“The wild animals seem to know me, for they never attempt to do me any hurt. I do not think I am unhappy, for I can sleep when I like, and in my dreams I go over the past again and again. They used to teach me that another life comes after death. I do not know... I know that if the soul lives when the body dies, our souls will be together... But now I dream... and dream...”
Chapter Twelve.
The Hunter of the Didima.
“You say, my Chief, that you wish me to relate a tale of the days of my youth, which are now so very far away. Well, I owe you homage for that you opened the door of the prison wherein my grandson lay, accused of a crime which another had committed. Last year I might have sent you a cow, which would have kept your children’s calabash always full, but now that the Rinderpest has emptied my kraal I am a poor man—so poor that I cannot even offer you a drink of sour milk. There, behind that mat, lie the calabashes splitting from dryness. Wau, but it is hard for an old man who has owned cattle all his life to look every day into an empty kraal.
“Oh yes—about the tale. Well, I can tell you of an occasion when I was so near my death that for months afterwards I would start up in my sleep of nights and shriek aloud. The tale has often been told, but never the whole of it, for it is shameful for a man to relate how he wept like a woman and begged for his life. But now all the others are dead—and, for myself, why, I am only an old man of no account who will soon be dead too.
“In the days I speak of Makomo was Chief over all the country. I was a young man, and had only been married a few months. My father was one who stood near the Chief. He was rich in cattle and his racing oxen were the best in the land. I had only recently been made a man. I was too young, so many said, for the rite, but the Chief’s ‘Great Son’ was to be made a man at the time, and my father wanted me to be one of his blood-brothers. Then my father said I should marry and get grandchildren for him. In those days I cared for nothing but hunting, but my father began paying dowry for a girl, so I made no objection. She came to be the grandmother of Nathaniel, whom you know. He comes home twice every year from the Mission, and tells me that I am going, when I die, to a deep pit full of a very hot kind of fire. Well, perhaps I am, but I shall meet my Chief and my old friends there, but not Nathaniel, nor his grandmother.
“Makomo was a great Chief in those days, and no one ever dared to disobey him except the ‘Abatwa,’ the wild Bushmen who dwelt in the high mountains among the rocks and forests, and who shot people to death with shafts smeared with the poison of snakes. Brave as Makomo’s men were when they fought the English, they dreaded the little men of the rocks, who could kill from afar without being seen or heard.