less. At the second pause, as they were passing us, one of his oxen turned, leaning inwards against the chain, and looked back. Old Charlie remarked quietly, ‘I thought he would chuck it; only bought him last week. He’s got no heart.’
He walked along the span up to the shirking animal, which continued to glare back at him in a frightened way, and touched it behind with the butt of his long whipstick to bring it up to the yoke. The ox started forward into place with a jerk, but eased back again slightly as Charlie went back to his place near the after oxen. Once more the span went on and the shirker got a smart reminder as Charlie gave the call to start, and he warmed it up well as a lesson while they pulled. At the next stop it lay back worse than before.
Not one driver in a hundred would have done then what he did: they would have tried other courses first. Charlie dropped his whip quietly and outspanned the ox and its mate, saying to me as I gave him a hand: ‘When I strike a rotter, I chuck him out before he spoils the others!’ In another ten minutes he and his stalwarts had left us behind.
Old Charlie knew his oxen – each one of them, their characters and what they could do. I think he loved them too; at any rate, it was his care for them that day – handling them himself instead of leaving it to his boys – that killed him.
Jock of the Bushveld Page 18
