Jock of the Bushveld

by Percy Fitzpatrick

  All along the surface of the earth there lay for a minute or so a two feet screen of mingled dust and splash: long spikes of rain drove down and dashed into spray, each bursting its little column of dust from the powdery earth. There was an indescribable and unforgettable progression in sounds and smells and sights – a growth and change – rapid yet steady, inevitable, breathless, overwhelming. Little enough could one realise in those first few minutes and in the few square yards around; yet there are details, unnoticed at the time, which come back quite vividly when the bewildering rush is over and there are impressions which it is not possible to forget.

  There were the sounds and the smells and the sights! The sounds that began with the sudden crash of thunder; the dead silence that followed it; the first great drops that fell with such pats on the dust; then more and faster – yet still so big and separate as to make one look round to see where they fell; the sound on the waggon sail – at first as of bouncing marbles, then the ‘devil’s tattoo’, and then the roar!

  And outside there was the muffled puff and patter in the dust; the rustle as the drops struck dead leaves and grass and sticks; the blend of many notes that made one great sound, always growing, changing and moving on – full of weird significance – until there came the steady swish and hiss of water upon water, when the earth had ceased to stand up against the rain and was swamped. But even that did not last; for then the fallen rain raised its voice against the rest, and little sounds of trickling scurrying waters came to tone the ceaseless hiss, and grew and grew until from every side the chorus of rushing tumbling waters filled the air with the steady roar of the flood.

  And the smells! The smell of the baked drought bound earth; the faint clearing and purifying by the first few drops; the mingled dust and damp; the rinsed air; the clean sense of water, water everywhere; and in the end the bracing sensation in nostrils and head of, not wind exactly, but of swirling air thrust out to make room for the falling rain; and, when all was over, the sense of glorious clarified air and scoured earth – the smell of a new-washed world!

  And the things that one saw went with the rest, marking the stages of the storm’s short vivid life. The first puffs of dust, where drops struck like bullets; the cloud that rose to meet them; the drops themselves that streaked slanting down like a flash of steel ramrods; the dust dissolved in a dado of splash. I had seen the yellow brown ground change colour; in a few seconds it was damp; then mud; then all ashen. A minute more, and busy little trickles started everywhere – tiny things a few inches long; and while one watched them they joined and merged, hurrying on with twist and turn, but ever onward to a given point – to meet like the veins in a leaf. Each tuft of grass became a fountainhead; each space between a little rivulet, swelling rapidly, racing away with its burden of leaf and twig and dust and foam until in a few minutes all were lost in one sheet of moving water.

  Crouching under the waggon I watched it and saw the little streamlets, dirty and debris laded, steal slowly on like sluggard snakes down to my feet and, winding round me, meet beyond and hasten on. Soon the grass tufts and higher spots were wet; and as the water rose on my boots and the splash beat up to my knees, it seemed worth while making for the tent of the waggon. But in there the roar was deafening; the rain beat down with such force that it drove through the canvas covered waggon tent and greased bucksail in fine mist. In there it was black dark, the tarpaulin covering all, and I slipped out again back to my place under the waggon to watch the storm.

  We were on high ground which fell gently away on three sides – a long spur running down to the river between two of the numberless small watercourses scoring the flanks of the hills. Mere gutters they were, easy corrugations in the slope from the range to the river, insignificant drains in which no water ever ran except during the heavy rains. One would walk through scores of them with easy swinging stride and never notice their existence. Yet, when the half-hour’s storm was over and it was possible to get out and look round, they were rushing boiling torrents, twenty to thirty feet across and six to ten feet deep, foaming and plunging towards the river, red with the soil of the stripped earth, and laden with leaves, grass, sticks and branches – water furies, wild and ungovernable, against which neither man nor beast could stand for a moment.

  When the rain ceased the air was full of the roar of waters, growing louder and nearer all the time. I walked down the long low spur to look at the river, expecting much, and was grievously disappointed. It was no fuller and not much changed. On either side of me the once dry dongas emptied their soil stained and debris laden contents in foaming cataracts, each deepening the yellowy red of the river at its banks; but out in midstream the river was undisturbed and its normal colour – the clear yellow of some ambers – was unchanged. How small the great storm seemed then! How puny the flooded creeks and dongas – yet each master of man and his work! How many of them are needed to make a real flood!

