The Lost World of the Kalahari Read Free Page A

excursions in the deep bed of the Great River, I saw some of those holes. The spikes in the centre and the top-cover were gone but I remember the sensation of wonder that came over me as one of the elder men said: ‘That’s how he did it! That’s how fat old tannie sea-cow found her way into the pot.’ ‘Old tannie sea-cow’ was our endearing way of naming the hippopotamus, so called because it was there in the surf of the sea to welcome my people when they first landed in Africa. Between the sea and the Great River of my childhood lay hundreds of difficult miles, and it was impossible to find a place of water and reeds not associated in local legend and story with the sea-cow. However, long before this day of which I am speaking, ‘Fat little old aunt sea-cow’ had vanished like the Bushman, who had so admired her waistline and so loved her lard.
    In the tracks between water-holes and rivers the Bushman spread snares of tough home-made rope. The snares according to my grandfather were made of several kinds but the favourite was the classical hangman’s noose. The noose was spread round the rim of a hole delicately covered over with grass and sand. Its end was tied to a tense spring made of the fiercely resilient stem of blue bush wood. This stem was doubled over into the sand and so triggered that, however deft a buck’s toe or crafty a leopard’s paw, the merest touch would release the spring. The noose would instantly be jerked tight and the straightened stem hang the lively animal by paw or throat in the air.
    So skilful and confident a hunter did the Bushman become that he did not hesitate to match himself in the open against the biggest and the thickest-skinned animals. For instance, my grandfather said he would provoke the male by darting in and out of a herd of elephant, or teasing the smaller crashes of rhinoceroses, relying only on his knowledge of their ways and his own supple limbs for survival. He would contrive to do this until an angry elephant bull or some never very enlightened rhinoceros father would charge out to deal with him. Twisting and turning and shrieking a charm of magic words, the Bushman would flee until the animal was involved in a baffling pursuit. Then a companion would run up behind unperceived to attack the only place where such a rampant animal was vulnerable to Stone-Age weapons. Smartly he would slice through the tendons above the heel. The animal now helpless on its haunches, the Bushman would close in to finish him off with spears and knives.
    On top of his great daring and resource as a hunter, he was also subtle. That was a quality stressed by all those who had known him. He never seems to have attempted to accomplish by force what could be achieved by wit. The emphasis in his own natural spirit was on skill rather than violence. I can remember my grandfather saying with a note of admiration if not envy strangely alive on his pious Calvinist tongue: ‘Yes! he was clever, diabolically clever.’ The Bushman would, for example, use the lion as his hunting dog. When his normal methods of hunting failed him he would frighten the game in the direction of a hungry lion. He would let the lion kill and eat enough only to still its hunger, but not enough to make it lazy. Then the Bushman would drive the lion off with smoke and fire, and move in to eat the rest of the kill. In this way he would follow a favourite lion about from kill to kill and it was extraordinary how he and the lion came to respect their strange partnership. My grandfather said there was something uncanny about it. He remembered, too, his father telling him that when they first felt their way into the country across the Great River they found that all the lions were man-eaters. The many thousands of dead bodies left on the veld after a generation of massacre and counter-massacre by Korannas, Griquas, Mantatees, Zulu, Matabele, and Barolong had given the lions such a taste for