So one still, cool morning, when a transparent haze filled the valley and hung like the shadow of a dream over the forested plains that stretch from the foot of the mighty mountains to the far-off Lebombo, the boy, the girl and the Boer started on their adventure. Their course led along the southern bank of the Olifant. The mountains were soon left behind, and then, on the plains, the boy—for the first time in his life—saw large game in true profusion. All day long as they advanced could be seen the varied population of the wild melting before them into the gloom; for the forest, although continuous, was not dense except in the immediate vicinity of the river. Thus the eye could range for a couple of hundred yards on every side.
Owing to the late local rains the pasturage was good, so all the game from the surrounding arid spaces had flocked in. Occasionally the landscape resembled a kaleidoscope, so dense and varied were the manifestations of animal life. Buffaloes would hurtle through the undergrowth, swerving to avoid the tree-trunks with the agility of cats. A black rhinoceros, its wicked-looking head low near the ground, would dash fiercely away, its horn dividing the tangled brushwood after the manner of the cutwater of a boat. Families of wild pigs, their tufted tails held straight up, trotted off with swift quaintness. Herds of gentle giraffes, disturbed at their browsing on the high branches, swayed out of sight, their long necks undulating from side to side. Quaggas, sleeping in the glades, sprang up at their sentinel’s warning stamp, and fled, waking thunders with their hoofs. Fierce-eyed gnus swiftly ambled away. Antelopes, from the hartebeeste, big, awkward and ungainly, to the little russet impala, the very embodiment of sylvan grace, crowded the ever-opening vistas.
All day long they tramped without firing a shot, for ammunition had to be husbanded. Just before camping at sundown the boy shot a tsessabi, the flesh of which is among the very best the wilderness affords. To their astonishment several of the Baiala appeared on the scene. One of these was a little, elderly man who appeared to be a sort of leader, and who seemed to have attached himself to the boy.
They camped on the river bank amid scenery more lovely than any pen could describe. The clear stream, eddying and whirling among great grey rocks, was nearly three hundred yards wide. Groves of splendid trees, dark green and luxuriant, lay in an almost continuous chain along the water’s edge, only separated from each other by little spaces of green sward. On one of these they camped. Across the river a long, even wall of sheer cliff hung like a rampart over the flood. It was about a hundred feet high. Along its summit giant trees were silhouetted against the sky; masses of variegated creeper fell like cataracts over its face.
Three
Day passed swiftly after day, each like a cup full to the brim of joy. The hunters went to sleep soon after dusk, leaving the tending of the fire in the hands of the Baiala. Every morning in the grey dawn the girl would steal away to bathe in one of the secluded reaches of the river. The boy would watch for her going and then set about preparing coffee. This would be ready by the time she returned, with her waved, glossy hair drying on her shoulders and the brightness of the morning shining from her face. Then he would go to bathe and the girl would prepare breakfast.
Silence, more eloquent than speech, enmeshed these two more and more in mutual comprehension. An idea took root and grew in the mind of the boy that he had found the environment best suited to him; that a life spent in this teeming wilderness, with the girl at his side, would be good. What part had he in civilisation—in that society of conventional men and women which had lured him on, almost to his ruin, and flung him contemptuously aside when he ceased to amuse?
Before being an agriculturist, man was a hunter. This explains the circumstance that for many the hunting instinct—the lust to kill for the sake of killing—when once indulged in becomes so haunting and dominant that all other pursuits pall. Atavism is a curious and an awful thing; an influence may rise through the dark detritus of inconceivably remote time, take our lives in its shadowy hands, and shape them to strange ends. Under the spell of the wild, the boy reverted to the stage of primeval man.
Here, then, was his paradise. Why not, therefore, take this deep-bosomed Eve to mate, and enter into his inheritance. But at this stage was it love that he felt for her? He was not sure. She attracted him strongly, but there was also an occasional feeling of slight repulsion. He had always been moody and changeable. Little, undefinable contraventions on her part of that code of conventionality which he affected to despise, but which is always ineradicable in those whose childhood has passed in a refined home, jarred on his sensibilities.