  There are few things more deceptive than the tropical storm. To one caught in it, all the world seems deluged and overwhelmed; yet a mile away it may be all peace and sunshine. I looked at the river and laughed – at myself. The revelation seemed complete; it was humiliating; one felt so small. Still, the drought was broken; the rains had come; and in spite of disappointment I stayed to watch, drawn by the scores of little things caught up and carried by – the first harvest garnered by the rains.

  A quarter of an hour or more may have been spent thus, when amid all the chorus of the rushing waters there stole in a duller murmur. Murmur it was at first, but it grew steadily into a low-toned, monotoned, distant roar; and it caught and held one like the roar of coming hail or hurricane. It was the river coming down.

  The sun was out again, and in the straight reach above the bend there was every chance to watch the flood from the bank where I stood. It seemed strangely long in coming, but come it did at last, in waves like the half spent breakers on a sandy beach – a slope of foam and broken waters in the van, an ugly wall with spray tipped feathered crest behind, and tier on tier to follow. Heavens, what a scene! The force of waters, and the utter hopeless puniness of man! The racing waves, each dashing for the foremost place only to force the further on; the tall reeds caught waist-high and then laid low, their silvery tops dipped, hidden and drowned in the flood; the trees yielding and the branches snapping like matches and twirling like feathers down the stream; the rumbling thunder of big boulders loosed and tumbled, rolled like marbles on the rocks below; whole trees brought down and turning helplessly in the flood – drowned giants with their branches swinging slowly over like nerveless arms. It was tremendous; and one had to stay and watch.

  Then the waves ceased; and behind the opposite bank another stream began to make its way, winding like a huge snake, spreading wider as it went across the flats beyond, until the two rejoined and the river became one again. The roar of the waters gradually lessened; the two cataracts beside me were silent; and looking down I saw the fall was gone and that water ran to water – swift as ever, but voiceless now – and was lost in the river itself. Inch by inch the water rose towards my feet; tufts of grass trembled, wavered and went down; little wavelets flipped and licked like tongues against the remaining bank of soft earth below me; piece after piece of it leaned gently forward and toppled headlong in the eager creeping tide; deltas of yellow scum-flecked water worked silently up the dongas, reaching out with stealthy feelers to enclose the place where I was standing; and then it was time to go!

  The cattle had turned their tails to the storm and stood it out. They too were washed clean and looked fresher and brighter; but there was nothing in that! Two of them had been seen by the boys moving slowly, foot by foot, before the driving rain down the slope from the outspan, stung by the heavy drops and yielding in their weakness to the easy gradient. Only fifty yards away they should have stopped in the hollow – the shallow dry donga of the morning; but they were gone! Unwilling to turn back and face the rain, they had no doubt been caught in the rush of stormwater
and swirled away, and their bodies were bobbing in the Crocodile many miles below by the time we missed them.

  In a couple of hours the water had run off; the flooded dongas were almost dry again; and we moved on.

  It was then that the real ‘rot’ set in. Next morning there were half a dozen oxen unable to stand up; and so again the following day. It was no longer possible to take the four waggons; all the spare cattle had been used up and it was better to face the worst at once; so I distributed the best of the load on the other three waggons and abandoned the rest of it with the fourth waggon in the bush. But day by day the oxen dropped out and, when we reached the Junction and branched up the Kaap, there were not enough left for three waggons.

  This time it meant abandoning both waggon and load; and I gave the cattle a day’s rest then, hoping that they would pick up strength on good grass to face the eight drifts that lay between us and Barberton.

  Our Last Hunt

  We had not touched fresh meat for many days as there had been no time for shooting. But I knew that game was plentiful across the river in the rough country between the Kaap and Crocodile, and I started off to make the best of the day’s delay, little dreaming that it was to be the last time Jock and I would hunt together.

