Feld-kost.—Tubers, bulbs, of wild plants, suitable as food.
Chapter Seventeen.
Noquala’s Cattle—A Tragedy of the Rinderpest.
A Kaffir at Home.
It was about eleven o’clock of a winter’s morning in 1897 when Noquala stood before his hut and watched his cattle being driven in for milking. A noble, dun-coloured bull, in whose lowing the amatory and the defiant were about equally mingled, led the herd through the narrow gateway of the kraal, in which ample enclosure he stood, pawing the dusty manure over his shoulders and flanks. From a smaller enclosure a few yards away to the right came a chorus of agonised appeals for milk from the waiting calves. The herd of cattle numbered rather more than a hundred, and it could be seen by the most unprofessional eye that in quality its members were far superior to the usual run of cattle that one sees at the ordinary native kraal. The majority were dun-coloured.
Noquala was a jovial-looking Hlubi of about fifty years of age, stoutly built, and with a shrewd, lively eye. His hair and beard were markedly tinged with grey. His only clothing was a red blanket loosely drooped around his middle, leaving his trunk and his strong shoulders bare. On his right arm, above the elbow, he wore a thick ring of ivory; otherwise he wore no ornament whatever.
Makalipa, Noquala’s wife, was sitting in the sun at the side of the hut, lazily engaged in making a mat out of rushes. She addressed her husband by name once or twice, but he, being absorbed in the contemplation of his herd of cattle, which was the thing he most loved in the world—his children not excepted—took no notice whatever of her.
“You, you—I wonder you do not sleep in the kraal; I wonder you do not eat grass,” she said, in an audible soliloquy. “If I loved cattle like you do I would tie a pair of horns on my head and go on all fours. You are more of a bull than a man, and ought to be married to a cow.”