A Vendetta of the Desert

by W. C. Scully

Kanu at once did what was the only proper thing to do under the circumstances,—he cried out in the Bushman tongue that he was a friend and a brother, and then fell flat on his face and lay, with extended arms, awaiting death or the signal to arise. Then he heard the warriors consulting together as to whether they should summarily despatch him or lead him captive to the cave in which they dwelt and kill him there for the amusement of the non-combatant members of the little community. They decided in favour of the latter alternative and then Kanu knew that most probably his life would be spared.

But as yet he was not by any means out of the wood His vestiges of European clothing caused him to be suspected and, in the savage mind, suspicion and condemnation are not very far apart. Cases were familiar to all in which renegade sons of the desert had betrayed the hiding-places of their compatriots to their deadly enemies, the Boers, and it was quite possible that Kanu might turn out to be a traitor. But when the captive showed the unhealed stripes with which his back was still scored, the captors began to feel more kindly disposed towards him, and they eventually came to the conclusion that he was not a spy.

Later, when Kanu told his father’s name, and related the circumstances of the raid which swept his family from the face of the earth and made him a bondman to the hated Boer,—and when it turned out that old Nalb, the patriarch of the party, had once seen a picture painted by Kanu’s father who, though he had died comparatively young, had been a somewhat celebrated artist, the new arrival was accepted into full fellowship and made free of the cave and all its contents.

The Bushman acknowledged no chieftain, nor was he bound by any tribal ties. Each family was independent of every other family and hunted on its own account. The little community into which Kanu found himself adopted consisted of eight men, seven women and fourteen children of various ages. They lived after the manner of their kind,—absolutely from hand to mouth, taking no thought for the morrow. Their movements about the country were determined by accidents of weather and the chase, but they retired from time to time to their cave in the Kamiesbergen, whenever the adventitious rains made the locality habitable. When they, or any of them, killed a large animal, they would not attempt to remove the meat, but would camp alongside the carcase and gorge until everything but the hair and the pulverised bones was finished. The family cave, besides being endeared by many associations, had the advantage of being in the vicinity of a spring which, although its water was rather brackish, had never been known to give out completely in the severest drought.

The cave had another great advantage,—that of being surrounded on all sides by a wide belt of desert, so the pygmies were not at all likely to be disturbed by inconvenient callers. It was spacious, and its walls were well adapted for the exercise of that remarkable art which the Bushman practised,—the art of painting. Here, on the wide natural panels were frescoed counterfeit presentments of men and all other animals with which the Bushmen were familiar, in more or less skilful outline. There was no attempt at anything like perspective, but some of the figures were drawn with spirit and showed considerable skill as well as an evident natural artistic faculty. The animals most frequently represented were the eland, the hartebeeste, the gemsbok and the baboon. One picture was a battle-piece and represented a number of men being hurled over a cliff. This was old Nalb’s handiwork, and was executed in commemoration of an attack by some strangers upon the ancestral cave, which was repulsed with great slaughter.

A few of the paintings were the work of itinerant artists, who sometimes, in seasons of plenty, wandered from cave to cave,—possibly in the interests of art,—even as Royal Academicians have found it necessary to visit the schools of Rome and Paris. Such paintings could be distinguished among the others by the hand-print of the artist in paint below each. They were usually somewhat better executed than the others, and often represented animals not common in the neighbourhood, but with whose proportions the artist had evidently familiarised himself in other and, perhaps, distant parts.

The paints used were ochres of different tints,—from white, ranging through several reds and browns, up to black. These were mixed with fat and with some vegetable substance to make the colours bite into the rock. Some of the most vivid tints were taken from those fossils known as coprolites, in which small kernels of ochreous substance are found to exist. The brush was made of the pinion feathers of small birds.

It was not long before Kanu rose to a position of eminence in the little clan. He took unto himself, as wife, Ksoa, a daughter of old Nalb and, when that venerable leader’s physical vigour began to decline, Kanu gradually came to be looked upon as his probable successor. His sojourn among the Boers, whilst it had told against his skill as a hunter, had sharpened his wits generally. Soon he became as expert as any in the tracking of game. Then he introduced a slight improvement in the matter of fixing an arrow-head to the shaft, which was immediately recognised by the superstitious Bushmen as an evidence of more than human ability. Thus, when old Nalb met his death from thirst, after finding that the store of water-filled ostrich-eggshells which he had cached a long time previously had been broached, Kanu was at once looked upon as the leader.

For a few seasons peace and plenty reigned. The locusts appeared year after year, on their way to devastate the cultivated portions of the Colony, and the Bushmen thanked their gods for the boon, with elaborate sacrifices in which Kanu officiated as high priest. Then came the drought, which was attributed to the fact of one of their number having allowed his shadow to fall upon a dying ostrich in the afternoon. Had this happened in the morning, it would not have mattered so much but, happening when the sun was going home to rest, and thus preventing the luminary from taking his lawful dues in the matter of supper, it was looked upon as likely to prove a deadly affront to all the spirits of the sky, who were the sun’s subjects. These spirits, who sent or withheld run as pleased their capricious minds, the Bushmen feared and constantly endeavoured to propitiate. The man guilty of this heinous offence was looked at askance by all, but was forgiven after elaborate and painful rites had been solemnised over him. Nevertheless, when the drought increased in intensity, and the children began to sicken from drinking the salt-charged water from the failing spring, the offender found it judicious to disappear.

As soon as the women had returned from the spring, bearing their bark nets full of ostrich-eggshells containing water,—the shells being closed with a wooden peg at each end, a start was made. The skins were rolled up into bundles and upon these were bound the earthen pots and the bags containing the very scanty store of grain. This grain was the seed of the “twa” grass, plundered from the store-houses of ants. The women and children were loaded to their utmost capacity of draught, whilst the men carried nothing but their bows and arrows, and their digging sticks. These last were pointed pegs of very hard wood, about eighteen inches long, stuck through round stones four or five inches in diameter, which had been pierced for the purpose. The object of the stone was to give the sticks weight in the digging.