“I heard our father talking to my mother about the elephant hunt,” Sisiwe went on. “This time he is taking some of our older brothers with him.”
Nomusa’s brown eyes grew big with excitement. “Oh, Sisiwe, how I should love to go! Do you suppose I could?”
Sisiwe opened her eyes in astonishment. “A girl go on an elephant hunt? Who ever heard of such a thing? Why, Nomusa, you talk as if you were our brother Mdingi!”
“It is true that I do not like girls’ work,” Nomusa said sadly.
“Nomusa!” Makanya called out sharply from within the hut.
“I am here, my mother,” answered Nomusa, quickly crawling through the low opening of the hut. A delicious smell of food cooking enveloped her as she entered. Corn mush and bananas were steaming in a pot over the fire.
After the dazzling sunshine outdoors, it took one’s eyes several seconds to be able to see inside the dark hut. It was just one large room; on the long pole extending from one end of the hut to the other hung baskets, wooden milk pails, gourds, and other things used in the vegetable gardens.
There was a saucerlike hole in the middle of the floor. Here they made the fire for cooking. Nomusa and her mother had gone to great trouble to pound a mixture of ant-heap sand, clay, and cow dung into the dirt floor, pounding and rubbing it with large smooth stones so it would gleam and glisten. She hoped her father would notice that they were good housekeepers.
“What kept you so long, my daughter?” asked Makanya. “I have been waiting for the water. Did you forget your father is coming to visit us? Stir the fire while I feed Bala.”
Nomusa’s mother gently laid the baby on a mat while she took an earthenware jar from the cool earth on one side of the room. In this jar was milk that had been left to sour into thick, large clots. The milk was cold and curdlike. Then Makanya picked up Bala and held her on her grass-skirted lap. The fat baby began to coo expectantly, holding up her brown, dimpled hands to her mother. Like a bird she opened her mouth, uttering cooing sounds. Makanya slowly poured some of the clotted milk into the baby’s mouth. Bala began to smack her lips happily, but suddenly her expression turned into one of disappointment and disgust. She did not like her new food, and she would not swallow it, but began spitting it out as fast as she could. The clotted milk dribbled over her chin and down her chubby body.