  Weeks had passed without a hunt, and Jock must have thought there was a sad falling away on the part of his master; he no longer expected anything; the rifle was never taken down now except for an odd shot from the outspan or to put some poor animal out of its misery. Since the night with the lions, when he had been ignominiously cooped up, there had been nothing to stir his blood and make life worth living.

  This morning, as he saw me rise from breakfast and proceed to potter about the waggons in the way he had come to regard as inevitable, he looked on indifferently for a few minutes and then stretched out full length in the sun and went to sleep.

  I could not take him with me across the river, as the ‘fly’ was said to be bad there, and it was no place to risk horse or dog. The best of prospects would not have tempted me to take chance with him, but I hated ordering him to stay behind, as it hurt his dignity and sense of comradeship, so it seemed a happy accident that he was asleep and I could slip away unseen. As the cattle were grazing along the riverbank only a few hundred yards off, I took a turn that way to have a look at them, with natural but quite fruitless concern for their welfare, and a moment later met the herdboy running towards me and calling out excitedly something which I made out to be: ‘Crocodile! Crocodile, Inkos! A crocodile has taken one of the oxen.’ The waggon boys heard it also, and armed with assegais and sticks were on the bank almost as soon as I was; but there was no sign of crocodile or bullock. The boy showed us the place where the weakened animal had gone down to drink – the hoof slides were plain enough – and told how, as it drank, the long black coffinhead had appeared out of the water. He described stolidly how the big jaws had opened and gripped the bullock’s nose; how he, a few yards away, had seen the struggle; how he had shouted and hurled his sticks and stones and tufts of grass, and feinted to rush down at it; and how, after a muffled bellow, and a weak staggering effort to pull back, the poor beast had slid out into the deep water and disappeared. It seemed to be a quite unnecessary addition to my troubles: misfortunes were coming thick and fast!

  Half an hour was wasted in watching and searching, but we saw no more of crocodile or bullock. As there was nothing to be done, I turned upstream to find a shallower and a safer crossing.

  At best it was not pleasant: the water was waist-high and racing in narrow channels between and over boulders and loose slippery stones. I was glad to get through without a tumble and a swim.

  The country was rough on the other side and the old grass was high and dense, for no one went there in those days, and the grass stood unburnt from season to season. Climbing over rocks and stony ground, crunching dry sticks underfoot and driving a path through the rank tambookie grass, it seemed well-nigh hopeless to look for a shot; several times I heard buck start up and dash off only a few yards away, and it began to look as if the wiser course would be to turn back.

  At last I got out of the valley into more level and more open ground, and came out upon a ledge or plateau a hundred yards or more wide, with a low ridge of rocks and some thorns on the far side – quite a likely spot. I searched the open ground from my cover and, seeing nothing there, crossed over to the rocks, threading my way silently between them and expecting to find another clear space beyond. The snort of a buck brought me to a standstill among the rocks, and as I listened it was followed by another and another from the same quarter, delivered at irregular intervals; and each snort was accompanied by the sound of trampling feet, sometimes like stamps of anger and at other times seemingly a hasty movement.

  I had on several occasions interrupted fights between angry rivals: once two splendid kudu bulls were at it; a second time it was two sables, and the vicious and incredibly swift sweep of the scimitar horns still lives in memory, along with the wonderful nimbleness of the other fellow who dodged it; and another time they were blue wildebeest. But some interruption had occurred each time, and I had no more than a glimpse of what might have been a rare scene to witness.

  I was determined not to spoil it this time: no doubt it was a fight, and probably they were fencing and circling for an opening, as there was no bump of heads or clash of horns and no tearing scramble of feet to indicate the real struggle. I crept on through the rocks and found before me a tangle of thorns and dead wood, impossible to pass through in silence; it was better to work back again and try the other side of the rocks. The way was clearer there and I crept up to a rock four or five feet high, feeling certain from the sound that the fight would be in full view a few yards beyond. With the rifle ready I raised myself slowly until my eyes were over the top of the rock. Some twenty yards off, in an open flat of downtrodden grass, I saw a sable cow: she was standing with feet firmly and widely planted, looking fiercely in front of her, ducking her head in threatening manner every few seconds and giving angry snorts; and behind, and huddled up against her, was her scared bewildered little red-brown calf.

