Kanu had much to tell his fellows about his varied experiences, and the relation of these was always more than half acted. The old, bald-headed man with the white beard who had sentenced him to be whipped, would have felt his dignity to be seriously compromised if he had seen his former victim perched on a rock mimicking him, and declaiming gibberish to a group of convulsed admirers; accentuating in a most preposterous manner every one of His Worshipful peculiarities.
It was in the hunting-field that the true potency of the Bushman was shown. Inside a wicker framework covered with the skin of an ostrich, the hunter would stalk in among an unsuspecting flock of feeding birds. With slow, swaying stride,—the long neck bent down and the beak bobbing as though pecking at the green beetles on the bushes, the counterfeit presentment of a stately, full-plumaged male would edge its way in, making the characteristic by-play which the male adopts when he wants to attract the females by an affective display of his beauties. Then, one by one, the members of the doomed flock would bite the dust, and the slayer, doffing his disguise, would proceed to cut up the carcases into pieces convenient for roasting,—or else collect fuel pending the arrival of his friends with the fire-stick.
Thus passed the halcyon days. Kanu and his men became muscular and wiry; the women and children fat and sleek. Kanu was venerated by his subjects as a powerful but beneficent magician, who had gone to some wonderful “other” world and returned laden with gifts of useful knowledge. Ksoa, Delilah-like, tried to get him to reveal to her the secret of his power, so he told her that he had been taken captive once by a monstrous being which was about to eat him,—when a blind lioness of wonderful size, strength and beauty had set him free and destroyed his enemy. This lioness had given him as a charm a hair out of her own splendid mane. So long, he said, as this hair were not stolen from him, or lost, all would go well with him and his. If, however, the hair were to be stolen,—not alone would good fortune depart from Kanu and his clan, but dire disaster would fall upon the stealer.
One day, after much persuasion, Kanu consented to show his wife the talisman. It had been carefully rolled around a dry leaf; Ksoa marvelled greatly as she saw its length uncoiled and saw how it glinted in the sun. She did not dare to touch it, but begged of her lord to put the precious thing safely away at once, lest anything should happen to it.
“What a great and wonderful lioness that must have been.—And a lioness with a mane,” she commented, in an awed whisper.
“Yes,” answered Kanu, with a sigh.