When Nomusa and Hlamba brought their water jars to their huts, the bigger boys were already in the cattle pasture. Only the smaller children were playing about in the kraal space. They were making toy kraals, cattle, and dolls out of clay and baking them in the sun.
There was Themba among the little boys, making clay oxen and cattle kraals and pretending to trade toy cattle for dolls as wives. That was what the men did.
While the small children played, the older girls were busy helping their mothers, and there was great activity inside and outside the huts.
Nomusa had finally finished weeding her mother’s garden and had carried back in her left hand a large pumpkin. In her right she held three long pieces of sugar cane. Out of her mouth stuck a small piece of sugar cane which she was chewing and sucking as she walked briskly to her hut. She had stuck five gray and white porcupine quills in her thick hair. Carefully she dropped the pumpkin and the sugar cane before the hut entrance and pushed them before her as she crawled in.
“Well, today you have returned very quickly, Nomusa,” her mother said approvingly. “Have you weeded the garden well?”
“That I have, my mother,” said Nomusa. “And see what I have brought you”—pointing proudly to the quills in her hair.
Her mother stopped brewing corn beer and came over to examine the porcupine quills. She took one out of Nomusa’s hair and put it into her own, trying it out by gently scratching her head with it.
“Yo! Very sharp point,” she observed. “How did you get the quills?”
“While I was weeding the garden, I saw the porcupine close to the ground trying to creep out from under our thorn fence. So I threw a large yam at it as hard as I could, and although the porcupine got away, the yam lay on the ground with these porcupine quills in it.”