  It seems stupid not to have guessed what it all meant, yet the fact is that for the few remaining seconds I was simply puzzled and fascinated by the behaviour of the two sables. Then in the corner of my eye I saw, away on my right, another red-brown thing come into the open: it was Jock, casting about with nose to ground for my trail which he had overrun at the point where I had turned back near the deadwood on the other side of the rocks.

  What happened then was a matter of a second or two. As I turned to look at him he raised his head, bristled up all over and made one jump forward; then a long low yellowish thing moved in the unbeaten grass in front of the sable cow, raised its head sharply and looked full into my eyes; and before I could move a finger it shot away in one streak-like bound. A wild shot at the lioness, as I jumped up full height; a shout at Jock to come back; a scramble of black and brown on my left; and it was all over. I was standing in the open ground, breathless with excitement and Jock, a few yards off, with hindlegs crouched ready for a dash, looking back at me for leave to go!

  The spoor told the tale: there was the outer circle made by the lioness in the grass, broken in places where she had feinted to rush in and stopped before the lowered horns; and inside this there was the smaller circle, a tangle of trampled grass and spoor, where the brave mother had stood between her young and death.

  Any attempt to follow the lioness after that would have been waste of time. We struck off in a new direction. In crossing a stretch of level ground where the thorn-trees were well scattered and the grass fairly short, my eye caught a movement in front that brought me to instant standstill. It was as if the stem of a young thorn-tree had suddenly waved itself and settled back again, and it meant that some long-horned buck, perhaps a kudu or a sable bull, was lying down and had swung his head; and it meant also that he was comfortably settled, quite unconscious of danger. I marked and watche
d the spot, or rather, the line, for the glimpse was too brief to tell more than the direction; but there was no other move. The air was almost still, with just a faint drift from him to us, and I examined every stick and branch, every stump and ant heap, every bush and tussock, without stirring a foot. But I could make out nothing: I could trace no outline and see no patch of colour, dark or light, to betray him.

  It was an incident very characteristic of Bushveld hunting. There I stood minute after minute – not risking a move, which would be certain to reveal me – staring and searching for some big animal lying half asleep within eighty yards of me on ground that you would not call good cover for a rabbit. We were in the sunlight; he lay somewhere beyond, where a few scattered thorn-trees threw dabs of shade, marbling with dappled shade and light the already mottled surface of earth and grass. I was hopelessly beaten, but Jock could see him well enough; he crouched beside me with ears cocked, and his eyes, all ablaze, were fixed intently on the spot, except for an occasional swift look up to me to see what on earth was wrong and why the shot did not come. His hindlegs were tucked under him and he was trembling with excitement. Only those will realise it who have been through the tantalising humiliating experience. There was nothing to be done but wait, leaving the buck to make the first move.

  And at last it came: there was another slight shake of the horns, and the whole figure stood out in bold relief. It was a fine sable bull lying in the shadow of one of the thorn-trees with his back towards us, and there was a small ant heap close behind him, making a greyish blot against his black back and shoulder, and breaking the expanse of colour which the eye would otherwise easily have picked up.

  The ant heap made a certain shot impossible, so I lowered myself slowly to the ground to wait until he should begin feeding or change his position for comfort or shade, as they often do: this might mean waiting for half an hour or more, but it was better than risking a shot in the position in which he was lying. I settled down for a long wait with the rifle resting on my knees, confidently expecting that when the time came to move he would get up slowly, stretch himself and have a good look round. But he did nothing of the kind; a turn or eddy of the faint breeze must have given him my wind; for there was one twitch of the horns, as his nose was laid to windward, and without an instant’s pause he dashed off. It was the quickest thing imaginable in a big animal: it looked as though he started racing from his lying position. The bush was not close enough to save him, however, in spite of his start, and through the thin veil of smoke I saw him plunge and stumble, and then dash off again; and Jock, seeing me give chase, went ahead and in half a minute I was left well behind, but still in sight of the hunt.